More than forty years into his public ministry, Billy Graham had few, if any, peers as a Christian leader. Still, he regularly insisted that he lacked depth and profundity as a theologian and that his sermons and books were rather ordinary in both form and content. Few of his closest colleagues seemed inclined to dispute him. Robert Ferm, who spent a career putting the best possible face on Graham’s actions and words, described him as “a theologian of the highest realm” but made the mark of his greatness his ability to simplify. “I have read the major theologians,” Ferm said, “and he is in an entirely different category. He is a man who knows God. Knowing God, he has a concept of the inspiration of Scripture that he can put into fifteen or twenty words, while other men would write a whole book about it.” Other associates and friends acknowledge the simplicity of Graham’s theology but do not assign it the same depth. John Akers tactfully observed, “I have found from time to time that he had more understanding about certain theological issues than is perhaps the popular perception.” Carl Henry admitted that “I keep my fingers crossed about the books Billy writes” and characterized Graham’s theology as a conservative “people’s theology” that gained its authority from the evangelist’s total reliance on Scripture. Still another veteran colleague was more blunt: “Billy has never worked through his theology.”
The theology Graham espoused in his later years differed a bit from that of his early ministry, but warnings by his Fundamentalist detractors that association with liberal churchmen would undermine his allegiance to the pillars of Evangelical orthodoxy proved unwarranted. He made room for more liberal views than his own but remained loyal to traditional formulations. He refused, for example, to damn those who espouse some form of theistic evolution—“I seriously doubt if differences at this point really make too much sense”—but made it clear he believed Adam and Eve were real people who lived in a real Garden of Eden “that many scholars think was in the area now occupied by Iraq and Iran.” Similarly, he acknowledged he could find nothing in the New Testament that made belief in the Virgin Birth essential to salvation but unequivocally stated that “I most certainly believe Jesus Christ was born of a virgin.” As for the nature of Scripture itself, he shied away from the shibboleth term inerrancy, by which conservatives mean the Bible contains no scientific or historical error, but he regularly asserted his belief in the “plenary verbal inspiration” of the Bible, noting that “it has always been clear to me that we cannot have inspired ideas without inspired words.” And he never wandered far from his conviction that when he used the phrase “The Bible says . . . ,” it was tantamount to saying, “The Bible means. . . .” Even so, he did not insist that all Christians hold a conservative view of Scripture. “We are not saved because of our view of the Bible,” he said. “We are saved by our view of Jesus Christ and our acceptance or rejection of him and the life we live after we come to Christ.”
Graham’s reflections about other key aspects of systematic theology were equally innocent of struggle or conflict. “I cannot prove the existence of God,” he said, “but deep inside, everyone knows there must be some sort of supernatural being.” Though he confessed that “I can’t explain the Trinity satisfactorily,” he noted that “it’s not what I don’t understand about God that troubles me. It’s what I do understand and don’t do. That’s not original with me, by the way. I’ve heard a lot of people say that.” His view of humanity and its deepest need also remained essentially unchanged from the portrait he drew in the 1950s. The complexities of human nature plumbed by Shakespeare and Sartre, by Camus and Chekhov, by Bergman and, indeed, by the Bible itself need not occupy us unduly, he seemed to say, since virtually all human problems can be explained by reference to “something that happened in the Garden of Eden long ago.” In the early years of his ministry, Graham had proclaimed that “Christ is the answer” to virtually any problem his hearers might face. Wider experience and honest reflection eventually taught him to admit to inquirers that “coming to Christ is not going to solve all your problems. It may create some new problems. Because when you’ve been going one way and suddenly turn around and go the other way, against the tide of evil in the world, that’s going to create some friction and difficulty.” Still, those fearing they were doomed to days of persecution and long nights of existential wrestling were surely relieved to hear in his next sentence that they could successfully meet and master these challenges if they had “certain things, and we’re going to give them to you in just a moment.” The promised buckler and shield consisted of a copy of the Gospel of John, a few memory verses, the first lesson of a Bible correspondence course, and assurance that God would not allow Satan to subject them to doubt or temptation too compelling to resist.
One of the thorniest problems for Evangelical Christians is the fate of the heathen who never hear Billy Graham or any other Christian evangelist proclaim the gospel. A 1978 article in McCall’s magazine quoted Graham as having said “I used to believe that pagans in far countries were lost if they did not have the gospel of Christ preached to them. I no longer believe that.” Predictably, that apparent widening of the circle of the saved scandalized some of Graham’s supporters and led to a hasty assurance by Christianity Today that the evangelist’s beliefs had been misrepresented. Graham was careful not to make any subsequent statements that appeared to exempt anyone from the need to make an explicit commitment to Christ, but he did not automatically consign to hell all who never hear the Christian gospel preached. “They are in the hands of a God of love and mercy and grace,” he said. “I don’t think I can play God.” He was willing to venture, however, that he doubted a righteous God would consign an Albert Schweitzer, who denied the deity of Christ but gave his life to good works, to the same fate reserved for such consummately evil men as Hitler and Eichmann. “Hitler and Schweitzer should not be in the same place.” Beyond that, he would not speculate: “I’m going to have to wait until I get to heaven, and ask the theologians up there and get the answer.”
That he might not get the opportunity to press his query seemed never to occur to him. “I know beyond the shadow of a doubt,” he said, “that if I died at this moment, I would go straight to the presence of God.” Moreover, “I look forward to dying, because I know that I’ll be relieved from all the bondage of this body. And all the temptations and all the pressures of this life will be gone. What a glorious future we have in Christ.” Throughout his career, Graham has talked of his readiness to die with a kind of wistful serenity that has led some to suggest that he nursed a fairly transparent death wish. His associates chuckle at that hypothesis, noting that his supposed romance with death does not deter him from rushing off to the Mayo Clinic at the slightest sign of illness, and Graham himself acknowledges that when death actually stares him in the face he experiences quite normal reactions. In 1987, while returning home from Europe, a small bomb went off in the baggage compartment of the plane, causing a momentary fear of crashing. “I wouldn’t say I was afraid,” he recalled, “because I’m ready to go at any time. I’d say I was nervous. I thought to myself, ‘Am I afraid to die?’ and then I thought again that it’s instinctive to want to live. I mean, that’s something God gave us and if we don’t have that sense of self-preservation we would all die. We might go out and commit suicide. But I am not afraid of death.” Still, he admitted, “I’m not looking forward to the dying process We’re all afraid of the unknown. We’re not quite certain of how it’s going to be. I’m not afraid of being dead. I’m afraid of the period of dying, catching fire or suffering before death. I hope I don’t have to go through that. But I may. I’m ready.”
Graham’s readiness to die stemmed in large measure from his firm conviction that good as this life has been to him, it cannot compare with an eternity in heaven, which he believed to be an actual physical place, though not necessarily in our particular solar system. “Some people have speculated that it’s the North Star,” he once volunteered, “but this is all speculative.” Next to basking in the presence of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit throughout eternity, the greatest joy of all will come from being united with the great saints of all ages and reunited with one’s own family and friends. Among those Graham looked forward to visiting is Elvis Presley. “I never met him,” he said, “but I believe I will see him in heaven, because Elvis was very deeply religious, especially in the last two or three years [of his life].”
As a younger man, Graham was prone to blaming a roaring lion’s share of the world’s suffering on the active agency of Satan and his cohort of demons. With the passage of time and the accumulation of experience, he resorted to such dualistic explanations less often. “Suffering is simply a fact,” he wrote in 1983. Christians should remember that they are not exempted from suffering, and should keep in mind as well that “when one bears suffering faithfully, God is glorified and honored.” He admitted he had no answer to why some evangelists carry scars from being beaten and burned for Christ’s sake, while his life had been free from physical persecution, or why “some people appear to glide effortlessly through life while others seem constantly to be in the throes of pain and sorrow.” In 1962 he speculated that God may have used a French air disaster that killed 130 people, including a large delegation from Atlanta, Georgia, as a tool to move many others to be converted. In 1988 when a Pan Am crash in Scotland took the lives of dozens of students from Syracuse University, where he was holding a crusade, he avoided any suggestion that God was killing young people to boost conversion rates. Asked how he would minister to the parents of the dead young people, he said, in a voice filled with compassion, “I would put my arms around them and weep with them, and quote Scripture. I would try to tell them there is hope for those who put their trust in God.” As for trying to discern the will of God in human suffering, he resorted humbly to citing a charming image favored by Evangelical saint Corrie Ten Boom: “Picture a piece of embroidery placed between you and God, with the right side up toward God. Man sees the loose, frayed ends; but God sees the pattern.”
Just as Graham believed that some, though not all, evil could be laid at Satan’s hooves, so he maintained that Christians often enjoy the beneficent ministration of angels, whom he dubbed “God’s Secret Agents.” In Angels, a 1975 book that sold over two million copies, he asserted that while everything in the book was supported in Scripture, he also believed in angels “because I have sensed their presence in my life on special occasions.” Asserting that “some biblical scholars believe that angels can be numbered potentially in the millions,” he described them as ageless and immortal, free of sickness, and able “to move instantaneously and with unlimited speed from place to place,” though only some of them have wings. Nothing indicates they have to eat to stay alive, and the Bible gives no hint that they are concerned with sex, an attribute that “may indicate that angels enjoy relationships that are far more thrilling and exciting than sex.” The possibility that being sexless may be one of the drawbacks of angelhood—perhaps the short end of a trade for immortality or ubiquity—seems not to have occurred to him. He did, however, acknowledge that humans had some advantages over angels. No angel, for example, can pastor a church, serve as an evangelist, or counsel inquirers at a crusade. Still, because they possess detailed knowledge of earthly affairs, they can participate in many mundane activities. Graham thought it at least plausible, for example, that angels had piloted fighter planes for dead men during the battle for Britain in World War II, though he acknowledged that this was a hypothesis that “we cannot finally prove.”
As a young man, Graham had been deeply impressed with dispensationalist premillennialism and its detailed scenarios of the course human history was taking. With exposure to alternative theological views, and the repeated experience of seeing the precise predictions of dispensationalist teachers go unfulfilled, he modified his personal eschatological beliefs and toned down his public statements about the Second Coming even further. “I used to be able to preach to an audience and sort of outline exactly what the events would be that would precede the Second Coming of Christ,” he mused. “I don’t do that anymore. I still hold some views on it, but I don’t make them public. I think there is something to dispensationalist teaching, but I just can’t accept the way some dispensationalists apply biblical prophecy to current newspaper headlines. I don’t believe, for example, that the Common Market is the organization of the beast, as some of them say.” Though no longer willing to predict the timing of the rapture—“I don’t think anyone knows when Christ is coming back, and Jesus warned us not to speculate about dates. It could be tonight. It could be a million years from now. I don’t know”—he had lost none of his confidence that Jesus is indeed coming again, probably sooner rather than later, and that the broad outlines of premillennial teaching are reasonably trustworthy. He clearly believes that a time will come when “a counterfeit world system or ruler will establish a false Utopia for an extremely short time. The economic and political problems of the world will seem to be solved. But after a brief rule the whole thing will come apart. . . . This massive upheaval will be the world’s last war—the battle of Armageddon.” This climactic battle will be followed by Christ’s millennial reign, during which “political confusion will be turned to order and harmony, social injustices will be abolished, and moral corruption will be replaced by integrity. For the first time in history the whole world will know what it is like to live in a society governed by God’s principles. And Satan’s influence will not be present to hinder world progress toward peace, unity, equality, and justice. Man’s dream for global harmony will be realized!”
Like other premillennialists, Graham saw such phenomena as the AIDS plague, continuing and apparently irresolvable conflict in the Middle East, the decline in private and public morality, the increase in lawlessness, the proliferation of wars, and the rise of religious cults as other signs that the end is near. He did not follow the lead of some who insisted the rapture would come in less than forty years after the establishment of the nation of Israel in 1948 but expressed his belief that “there is a special place for Israel in God’s plan. I think it is significant that they are a nation and are in the land that God promised them. I think it is one of the signs that we are told to look for in connection with the coming again of the Lord.” On several occasions he has even ventured that his own worldwide ministry, in person and on radio and television, may be part of the universal evangelization process premillennialists believe will occur just prior to the Second Coming. “With all the media we have,” he told an international gathering of evangelists in 1986, “we can reach the world quickly and bring back the King. I believe we could be living in the last period of history. I hear the Four Horsemen. They are on the way!”
One notable change in Graham’s theology, pressed on him by external developments, was his greater acceptance of charismatic phenomena. “I believe God has used the charismatic movement throughout the world to wake up a lot of communities,” he observed. “It fits in with the temperaments of many cultures. I think it has been raised up by the Lord. But I have never spoken in tongues. I know many godly people who have, but who never talk about it except privately, and it has brought great change in their lives.” Did he yearn for such gifts himself? “I have asked God to give me all he wants me to have, but I have never been given tongues. Oral Roberts once told me that if I ever spoke in tongues, not to tell anybody. I believe it is one of the gifts of the Spirit, but our Lord never mentioned it. Paul dealt with it in only one book, and that was with a troublesome church [at Corinth]. It was a carnal church, and the gift of tongues was giving a lot of trouble. At certain periods of history, I think it has been a gift of the Holy Spirit, but it is easily counterfeited and we have a tremendous amount of false speaking in tongues today. I have never asked for that gift. Paul said it was the least of all the gifts. The greatest of all the gifts is love.”
Graham’s assessment of divine healing follows a similar pattern. He professed not to doubt that miraculous healing can occur but warned that one must exercise “spiritual discernment” to avoid being duped by the “many frauds and charlatans” involved in faith healing. He also conceded the possibility that some Christians might have a genuine gift of prophecy but warned that it should be heeded only when “it does not involve new revelation” that contradicts “the written Word of God” He was even less tolerant of the popular charismatic teaching that God wants Christians to be wealthy, particularly those Christians who are willing to make generous contributions to the television preachers who espouse this teaching. Though the doctrine is taught by some of the most popular television ministers—Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Kenneth Copeland, and, before his fall, Jim Bakker—Graham abandoned his usual conciliatory attitude when discussing this teaching. “I don’t like it at all,” he snapped. “I think it is contrary to Scripture. God promised wealth to certain people, like Abraham and other great men of the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, we are told to deny ourselves.” He then rolled into a monologue that revealed something of his own struggle with the ease and prosperity of his own life. “In our culture,” he said, “it is hard to deny yourself. When we came up here, we thought we were denying ourselves, with this twelve-dollar-an-acre property and two log cabins. But we added on as the children came, and today it’s a big, fine house. Ruth and I talk quite often about what standard we should live by. When I go to places like India and Bangladesh and Africa, it bothers me no end that I have three good meals a day. We have never been tempted along the lines of money so much, but we do have money. We have too much. What do you do? I guess it’s individual conscience in our culture. But I think that teaching is heresy. I just don’t agree with it at all.”
Those who acknowledge that Billy Graham was no theological sophisticate recognize that his fame did not rest on his ability to spin theological webs or split fine hairs of doctrine, and even members of his own team, who heard him preach hundreds, even thousands, of times, do not regard him as a remarkably gifted pulpiteer. Without being prodded, his closest associates and most ardent admirers volunteer rather readily that “Billy’s sermons are quite ordinary, even sub-ordinary,” or that “he’d be the first one to tell you there are lots better preachers.” Over the years Graham’s preaching changed somewhat in both content and delivery. Though he still preached regularly on John 3:16 and Belshazzar and the Second Coming, his later sermons were much shorter and less densely packed than in earlier years. He also used a much calmer and quieter style, a change fostered not only by age but by the demands of television. He could still summon the old fire on occasion, but as early as the 1970s, his preaching became much more avuncular, befitting his passage from young firebrand to senior statesman. The later preaching still followed the pattern of attacking the complacency of his audience by confronting them with their fears and discontents, but the focus had shifted noticeably. The flames of hell and nuclear holocaust that caused audiences to sweat in terror from the 1940s well into the 1960s gradually gave way to the chillier discomforts of loneliness, emptiness, guilt, and the fear of death, and to such high-profile threats to society as drugs and AIDS. Graham freely acknowledged his use of fear as a motivator for conversion, but the anger that critics had professed to see in his early preaching seemed mostly absent. Certainly, Graham hoped it was gone. “We need to preach with compassion,” he told a group of aspiring evangelists. “People should sense that you love them, that you are interested in them. Even when you preach about hell, you need to convey that both the author [God] and the messenger speak from a broken heart.”
It would be gratifying to report that Graham’s use of jokes and humor had taken on a finer and subtler tone as well, but such was not the case. Most of the jokes in his relatively small stockpile were the very same ones he had been using for thirty years, and age had not sharpened their effect. Aides said they had often advised him to refresh his store of anecdotes or, perhaps even better, to quit trying to be a humorist, but their pleas were outweighed by the unfailing willingness of his audiences to laugh at even the hoariest of his pocketful of chestnuts. They also failed in efforts to get him to purge his sermons of worn-out illustrations and resigned themselves to finding them a source of some amusement. In the spring of 1986, he quoted the popular song, “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” and said, “There’s a movie out, And God Created Woman, starring Brigitte Bardot,” as if they were parts of current popular culture rather than artifacts of earlier decades. In the same crusade, in a less anachronistic but even more glaring example of obliviousness, he told a long story that he claimed had happened just a few weeks earlier. With no apparent sense that the account might have a familiar ring to it, he told, in full detail, the story of a newly released prisoner who eagerly returned home, to be welcomed by a plethora of yellow ribbons tied around an old oak tree. A few people applauded as if hearing the story for the first time, but others indicated by quizzical expressions that at least the broad outlines of the story seemed vaguely familiar. When a team member was asked the next morning if he thought that story might serve well as a theme for a movie, or perhaps a popular song, he broke into laughter and said, “Oh, you caught a mild version. Sometimes he has rags and dish towels and sheets hanging from telephone poles and skyscrapers.”
One might easily assume that such oddities reflect a habit of reusing old sermons without feeling any impulse to update them, but that is apparently not the case. Weeks before every crusade, Graham began to fret about what he would preach and to hound staff members to help him come up with new material, and one of his secretary’s primary tasks in the final days before the opening service was to type new sermon manuscripts on a large-print typewriter. Wisely, Graham made no attempt to deny that he reused much old material. Waving his hand at a row of black notebooks in the small office in his home, he said, “Those are sermons I have preached in the last fifteen years. The old ones are down at the office. Some of those are better than the ones I’ve preached more recently. What I’ll do is take and rework those.” Reworking tried-and-true sermons—a perfectly honorable practice among preachers—consists largely in sparking them up with new factual data, new references to current events, and new illustrations. And well before a crusade began, aides prepared briefing documents that he could draw on to illustrate his sermons as well as answer questions from the press. Associate Evangelist John Wesley White for a long time was Graham’s primary sermon illustrator. White, who held a doctorate from Oxford, viewed his work modestly. “I’m often cast as an intellectual,” he said, “which I’m not. I’m not reading heavy philosophical literature. I’m reading Time, Newsweek, USA Today, the Toronto Star, and that kind of thing. I contribute substantiating quotes, convincing statistics, colorful little—I hesitate to say this—National Inquirer ham-and-eggsy things. I’d like to think they’re true.” Ed Plowman observed that “like a lot of public speakers, Billy tends to pull usable quotes from various sources, and sometimes these are taken out of context. More and more these days, he speaks from a text, and John Akers and others go over it with him to make sure of the wording and the accuracy, particularly on historical and political matters. When he departs from the text, he sometimes gets into trouble.”
Graham’s reliance on the work of others, and the concomitant superficial acquaintance with the material he cited, betrayed itself in mispronunciations, as when he spoke of “the great Jewish scholar, Maiodes,” or “the famous writer, Eli Weasel,” and in such superfluities as identifying Dostoevski as “the greatest novelist in the Soviet Union,” then adding, “He was. He’s dead now.” Some of Graham’s illustrative imports were jarringly imprecise, as when he said, “A famous man committed suicide the other day,” or “A psychologist in Chicago said the other day . . .” or “A sociologist at Oxford said last year . . .” or “That’s like the girl at Harvard who was searching for something and didn’t know what it was—and it was written up in Time magazine.” At other times the ostensible precision was itself rather astonishing. Without citing supporting documentation, he might announce that “over four hundred people in Los Angeles claim to be Jesus Christ” or reveal that “84 percent of the modern novel is illicit, illegal, or immoral.” At a service in Columbia, he repeated his familiar claim that sexual chastity is virtually impossible without supernatural assistance, then noted that this is especially the case for a man, whose sex drive “is six times greater than in a woman.” At that revelation, a young woman handling press relations for the crusade dropped her head on the table and mumbled in despair, “Where did he get that? How could anybody measure that? Ohhhhhh.” Other team members apparently suffered a similar reaction. At breakfast the next morning, when John Wesley White was asked if he would comment on something Graham had said the evening before, he did not require further elaboration. “That did not come from me,” he quickly interjected. “Kathleen [his wife] and I were sitting right behind a row of girls and in front of them was a bunch of Army recruits. I don’t think they had had a dosage of saltpeter that day. There was a fascinating reaction on their faces when Billy said that. I had gone through that sermon and given him a lot of material, and Kathleen turned to me and said, ‘Did you give him that?’ I said, ‘No, I did not!’ I believe if you asked T.W., he would say right quickly, ‘Didn’t get it from me.’ You would have some trouble getting anyone to own up to that one.”
Fortunately, Graham recognized this tendency in himself. The next evening, he said, “The United States owes a trillion dollars. Do you know how much that is? If you stacked dollar bills all the way to the moon and back, you wouldn’t have a trillion dollars.” Then, perhaps having been chided by friends for his previous remark, or simply finding his own illustration implausible, he paused, then said, “I heard that. I think that’s an exaggeration. I believe you would have a trillion.” Generous chuckles rippled through the audience. Caught up in the amusement, he added, “But I read that in some paper, and I always believe everything I read in the paper. Especially the Inquirer.” Laughter rolled out of the stands, and no one appeared to enjoy the self-deprecating humor more than Graham’s own colleagues. Perhaps the evangelist’s ability to poke fun at his own foibles was aided by the insightful aphorism he quoted a few moments later: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.”
Analysts from within Graham’s camp believe it was precisely his trusting simplicity that made him so effective as a preacher. Whatever his audiences thought about his intellectual acumen, they viewed him as utterly sincere about what he said in the pulpit. “There is no magic, no manipulation,” observed Gavin Reid. “The man just obviously believes what he says, and he comes over as a very human person.” In the end, however, they insist that any attempt to explain Billy Graham in secular terms was bound to fail. “There is something quite miraculous about his power,” John Innes said. “I think people believe they are going to hear something from God when Mr. Graham gets up there, and I believe they do. They hear another voice through him—-the voice of God.” Graham agreed with these observations but thought they apply to all true evangelists, not just himself. “An evangelist,” he said, “is a person with a special gift and a special calling from the Holy Spirit to announce the good news of the gospel. You’re an announcer, a proclaimer, an ambassador. And it’s a gift from God. You can’t manufacture it, you can’t organize it, you can’t manipulate it. . . . I study and read and prepare all the time, but my gift seems to be from the Lord in giving an appeal to get people to make a decision for Christ. That seems to be the gift. Something happens that I cannot explain. I have never given an invitation in my whole life when no one came.” According to Graham, exercising his gift took a tangible physical toll on his energy: “In the five or ten minutes that this appeal lasts, when I’m standing there, not saying a word, it’s when most of my strength leaves me. I don’t usually get tired quickly, but I get tired in the invitation. This is when I become exhausted. I don’t know what it is, but something is going out at the moment.”
Perhaps the most notable development in Graham’s preaching over the years was a shift in his stance on various moral and social issues of high interest to Evangelicals. His code for personal behavior remained quite conservative, but he displayed a more tolerant attitude toward human frailty than he once did, he recognized differences between cultures, and he stressed forgiveness more than judgment. He also developed an increased appreciation for the need to change social structures and conditions as well as individual hearts.
While many Evangelicals and Fundamentalists continue to regard the use of alcohol as one of the surest signs of a corrupt lifestyle, Graham frequently noted that “I do not believe the Bible teaches teetotalism. I can’t believe that. Jesus drank wine. Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding feast. That wasn’t grape juice as some of them try to claim. The Greek word is the same as the Bible uses everywhere else for wine.” When he first went public with that assertion in 1976, in defense of Jimmy Carter’s admission that he enjoyed an occasional highball, Graham drew a fusillade of criticism from stunned supporters, but he refused to back down. Drunkenness is clearly a sin, he said, and distilled liquors make the use of alcohol far more risky than it was in biblical times. He even agreed that it was better for Christians to abstain completely from alcohol than to risk falling into the problems it could cause. But in contrast to his occasional tactic of claiming he had been misquoted and misunderstood, he not only continued to defend and repeat his earlier statement but acknowledged that he used alcohol himself from time to time, and that he knew something of its effects. “Once in a while I will have a sip of wine before I go to bed,” he told a reporter. “I only have to drink a little wine and my mind becomes foggy and I don’t like it. After all, a clear mind is what I have been striving for all my life.”
The years did not diminish Graham’s conviction that sex offers perhaps the most formidable temptation human beings can face, and that abstinence from fleshly lusts is the proper course to follow, but he displayed considerable compassion for young people growing up in a sex-saturated culture. “It’s very, very difficult,” he acknowledged. “If I had grown up in the present society, I’m not sure I could have coped at all. I think the only way a person can live clean today is if he has had a very real experience with God. I think they are given a supernatural power to live a clean life.” Perhaps recalling evenings of delicious temptation in his father’s shiny Plymouth automobile, he recommended that dating couples put a Bible on the car seat between them as a reminder that “Christ is the cure of even the most torrid of earthly temptations,” and assured them that if they would make the decision to resist temptation, “God provides a way of escape. The Holy Spirit is there to help.” Graham professed to have direct knowledge of the Spirit’s power to manage sexual tension. “I’ve been away from my wife as long as six months,” he volunteered, “but I never engaged in any sort of sexual practice. This means that a person can control his sex desires with the help of God.” Though he clearly believed that sex is wonderful in its place—at home, between loving marriage partners—he frequently reminded his audiences that “you don’t have to have sex to live. It is not like water or bread. Many have lived without sex. They have taken a chastity vow, and they have a strength and a power and an alertness that other people don’t have. . . . God can give you power to control that part of your body.”
And yet he refrained from making people feel guilty about every sexual thought they may have. When speaking of lust, he noted that “I’m not talking about looking at a beautiful girl and admiring her. That’s natural, and God gave us these sex instincts, and I don’t think we should deny them. But he drew some circles around it and said, ‘Thus far, and no further.’ And if you do [go further], you hurt yourself.” He recognized, of course, that many devout Christians do go further, but his response to such slips was hardly a bluenosed harshness. If he had children who he knew engaged in premarital sex, he said, “I would tell [them] that I totally disapprove, but I would love them even if they did.”
Graham showed similar flexibility in his attitude toward homosexuality and abortion, two other issues on which Evangelicals have taken a generally rigid stance. He continued to regard homosexuality as a sin but refused to put it in the category of special heinousness. “The Bible teaches these practices are wrong,” he said, “but no more so than adultery.” More boldly, he asserted, “I love them and don’t treat them any differently than my other friends. There are worse sins.” Clearly, he felt that treating homosexuals as pariahs was an un-Christian response. Just as clearly, however, he believed that conversion would lead to a change in sexual orientation, or at least to an ability to control homosexual behavior. “You have to take a vow to God,” he recommended, “and ask God to help you, and he will.” He recognized that not everyone in his audience would share his views, but rather than write them off as hopeless and hell-bound, he offered them the best advice he could find. In a 1988 telecast focusing on AIDS, he included an extended appearance by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who made it clear he believed abstinence is the proper course for unmarried people but urged those who were not being abstinent to use condoms, a notable departure from the standard Evangelical television program.
On the volatile question of abortion, Graham took a conservative but not absolutist line. “The Bible does not support the indiscriminate practice of abortion,” he said, but added that “an exception might be made in the case of incest, rape, or when the mother’s life is in danger,” noting that “this is about the same position as Pope John Paul II takes. I know some people feel that is not the right position, but that’s my position.” He disagreed with the pope’s position on birth control. “I am a strong advocate of birth control,” he said, acknowledging that this runs counter to official Catholic doctrine, but added, “I suspect that many Catholics practice it.” Protestants have typically favored birth control, but Graham’s position explicitly reflected his expanded social consciousness. “When you travel through India, Pakistan, etc., you have to believe in some form of control of the population. I don’t think it should ever be state control, . . . but the population explosion is a very serious thing.”
Demographic realities also pressed Graham, along with other Evangelical leaders, to relax long-standing strictures regarding divorce and remarriage. Traditionally, strict Evangelical teaching has frowned strongly on divorce and sanctioned remarriage only for those whose spouses were guilty of adultery. In practice, many people who divorce for reasons other than adultery remarry and continue to attend church, but they are often the cause of some awkwardness for all parties, and many divorced Evangelicals either remain single out of explicit fear of eternal punishment, or if they choose to remarry, move to new churches to give themselves a fresh start. As the high divorce rates prevalent in the larger society began to appear in Evangelical circles, the churches have not only shown a greater tolerance for what they once regarded as a notable aberration but have made the “singles ministry,” which typically includes a substantial divorced contingent, a major feature of many successful congregations. Graham felt more comfortable with the traditional teaching; in describing a case in which a divorced woman had remarried, he discreetly noted without giving details that “she was free to remarry,” meaning that her husband had committed adultery. And what of those who are the sinners instead of the sinned against? “If they are not the innocent party,” he replied, “there is a question in my mind. Not a definite yes or no. I am not a legalist. Some of these things have to be taken case by case, point by point. God can forgive adultery.” His frequent use of the phrase “You can’t unscramble eggs” when referring to such cases indicated a pragmatic belief that trusting God to forgive all sorts of past mistakes is a more viable course of action than trying to rewrite history.
Graham also moderated other views regarding the family. In earlier years he spoke of the husband as “the master of the house” who “organizes it, holds it together, and controls it,” and had counseled wives “to remain in subjection” to their husbands. By the mid-1970s, he had absorbed enough feminist rhetoric to cause him to rethink his position. Volunteering that he had based his earlier views on a misinterpretation of the Bible, he said, “I believe the Biblical position on women’s rights is that the husband and wife are equal.” He still believed that “in the governing organization of the home, the husband is the head,” but was willing to concede that “the woman is also the head in certain areas and there is an equal responsibility in the home.” Like vice-presidents in a corporation, they have equal status but manage different divisions. In this kind of arrangement, subjection would not be an issue. Husbands and wives would “submit to each other.” Predictably, he decried a feminist tendency to devalue the role of wife and mother as “a Satanic deception of modern times” but conceded that “there are things in today’s feminist movement that I like because I think women have been discriminated against.”
Such views, of course, were hardly radical, even in Evangelical circles, but Graham took a somewhat bolder step by lending support, or at least not offering opposition, to the ordination of women. In 1975 he admitted that he was simply not sure about what position to take on this touchy subject. Two years later he said, “I don’t object to it like some do because so many of the leaders of the early church were women. They prophesied. They taught. You go on the mission fields today and many of our missionaries are women who are preachers and teachers.” As for women as pastors, “I think it’s coming probably, and I think it will be accepted more and more. I know a lot of women who are far superior to men when it comes to ministering to others.” Men might resist giving them full rights in the church, but such women “are ordained of God whether they had men to lay hands on them and give them a piece of paper or not. I think God called them.” A decade later, following the pattern he had set in dealing with blacks during the 1950s, Graham had quietly placed his stamp of approval on women ministers by including them (albeit in small numbers) in BGEA-sponsored conferences and by inviting them to lead prayer and take other public roles in his crusades.
Just as association with world church leaders had given Graham a more flexible attitude toward theological positions different from the Fundamentalist revivalism in which he had been raised, so his exposure to the full range of the world’s political and economic systems had made him less confident that Western-style free-enterprise capitalism would be the system of choice in the millennium. While still voicing a clear preference for the free-enterprise system, he said, “I don’t think it’s the only one that Christians can support. We are a socialist society compared to, let’s say, the days of Franklin Roosevelt. There has to be a certain amount of socialism.” The inequity between rich and poor, including disparities between wealthy and developing nations, he observed, “is going to have to change somehow, whether voluntarily or by law. You can’t have some people driving Cadillacs and other people driving oxcarts and expect peace in the community. There is a crying need for more social justice. It’s a problem whose solution is beyond me, but I’ve found about 250 verses in the Bible on our responsibility to the poor.”
Even though he had supported Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Graham had retained a slight cynicism toward such government programs. In 1969 he spoke with approval at having seen a poster that read, I FIGHT POVERTY. I WORK. And he criticized the motives of those who backed anti-poverty legislation by observing that “many people carry a heavy load for poverty because they want votes, and others want to get involved in the problems so they can get their hand in the till.” He conceded that the existence of opportunists and grifters “should never do away with our responsibility for the legitimate poor,” but his portrait surely gave comfort to those inclined to blame the poor for their own plight. He also continued to maintain a somewhat fatalistic attitude toward poverty, citing Jesus’ observation, “The poor you have with you always,” and reiterating his belief that only the Second Coming and the millennium would bring true relief from the world’s enduring problems. Repeated firsthand exposure to human suffering eventually had its effect on Graham’s native compassion, and he gradually began both to enlist his organization in the struggle against poverty and to acknowledge that poverty had other than individual roots and that something more sweeping than philanthropy would be required to ease the world’s suffering. “From the very beginning,” he said, “I felt that if I came upon a person who had been beaten and robbed and left for dead, that I’d do my best to help him. I also felt that this applied to my relatives and friends and immediate neighbors. But I never thought of it in terms of corporate responsibility. I had no real idea that millions of people throughout the world lived on the knife edge of starvation and that the teachings of [the Bible] demanded that I have a response toward them. . . . As I’ve traveled around through India and Africa and Latin America and all those places for all these years, it can’t help but be a heavy pressure. . . . For a person who hasn’t been there and touched those people and seen those people, it is really difficult to explain . . . [but] as I traveled and studied the Bible more, I changed.”
In 1973 BGEA inaugurated its World Emergency Fund to provide a more routinized way of responding to similar needs. Aware of the criticism some relief agencies receive for the proportion of their incomes they spend in overhead, Graham took deserved pleasure in noting that “not one penny” of the monies contributed specifically to this fund was siphoned off for administrative purposes. More as an example than as a serious attempt to alleviate hunger, Graham’s later crusades included a program called Love-in-Action in which people were asked to contribute nonperishable food to the service for distribution through reputable social agencies. Typically, this effort brought in several tons of canned and boxed goods, but Graham freely admitted its limitations and symbolic purpose: “Of course, we can’t feed all the hungry people. It’s only a gesture, to demonstrate what we ought to do all the time. If the churches and synagogues did what they could do, we would not have to have such a confused welfare system.”
By the early 1980s, Graham was beginning to echo Roman Catholic statements about God’s presumed “preferential option for the poor.” During an address at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he astonished the school’s dean, a former resident of Charlotte, and many of the students gathered to hear him, when he said, “As a Christian, I believe that God has a special concern for the poor of the world, and public policy should in some way reflect this concern. I believe God has a special concern for things like peace, racism, the responsible use of Earth’s resources, economic and social justice, the use of power, and the sacredness of human life.” He admitted that “how these matters are to be implemented is a very complex matter” and confessed that “I have not always seen many of the complexities. . . . I am still learning. . . . But I have come to see in deeper ways some of the implications of my faith and the message that I have been proclaiming.” In Approaching Hoofbeats, which appeared the following year, he offered details on the worldwide scope of such problems as hunger and infant mortality, asserted that the disparity between the rich and the poor is “one of the basic causes of social unrest in Central America and other parts of the world,” and condemned “the indifference of certain governments to the plight of their own people.” And by the end of the 1980s, he was insisting that the United States do its part for underprivileged nations by helping them gain relief from international debt. Though he recognized that Americans would bridle at the austerity such a policy would entail, since it would inevitably increase the tax burden on Americans, he saw no other alternative. “I think we’ve got to help them with this debt,” he said. “It’s threatening Latin countries and countries throughout the world, and we’ve got to do something about it.”
The evangelist was also willing to identify, or at least to sympathize publicly, with groups that had once drawn his barely disguised scorn. During a two-installment tour of British cities in 1984 and 1985, he repeatedly expressed concern for the unemployed, making it clear that he no longer regarded people who were out of work as willfully lazy. “The most important thing, apart from finding jobs,” he said, “is that unemployed people should not be made to feel that they are second-class citizens. Christians should be deeply concerned for the problems of society and should be supportive of those who are socially deprived.” While preaching in the industrial city of Sheffield, he met with miners who had been involved in a brutal union dispute to suggest how Christian teaching might apply to their situation. Details of their conversations were not revealed, but they apparently went beyond the pious palliatives that have led many British working people to give up on the church. The president of the National Union of Mineworkers called the meeting “extremely useful,” and Graham, while insisting he did not know enough about the situation to take sides, did the miners’ cause no harm by saying, “My heart goes out to people who hurt.” British churchmen, who have often faulted Graham for excessive individualism, professed to be gratified “by the way in which the social awareness of his maturity finally tempers the fundamentalist fires of his youth.”
Graham’s views on crime and punishment also took on a more liberal cast. He grew more aware that not all crime is street crime or committed by poor people—“Many of our crimes are committed in upper-middle-class or affluent environments”—and believed that some form of gun control would be appropriate. He also developed reservations about capital punishment. “One of the hesitations I’ve had,” he told a reporter, “is that so many blacks are executed. The system has always been too one sided, and many of the people on death row are poor people who couldn’t afford good lawyers. There is no perfect system of justice on this earth. God will have it at judgment. But this is a very imperfect system. And execution makes the imperfection final.” At hearing her husband backtrack on some of his earlier law-and-order sentiments, Ruth frowned and bluntly interjected, “I’m for capital punishment. I think it is a deterrent. I know in countries where they have it, I feel safer walking down the streets.” Unwilling to start an argument but also unwilling to abandon his position, Graham gently responded, “Darling, there are countries where they have executions in which I don’t feel safe at all.”
No shift in Graham’s social thought drew more attention than his increased concern for peace and nuclear disarmament. Given the flak his 1982 visit to Moscow drew, he might easily have backed off his more dovish sentiments or claimed he had been misunderstood or misquoted. Instead, he stood by his ploughshares and included an extended statement of his views on disarmament in his 1983 book, Approaching Hoofbeats. He began with a confession and a statement of repentance. “To limit the growing threat of nuclear warfare seems perfectly in line with Christ’s call to be peacemakers on the earth,” he said, but admitted that “in those first years of the nuclear age I did very little in this particular area. I preached the gospel throughout the world, which was my primary calling, and I warned people against war in my sermons from the very beginning. . . . But perhaps I should have done more . . . I wish now that I had taken a much stronger stand against the nuclear arms race at its beginning when there was a chance of stopping it.” He repeated his by now standard statement that he was neither a pacifist nor an advocate of unilateral disarmament and acknowledged that, given the sinful nature of humankind, police and military forces would always be necessary in this temporal realm. Still, he regarded a worldwide concern for peace as a heartening sign, and he called on all Christians “to rise above narrow national interests and to give all of humanity a spiritual vision of the way to peace.” He then repeated the recommendations he had made at the 1982 Moscow conference: Urge all governments to respect the rights of religious believers, get to know one another personally, and encourage world leaders to work toward eliminating all nuclear and biochemical weapons of mass destruction.
Graham’s fear that either the Soviet Union or the United States would set off a major conflagration ebbed in the 1980s, but it was offset by concern over nuclear proliferation and the problems inherent in a situation in which “the smaller nations, many nations not quite as stable,” had or would soon have nuclear capability. Showing his willingness to draft such possibilities into the service of his invitation, he told a South Carolina audience, “Fifteen to twenty-five nations have a nuclear capacity. Terrorists are also working on it, and may have it. That’s the reason you ought to come to Christ.” He also continued to insist that “no Secretary of State or government official shuttling back and forth between countries can lessen these international tensions. It may patch things up for a while, but only the coming of Christ will solve the problems.” Still, his shift from a fatalistic view of nuclear war as the likely means God would use to launch Armageddon to a vision of world peace as “a realistic, present hope” for which Christians ought to strive, and his seconding Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 observation that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in a final sense—a theft from those who are hungry and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed” was real and significant. Christianity Today correctly characterized his interest in nuclear issues as something other than “the scare tactics of a preacher who wants responses to his sermons.” It reflected instead the agony of “an evangelist and international diplomat” who had “discussed these problems with seven U.S. Presidents and other heads of state and world leaders, and has dealt with more people searching for God than perhaps any man in history.”
Did Graham honestly think his vision of SALT 10 could ever be realized? “Not likely,” he admitted. “But does that mean I should cease praying, speaking, and working for that day when the people of the earth will unite to remove the ever-present threat of nuclear holocaust? Again, no! . . . I do not plan to be a leader in a peace movement or organization. I am an evangelist. But I am a man who is still in process.”