“Guard What Has Been Entrusted to You”
*Bob Williams’s death was untimely, but the Graham organization had been confronted with the realities of aging and death for several years. No one had believed Billy Graham would live forever, but questions of who, if anyone, would succeed him at his passing and of what would happen to BGEA at that point had been difficult to face. Graham and some of his closest associates clearly hoped Franklin would assume the mantle as leader of the organization and perhaps even as primary evangelist, even though Franklin had expressed considerable ambivalence about taking either role. Others were less sanguine at the prospect of transferring their loyalty and devotion to a man whose style differed significantly from his father’s and who, some thought, had not yet fully proved he was ready to assume such a position. And understandably, many people who had grown comfortable with a system and organization that had shown remarkable stability over more than four decades were anxious at the prospect of any significant change. As an obscure but wise philosopher once remarked, “When you start changing things, something different might happen.” But when Billy Graham was diagnosed with serious progressive illness in 1992, the pressure to attend to BGEA’s future began to mount, as it became increasingly clear that “someday” was, unavoidably, now at hand. Inevitably, Franklin Graham edged closer to center stage and the spotlight he had never seemed to crave.
Franklin had been ordained in 1982, but he doubted the pulpit would be a major focus of his ministry, and he clearly did not aspire to follow in his father’s footsteps as a crusade evangelist. In 1983, while he was assisting at a crusade in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, led by BGEA associate evangelist John Wesley White, White persuaded him to preach one evening. When not a single person in the crowd of approximately 1,000 responded to the invitation, Franklin was devastated. “Don’t you ever ask me to do that again,” he told White. “I’m not Billy Graham.” He was serious. Not until 1989 did he preach in another crusade and then only after strong urging from his friend, hunting companion, motorcycle buddy, and born-again country guitar picker Dennis Agajanian, who gave him a rifle as an added inducement to join White in a crusade in Juneau, Alaska. The first effort in Juneau was hardly more successful than the Saskatoon outing. As Franklin told the story, only nine people came forward, and four of them were Dennis Agajanian’s friends. “He wanted to make sure that somebody went up,” Franklin recalled. “I didn’t find out about that until several years later. I asked him, ‘Dennis, why in the world would you do that? If God is in this and we try to manipulate the invitation, God will curse us. He won’t bless us.’”
A night or two later, Franklin used one of his father’s favorite sermons, and the unmanipulated response to that one was much better. Franklin took this as a sign. “I realized that I had nothing to do with that. That was the Holy Spirit of God touching the lives of these people. They were responding to God’s invitation. I went back to my room that night and said, ‘God, if this is something you want me to do, I’ll be glad to do it. I will make it the number one priority in my life and I will do it as long as you will allow me to do it, but I will need your help.’” While he had no intention of shortchanging his work at Samaritan’s Purse, Franklin pledged to devote one-tenth of his time to evangelistic preaching and was soon holding eight to ten crusades around the world each year, at first alternating with John Wesley White and later as sole preacher, to progressively larger crowds.
The success of these crusades surprised no one more than Franklin Graham himself. In 1994 he told Ken Garfield of the Charlotte Observer that he had avoided evangelistic preaching, because “I didn’t want to be compared to Daddy. There is enough pressure in life. I didn’t need that one.” And even with five years of preaching under his belt, he said, “It’s not that I want Daddy’s mantle. The Lord in heaven called me to do it.”
Although convinced of his own call, Franklin understood that many people had come to hear him, at least during the early years of his evangelistic ministry, to see how he stacked up against his famous father. “I don’t know if I can avoid comparisons,” he admitted. “Billy Graham is my father. I’m his son.” But, he added, “I love my father. How can you be tired of being compared to someone you love and admire so much?” He frequently told his audiences that “because I am the son of Billy Graham, that did not impress God one bit,” but he realized it might impress others, so when he conducted a campaign in Australia in 1996, billboards proclaimed that “Over 40 years with Billy Graham makes him worth hearing.” The family resemblance is clearly there, with the strong, classic features and piercing, direct gaze. His preaching style is nothing like his father’s early, spellbinding, Gatling-gun delivery, but it had been decades since Billy’s own preaching, tamed by television, had borne much resemblance to the impassioned oratory that took him to fame in the 1950s.
Franklin calls his campaigns “festivals” instead of “crusades,” explaining that “a crusade is not something unchurched people understand. What does that mean? A crusade for what? People understand festivals. You have beer festivals, art festivals, and music festivals. Albuquerque has a balloon festival. I would rather have a name that, if we’re going to publicize something in the community, people will say, ‘Well, sure, if there’s going to be a festival, I will be there.’ I majored in marketing. This is a way to attract people. You don’t want to turn people off. You want them to taste your product.” His festivals certainly have music and perhaps a few balloons, and JumboTron screens flash with video clips aimed at holding his audience’s attention, but the product they are invited to taste is hardly all milk and honey.
While his services often resemble the Youth Nights in his father’s crusades, he is quick to note the differences. Shortly before Billy Graham’s Greater Louisville Crusade in June 2001, Franklin observed that “Daddy’s Youth Nights are a little more edgy than mine. We have had some discussions about that. It is not so much Daddy as it is the people around him that are pushing him in that direction. I think they have pushed Daddy a little too far. I know he has felt uncomfortable, and his board has felt uncomfortable. I have felt uncomfortable. For me, Billy Graham is a standard, and when Billy Graham does something, we’re saying to the churches of America, ‘This is okay,’ and churches will say, ‘Billy Graham is doing it, so we can do it too.’ Some of these groups, you can’t understand them, and I’m thinking, ‘Why do I want them?’ They make a noise. A crusade or festival should not be there solely to entertain. We should have good music, which is part of the magnet that helps attract people, but it has to be music that’s focusing on what we want. If we lose that, if we bring groups that are just doing a gig, I don’t want them. The key is having everything point to the cross—your music, your musicians, everything—so that when I stand up to preach, the platform has been set. Everything has to focus toward the Lord Jesus Christ and preparing people for that invitation.”
When he preaches, Franklin speaks directly and with authority. He has a good sense of humor, but relies little on jokes or other devices many preachers use to seduce and hold an audience. Instead, he moves quickly into the heart of his rather short sermons, identifying sins by name and warning that death and hell are their consequence, declaring what God has done through his Son to repair the breach between himself and fallen humanity, and calling on his audiences to repent at the foot of the cross, ask for the needed and promised forgiveness, and accept Christ as Lord of their lives. Whereas his father told of other people who rebelled against God, Franklin draws on his own biography. “For years I didn’t want Jesus Christ in my life,” he confesses. “I ran from him. I was afraid if I gave my life to him I’d have a spiritual straitjacket all my life. I wanted to be free. I wanted to make myself happy. There was a lot of fun, no question, but there was an emptiness. There was a big hole in the middle of Franklin Graham.”
Accounts of wickedness overcome have long been a staple of evangelistic preaching, but Franklin’s message of rebellion fired by emptiness obviously strikes a chord with his audiences, heavily populated with “baby boomers” and their offspring. Their awareness that Franklin was indeed a bit of a rebel—even if smoking, drinking, and driving fast do not hold the top positions in everyone’s list of sins—provides an authentic touch. This image is undergirded by his having Dennis Agajanian, Ricky Skaggs, and other tough-looking contemporary musicians open his programs and his own habit of preaching in jeans, boots, a black leather jacket, and a Harley-Davidson baseball cap. (“I dress this way not because it’s an image. I just enjoy it. When I was at the White House . . . I wore a suit. I know when to put a tie on.”) Most of his listeners also know that Franklin actually rides a Harley, flies his own plane into dangerous regions and dodges artillery fire and snipers’ bullets in his work with Samaritan’s Purse, and once famously cut down a tree with more than 700 rounds from an assault rifle. The combination of being both William Franklin Graham III and Franklin Graham, Rebel with a Cause and Christian Soldier of Fortune, has powerful appeal, and Franklin has used his legacy, his license, and his liberty to good effect, drawing ever larger crowds to his services.
As Billy Graham’s medical problems continued their slow but inexorable course, the need to think seriously and concretely about the future of BGEA became more pressing. Franklin’s expanding ministry, both in the pulpit and with Samaritan’s Purse, had improved his stature among organization stalwarts and generated increasing speculation that he would eventually take the reins. According to Time, Ruth Graham “became increasingly vocal in her belief that Franklin should eventually be his father’s successor.” Franklin apparently also thought it possible and reportedly broached the subject with his father early in 1995. Apparently the elder Graham was not ready to make a decision. Some accounts say he “rebuffed” his son’s inquiry. Franklin said only that, while it was plausible that he might one day head BGEA, “[my father] didn’t say it to me.” Neither did he say it to anyone else, at least publicly. However, the option to remain noncommittal would soon be taken from him by circumstances beyond his control.
In conversations among BGEA insiders, some words serve as shorthand for signal moments in Billy Graham’s ministry: The Canvas Cathedral, Harringay, Madison Square Garden, Berlin, Lausanne, Amsterdam. For less glorious reasons, Toronto joined that list in June 1995. At a standard appearance before a large civic club on the day before a crusade was scheduled to begin at Toronto’s Sky Dome, Graham collapsed, felled by a bleeding colon. From his hospital bed he asked T. W. Wilson to contact Franklin and ask him to take his place in the pulpit at the opening service. What followed is variously described, depending on one’s place in the audience, backstage, or among the dramatis personae, as a series of innocent misunderstandings, an unattractive struggle for power, or, less darkly, a mirthless comedy of errors.
Wilson called Ruth Graham, who called Franklin and told him his father was ill and wanted him to preach in his stead. Franklin had returned from Rwanda the day before, and his plane was being serviced. But he quickly arranged for a substitute and, with his wife and a daughter, flew to Montreat the next morning to pick up Ruth, then headed for Toronto. Before leaving, Franklin had called his sister Anne Lotz and asked her to pray for him. Concerned about their father and also recognizing the symbolic significance of having her brother step into the famed evangelist’s shoes in a major international setting with the spotlight at full wattage, Anne booked a flight and arrived in Toronto in mid-afternoon. Not long after she checked into her hotel, she received a call from a distraught Franklin, who told her he had just been informed that he would not be preaching that evening. Instead, associate evangelist Ralph Bell, an Ontario native, would fill in for their father. The decision had been made that morning, but no one had told Franklin when he was met at the airport. “My mother went straight to the hospital to see Daddy,” Franklin recalled, “and I went to the hotel room to work on my notes. About 5:00 o’clock—two hours after BGEA issued a press release naming Bell as the speaker for that evening—one of Daddy’s aides dropped by my room and said, ‘Franklin, I’ve got to talk to you.’”
Anne was furious and demanded to know who was responsible for this turn of events. Franklin wasn’t sure, but gave her the names of the people he presumed were involved. The basic outlines of what happened next are not in much dispute. Anne and Franklin had emotional meetings with their father, with members of the crusade committee, and with key BGEA personnel, including Rick Marshall, who was directing the Toronto crusade. Anne and Franklin thought it important that their father’s wishes be honored; Marshall and the committee contended that Billy Graham crusades had always been characterized as local events and therefore the local committee should have the final say in such matters. The committee refused to change its decision but would allow Franklin to “bring a greeting” from his father and give a brief report on his mission to Rwanda. They would get back to him the next day about whether he could preach at subsequent services. That evening Franklin used his allotted time to give a quite brief evangelistic message rather than a report on Rwanda, and Ralph Bell preached as planned. The next morning, when representatives of the crusade committee tried to reach Franklin to tell him they wanted Bell to preach at the remaining services as well, they learned that he had already flown back to North Carolina.
Beneath that consensus view of the known facts lie several conflicting explanations and attributions of motive. It appears that the Canadian committee did make the decision to ask Ralph Bell to fill in for Billy Graham and, when pressed by the younger Grahams, stood by their decision. Why they did so is less clear. Although Bell is a Canadian and had filled in for Graham on other occasions, some insiders doubt the local committee was even aware of that and assert that BGEA representatives must have suggested him to the local committee. They also note that John Wesley White is a Canadian but was apparently not mentioned as a candidate for the task, perhaps because he was known as one of Franklin’s staunchest advocates. That the push for Bell as Billy’s replacement came from inside BGEA also fits with a report that the chairman of the local committee claimed not to have known of Billy Graham’s wish until he met with Anne and Franklin.
Those who feel the decision to go with Bell was at least defensible point to BGEA’s tradition of local control of the crusades, but they also speculate that both Rick Marshall and the local committee probably felt it unwise, after long months of extensive and expensive preparation, to turn Billy Graham’s pulpit over to a relatively unseasoned evangelist, even if he did have his father’s name, genes, and blessing. Franklin and those who take his side have a less sanguine view. Franklin questioned both the behavior and motive of those who had countered his father’s request. He and Anne certainly understood the potential symbolic power involved in picking up his fallen father’s mantle at an event already making international news because of Billy’s collapse. “That’s what some people were afraid of,” he said. “I was honored that my father wanted me to preach, that he thought I was ready to fill in for him. I don’t think my father’s crusade directors were loyal to him. That is what he asked for, and they didn’t support him.”
In an interview not long after that event, Franklin showed his awareness that religious organizations, even those with the finest reputations, are not immune to the forces that characterize “worldly” organizations. Noting that control of BGEA’s $90-million annual budget could provide significant incentive to those wanting to shape the organization’s—and their own—-future, he said, “Listen, people will shoot you for $20. For $90 million, who knows?”
It is worth noting that no one believed Ralph Bell had a hand in stirring the pot, and Anne has said that Bell encouraged her to try to persuade the committee to let Franklin preach. By all accounts, Bell acquitted himself admirably, in and out of the pulpit, throughout this trying time, preaching to huge crowds each of the first three nights. Billy Graham recovered sufficiently to preach at the last two services.
Franklin’s family and friends worried about the impact this would have on him. Years later, both Anne and Franklin acknowledged that she had displayed more open outrage than he, and she speculated that perhaps both her presence and anger had been providential. “Franklin handled it so well,” she said, “but I feel like maybe God had me there to go with him, and that for me to be outraged helped him. He was concerned with calming me down, so maybe I was able to vent some of the anger he felt and also stand by him.” Less angry than concerned, BGEA photographer Russ Busby sat down with Franklin a few days later and told him, “I don’t know what happened, but there is one thing you need to consider. What really matters is what happens inside us. Don’t let this turn you bitter against God or anyone else. Make sure in your own heart that you’ve got it worked out. Because that’s where the problem could lie.”
For a time, Franklin insisted that he did not know the details of the Toronto affair, that he never wanted to learn them, and further, that it really didn’t matter. But years later, in a softer mood, he acknowledged, “There have been politics for a number of years in BGEA. And at some point there were people who worked very hard—I won’t say against me, but they certainly didn’t work for me.” He recalled a widely publicized dispute between Samaritan’s Purse and the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability in 1992. Questioned by the watchdog group for some of his organization’s accounting practices and for his personal use of the company plane, Franklin withdrew Samaritan’s Purse from the ECFA in April 1992, dismissing the investigation as the work of “crummy little Evangelical busybodies” who were jealous of his success. He insisted that “[ECFA] cannot hold up one piece of paper, not one document, and say, ‘This is where we got him.’ They can’t do it.” Whatever problems existed were cleared up quickly, and Samaritan’s Purse membership in ECFA was reinstated in January 1993. Two years later, the organization’s president dismissed it as “a bump in the road. And now it’s gone.” Looking back, Franklin saw it as part of an effort to sidetrack his ascension to leadership of BGEA. “That whole thing with ECFA,” he said, was all political. It was an effort by some people to tarnish Franklin. “‘We don’t want to destroy him, but let’s taint him so that he’s not in the running, so that his credibility is blackened a little bit.’”
The awkwardness and tension generated by the turmoil in Toronto forced Billy Graham to recognize that, by leaving questions of succession and leadership unresolved, he ran the risk of having members of his team, long noted for its harmony and relative lack of infighting, split into factions that could undercut its effectiveness after he passed from the scene. This would hurt not only the organization he had led for nearly half a century but the entire Evangelical world. A few months later, Graham took action. First, he joined Franklin in a father-and-son crusade in Saskatoon, which coincided with the publication of Franklin’s autobiography, Rebel with a Cause: Finally Comfortable with Being Graham. That symbolic joint lifting of the torch was followed shortly afterward, on November 7, by the BGEA board’s electing Franklin to the newly created position of first vice-chairman, “with direct succession to become chairman and CEO should his father ever become incapacitated.” Billy Graham retained his position as chairman of the association, but Franklin gradually took increased responsibility and in November 2000 was officially named CEO. John Corts remained as president and continued to oversee the Minneapolis operation on a day-to-day basis, but Franklin began to spend more time at the headquarters and to take a real leadership role. In January 2002, Corts retired, and Franklin assumed the additional role of BGEA president.
Not long after it became clear that Franklin would eventually head the ministry, a BGEA veteran advised him to “keep one thing in mind. Most of the people in the Minneapolis office honestly believe, and I believe with them, that they have given their lives to your father’s ministry and, through that, to God. Don’t lose sight of that. Whatever differences you may have with them, keep in mind that they really have dedicated their lives to your father’s ministry and to God’s work.” Franklin appeared to have heard that counsel, volunteering that “with BGEA we have a leadership that is older and retiring. I’m coming in and trying not to step on toes and slowly trying to fit in.”
Those who knew Franklin best recognized the potential for friction, because of both his new authority and his old personality. Soon after he was named Vice-Chairman and Successor, a cousin, Mel Graham, observed that “the handful that would resist Franklin clearly see him as a threat. Uncle Billy has got a lot more timid, a lot more easygoing here in his later years. And Franklin is a man of action. If somebody’s chain needs to be jerked, he’ll jerk it.” No one doubts that Franklin is more direct and less averse to conflict than was his father, but most observers gave him high marks—improving significantly over time—for his sensitivity both to his father’s continuing position as the dominant figure in the association and to the predictable anxiety felt by people about possible changes in the roles they had occupied for decades, and perhaps even about how secure their positions would be in a new regime.
One BGEA staffer attributed what difficulty existed not only to normal resistance to change on the part of entrenched team veterans, but also to Billy Graham’s reluctance to cede control even in the face of clearly diminished abilities. “We have a relay race, and the guy who created the baton and has been carrying it for fifty years has come to the point where he ought to hand it off, but he wants to take another lap. That has been a problem. Some of the people who are extremely loyal to him and to the ways we have always done things want to point out everything that Franklin is going to do or trying to do or thought about doing or mentioned in an elevator, and when they bring it up to Billy, he says he is not sure about that. But when you pin him down, he says, ‘Sure, that’s what I want to do.’ I think eventually it is going to work out fine, but has it been a model transition? No. I think everybody would say that.”
Russ Busby also acknowledged Billy Graham’s difficulty in passing the baton, but felt he had loosened his grip sufficiently by mid–2001 to effect a relatively smooth transfer. “It took a little bit of time, but I think God has given Mr. Graham peace about this. I think he has peace about Franklin’s motives for preaching. They are not, from my viewpoint, self-serving. I don’t think he’s ever wanted to run the Billy Graham Association. He’s got his own organization. But in the present situation, someone needs to take over. I think Billy also had some concern as to whether Franklin was ready for it. And when it is your own son, you want to make sure this is right, that you are not pushing your son into a place God has not prepared for him. In my mind, that would have been Billy’s biggest concern. I think he has peace about that now. I also think God has worked in Franklin’s life and accomplished what needed to be done there for him to take over. In my mind, God has put his stamp of approval on Franklin.”
Without a doubt, the spectacular growth and success of Samaritan’s Purse greatly enhanced Franklin’s standing in the Evangelical world and helped convince skeptics that he had the ability to run BGEA. In fiscal year 2001, Samaritan’s Purse income topped $179 million, including nearly $24 million from its Canadian affiliate. This outstripped BGEA revenues by approximately $62 million, a bracing response to those who feared that Franklin would never be able to attract the financial support that had come to his father. Audited statements revealed that 91 percent of Samaritan’s Purse income was expended on ministry, an admirably high proportion for any nonprofit organization. The organization’s facilities are extensive, modern, and comfortable, but neither lavish nor designed to draw attention to or pay homage to their leader. Located several miles from Boone, North Carolina, the complex is not only rather difficult to find, but has no signage to indicate one has arrived.
A visit to the ministry’s website (www.samaritanspurse.org) reveals the impressive range and scope of its efforts to bring relief and support for people in need around the world. In the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis in Central America, Turkey, India, Indonesia, and the U.S. Gulf Coast, Samaritan’s Purse has airlifted emergency supplies such as food, blankets, and temporary shelters, then followed up by building thousands of durable one-room homes—a project so impressive that the U.S. government AID program funneled money through the organization to build additional houses. In other initiatives, the ministry has built an orphanage in Moldova; set up a big water-filtering project in Ethiopia; helped establish a silk-production industry in Laos by distributing 600,000 mulberry saplings (to provide food for silkworms) to help families increase their income; delivered planeloads of food, medicine, and supplies to homeless people in Rwanda and to refugees in Afghanistan; and dispatched hundreds of medical professionals to different parts of the world as volunteers under its medical arm, World Medical Mission. In 2012, the organization sent disaster relief units and hundreds of volunteers to help survivors of Hurricane Sandy.
Greg Laurie, a noted California evangelist and pastor and a member of the Samaritan’s Purse board, observed that Franklin “will go into virtually impossible situations and get something done. He won’t take no for an answer.”
For several years Samaritan’s Purse has been heavily involved in Sudan in response to pleas from southern Sudanese Christians who had suffered atrocities at the hands of their own countrymen, mostly northern Muslims who have killed nearly two million of them and have tortured and displaced millions more, even selling them into slavery. Flying into areas officially off-limits to international agencies, Samaritan’s Purse pilots delivered emergency supplies that included bags of maize and sorghum seed (staples of the Sudanese diet), basic medical supplies, mosquito-nets dipped in natural insecticide to help ward off malaria, and tools to help refugees reestablish their lives. In 2014 the organization distributed more than 1,500 metric tons of food each month to nearly 90,000 people in refugee camps in the region. Opened in September 1997, the eighty-bed Samaritan’s Purse hospital, staffed primarily by international volunteer medical professionals working for a few weeks at a time, has treated more than 100,000 patients in an area that had been without adequate medical care for more than two decades. The hospital has been bombed repeatedly, killing some personnel. Because of his organization’s work in Sudan, Franklin Graham was asked to testify before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he called on the United States to join with other world powers to bring down what he regarded as “an illegitimate government.”
In February 2002 Franklin took on a significant—and to some, surprising—challenge when to date when Samaritan’s Purse, in cooperation with BGEA and at a cost of $2.3 million, organized “Prescription for Hope,” an international Christian conference on HIV/AIDS that drew more than 900 frontline AIDS workers, church and government leaders, and medical providers from 87 countries to Washington D.C. During the five days of the conference—which featured such speakers as Senators Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and the First Lady of Uganda, Janet Museveni—Franklin called on Christians to show “Christ-like care and compassion for the infected and affected.” This was not simply an attention-grabbing venture. Since 2002, Samaritan’s Purse has worked with AIDS patients and their families in more than forty-two countries. In another bold effort to fight a deadly epidemic, Samaritan’s Purse attracted international acclaim in 2014 when its extensive efforts to combat the Ebola outbreak in Liberia led to its being named, along with a small number of other organizations, as Time magazine’s Person of the Year.
Interestingly, and in contrast to these dramatic, often life-saving efforts, a program that began in 1993 as a heart-warming little venture to brighten a few children’s lives at Christmas time has become Samaritan’s Purse’s largest program, at least from a budgetary standpoint. The program, known as Operation Christmas Child, is simple in its essence. Donors, mostly children from affluent Western countries, pack a shoebox with candy, small toys, school supplies, and perhaps a pair of socks or mittens and send it to Boone along with nine dollars to cover shipping costs. After being checked at large processing centers in Boone and Charlotte to make sure they contain no inappropriate items such as food that might spoil or dangerous or inappropriate toys, the boxes are securely wrapped, then packed with others for eventual distribution to children in countries ravaged by war, poverty, or natural disasters. Imagining the delight in the eyes of a child in Albania or Zimbabwe as she opens her little box has proved irresistible, as has the opportunity to have one’s own children and grandchildren feel some connection with and responsibility for those less fortunate. In the weeks before Christmas 2016, Samaritan’s Purse planes and trucks delivered more than 11.5 million shoeboxes to distribution points in 104 countries. The total cost of Operation Christmas Child for that year topped $281 million, over 54 percent of total expenses for the combined U.S. and Canadian organizations. One might argue that this substantial amount of money could be used to meet more vital needs, but most of it is generated by the program itself and would probably not otherwise be available. Perhaps more importantly, hundreds of thousands of families who might not think of giving money to buy wood stoves or water filters or mulberry saplings will form a bond with an organization that has thought about such things.
Throughout the growth of this ministry Franklin has insisted that his efforts at social amelioration are subordinate to evangelism. “Our goal and our purpose,” he asserted, “is to take an ugly situation and turn it around so we can preach the Lord Jesus Christ—not in a crusade environment or a mass rally, but one on one, in small groups. People will listen out of respect—‘I am interested that you would come all the way from America to my corner of the world. You are here and you helped me. I am interested in who you are and what you believe.’ Our being there in those circumstances generates a sincere interest. We planted over a hundred churches in Kosovo alone.” His obvious success at both kinds of ministry has drawn real admiration from within BGEA, including the admission that “when you think about it, his ministry is really more complete than his father’s . . . and that’s good.” There is also a recognition by some that many contemporary young people are attracted more strongly by a demonstrated commitment to relieve human suffering than by a passionate proclamation of original sin or substitutionary atonement.
One of the fears expressed by and for the generation of Evangelical leaders reaching the end of their careers at the close of the twentieth century was that their successors, having grown up in times of affluence and relative ease and having experienced Evangelicalism as a significant part of the cultural mainstream rather than a marginal movement fighting for respectability, would be too soft, too willing to compromise with “the world,” too willing to water down their message to gain popularity. Ironically, despite his early wildness, Franklin Graham seems not only firmly committed to a quite conservative view of Scripture and Evangelical theology, but also more willing than his father to condemn both sin and sinners in blunt, unyielding terms. In this respect, as one observer noted, he is more like the young Billy Graham than the older one and may even be more like that earlier notable exponent of “muscular Christianity,” Billy Sunday. “I want to confront you in love,” Franklin has said, “But I’m warning you that there’s a hell and there’s a heaven, and your soul lives for eternity. [God] has a standard, and that standard doesn’t change. . . . [I]f you continue this behavior, you may die, and your soul will be separated from God for eternity.”
Franklin certainly says things his father probably would not have said after becoming a national and international figure. He exhorted a 1999 Wheaton College graduation class not to “lower the flag” by being “tolerant of people who live in sin,” and was clearly willing to follow his own admonition. His father surprised many during the Monica Lewinsky scandal by saying, on NBC’s Today show, “I forgive [President Clinton] . . . because I know the frailty of human nature and I know how hard it is—especially a strong, vigorous young man like he is. . . . He has such a tremendous personality that I think the ladies just go wild over him.” In contrast, Franklin said flatly, “A lie is a sin, and sex outside marriage is a sin. It doesn’t matter if you’re the president of the United States or Franklin Graham or a busboy in a hotel.” He didn’t deny the reality of temptation, but felt it could be avoided by following the same rules that had helped his father avoid scandal for so many years: “I will never be alone with another woman or travel with my secretary alone,” he told a radio interviewer. “I’ll always make sure there are other people with me.” As for Bill Clinton, Franklin said, “For the sake of the country, the best thing he can do is quietly resign. Let Al Gore pardon him and get it off the front pages and into history.”
In the same spirit, Franklin differed with Evangelicals who had given positive reviews to Robert Duvall’s movie The Apostle. Franklin told his Wheaton audience, “When Hollywood portrays the Church of Jesus Christ as immoral, no, don’t you tell me this is a great film. No way. Hollywood portrays a minister of God’s Word as a murderer, a womanizer, a drinker, bringing the level of the pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ down to the level of trash.” On the other hand, Franklin brought Jim Bakker to his father’s home for Sunday dinner the weekend after the disgraced evangelist got out of jail, and he continued to act in a supportive fashion, in keeping with his belief that God not only condemns sin but also forgives it. Bakker, incidentally, had a more favorable view of Duvall’s movie, seeing it as “the story of a man who did a terrible thing, but his heart, like David’s, was toward God. . . . Either we believe in grace or we don’t. So I have to accept the grace in that story.”
Franklin also sounded harder than his father on other “sins of the flesh.” To the consternation of many conservative and abstemious Christians, Billy Graham freely acknowledged that Jesus and his companions drank wine, that the Bible does not command total abstinence, and that he occasionally lifted a glass himself. Franklin, a former drinker, draws a sharper line: “The world says, ‘You want to drink? That’s great. Just be responsible [and] have a designated driver.’ No, it’s not OK. It’s wrong. It’s a sin.” When asked his opinion of American drug policy, he said, “I think that people who sell drugs—I’m not talking about people who use it, but about those who traffic in it—I think they ought to be executed. They are killing and destroying lives. They are no different than Timothy McVeigh. You want to stop drugs? Then [make it clear,] ‘You deal in it, you get caught, you pay with your life, because you are taking lives. You are a murderer, a killer, a destroyer of families.’ I tell you, if you get that tough, you are going to clean up the streets pretty quick.” He readily acknowledged that the American drug war in South America is “crazy” and riddled with corruption, he urged enlargement of treatment programs to help people get free of drugs, and he conceded that execution might be too harsh for lower-level dealers. But, he said, “If we are serious about it, we need to be tough. We have to be a little bit meaner. We are so timid about the death penalty. For people who deal and traffic in drugs, there need to be severe, severe penalties.” To discourage users, he also favored a policy that relies heavily on punishment as a deterrent: “You can cut off demand pretty quickly with laws that make it such a risk that you never, ever want to get caught with drugs. Singapore doesn’t have too much of a drug problem. It’s a great place to live. It’s a wonderful society. It’s clean, it’s beautiful. A beautiful place.”
Franklin’s decisive, sometimes authoritarian opinions and statements may help account for his appeal to a generation grown skeptical of moral relativism. Even those not inclined to share his views may have little quarrel with his call for a more stringent sexual morality and abstention from alcohol and drugs; his approval of harsh penal sanctions obviously resonates widely throughout society, at least among white Americans. But some of his comments on international political issues have been bolder and more controversial than those of his father, who typically tried either to sidestep controversy or to express any criticism he might have of a current administration in circumspect language and muted tone.
In a 1999 interview with Christianity Today writer Wendy Murray Zoba, Franklin said, on the record, that the United States should not have gotten involved when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. “He was just taking back what originally belonged to Iraq. . . . Kuwait is part of Iraq. It is.” Samaritan’s Purse not only provided aid to Iraq after the Gulf War, but also sent young single men into the area, hoping they would marry Christian Iraqi women and remain in the country as missionaries. (In another attempt to use the Gulf War as an opportunity for evangelism, Franklin helped U.S. troops smuggle Arabic-language New Testaments into Saudi Arabia.) Years later, after watching a video of Serbian soldiers brutalizing Bosnians in Sarajevo, Franklin said he would have had them executed. Commenting on atrocities in Sudan, he threw a combination punch, noting that “black brothers in Africa are being annihilated by the Muslims, who are Arabs. . . . But Jesse Jackson is silent. What is that?”
During a festival in Lexington, Kentucky, in October 2000, Franklin stirred the ire of Arab Americans when he reacted to violence in the Middle East by saying, “The Arabs will not be happy until every Jew is dead. They hate the state of Israel. They all hate the Jews. God gave that land to the Jews. The Arabs will never accept that. Why can’t they live in peace?” The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee immediately called on BGEA “to repudiate these shockingly racist comments which condemn each and every Arab as a genocidal bigot and suggest that Palestinians have no rights in their own country because ‘God gave that land to the Jews.’” None of these provocative statements or actions is of a kind one associated with Billy Graham. In fact, in the days immediately following Franklin’s statements about Arabs, the elder Graham issued a statement saying he was “praying for and supporting the efforts among leaders of both sides in the search for peace.”
In a similar vein, Franklin has been more pointed than his father in claiming unique superiority for Christianity over other religions. While Billy never wavered in his effort to proclaim the acceptance of Christ as the only reliable road to salvation, he was clearly troubled by the prospect that people who had never heard the gospel message would be condemned to eternal damnation (see p. 576), and he was often at pains to avoid appearing to be an opponent or critic of other faiths, particularly the major world religions. Franklin seems untroubled by the prospect that his comments might offend some who do not share his convictions. To the familiar, if naive, question as to whether Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists were not all serving the same God that Christians worship, he said, “It’s not the same God. There’s one God and he has a son, Jesus Christ. Friends, there’s no other way.” On another occasion, he said, “It wasn’t Mohammed of Islam who died for the sins of the world. It wasn’t Buddha who died for the sins of this world. . . . It was the Lord Jesus Christ.” And after a trip to India, he marveled at “hundreds of millions of people locked in the darkness of Hinduism. It was an unbelievable eye-opener for me to see how pagan religion blinds and enslaves people. These people were bound by Satan’s power.”
Further, Franklin’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan differed sharply from his father’s irenic observations. Twice, including on the NBC Nightly News, he called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.” Predictably, these words brought a strong response, from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (which failed to get a meeting with Franklin), but also from the president of Stop Hunger, a relief organization. Franklin backtracked slightly, noting the millions of dollars Samaritan’s Purse had poured into Muslim countries and claiming he had been “greatly misunderstood.” Yet in the Wall Street Journal, he observed that “The persecution or elimination of non-Moslems has been a cornerstone of Islamic conquest and rule for centuries,” adding that the Qur’an “provides ample evidence that Islam encourages violence in order to win converts and to reach the ultimate goal of an Islamic world.”
This is not to say that Franklin sees no virtue in religions other than Christianity. In discussing President George W. Bush’s controversial “Faith-Based Initiative,” Franklin parted company with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, both of whom had said that Muslim groups should not be eligible for assistance under the proposed program. “Let’s say that Muslims have a way to get kids off the street after school,” he volunteered. “I may not like the fact that they’re Muslims, but why should they be discriminated against? If they are doing a good job, I say thank God somebody cares enough to [help those kids].”
Franklin has also followed his father’s lead in welcoming virtually all denominations, including Roman Catholics, to participate in his festivals as full partners. Still, he feels bound by conscience and calling always to make it clear that he is a minister of Jesus Christ, not a spokesman for some kind of civil religion guaranteed to offend no one. At a memorial service for the victims of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, he asked the 70,000 mourners gathered before him and the millions more watching the live CNN broadcast, “Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Have you trusted him as your Savior?” Extolling the example of seventeen-year-old Cassie Bernall, whose confession, “Yes, I believe in God,” apparently prompted Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to kill her, making her a born-again martyr and heroine, Graham told his hearers that the only way they could be prepared to meet God should their own lives end suddenly was “to confess our sins, repent of our sins, and ask God for his forgiveness and to receive his son, Jesus Christ, by faith into our hearts and into our lives.”
Not surprisingly, Franklin’s use of this occasion to preach what amounted to an Evangelical sermon drew fire from several quarters. Rabbi Fred Greenspahn, chairman of the religious studies department at the University of Denver and the only non-Christian on the program, said it showed a “pretty ignorant narrow-minded streak of Christianity.” He told Graham afterward that he had found his remarks “hurtful because they weren’t inclusive of other religions.” According to Greenspahn, “He looked at me and ignored me. . . . It seemed to me at that service if you weren’t ‘saved,’ you weren’t acceptable.” Another rabbi said that he had felt “disenfranchised” because the service was “clearly Evangelical,” adding that a service of that sort should be religiously inclusive. This one, he said, “didn’t pass the smell test. It shut out a lot of people.” Not all the criticism came from non-Christians. The Rev. Michael Carrier, a Presbyterian pastor and president of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado, said, “I felt like he was trying to terrorize us into heaven instead loving us into heaven. . . . [This service] was supposed to be for all the people of Colorado and the nation to find solace, not an Evangelical Christian service.” Franklin himself apparently had no second thoughts. Interviewed about the event a few days later, he said he had felt an “awesome responsibility” at the Columbine service “to give people a rope to hold on to. I had about five or six minutes. The families of the 13 were there looking and the whole world was watching on TV. I just wanted to tell people that there is a God, that he loves us, and that he gave his only son 2,000 years ago.”
Franklin stirred a similar response in January 2001, when he led the invocation at the presidential inauguration of George W. Bush and delivered the sermon at a service the next morning in the National Cathedral. He concluded his inaugural prayer by saying, “May this be the beginning of a new dawn for America as we humble ourselves before you and acknowledge you alone as our Lord, our Savior, and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” At the worship service the following morning, he spoke of “Christ, whom the Bible speaks of as the source of all wisdom,” and proclaimed that “it’s not enough just to be moral; it’s not enough just to believe in God. The Bible says in John 3 that you must be born again.” He asserted his belief that God is calling America to repentance and faith and that “to repent is to acknowledge our need of the Great Physician in our lives . . . and to accept his prescription for healing of our souls found in his son, Jesus Christ, and by faith receiving him into our heart and trusting him as our savior and follow him as our Lord. . . . Jesus said in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the father but by me. . . . May we as a nation again place our hope and trust in the almighty God and his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, our Savior, our Redeemer, and our Friend. May God bless you, and may God bless America.”
These statements drew critical comments from Jews, Muslims, and other non-Christians, and also from Christians who felt that the inauguration—the preeminent ritual of American civil religion—should be an occasion to bring the nation together, not symbolically exclude people of different faiths or of no faith at all. When asked about what he had said and the reactions to it, Graham made it clear that his distinctly Christian statements were not the product of thoughtlessness or habit. At a rehearsal the day before the inauguration, he recalled, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, an African-American pastor from Houston who was scheduled to give the benediction, had asked him if he planned to pray in the name of Jesus. “I said, ‘Absolutely. Yes sir. This isn’t a platform I have sought. I think God has put me here, and I think it would be wrong not to pray in the name of the Lord Jesus.’ And he said, ‘Good. I’ll do it too.’” And he did. Caldwell drew even more fire than Graham when he closed his benediction with the words, “We respectfully submit this humble prayer in the name that’s above all other names, Jesus the Christ. Let all who agree say ‘Amen.’”
Picking up a Bible during this interview, Graham continued, “The President put his hand on the Bible. Is he excluding Muslims because he doesn’t have the Qur’an? Or how about the Hindu Book of the Dead? How long does the list have to be? Did he exclude all of these and other Americans because he had his hand on the Holy Bible? The President is a Methodist—a born-again Methodist—a Christian who wants to have a Christian prayer to open the inauguration and a Christian benediction to close it. It is his inauguration. He is a Christian. Because the United States voted for a Methodist, did we exclude the Jews because [vice presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Joseph] Lieberman didn’t get elected? Come on! Why fault me because, as a Christian, I invoke the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God?” My Father in heaven prepared me for that moment, and I wasn’t about to sell out his Son Jesus Christ because of what people might say. I’m a minister of the gospel. If you don’t want me mentioning the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, don’t invite me. That’s just the way I feel.”
Billy Graham made pointedly Christian statements and led Trinitarian prayers in public for decades without stirring much notice, but Billy Graham was an icon, and he achieved iconic status when America was a far less diverse nation than at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Franklin’s form of insistent Evangelicalism has kept him from assuming his father’s mantle as Chaplain to the Nation. Though seen as a major spokesman for Evangelical Christianity, Franklin recognizes that at such occasions as the Columbine memorial service and the inauguration, he served as a stand-in for his incapacitated father, and he professed not to care about assuming the role of the People’s Pastor. “That is not something I want to do,” he said. “If the President asked, I would go to something, but I don’t see myself being the kind of figure my father was. This is not a role I want. I have enough roles right now. Managing Samaritan’s Purse and BGEA is enough.” Franklin did, however, make a quick round trip to Philadelphia during Amsterdam 2000 just to give the closing prayer on opening night of the Republican National Convention. (The official convention website, incidentally, posted the text of his prayer but did not include the closing line, “We ask this tonight in the precious name of thy Son, the Lord Jesus Christ.”)
Russ Busby expressed what seemed to be the emerging assessment of Franklin’s fitness for the challenging position he inherited. “God prepares new people for new times,” he said, “and I think he has prepared Franklin. After being around him for many years and traveling with him and being in all of his meetings in the last three or four years, I have seen God working in his life. No one can replace Mr. Graham. Franklin is different from his father, so a few things will be different. That’s what causes all of us to get a little apprehensive. But Franklin has a heart for God, and it shows. And the more you are around him and hear his message and talk to people and see him out with Samaritan’s Purse—really down with the people, wanting to help, so that ultimately he can present God’s love to them through Jesus Christ—you can see that he is real.”
Franklin’s standing with long-term BGEA supporters has doubtless been enhanced by his increasing success as an evangelist, in the United States and internationally. Although his festivals in the U.S. have not matched those of his father’s crusades, they have typically attracted tens of thousands in cities such as Mobile, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Norfolk. Far larger crowds have flocked to his meetings in other countries, with aggregate attendance of 71,000 in Montevideo, Uruguay; 76,000 in Timisoara, Romania; 93,000 in Moldova in 2005; 112,000 in Villahermosa, Mexico; 186,000 in Ecuador in 2006; 183,000 in Taipei; and 317,600 in Manila. And in 2008, Franklin obtained permission to visit Pyongyang, North Korea, where he met with both religious and political leaders and preached in one of the city’s two Protestant churches. Such results reassure those who may have feared that Franklin’s commitment to Samaritan’s Purse might cause him to neglect the public evangelism that was the heart of his father’s ministry. And those taking an even longer view are surely heartened by the knowledge that Franklin’s oldest son, Will—a pastor in Raleigh, North Carolina, and a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University—has laid claim to the family mantle. In 2006, Will held his first large “Celebration” in the U.S. in Gastonia, N.C. (He had previously held a similar mission in Barrie, Ontario, in 2004.) He preached to overflow crowds and saw more than 300 people respond to the invitation. Fittingly, as a sign of patriarchal blessing, his choir leader for the event was Cliff Barrows. Will seasoned quickly, leading successful evangelistic outreaches in several states and in South America, Australia, and India. By 2013, he was a full-fledged BGEA Associate Evangelist and Executive Director of the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove.