God’s Self-Starters

In one of those deft phrases, of which he is a master, historian Martin Marty once described Evangelical Christianity as “the religion you get when you get religion.” Marty was referring to the soul-saving, convert-making style of American Christianity identified with the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, the circuit-riding Methodist preachers of the nineteenth century, and the itinerant revivalists of every stripe who laid across the hinterlands of America a sawdust trail that eventuated in the minutely managed urban crusades of Billy Graham. Marty’s pithy definition, adopted from a line by journalist H. L. Mencken, captures Evangelical religion as experienced individually by those who come forward to “get saved” or be “born again,” but it leaves out the nature of that religion as organized and marketed by the convert-makers themselves.

From that angle, Evangelical religion is essentially an entrepreneurial religion. This is not a theological definition, nor is it how most Evangelicals today would understand themselves. But it is, I would argue, a definition that captures Evangelicalism’s distinguishing feature. There would be no Evangelicalism without evangelizers and their organizations. But what kind of organizations are they?

Those evangelists who care about pedigree trace their genealogy back to George Whitefield, an itinerant Anglican priest whose New England revivals in the 1730s and ’40s lit the fires of the First Great Awakening. Whitefield’s operative words all began with re—revelation, reform (as in the Reformation), regeneration, and, especially, rebirth. “My one desire,” he said, “is to bring poor souls to Jesus Christ,” the baptized no less than the nonbaptized. But his method—preaching outdoors to massive crowds—was new. (His biggest draw was twenty-five thousand, in Philadelphia.) So was his disregard of established churches and denominational differences. He would share his platform with anyone who believed that the only thing that made a Christian a Christian was her (Whitfield’s audience was preponderantly female) experience of personal conversion, or “new birth,” and the subsequent power to lead a holy life. In the Second Great Awakening, just prior to the Civil War, the message was essentially the same. What differed for those preachers and for their twentieth-century successors were the medium and technique.

The genius, the energy, of Evangelicalism lies in its protean drive to fashion ever-new ministries and movements in order to segment and target new audiences as markets for spreading the Gospel and converting individuals to Christ. It is this entrepreneurial character that makes Evangelicalism an especially American form of Christianity, and helps explain the strong affinity between Evangelical Protestantism and free-enterprise capitalism, as manifest in the sudden rise in the late 1970s of the “New Religious Right.”

In the Seventies, as in the previous two decades, Evangelical Protestantism was identified most prominently with evangelist Billy Graham. “If you want to know where the center of Evangelicalism is,” so the saying went, “look to Billy Graham. And if you want to know where Evangelicalism is headed, keep looking to Billy Graham.” At any given moment, Graham and his associates defined where Evangelicals stood in relation to the narrow Fundamentalism out of which they grew, and to liberal Protestantism, which functioned as their foil, and to American politics, a place where Graham had firmly planted his personal flag as friend and unofficial pastor to successive occupants of the Oval Office.

That Graham was an evangelist by calling and by trade suggests just how deeply Evangelicalism itself is wed to the entrepreneurial spirit. The classic stand-up evangelist is an itinerant preacher, not the pastor of a church. People go to church, but evangelists take religion to the people. Theirs is a mobile ministry in the manner of the Apostle Paul, for which the closest modern secular analogue is the traveling salesman. Selling Jesus one-on-one and marketing him to millions through revivals and latterly through the media is what evangelists do.

But unlike Paul, modern American evangelists do not travel alone, much less on foot. All successful evangelists create their own business organizations that seek venues, sign television contracts, promote, advertise, sell (Bibles, books, audios, videos, T-shirts, and sometimes even healing cloths and tiny plastic communion cups), and in general see to it that the donations keep coming in. In this respect, the modern evangelist epitomizes the self-starting entrepreneur, and as such is apt to imagine that Jesus was one, too. The connection was established in 1925 in The Man Nobody Knows, the huge bestseller by advertising genius Bruce Barton. Barton marveled at the way a humble carpenter “picked up 12 men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world.”

Not all evangelists are ordained ministers and of those who are, most in the past took up the call with no formal theological education. Among the most successful lay evangelists in the last decades of the twentieth century were Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ; James Dobson, a pediatric psychologist who established Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the former Nixon White House aide who created his own prison ministry after serving time himself as a convicted Watergate conspirator and felon; and Pat Robertson, the religious broadcaster and onetime candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. A complete list of all the evangelistic “outreach” organizations and their missionary affiliates formed since the Fifties does not exist. If it did, it would be thicker than most yellow pages.

Evangelicalism is also entrepreneurial in its theology. Although the message comes from the Bible, the interpretation is up to the preacher, whose challenge is to find fresh ways to sell his message. These preachers do not, as a rule, subscribe to formal creeds or honor denominational distinctions. Their job is save individual souls, something that can occur quite independently of churches and usually does. Not surprisingly, entrepreneurial religion measures its success by the number of converts it makes. Even local churches that call themselves Evangelical “count the house,” and a growing church is, by Evangelical accounting methods, a sign of God’s favor.

Indeed, if you read the biographies and autobiographies of some of the better-known Evangelical pastors, their stories go well beyond the conventional conversion narratives of the eighteenth century: they reek of Horatio Alger. The theme of the self-made man is what united in the 1970s and ’80s a Fundamentalist like Rev. Jerry Falwell with a therapeutic megachurchman like Rev. Robert Schuller, the founding pastor of the huge Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, California. Schuller, who was educated in a Calvinism he no longer preached, started his first church by preaching solo in a defunct outdoor movie theater. Falwell started his in an abandoned bottling plant. Even today, at schools like Liberty University, founded by Falwell, graduates who go into the ministry are expected to set out on their own and “plant” new churches; they do not, as mainline Protestant clergy do, begin by taking a junior position in an established congregation. And it works. Independent churches—that is, those with no denominational ties or creedal identity—represented the fastest-growing segment among Protestant congregations in the second half of the century.

Today, Evangelical Christianity has developed well beyond the originating characteristics I’ve just described. But in the Seventies, its entrepreneurial style was its glory and its boast. I did not learn this just by reading about evangelists or attending their revivals but by meeting them face-to-face.

The Great Commissioner

The evangelist I saw most often, apart from Billy Graham, was Bill Bright. He and one of his aides came calling on me at least once a year to pitch the latest venture of Campus Crusade for Christ. Bright founded CCC in 1951 as a proselytizing ministry at the University of California, Los Angeles, using students trained by him to “witness” to fellow students. Soon it spread to hundreds of other campuses and eventually went international. Bright saw himself as the kind of man the risen Christ had in mind for His Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations….” Although Bright founded and controlled Campus Crusade, he was not, like Graham, the medium of his message. His gift was training others to be effective evangelizers. Bright’s own training was in sales and he employed the lingo—sales force, sales tools, memorized sales pitches, and tips on how to close a deal, meaning getting someone to come to Christ. Fraternity presidents, student body officers, cheerleaders, and star athletes were his prime targets. His evangelizers worked the cafeterias, library steps, and student lounges. Trouble was, his youthful recruits were not steeled salesmen accustomed to rejection. Many students disparaged them as “Christers.”

Bright’s first big breakthrough came after he simplified his pitch by writing a short pamphlet called The Four Spiritual Laws, which his evangelizers could read to students and leave for them to ponder. Based on the idea that God has a plan for every human being, the four laws became the stripped-down summary of the Campus Crusade theology. The second was Bright’s eventual decision to require his staff to raise their own salaries through donations, freeing Bright himself to concentrate on donors with deep pockets for his new and ever more ambitious projects. Among the latter were giant youth gatherings like “the Berkeley Blitz,” which was his planned invasion of the campus where the Free Speech Movement had started. He was determined to create a Christian youth culture to counter the Sixties counterculture. It was another of these extravaganzas, “Explo ’72” (short for “Spiritual Explosion”), planned for Dallas, that brought Bright to New York a year ahead of time to pitch the media. He predicted the event would attract one hundred thousand young people and it almost did.

Whenever evangelists came calling, I told them they would have to pitch me over lunch—on them. I picked the restaurant, always a good one, and routinely ordered two Jack Daniel’s as bracers while they talked. It was a taunt, I suppose, but I wanted them to know at least that much about where I stood. Bill Bright was a short, somber, rather unctuous undertaker kind of man whom I imagined as T. S. Eliot’s Eternal Footman sans the snicker. He was not at all like the cheerful, sociable southern evangelists who came round and right off called me Ken. At lunch, Bright told me how he had felt a personal call from God to “win the entire country for Christ by the year 1976,” the nation’s bicentennial. Dallas was to be the first step. His next goal was to evangelize the entire world for Christ by 1980. Being in the business of saving souls, all evangelists tend to identify their goals with God’s own. But Bright was the only one who also assigned God a timetable.

As at lunches past, I could see behind Bright’s salesman’s eyes that he was wondering about the state of my own immortal soul. This time I thought I’d tease him with a glimpse. I told him how my father had been saved by Billy Sunday as a youth. Bright’s eyes brightened.

“And you, did you follow in your father’s footsteps?” he asked. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” In all the years I’d known him, Graham had never asked me that. But Bright had slipped into witnessing mode and I thought I’d witness back.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want a personal Lord and Savior. I prefer the one everyone else has.” I’d been waiting for years to tell an evangelist that.

I knew what he meant, of course. But the idea of pushing Jesus as my personal savior rankled, as if Bright were recommending a personal trainer. The Jesus I knew had been mediated to me by others, a rather old and large community of others at that. And as I understood the Gospels, Christ was to be encountered through a community of faithful, not just in that deceptive inner space we call the heart. Bright, too, was offering me a socially constructed Jesus, one mediated to him by others, though he was blissfully unaware of that.

Explo ’72 nearly fizzled until Billy Graham agreed to serve as honorary chairman. He even predicted it would be a “Christian Woodstock,” a prospect that unsettled some conservative folks in Dallas. Bright took the hint and turned the final night into a “Jesus music festival” headed by Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson. An estimated seventy-five thousand kids turned up, proving, according to one of Bright’s biographers, that there really was a Christian youth cohort out there that dressed counterculturally but was religiously and politically conservative at heart. Working through Graham, President Nixon let Bright know he’d accept an invitation to address the crowd. That very year Nixon had been named, improbably, “Churchman of the Year” by a private foundation called “Religious Heritage of America”: this for a man who, on Graham’s advice, attended religious services only downstairs at the White House. But 1972 was also an election year, and Bright’s aides convinced him not to make his Explo ’72 overtly partisan. In any case, Explo’ 72 turned out to be an organizational success: with hyperbole typical of evangelists, Graham generously dubbed it “the greatest religious happening in history.” (So much for Pentecost.) Bright was the real winner: Campus Crusade attracted so many new recruits that he was able to double his staff to three thousand.

By 1974, Bright could no longer resist political temptation. As conservative in politics as he was fundamentalist in theology, he opened “the Christian Embassy” in a splendid mansion purchased from the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., for $550,000—a huge sum at the time. The purpose of the embassy was to provide prayer, worship, fellowship, and counseling to legislators and government officials. But if the art of evangelism is based on personal contact, so is the art of politics, and Bright was soon a familiar figure in conservative Republican circles. Two years later, he covertly joined forces with a movement led by Arizona congressman John Conlan, an ex–Catholic priest married to a former nun, that planned to go precinct by precinct organizing “real Christians” (a designation that excluded all but Fundamentalist and Evangelical Protestants) behind conservative politicians. One publisher involved put out a “Christian Index” ranking members of Congress according to how they voted as measured by a conservative reading of the Constitution and “God’s law.” The index was put together in Conlan’s office and—no surprise—his name topped the list. All this took place years before anyone had heard of Rev. Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority, or the Religious Right with its voters’ guides.

It was Billy Graham who tipped me on what Bright was up to. In May 1976, he sent me a copy of a letter he had sent to Bright outlining his disagreement with the latter’s political activities. I sat on it until a story on Bright’s maneuvers appeared in Sojourners, a youthful, left-leaning Evangelical magazine edited by Jim Wallis, one of the truly gifted Evangelical ministers of our time. I immediately asked Newsweek’s Washington bureau to follow up. Meanwhile, I phoned Billy Graham, who reiterated that he was “opposed to organizing Christians into a political bloc” and that he was furious with Bright. “Bright has been using me and my name for twenty years,” he grumbled, promising to have it “straight with him” that very week. Graham went on to list a series of differences he had lately had with Bright. By recruiting evangelizers from among those he converted, Graham said, Campus Crusade “has become almost a denomination by itself, in competition with the churches.”

The rebuke from Graham stung Bright and threatened his future fundraising efforts. But he had every reason to believe that Billy would support his venture into political mobilization: in his own way, Graham had been doing the same thing for decades.

Graham’s Secret Effort to Stop JFK

The most egregious example, long suppressed by Graham, occurred during the Kennedy-Nixon contest in 1960. Graham wrote his close friend Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s running mate, assuring him that he would remain neutral in the race and in fact was sitting it out in Switzerland. On the contrary, three months before the election, Graham summoned about two dozen Evangelical leaders to a relative’s home in Montreux where he often vacationed. There they discussed how to mobilize American Protestants against Kennedy. They deeply feared having a Catholic in the White House. Among them were Norman Vincent Peale; L. Nelson Bell, editor of Christianity Today and Graham’s father-in-law; Harold Ockenga, a leading Evangelical theologian and rabid anti-Catholic; J. Elwin Wright, cofounder of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE); and Glenn Archer, head of Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, a vocal anti-Catholic organization.

After the meeting, both Graham and Peale wrote Nixon, explaining their plan. Under the auspices of an NAE spin-off called—ironically—“Citizens for Religious Freedom,” they would hold a conference at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., to brief 150 other Protestant leaders and pastors on how to stop Kennedy. Billy stayed in Montreux, though he advised Nixon by letter on the campaign, and Peale agreed to front the meeting, where several of the Montreux group spoke. Peale warned that “our American culture is at stake” and Bell declared that “the antagonism of the Roman church to Communism is in part because of [their] similar methods.” Two reporters slipped into the session and took notes on the rabidly anti-Catholic discussion, and passed on what they heard to their colleagues. When Peale held a press conference afterward, he took such a drubbing from the reporters that the plan never got off. In fact, the entire effort undoubtedly bolstered Kennedy’s election. The Democratic candidate read about the meeting while campaigning in the West. He already had in his pocket an invitation to address the Greater Houston Ministerial Association and decided right then to accept it. That address, of course, is now history.

Publicly embarrassed, Peale went into severe depression and hiding, offering to resign his post as pastor of New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, the editorship of his magazine, Guideposts—even his membership in the New York Rotary Club. Privately he felt that Graham, by hiding his central role in the project, had let him suffer the consequences, though he never said so publicly. Graham never did own up to his role in the stop-Kennedy cabal, telling JFK that his vote was for Nixon, not against him. The entire episode gets only a brief, bland summary in Graham’s grandly misnamed autobiography, Just as I Am.1

Bright’s “Ministry of Giving”

By 1974, Graham had become a wiser man. Eventually he and Bright reconciled. But in airing his differences with Bright, Billy had done his fellow Evangelicals a favor. The biggest problem Campus Crusade posed to others in the Evangelical camp—Billy excepted—was Bright’s ability to corner the market on major donors. Increasingly, he relied on the financial support and referrals from deep-pocketed political reactionaries like the Hunt brothers of Texas. “Wherever I go and meet a wealthy person,” complained David Hubbard, president of Evangelicalism’s flagship school, Fuller Theological Seminary, “I find that Bill Bright has been there first.” Undeterred, in 1977 Bright set a budget of $1 billion for his biggest entrepreneurial effort yet, “Here’s Life World,” through which he hoped to make good on his promise to preach Christ to the entire globe by 1980. He failed, of course, but it was just a marketing plan anyway. Just six months before his deadline, Bright established “History’s Handful,” a gimmicky effort to raise $1 billion from 1,000 donors willing to give or raise $1 million each. Part of the strategy was to convince donors to go into debt, if need be, in order to support his effort. Bright assured them that they were participating in a “giving ministry” that would result, among other things, in their “eternal salvation.” Martin Luther would have condemned this as salvation through good works. But Bright saw it as the fiduciary obligation a Christian acquires once he knows he is saved. In Bright’s hands, theology was always fungible.

Campus Crusade turned out to be a classic example of Evangelicalism’s inherently entrepreneurial spirit. “A man’s gotta dream,” as was said of Willy Loman at his funeral, and in pursuit of his, Bill Bright raised and spent at least a billion dollars. In addition to his ministries targeted to college and high school students, he added Evangelical training organizations for families, single young adults, and military personnel, plus media ministries. By acquiring Athletes in Action (AIA), he was able to penetrate college and professional locker rooms, recruit coaches, and even field a barnstorming AIA basketball team composed of former college players who witnessed to their faith at halftime.

In his battle with the Sixties counterculture, Bright emerged the twelve-round winner on points. His evangelizing of the young proved to be more populist and more enduring than the counterculture’s immersion in acid and alienation. History has to give him that much. Bright never did manage to fulfill the Great Commission, but organizationally, at least, he achieved a salesman’s success. At his death in 2003, Campus Crusade was an international big tent with thirty different ministries and a staff numbering half a million.

The “Chairman of the Board”

In the world of entrepreneurial religion, there was only one organization that surpassed Bill Bright’s in global reach and clout. The first name of the man that organization answered to was also William, but everyone called him “Billy.” He had an immediately recognizable voice, magnetic personal charisma, a powerful stage presence, and a buddy in the White House, and among the brethren he was the acknowledged “chairman of the board.” For many of us that description denoted Frank Sinatra, but in the world of entrepreneurial religion it was Billy Graham.

From the start of his public ministry Graham determined to avoid the Elmer Gantry stereotype by separating his preaching from the business side of mass evangelism. He was lucky. Unlike Bright, he did not go hat in hand to wealthy donors: they came to him. The alliance between private wealth and big-time evangelists is an old and sturdy one. Dwight Moody had his John Wanamaker and J. P. Morgan; Billy Sunday had his John D. Rockefeller Jr. and S. S. Kresge; and Graham had J. Howard Pew, W. Maxey Jarman, J. Willard Marriott, and many more. This alliance also helps to explain why big-time evangelism has also espoused conservatism in politics. Historian George Marsden has said that “Revivalism has been to American religion what free enterprise has been to the American economy,”2 but that observation falls just short. Revivalism was free enterprise in the service of religion.

If Billy Graham was well connected, he was also well advised. As early as 1950, when his reputation was just ascending, Graham set up the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), taking a modest but always sufficient salary from it, and hired others to handle his ministry’s financial matters. In this and in all other ways but politics, his integrity was unimpeachable. Billy was the chairman of the board and very much its CEO, a fact that was usually lost on his adoring public but everywhere evident to the gathering Evangelical movement. Organizationally, Billy Graham was the movement.

Through the BGEA Graham established a broadcast division that purchased airtime on radio and later on television for his Hour of Decision programs. In 1949, when Graham was still a newcomer on the evangelistic circuit, the BGEA bought out Great Commission Films to distribute movies of his crusades; later, under the name of World Wide Pictures and with a studio of its own in Burbank, California, the corporation produced feature films for distribution around the world. In 1952, Graham and his close aide George Wilson started the Grason Company, which published and distributed books, records, and music used by the BGEA and gave its profits to the BGEA. Another affiliated organization, World Wide Publications, handled wholesale sales. Eventually, the BGEA maintained offices in nine foreign countries.

Even without the BGEA, Graham was financially secure. He maintained a comfortable lifestyle on 150 acres atop a North Carolina mountain where he built his home. Under his name, he distributed a column, “My Answer,” that appeared in 1,200 newspapers. Altogether, he authored or authorized in his name more than thirty books, several of them huge bestsellers.3 In 1960, Graham created his own monthly magazine, Decision, which eventually gained a circulation of 42 million.

By 1976, the BGEA could report an income of $28.7 million with a budget larger than that of most Protestant denominations. Graham himself was wary of revealing just how prosperous his organization had become: ordinary believers, too, supported his evangelism with their dimes and dollars, though he only saw them (from a distance) at his crusades. When word surfaced that the little-known Billy Graham World Evangelization and Christian Education Fund of Dallas had accumulated $23 million in stocks and real estate, Billy explained to me that he had kept the existence of the fund quiet for fear of being inundated with requests for aid. It was, he said, a reserve he was building up to realize two personal dreams: to build a training center in North Carolina for evangelists and a Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. And eventually he did both.

No one called the BGEA “Billy Inc.” but that is what it was and had to be if Billy was to preach the Gospel on a worldwide stage. It was at once his support system and the mechanism through which he trained others in the techniques of evangelism. No less than Bright, Graham was driven by the words of the Great Commission.

Even so, Graham’s entrepreneurial drive went beyond the BGEA. In 1956, Graham, his father-in-law, and others founded the biweekly magazine Christianity Today, with Billy serving as chairman of the board. Through it and its associated publications, Graham and the editors he selected both defined what Evangelical Christianity was and provided the medium through which conservative Christians within the liberal mainline denominations could find common cause and identify with traditional Evangelical churches and denominations. In this sense, Graham’s new or neo-Evangelicalism ushered in a new kind of ecumenism and postdenominationalism that both countered and paralleled the ecumenical movement represented by the liberal National Council of Churches and progressive Protestant publications like The Christian Century. And for a long time Graham also served on the boards of the three major Evangelical schools: Fuller Theological Seminary in California; his alma mater, Wheaton College in Illinois; and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, which, with funding from J. Howard Pew, Billy himself established in 1969. Significantly, he never sat on the boards of Southern Baptist universities or seminaries. Although Southern Baptists claimed him as one of their own, Graham had by 1970 established an identity that was far more encompassing. To his legions of followers, especially abroad, Billy the Baptist had become a generic “Dr. Christian.” Like the proverbial pealed artichoke, all that was left of his Southern Baptist identification was the scent.

Preacher-in-Chief

In the spring of 1970, I sent several cover-story suggestions up the editorial ladder, including one on “The Surging Southern Baptists.” The denomination was by then the largest Protestant church in the country, with big plans for conquering the North for Christ. I had gone south once or twice to address the editors of the Southern Baptist Convention’s state newspapers and had come away impressed by the way in which Southern Baptists had so thoroughly shaped the culture and mores of an entire region. Their age-related Sunday schools and other organizations for Southern Baptist youth were much like the formation apparatus I experienced growing up Catholic. Indeed, some called the Southern Baptist Convention the Catholic Church of the South. The Convention’s public information director, a wonderfully affable man with the echoing name of W. C. Fields, plied me with numbers: in ten of the eleven states of the old Confederacy, Southern Baptists constituted an absolute majority, and in Texas alone the Baptist state convention, with 1.8 million members, was larger than all but eleven Protestant denominations. It was a chance to study the country’s last and largest religious subculture, one that was still struggling over racial integration of society and of its churches.

Summer was usually a slow time for news, so editor Oz Elliott reluctantly gave my proposal a green light, on one condition: “Just make sure we put Billy Graham’s picture on the cover.” Oz knew Billy would sell more copies off the newsstands than a story on the Southern Baptists, regardless of their numbers, ever could. By then Graham had personally conquered northerners in a way that the Southern Baptists never would.

As the nation’s preacher-in-chief, Billy was at the zenith of his political influence, thanks in large part to his deep friendship with President Richard Nixon. They were each other’s enablers: Graham won the president’s ear and regular overnights in the Lincoln Bedroom, and Nixon got access to Billy’s national following together with his blessings. At the moment, Nixon’s need of Billy was the greater. It was an election year and opposition to the Vietnam War was fierce, especially on college campuses. The only universities the president dared to visit during his first term were the military academies—with one exception. He did address General Beadle State Teachers College in Madison, South Dakota, the hometown of conservative Republican senator Karl Mundt. So, as it happened, did I a year later. It was a measure of the president’s popularity on campuses that the religion editor of Newsweek, hardly a household name, drew the larger crowd.

In May 1970, Billy found a way of ushering the president onto a major campus without his being invited. Graham was due to hold a crusade in Neyland Stadium on the University of Tennessee campus in Knoxville. Like all his crusades, this one was sponsored by the city’s Protestant churches, which paid to rent the stadium. Billy invited Nixon to be his personal guest; it was, he said, the first time any president would address a revival. Nixon, in turn, invited a group of Republican officeholders to share the platform: it was midterm election time and Nixon was as hell-bent to aid the party as Graham was to aid Nixon.

As president and preacher took their seats together, the choir sang “How Great Thou Art.” Given that the camera was tightly focused on both Graham and Nixon, their eyes shut tight and heads bowed in prayer, it was not entirely clear which “thou” was being addressed. Billy then got up to introduce the president to the crusade’s final, youth-night crowd. “I’m for change,” Billy said, “but the Bible teaches us to obey authority.” There was some pushing and shoving on the football field between a knot of antiwar protestors and a security line that included a burly group from the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Nixon took note. “I’m just glad there seems to be a solid majority on one side tonight,” Nixon told the crowd, “rather than the other.” But of course the Graham organization had seen to that.

Working closely with Chuck Colson, H. R. Haldeman, and other White House aides, Graham also planned a July Fourth “Honor America Day” featuring himself as preacher to the nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was billed as a day of national unity, with Bob Hope as Graham’s cochairman, J. Willard Marriott as organizer, and appearances by Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen and Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum. In fact, it was an anti-anti–Vietnam War rally that heard Billy leading a chant of “Never give in! Never! Never! Never! Never!”

On the Road

With all of this unfolding, I knew we had a legitimate cover story. But I needed to talk to Graham myself. Billy agreed to meet me in Los Angeles, where he had gone to edit the videotape of the Tennessee crusade. I took the red-eye from New York, arriving early on a Sunday morning. Like the outtakes of a movie often are, the insights into Billy I got that day were more revealing than the quotes I garnered for my story.

Graham was waiting at the airport with two members of the crusade “team.” All three men were dressed in identical green sport coats that matched the green Chrysler sedan they were driving. It was like meeting a college football coach and his staff, all wearing the team’s colors. Graham spent so much of his life on the road, he said, his teammates from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association had become his second family. Unlike his first family back home in North Carolina, Billy’s road teammates were all male. Graham had a rule, a wise one for the world’s most recognized evangelist: never be alone with a woman—not even with his female personal secretary, not even in a car.

Driving to the TV studio, where we would talk alone, Graham wanted me to know that the car we were sitting in was the gift of a Los Angeles auto dealer, Graham’s to use whenever he was in town. Again, I was reminded of college football, especially in the South, where the coach of the state’s team was more celebrated than the governor, and the object of appreciative fans’ gifts. Coaches are big, but Billy Graham was in a league of his own. I was thirty-four. He was fifty-one.

“I want you to see this,” Graham said, as we pulled into the studio parking lot. Billy opened his wallet and showed me a plastic credit card. It was issued by Marriott Hotels and the name printed on the bottom, in raised letters, read: BILLY GRAHAM WORLD EVANGELIST. “Willard Marriott gave me this,” Billy said. “He’s a Mormon, you know, but he supports our crusades. This card allows me to stay in any Marriott hotel anywhere in the world and I don’t have to pay for a thing.” Then he pulled out a card from Holiday Inn, which extended him the same gratuity. Several times over Graham had been recognized as “Salesman of the Year,” and just like every traveling salesman I ever knew, Billy relished his perks.

It was nearly noon in Los Angeles and it occurred to me that there would be no time for me to find a Sunday Mass. “Hope I didn’t keep you from church,” I said to Graham.

“I don’t get to church much on the road,” Billy replied. I could readily see his dilemma, imagining how disruptive it would be for a local preacher and his congregation to have Billy Graham show up at his Sunday service unannounced. But Billy was on the road two-thirds of the year, as he acknowledged, which meant he rarely spent a Sunday in common worship like other dutiful Christians, except at home, where he accompanied his wife to the Presbyterian church in Montreat, North Carolina. No matter: for an itinerant evangelist like Graham every day in the pulpit is the Lord’s Day, and even God rested on the Sabbath.

Even so, Graham’s relationship with churches was central to his ministry. His advance team organized local churches to support his crusades, and when newcomers declared themselves for Christ his crusade counselors directed them back to local congregations. No one accused Graham, as some did Bill Bright, of competing with the churches. But Billy’s relationship with his own Southern Baptists was a marriage of convenience.

“America’s Pastor”

Graham was raised in the Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church, a small, culturally conservative branch of Calvinism. But by the age of twenty he had been baptized more than once. The last immersion was by a Southern Baptist, and it was wholly expedient: without it he could not expect to preach in the surrounding Southern Baptist churches of northern Florida. Once Billy decided that his call was to evangelism he determined to elide the differences that divided his Protestant target audiences—as Whitefield had done two centuries earlier. But he also realized that the Southern Baptists, by far the largest Protestant denomination and one that incorporated an opportunity to get saved in every Sunday service, was the fellowship that was most likely to support his crusades. Yet only in 1953 did he formally join a Southern Baptist congregation: First Baptist Church of Dallas, then the largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world—a “megachurch” before there was such a label. He didn’t worship there, but his membership gave him access to a clutch of wealthy and conservative Texans. Moreover, by the time we talked, Billy had moved beyond the turgid Fundamentalism of the church’s pastor, Wallie Amos Criswell, and his die-hard support of racial segregation. Compared to Criswell, who regarded his lavish lifestyle as God’s reward for his service, Graham’s habits—like his salary—were relatively modest.

With this history in mind I asked Graham which church he now felt most comfortable in.

“Actually, Ken, I feel most at home in the evangelical wing of the Anglican Church,” Billy told me. On reflection, that made a certain sense. London was the site of his first overseas triumph, in 1954, and he always relished returning there. Besides, he admired scholarly Anglican clerics like John R. W. Stott, who sustained the Church of England’s evangelical wing. But I also think that Billy secretly admired the stately Anglican ritual, and there was really only one basic ritual—the sermon and altar call—in Southern Baptist worship. That said, Billy always looked at home in his plain, business-suit Baptist threads—and never more so than when photographed alongside the robed and mitered hierarchs of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches.

In any case, Graham had long ago placed himself above denominational differences and group identities. An evangelist can’t afford to parse theological differences and expect big crowds. Unlike Martin Luther King Jr., with whom he had an unsteady friendship, Billy spoke neither for nor to a constituency: he only addressed crowds of anonymous individuals as “America’s Pastor,” in Duke historian Grant Wacker’s apt phrase.4 For me the difference between these two Southern Baptist preachers came to this: with Graham you sang “Just as I Am”; with King it was “We Shall Overcome.”

Voice Alone

As the two of us sat in his old studio in Burbank—the same studio, Billy noted, from which he had once broadcast his Hour of Decision radio program—he rolled the videotape of his crusade with the president as his guest. I noticed that sequences involving protestors had been edited out. I asked Graham if he didn’t think that Nixon had used him for political purposes by attending his revival. Billy seemed surprised by the question. “If Mr. Nixon had been running for election,” he countered, “I could understand the charge of politics. But he is the president. I wouldn’t think that you’d call the president political.” He may be that naive, I thought, but it bothered me that he thought I was, too.

We both turned our attention to the television monitor. There was the familiar figure of Billy Graham preaching his familiar message from the pulpit, a choir of five hundred voices, and Graham’s closing altar call (though as in all revivals there was no altar) to the crowd to come down one by one and personally accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior.

I remembered how, while covering another Graham crusade, I, too, had responded to his altar call, though not for religious reasons. For me it was an exercise in understanding what moves others: I wanted to imagine as best I could the experience of a sinner in the stands getting saved with one momentous decision, like my father said he did. I even walked down to center stage to make my declaration. To my relief no one actually asked me for one. Instead, a counselor handed me a form in quadruplicate to fill out. It was then that I realized that a modern-day revival is a ritual rededication aimed more at the already saved—though maybe backslid—than at the unconverted. The BGEA’s own computer printouts showed that on average only 3.5 percent of crusade attendees made decisions for Christ. It was a ritual like any other, and like any other it required prior initiation to be effective.

Every year, thousands of Southern Baptist and other Evangelical and Fundamentalist youngsters are readied from the time they enter Sunday school for that moment, around the age of twelve, when each will step away from the pew, walk up the church aisle alone to recite “The Sinner’s Prayer,” and declare himself for Christ. It is, like Protestantism in general, a purely oral/aural experience. There is in a revival nothing to educate the eye other than the body language of the preacher, nothing for either the sense of taste or smell to suggest sacred presence. Voice is everything. If the Protestant Reformation was built on a trinity of “alones”—Christ alone, faith alone, the Bible alone—revivalism added a fourth: the voice alone, addressed to the listener as an isolated “Me alone.”

Graham himself was first prodded toward the pulpit on the eve of his sixteenth birthday after hearing a revival preached by a converted Jew, Mordecai Ham. Later, he was told by Bob Jones, whose fundamentalist college Billy briefly attended, “God can use that voice of yours.” And when, finally, young Billy Franklin Graham gave himself to the preaching ministry, it was, he has written, because he heard “the voice of God” while walking alone on a Florida golf course. And now, with his own baritone as an instrument, the mature Graham had the gift of making the simplest sentence sound like Sacred Scripture.

Once Saved, Always Saved

Whatever else they may be, evangelists are genuine American performance artists, and in watching Graham on videotape I was witnessing one of the best. I also watched Billy watching himself. “What are you experiencing?” I asked. I expected an analysis of his technique, perhaps some second-guessing of his doppelganger on the monitor. But that is not what I got.

“I get so engrossed, I don’t think of the man on television as me,” Billy said. “I think of him as another person speaking because the spirit of God begins to speak to me through him.”

At that moment I began to understand what makes Evangelical preaching more than just a hortatory exercise. Through his voice Graham was exercising a priestly function. It wasn’t just the Bible preached as the word of God that mattered. It was the orchestrated collective experience—the speaking and the hearing and the singing—that made Christ present to the crowd. I was witnessing a verbal sacrament (though Graham would never use that term) in which Christ, “the Word made flesh,” became Christ, the flesh made words.

Just by listening to himself on videotape that Sunday in Los Angeles, Billy had made it to church after all.

Once Graham clicked off the monitor I got down to basics. “Billy,” I asked, “what’s it like to know you are saved?” It was the sort of question that perhaps only a Catholic would ask, since Catholics do not believe that anyone can be certain of his own salvation—though a lot of Catholics act as if they are. It was also the sort of over-the-plate question any minor-league evangelist could easily hit out of the park. After all, Graham’s whole career was built on getting sinners to repent and thereby ensure their eternal salvation.

“It’s wonderful,” he said. “Indescribable.”

“Well,” I pressed, “suppose you’re saved, and afterwards you—uh—crawl in the hay with the organist?”

I purposely used the sort of down-home euphemism I thought Graham might tolerate, but for a moment he blushed. “Well, Ken,” he replied, “I just wouldn’t get as high a place in heaven.” Once saved, always saved—this is the blessed assurance that tortured Martin Luther, who never overcame the suspicion that he was unworthy of salvation. But American evangelism was built on providing just such certainty, an insurance policy that never runs out.

Months later, over lunch in the Senate dining room with Senator Mark Hatfield, a very serious and disciplined Baptist whose politics were markedly to the left of Graham’s, I recounted this story. I wanted his take.

“Ken,” he said, “if I didn’t know I was saved, I couldn’t get up in the morning.”

“Mark,” I blurted out, “if I knew I was saved, I wouldn’t get up in the morning.” Such are the abiding differences between the spiritual sensibilities of Evangelicals and of Catholics.

Unlike Hatfield, however, Billy had a very clear if literal view of his role in the afterlife. He imagined, he told me, that in their resurrected bodies, the saved would look like they did at whatever age they were most comely. “And what will you do when you are in heaven?” I prodded. Billy tapped his soft leather Bible. “St. Paul listed five rewards for real Christians,” he said. “And each of them must be tremendous crowns—or maybe planets to rule.” This from an evangelist who twice (in 1952 and fleetingly in 1964) considered Republican urgings that he run for president of the United States.

Graham and the American “Civil Religion”

My cover story on Graham was written right after his Fourth of July performance at the Lincoln Memorial. Only fifteen thousand showed up. But many times more would watch the videotape on television. What sort of event was it? was the question my story addressed. Was it civic or religious?

As it happened, I had just read sociologist Robert Bellah’s now-classic essay, “The Civil Religion in America.” In it, Bellah argued that alongside particular religions Americans had elaborated a set of civic rituals and shrines (the Lincoln Memorial was one) that united the nation and—this was crucial—against which, as in any religion, the American republic expected to be judged. The God of civil religion, in Bellah’s view, “is much more related to order, law and right than to salvation and love.”5

That, I thought, was the religion Graham had appropriated to himself. Yes, his main job was preaching individual salvation, but in his public role he reliably resisted anyone or any movement that threatened, in William Butler Yeats’s pungent line, to “hurl the little streets upon the great.” Graham could and did show great courage by insisting early in the Fifties that his crusades across the South be fully integrated. In fact, he received numerous death threats for his stand. But in the Sixties, he did not join other religious leaders on Dr. King’s march in Selma, Alabama, offering instead to go there afterward to calm the waters. Faced with any moral or civil irruption, Billy instinctively shrank from playing designated hitter: he preferred batting cleanup.

The sources of Graham’s law-and-order conservatism were more than temperamental. For one thing, his fierce anticommunism made him wary of any form of social unrest. For another, he preferred gradualism in matters like school integration. It was a defensible position, especially for a southerner. Billy also took literally the Apostle Paul’s words that everyone should be “subject to the governing authorities” because “those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” Above all, Billy liked to be liked, especially by men of wealth and power. He was drawn to politicians like moth to flame, and they to him. He was a master at networking because, as his archived correspondence shows, he was for many politicians a network unto himself. Biographer William Martin was spot-on when he titled his 1991 book Prophet with Honor. But so, from a different angle, was another biographer, Marshall Frady, a very gifted Newsweek colleague, who recognized in Graham a compromised Billy Budd.6

But as the Seventies wore on Graham changed. Watergate, which brought Nixon down, was a personal blow to Graham. More so was Nixon’s profanity as revealed on the White House tapes, which showed that Billy really didn’t know the real Richard Nixon, although Graham always insisted the real Nixon was not the frantic president on the tapes. After Watergate, Graham paid less attention to American politics and more to his role as Dr. Christian to the entire world. Here, too, he changed, but only gradually. For years he had traveled to Asia and other far-off places without ever supposing that Hindus or Buddhists might know something worth learning. As a self-styled “ambassador for Christ,” he always arrived equipped to deliver the Answer. Recognizing Christ in others, especially when those others are non-Christians, has never been a trait of entrepreneurial religion.

“I Won’t Play God Anymore”

Once Graham gained entry into the communist-run countries of Eastern Europe, his vision broadened. There he met Catholic and Orthodox as well as Evangelical Christians who had long suffered under communist suppression and found in them a Christian commitment tested in ways that those back home had never experienced. His eyes were opened.

The first time he talked about this for publication was in the fall of 1977. He was just back from Hungary, his first preaching tour inside the Soviet bloc. As it happened, McCall’s magazine asked me to do an interview with Graham about his marriage and his family. The editor agreed that once we covered those subjects I was free to ask him whatever I wanted. Since I saw the interview as a “family” feature for a women’s magazine and not news, I ignored Newsweek’s policy requiring the editors’ permission to write freelance articles. I took the pseudonym James Michael Beam, after the lower-shelf Kentucky bourbon.

I met Billy in an undistinguished mid-Manhattan hotel where he was resting between appointments. The hotel room was small, and standing or sitting, Graham at six feet two looked trapped, like a man in a suit two sizes too small. He was tired, he said, and missed his wife. So we talked about his family, the regrets he had about being away from his wife and children most of the year. No traveling salesman I knew put in those kinds of hours on the road. Indeed, Billy was downright apologetic about being an absentee father.

Then we slid into his favorite topic, his personal relationships with the last five presidents. Again he grew reflective and self-critical. He said he now regretted his political pronouncements from the pulpit and his former tendency to identify Christianity with the American way of life. “I no longer think we are a Christian nation,” he said. “We are a secular country in which a lot of Christians live. In fact, after visiting Hungary, I wonder whether Christians don’t have a harder time coping with the temptations of our society than the Christians in Hungary have in coping with the difficulties of living under a socialist system.”

I asked Billy how many fresh converts he figured he’d made in Hungary. He said he no longer looked at his ministry like a bookkeeper. “I don’t even give a thought anymore as to whether five or five thousand people come forward. All I care about is whether I have done the very best I can to explain as simply as I can what it means to be a Christian. The cost of Christian discipleship [a phrase coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer] is coming more and more into my message now. This is where I think I failed in my earlier ministry—I didn’t emphasize enough what it costs to follow Christ. That’s something I learned from traveling to other countries and from my American critics.”

This was a far humbler Billy Graham than the one I had profiled for Newsweek seven years earlier. I’d watched him move away from his earlier Fundamentalism and now, it struck me, he was moving beyond the certainty and triumphalism that I found so off-putting about evangelists. When I asked him how he saw his role today, his answer surprised me. “I used to play God,” he said. “But I can’t do that anymore. I used to believe that pagans in far-off countries were lost—were going to hell—if they did not have the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached to them. I no longer believe that.” Here he was being careful with his words, never mind that they were only for a women’s magazine. “I believe that there are other ways of recognizing the existence of God—through nature, for instance—and plenty of other opportunities, therefore, of saying ‘yes’ to God.”

I pressed him: “Are you saying that non-Christians can also be saved?”

“God does the saving,” Billy said firmly. “I’m told to preach Christ as the only way to salvation. But it is God who is going to do the judging, not Billy Graham.” He was particularly adamant about evangelistic groups like “Jews for Jesus” who target Jews for conversion. “If a person wants to convert to Christianity, that is his own free-will decision. I would never go after someone just because he is a Jew, which is why I have never supported the Jewish missions.”

When my McCall’s article appeared the following January under a cover line declaring, “I Won’t Play God Anymore,” it provoked an immediate public reaction. Other evangelists upbraided Graham for undercutting the very purpose of evangelism. Among other sins he was accused of denying the Gospel, of succumbing to New Age religion—even of being a Satanist. (These accusations can still be found on the Internet.) Jews for Jesus demanded that he clarify his stand. Billy had indeed made news, and Newsweek’s editors asked me if I didn’t think there was a story in it for us. James Michael Beam had put me in an intolerable position. I assured them, with crossed fingers, that the controversy would disappear overnight. Billy himself called a press conference to defend himself. It was a classic Billy Graham performance: like his favorite president, Eisenhower, he garbled his answers so effectively that he managed to both affirm and deny what he had said in the interview. The one thing he did not do, though, was reveal who had actually written the story. He understood my dilemma. I owed him one.

Billy and the Pope

The following October, Graham made a preaching tour in Poland (in communist countries he never called them “crusades”), where, for the first time, he was invited to hold evangelistic services in Catholic churches. One of them was in Krakow, where he was invited to have tea with the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. Meantime, the cardinal had been called to Rome to participate in the election of a new pope. Graham watched on television as Wojtyla himself emerged on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as Pope John Paul II. The pope’s first words were “Praised be Jesus Christ!” “Right then,” Graham later told me in an interview for a story on the pope, “I saw that he was an evangelist.” It took one to know one, I figured, and I thanked Billy for giving me the best one-word description of a very multifaceted pope.

In the years that followed, the mutual respect between Graham and John Paul II evaporated whatever reservations the American evangelist harbored about the Catholic Church. It also burned whatever rope bridges Billy still had to old-line Fundamentalists, who regarded Catholicism as a false religion and its faithful as apostates. In a private meeting at the Vatican, the pope told Billy “we are brothers,” and in a published interview with me Graham returned the compliment: “He’s the moral leader of the West.” He meant it. Billy always hoped that his preaching would ignite a great social revolution like the one the Polish pope helped fuel in Eastern Europe. Still, Graham was also fairly certain who was in second place as moral leader. When, in 1988, Billy was invited to Moscow for the millennial celebration of Russia’s conversion to Christianity and the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church barred John Paul II from attending, he told me: “Ken, I probably was invited in place of the pope.” Whatever the reason, Billy got to Moscow first. And when John Paul II died in 2005, the only religious organization other than churches invited to send representatives to the funeral was the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

A Tradition Apart from Traditions

By then, Graham’s major impact on American religion was already thirty years behind him. Through his personal style and organizational leadership, he reshaped the old Fundamentalism of the early twentieth century and gave currency to a new name plucked from the nineteenth: Evangelicalism. By the middle of the Seventies, Protestants as different in beliefs and behavior as Lutherans, Southern Baptists, and Pentecostals—and even theologically conservative Methodists, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians—began to think of themselves as belonging to a larger if more amorphous identity group called Evangelicals.

But this remarkable inclusion by confluence was achieved at a high price. Through his revivals, Graham advanced a generic form of Christianity that dismissed profound theological differences among the various traditions as if they were so much excess baggage. His was inclusion by subtraction and what got lost were all the ways that Christianity had been embodied in the centuries since the Twelve Apostles. While theologians in the official ecumenical dialogues worked through historic differences on the assumption that all partners had valid insights to contribute, Graham’s evangelism leaped over millennia of Christian history and experience to promote an individualized “biblical” Christianity that was, in effect, born yesterday. Much as I liked Billy—most people who met him did—he remained a kindred spirit to the Fundamentalist pastor who chiseled this into the cornerstone of his church:

The Church of Christ

Founded in Jerusalem in A.D. 33

Established in Sweetwater, Texas, A.D. 1928

There are countless cornerstones like this in churches throughout the South and Middle West, each testifying to the conviction, endemic in revivalist Christianity, that not only the individual but the church itself is born anew whenever and wherever a preacher takes a Bible in hand and someone listens. This is a tradition apart from traditions, built on the notion that the Bible is a self-interpreting book. But of course it isn’t, which is why Evangelicalism as represented by Billy Graham tried but never achieved more than organizational definitions of what distinguishes Evangelicals from other Christians. Even Billy admitted in 1982 that “I’d have a hard time giving you a definition of what it [Evangelicalism] is today.” Some Evangelicals took to calling themselves simply “Christians,” as if only they could claim that title. What they all had in common, though, was a personal experience. And for that experience they did have a special name: “born again.”

Parallel to Graham’s rise as America’s Pastor, another form of religion emerged, this time from the streets. Like entrepreneurial religion, it, too, appealed to people of all beliefs and none. It, too, challenged listeners to make decisions, to commit themselves, to take action.