Obituary - Billy Graham, charismatic Christian evangelist who filled stadiums around the world

Died: February 21, 2018

BILLY Graham, who has died aged 99, was a superstar of Christian evangelism who became famous for holding massive rallies all over the world, including in the UK, at which hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, discovered their faith. His rallies always ended the same way with Graham calling on the audience to let Christ into their lives. Over his long career, millions did.

He was born into circumstances that ensured the direction, if not the success, of his career. His parents were committed evangelical Protestants who kept the Sabbath, spurned alcohol, organised prayer meetings on their dairy farm and raised their children in the faith.

Converted at the age of 16 at a rally addressed by Mordecai Ham, one of the stars of the revival circuit, he enrolled at the Bob Jones Bible College (memorably described as the buckle on the Bible belt), which he found a little too strict in its fundamentalism for his taste, and then transferred to the Florida Bible Institute where he seized every available opportunity to preach (including having himself appointed as resident preacher to a caravan site).

After graduation, he broadened his social contacts and his intellectual horizons by moving to Chicago to attend Wheaten College, which, though fundamentalist in theology, was a fully accredited liberal arts college. There he came to the attention of Torrey Johnson, a nationally known radio preacher, who enrolled Graham in Youth for Christ, a touring evangelistic enterprise.

With two visits to Britain in 1946 with Young for Christ, Graham discovered his vocation: repeatedly preaching a simple (his critics says simplistic) gospel message to huge audiences. The format developed in those early tours served him well for over half a century.

His advance organisers would arrange for local churches to sponsor the rallies, to provide members for a massed choir, and to book blocks of seats so that the auditoriums were sure to be well-filled even if the general public was slow to respond. Skilful public relations work also ensured good press coverage.

The rally would then begin with rousing singing from the choir and from Graham’s soloist George Beverley Shea. Local celebrities (usually role models such as sportsmen who could demonstrated that Christianity was not “wet”) delivered brief testimonies to the Lord’s influence in their life and then Graham preached.

He used a combination of folksy anecdote and statistical evidence ("crime has increased 500 per cent in the last 30 years!") to demonstrate that some aspect of the world was in a mess and then cited a series of Bible texts to show the solution: "Getting right with the Lord."

He would then close with an emotional and repeated demand for members of the audience to "make a decision today for Christ" by coming forward to the stage, where they were met by counsellors, provided by the local churches but trained by the Graham organisation. The personal details of converts were carefully recorded and passed to the local churches to follow up.

He visited Scotland three times: in 1955, 1961 and 1991 and many thousands of Scots came forward at the end of his rallies. During the 1955 visit, called the All-Scotland Crusade, 90,000 people saw Graham and it was reported that 50,000 were converted during the visit.

Graham had the personal qualities to be a great preacher. He was tall and handsome, and radiated good health, sincerity and charm in equal measure. He had a command of evangelical rhetoric and he had a beautiful voice which, unusually, worked both in huge sports arenas and in the more intimate setting of the radio studio.

He also had the good fortune to embark on his career at the right time. America had just emerged from the Second World War as a pre-eminent world power, which gave his international tours an added attraction, but it was a nervous power, terrified of the influence of the Soviet Union, which made Graham's anti-communism attractive to many audiences and to influential sponsors.

One such sponsor propelled Graham to national attention. In 1949, when Graham was holding two weeks of rallies in Los Angeles, William Randolph Hearst, the model for Citizen Kane and a man not known for his personal piety, sent all his editors a telegram which simply said: “Puff Graham!” They did. The run of meetings was extended to two months and more than 350,000 people attended. Graham was soon on the front cover of Time and Newsweek magazines.

While print helped “puff” Graham, it was the new mass media which made him. In 1950 he broadcast his first Hour of Decision radio programme and within weeks it was reaching audiences of over 20 million. The new television technology also allowed his meetings to be transmitted simultaneously all over the world with a clarity and an immediacy that allowed these remote audiences to feel almost as involved as those at the original meeting. In this way, hundreds of millions of people in every continent heard Graham preach.

As his fame spread, the dogmatism of his southern fundamentalism was softened and by the 1960s he was being repudiated by many conservative Protestants for his willingness to co-operate with mainstream Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Given the very narrow task he had set himself, the claim that he had sold his principles for popularity seems unfair.

A more accurately diagnosed character flaw was Graham's fondness for powerful people. On his rise to fame, he courted politicians and presidents; once famous he allowed himself to be courted by the same. His stock fell sharply in the 1970s when he continued to defend Richard Nixon long after most people had realised that the president's administration was corrupt at heart.

That experience chastened him. When other television evangelists became involved in the politics of the so-called new Christian right in the 1980s, Graham stayed aloof. When leading evangelists Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Baker were brought down by sex scandals and fraudulent finances, the probity of honesty with which Graham had always managed his personal life and his finances did much to restore the reputation of the profession.

Graham also preached some controversial messages. On gay rights, for example, he said that homosexuality was a sinister form of perversion and claimed in 1993 that AIDS was a judgment from God (a statement which he later retracted); he was also an opponent of gay marriage.

Billy Graham’s combination of simple message, folksy delivery, effective management, and sophisticated technology allowed him to address an unprecedentedly large audience but it is less clear that this endeavour had much direct impact on the world. Local congregations who sponsored a Graham crusade always reported increased church attendance for months afterwards but the long-term trends - decline in churchgoing in the industrial west, rapid growth of Protestantism in the Third World - continued unaffected.

In Britain, he will be remembered as the glamorous naive American who startled the grey post-war with his brash, confident style as much as with his gospel message. Internationally, he will be credited as the first star of global mass media culture.

Graham's last crusade was in June 2005 in New York City; it drew 242,000 people. Graham's son, Franklin now leads the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and spoke at President Donald Trump's inauguration.

Billy Graham was pre-deceased by his wife Ruth and is survived by his two sons Franklin and Ned, and three daughters Gigi, Anne and Ruth.