America's Pastor

Grant Wacker

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674744691
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

During a career spanning sixty years, the Reverend Billy Graham's resonant voice and chiseled profile entered the living rooms of millions of Americans with a message that called for personal transformation through God's grace. How did a lanky farm kid from North Carolina become an evangelist hailed by the media as "America's pastor"? Why did listeners young and old pour out their grief and loneliness in letters to a man they knew only through televised "Crusades" in faraway places like Madison Square Garden? More than a conventional biography, Grant Wacker's interpretive study deepens our understanding of why Billy Graham has mattered so much to so many.Beginning with tent revivals in the 1940s, Graham transformed his born-again theology into a moral vocabulary capturing the fears and aspirations of average Americans. He possessed an uncanny ability to appropriate trends in the wider culture and engaged boldly with the most significant developments of his time, from communism and nuclear threat to poverty and civil rights. The enduring meaning of his career, in Wacker's analysis, lies at the intersection of Graham's own creative agency and the forces shaping modern America.Wacker paints a richly textured portrait: a self-deprecating servant of God and self-promoting media mogul, a simple family man and confidant of presidents, a plainspoken preacher and the "Protestant pope." America's Pastor reveals how this Southern fundamentalist grew, fitfully, into a capacious figure at the center of spiritual life for millions of Christians around the world.

CHAPTER ONE

Preacher

Blessed with an uncanny sense of the opportunities afforded by the media revolution, Graham adapted his old-fashioned message to new venues. Sensing the possibilities of an age increasingly given to sound bites, hurried interviews, and arresting visual images, he delivered his ideas in crisp and compelling forms. Journalists, academics, and ministers endlessly analyzed his public-speaking practices, especially in the crusade meetings in which the most memorable deliveries took place. Sympathetic observers touted them and critics lamented them, but no one doubted their power.¹ Admittedly, besides speaking, Graham and his editorial assistants wrote copiously. Though the prose proved clear and accessible, little of it was memorable, and much of it soporific. Sometimes he seemed to turn wine back into water. So it is that we probably would not care all that much about Graham today if millions of Americans had not first encountered him as a preacher, either face-to-face in the great stadium crusades or broadcast over radio and television. His publications elaborated themes that in most cases had been more forcefully articulated in the sermons. Faith, after all, came by hearing.

What was the substantive theological content of his sermons? What concepts did his words convey? The secondary literature about Graham is vast. Yet it seems fair to say that the great bulk of it discusses features of his ministry that he would have regarded as secondary or tertiary or less: his looks, style, relation to presidents, views of social and political issues, international travels, ability to evoke both adulation and contempt, friendships with the high and the mighty, reportedly storybook family life, and (indubitably) impeccable personal integrity, among others. Though he was a willing participant in all of those interests, he made clear—repeatedly—that he saw himself as an evangelist with one purpose: to win people to Christ. And that required him to think through and then communicate a bundle of theological concepts. He was not a theologian and never pretended to be. But he did know that he was a craftsman who worked with theological materials. And that is where students of Graham’s role in the shaping of a nation’s consciousness should begin: with the theology.

Theological Core

Logically, if not always in practice, Graham’s thinking about this subject started with the problem of authority. Who or what established the final rule of measurement for everything Christians should believe and practice? The answer, of course, resided in a single source, the Bible. That sacred text talked about many things but above all God, humans, and God’s relationship with humans. The Bible’s narrative arc was clear. It taught that the first human, Adam, had sinned by willfully rebelling against God’s rules. So did every person who came after. Human pride formed the toxic well that polluted the entire created order. Yet God, in his infinite love, chose to save people by revealing himself in his son, Jesus Christ, who was simultaneously fully God and fully man. Because Jesus lived a sinless life, his death paid the penalty for sin and his resurrection defeated the grave. If people repented of their sin and embraced Christ as Lord and Savior, the Holy Spirit would enable them to live lives of inward holiness and outward integrity. Christians could be confident that Christ would return at the end of human history. After death, believers would enter into the everlasting joys of heaven and nonbelievers the everlasting sorrows of hell. Believers were obliged to share this good news—or gospel—of salvation with others. The whole of it was this. Things were broken, but God offered a solution. Humans needed only reach out and take it.²

Graham repeated this core message, with little variation, on countless occasions. It formed the substance of the first formal compilation of his thought, his best-selling and eventually signature book, Peace with God (1953).³ The message could be summarized in—or reduced to, according to one’s point of view—something like a dozen words: Bible, God, sin, Jesus Christ, new birth, growth in grace, second coming, reward (or punishment), and mission. Of course, Graham knew that theologians used formal labels for each of those constants—authority, Trinity, depravity, Christology, soteriology, justification, redemption, sanctification, eschatology, and evangelization, among others—but he preferred the language of everyday experience. For that reason, he endorsed and sometimes preached from newer translations of the Bible, especially the vernacular Living Bible.⁴ He aimed to show that however phrased, the New Testament’s central message—the gospel—represented truly good news.

In Graham’s preaching the new birth constituted the centerpiece of the gospel. He knew perfectly well, of course, that Christian theology entailed many other claims. But since he saw himself as an evangelist called by God to invite people to faith, the new birth stood at the center of his own work. Many evangelicals used the term born again, and sometimes he did too, but he preferred new birth. He described the experience in various ways. In a theological mood he depicted it as a “saving knowledge of Jesus Christ.” It was not reformation but regeneration—literally, re-generation, re-creation, re-birth—of the person from the ground up. In February 1951, in one of his earliest nationally broadcast sermons, Graham articulated the position he would repeat thousands of times, nearly word for word, for the next six decades: “God gives a new nature to those that receive by faith His Son, Jesus Christ.… Reformation cannot be substituted for regeneration.… God’s standard … demands regeneration.”⁵

Authentic regeneration produced peace. It is significant that Graham’s foundational theological work would bear the title Peace with God. In 1986 he told his hometown paper, “I am for peace … first in our relationship with God through Christ; secondly that he can give us peace here and now in our daily life.… And thirdly, peace among people and nations. Peace in families. Peace in community. Peace between the races.”⁶ He captured the sum of the problem and the sum of its solution in two often-quoted sentences: “We need a new heart that will not have lust and greed and hate in it. We need a heart filled with love and peace and joy, and that is why Jesus came into the world … to make peace between us and God.”⁷ Reflecting on the whole of Graham’s publically presented theology after the preacher retired, the historian David Steinmetz captured the central point more succinctly than Graham himself usually did: The new birth offered not a problem-free life but “a relationship to God that transforms all other relationships.”⁸ Graham did not worry very much about rhetorical precision. Getting the point across was the point. Grace-filled hearts should result in grace-filled lives.

Throughout his ministry Graham emphasized the practical results of the new birth. Since the evangelical movement’s beginning in the early eighteenth century, partisans had viewed it as a means for imposing discipline on one’s life. Fully realized, it meant a heart freed from greed, revenge, violence, selfishness, and racial prejudice. Graham never budged from the insistence that the origin of humans’ problems, both personal and social, resided in the corrupt heart. Enduring solutions to the world’s problems—as opposed to temporary ones—required people to deal with the issue at its root, where it started. Later we will see that the middle-aged and mature Graham said more than the younger Graham did about the social effects of the new birth—more just, more equitable relationships among groups, races, and classes—but he never reconsidered his analysis of where the problem originated.

Contrary to the impression commonly conveyed by many academic studies of Graham, the priority he gave to the personal was shared by many thoughtful Americans outside the evangelical subculture. In 2008, to take one of countless possibilities, Duke University president Richard H. Brodhead remarked—in the wake of a university sports scandal—that “the integrity of the judicial system is no greater than the integrity of the individuals that constitute it.”⁹ Brodhead’s comment had nothing to do with religion, let alone Graham. And the analogy should not be pressed too hard. Nonetheless, the larger point held. Sturdy bridges required sturdy foundations.

PROVIDENCE AND MORAL THEISM

Besides the theological tenets sketched above, two additional principles marked Graham’s preached message: the concepts of providence and of “moral theism.” They did not show up, at least not explicitly, in Peace with God, but they functioned prominently in uncounted sermons, press conferences, and civic occasions.

Providence embodied the evangelist’s view of how God superintended the world in both the natural and the historical realms. That arrangement applied both to natural and human history. Nature’s laws normally prevailed, but occasionally God intervened in the form of miracles, which shattered nature’s continuity. As for human history, Graham, like most evangelicals, believed that it was neither determined nor random but something in between: contingent.¹⁰ That meant that God maintained a plan for the final hour of the final day, but he had given humans the ability to speed up or slow down the process. More precisely, God ultimately oversaw everything but left many of the details open-ended. Humans operated more or less freely within a framework of divine oversight. Well into his later years, Graham quoted the nineteenth-century Africa missionary David Livingstone in these terms: “We work for a glorious future which we are not destined to see.”¹¹ If Graham was vague about just how God’s superintending providence intersected with the natural and the historical realms, so was the Bible.

“Moral theism” was not a term Graham used—I adapt it from a similar term from the sociologist of religion Christian Smith—but it captures a second pervasive theme in his outlook.¹² Simply defined, it meant something like fundamental morality, based on the premise of a benign personal God. For Graham himself morality rested on Christian assumptions, but people did not have to be Christian to appreciate its relevance to their daily lives. Moral theism resulted in common-sense guidance for normal living. Its vagueness lent itself to capacious and flexible application. It allowed Graham to address dilemmas of daily life in a way that crossed theological and sectarian boundaries. And it won wide audiences while alienating few. So it was that on June 25, 2005, in Flushing Meadows, New York—the second evening of the final major crusade meeting of Graham’s life—the platform guests included former president Bill Clinton, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and New York Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer. “New Yorkers share an appreciation for faith,” said Bloomberg, “after all, our city was built by people who came here to worship God freely.”¹³ Graham’s moral theism drew on deep-running streams in American life that esteemed (albeit with mixed outcomes) ideals of decency, pluralism, and fair play.

The cluster of convictions set forth in Peace with God, along with providence and moral theism, constituted American evangelical boilerplate. It also marked Graham’s preaching from the beginning to the end of his career. He helped make it boilerplate. Looking inward, it formed the intellectual benchmark that enabled evangelicals to define the boundaries of orthodoxy. Looking outward, it enabled them to gain their bearings on the religious landscape.

Changes

Over the years Graham’s preached theology evolved in some ways. It is important to stress “some.” The core conviction of biblical authority, human sinfulness, divine grace, and Christ’s return remained impregnable throughout. And most of the changes were gradual shifts of tonality or emphasis or new ways of phrasing old positions. Sometimes the changes were mainly a matter of bringing to the surface themes that had been there all along. Nonetheless, tonality, emphasis, phrasing, and position counted, precisely because Graham’s audience also changed when it came to the ideas they were prepared to hear and support. The main developments applied to his understanding of the Bible, the new birth, and providence.

BIBLE

The final and sole authority of the Bible in matters of salvation remained unchanged, but how Graham conceived and articulated that concept evolved. His college training and early sermons left little doubt that he started out with a fundamentalist view that Scripture, reasonably read, did not make mistakes of any kind in matters of faith, science, or history.

The story of the Bible, fundamentalism, and fundamentalism’s stepchild, evangelicalism (or the new evangelicalism) is long and complex. Historians have given it sustained attention.¹⁴ The details need not detain us at this point—we will return to some of the more pertinent ones later—but here a word about words may be helpful.

Before the World War II years, fundamentalists, especially in popular writing and preaching, used the words authoritative, infallible, and trustworthy more or less interchangeably. They denoted the conviction that the Bible, fairly interpreted, told the truth about everything that mattered. After the war years, in the face of controversy, the words began to take on separate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. Preacher
• 2. Icon
• 3. Southerner
• 4. Entrepreneur
• 5. Architect
• 6. Pilgrim
• 7. Pastor
• 8. Patriarch
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Note on the Sources
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index