Shortly after Billy Graham’s death, George Will wrote an article entitled, “Billy Graham was Neither Prophet nor Theologian.” 1 Many viewed it as critical of the legacy of the beloved Evangelist.2 The negative reaction to Will’s article is largely unwarranted, as George Will was primarily critiquing Grant Wacker’s uneven treatment of Graham’s life and work in his 2014 book “America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation.”
Was Graham a Prophet and Theologian?
George Will is one of the most astute social and political commentators writing today and as with most of his work his article on Graham is thoughtful and cutting.
The irony, of course, is that no one would have agreed with the title of Will’s article more than Graham himself. Prophet and theologian are titles Graham would never have used of himself.
Graham was more nervous preaching to a Seminary Chapel filled with 100 theologians than he was preaching to a stadium filled with 100,000 common folks. After suffering a particularly brutal critique by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Graham told one reporter, “I have read everything Mr. Niebuhr has written, and I feel inadequate before his brilliant mind and learning.” 3
Graham felt woefully inadequate in the presence of career theologians.
In addition, Graham never felt worthy to be equated with the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. or John Paul II. One can certainly question Graham’s motives for such a disavowal, but the consistency of that disavowal betrays its sincerity.
Graham understood himself to be first and foremost, and to the very end, an Evangelist. Period. And as any Biblicist would know, the office of Evangelist is very different from that of Prophet or Theologian (Ephesians 4:11).
Graham’s life was devoted to leading people to Jesus Christ. He avoided the lure of lucrative television contracts and Hollywood movie deals for a singular focus on Evangelistic Crusades designed to partner with local churches in leading people to a relationship with Jesus Christ. Admittedly, it was when he veered from this focus that he found himself, like a fish out of water, mired in controversy.
Graham as Evangelist
Prophet and Theologian were titles largely foisted onto Graham by others. 4 Conceding the fact that Graham did not consider himself to be a prophet or a theologian, I would yet offer a few correctives to George Will’s article.
First, Will rehashes tired critiques of Graham’s approach to the evangelistic task. He writes:
His audiences were exhorted to make a “decision” for Christ, but a moment of volition might be (in theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s phrase) an exercise in “cheap grace.” Graham’s preaching, to large rallies and broadcast audiences, gave comfort to many people and probably improved some.
The fact that Graham’s approach to evangelism produced mixed results could be said of any approach. Will lazily offers Bonhoeffer’s famous phrase, which has become ubiquitous with a critique of Christian practice. However, Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace” was not a description of the evangelistic task as much as the way a person lived out their Christian faith after the decision to follow Christ. It was not as much a critique of the moment of salvation, as it was of how one (in the words of Paul) “worked out” their salvation (Philippians 2:12). 5
It’s always too easy for those in the stands to criticize the methods of “the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.” 6
Graham and American Politics
Will’s most searing critique, however, is reserved for Graham’s politics. Ironically, he takes Graham to task for both his involvement and lack of involvement in American politics. Graham, according to Will, was too vocal on issues such as Vietnam and Watergate, but not vocal enough on issues such as Civil Rights.
Although Will credits Graham as being courageous for his early stance on integration, he critiques him for consistently staying in the middle on other issues. Will writes:
“… he rarely stepped far in advance of the majority. His 1970 Ladies’ Home Journal article “Jesus and the Liberated Woman” was, Wacker says, “a masterpiece of equivocation.”
The first preacher with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame was an entrepreneurial evangelical who consciously emulated masters of secular communication such as newscasters Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell and H.V. Kaltenborn. Wielding the adverbs “nearly” and “only,” Graham, says Wacker, would warn that all is nearly lost and the only hope is Christ’s forgiveness.”
Perhaps. But, the King Center (established in 1968 by Mrs. Coretta Scott King) offers a more balanced assessment of Graham:
Noncommittal on integration in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, Graham evolved after Brown v. Board of Education. He refused to preach to segregated audiences and opposed South African apartheid. In 1957, Graham hosted Dr. King at his New York Crusade at Madison Square Garden. During the Albany Movement, Graham paid King’s bail. He held integrated crusades in Birmingham in 1964 and toured Alabama in 1965 after the violence in Selma. 7
Graham also offers a more intimate remembrance of his relationship to King and the challenges of racism during that era:
Early on, Dr. King and I spoke about his method of using non-violent demonstrations to bring an end to racial segregation. He urged me to keep doing what I was doing – preaching the Gospel to integrated audiences and supporting his goals by example – and not join him in the streets. “You stay in the stadiums, Billy,” he said, “because you will have far more impact on the white establishment there than you would if you marched in the streets. Besides that, you have a constituency that will listen to you, especially among the white people, who may not listen so much to me. But if a leader gets too far out in front of his people, they will lose sight of him and not follow him any longer.” I followed his advice. 8
George Will’s critique that Graham was no prophet because he did not take a strong enough stance on civil rights and was on the wrong side of history on Vietnam and Nixon are particularly biting.
Graham and Prophetic Action
Will concludes that the respect the nation has for Graham is proof that he was no prophet because, as Will reminds us, Jesus said, “a prophet hath no honor in his own country.”
Now it is George Will who is a fish out of water.
His characterization of the nature and role of the prophet is amateurish and one-dimensional.
Jesus, in explaining his rejection by his own village, was stating a truism in his day, but certainly not offering a comprehensive analysis of the role of the Old Testament prophet. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman offers a more comprehensive view when he writes that “the general phenomenon of prophecy in Israel is enormously diverse in its many manifestations. Any generalization about prophecy is likely to fail to comprehend the data.” 9 Abraham Heschel concurs as he writes that the prophet is not only a prophet, “he is also poet, preacher, patriot, statesman, social critic, moralist.” 10
Although Graham would abjure, I suggest that there were moments when he acted prophetically. For instance, Graham recalls:
“In 1953, during our Crusade in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I went into the building as the people were beginning to gather one night and personally tore down the ropes separating the white from the black sections – ropes that had been mandated according to the custom in those days by the local committee. My action caused the head usher to resign in anger on the spot (and raised some other hackles), but I did not back down.” 11
This was certainly a prophetic act.
In addition, Graham hoped to build a prophetic community through his evangelistic preaching. Graham observed:
As the issue (of Civil Rights) unfolded, I sometimes found myself under fire from both sides, extreme conservatives castigating me for doing too much and extreme liberals blaming me for not doing enough. In reality, both groups tended to stand aloof from our evangelistic Crusades, but those people who actively supported us understood very well our commitment to doing what we could through our evangelism to end the blight of racism.” 12
Building a prophetic community is a long and hard process, often fraught with pitfalls, setbacks, and quiet, thankless work. But as King, Brueggeman and others would write, building prophetic communities is the only way forward.
Who is the Prophet?
George Will claims that:
Prophets take adversarial stances toward their times, as did the 20th century’s two greatest religious leaders, Martin Luther King and Pope John Paul II. Graham did not. Partly for that reason, his country showered him with honors.”
George Will, a stellar historian, seems to have suffered from a temporary bout of historical amnesia. Graham was attacked by both the religious left and right. He was constantly plagued by critique from theologians of all stripes. He was too simplistic for the erudite Reinhold Niebuhr, and too worldly for the right-wing, Bob Jones. He was a political patsy to most Democrats and too ecumenical for most Republicans.
Certainly, Graham did not rise to the prophetic level of King, nor did he experience the terrifying persecution of King. But in all fairness, few have (including John Paul II).
Will suggests that the salutary honors of a nation eclipse any claim Graham may have as a prophet. Yet Martin Luther King Jr., and Pope John Paul II (his examples of modern-day persecuted prophets) are two of the most revered men in the modern American psyche. If the number of statues erected in your honor, streets and schools bearing your name, and national holidays celebrated in your honor is any indication of salutary praise, few have reached the dizzying heights of King. By Will’s own reasoning both King and Pope John Paul II would be eliminated as prophets.
Graham’s Greatest Laments
Finally, Will takes Graham to task on his political affiliations and foils. Will writes:
Graham frequently vowed to abstain from partisan politics, and almost as frequently slipped this self-imposed leash, almost always on behalf of Republicans. Before the 1960 election, Graham, displaying some cognitive dissonance, said that if John Kennedy were a true Catholic, he would be a president more loyal to the Pope than to the Constitution but that he would fully support Kennedy if elected.
Graham’s dealings with presidents mixed vanity and naivete. In 1952, he said he wanted to meet with all the candidates “to give them the moral side of the thing.” He was 33. He applied flattery with a trowel, comparing Dwight Eisenhower’s first foreign policy speech to the Sermon on the Mount and calling Richard Nixon “the most able and the best-trained man for the job probably in American history.” He told Nixon that God had given him, Nixon, “supernatural wisdom.” Graham should have heeded the psalmist’s warning about putting one’s faith in princes.
There were few things that were more embarrassing to Graham than his early attempts at political showmanship with Eisenhower, and his later defence of the indefensible actions of Nixon. However, unlike most politicians, Graham confessed his errors and vowed to refrain from political activism, hoping instead only to offer prayers for whoever occupied the Whitehouse. After Nixon he mostly held to that promise.
It’s true that Graham was pictured with every president since Eisenhower. It must be a difficult thing to say “no” to an American President who calls you to his office to pray. Just ask Rev. Tony Campolo who rushed to Bill Clinton’s side to “pray” with him during the public firestorm of the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Graham’s Legacy
Perhaps the biggest disappointment of George Will’s article, however, is that he offers no new critiques of Graham.
George Will ends his article lamenting, “Graham, Wacker concludes, had an attractively sunny personality and was ‘invincibly extrospective.’ This precluded ‘irony’ but also ‘contemplativeness.’”
Graham might smile at Will’s conclusion. He would certainly remind us that he was a simple man with a simple message and that he never claimed to be anything else.
Diane Sawyer, in an interview for ABC News, once asked Graham what he hoped people would say about him after he was gone. He answered, “I don’t want them to say big things about me because I don’t deserve them. I want to hear one person say something nice about me – and that’s the Lord. When I face him, I want him to say to me, ‘Well done, thy good and faithful servant.’ But I’m not sure I’m going to hear it, but that’s what I would like to hear.” 13
I take two things away from Graham’s response:
(1) When you say that you only care what Jesus thinks about you, and you mean it – you will inevitably take shots from both sides of the political and religious divide. Apparently, Billy Graham meant it;
(2) If Billy Graham doesn’t hear “Well done, thy faithful servant” from Jesus, we’re all in big trouble.
