Billy Graham
Graham turned revival preaching into a global, media-age ministry and became a counsellor to American presidents, while keeping a reputation for personal integrity across seven decades.
Personality
Graham was earnest, disciplined and careful about his own reputation. In 1948 he and his team drew up the Modesto Manifesto, a code of conduct on money, publicity and personal behaviour, and one of its rules became widely known as the Billy Graham rule. He was a plain, direct preacher with a single stated purpose, helping people find a personal relationship with God. Despite his fame he stayed rooted in his North Carolina farm upbringing and in his marriage to Ruth, which lasted almost 64 years; he called her the greatest Christian he had ever known.
Under pressure
Graham could act decisively on principle. At a 1953 rally in Chattanooga he took down the ropes separating Black and white listeners, telling organisers they could hold the revival without him if the barriers went back up, and his crusades were integrated from then on; in 1957 he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to join him on the pulpit in New York. His closeness to Richard Nixon later hurt him. When tapes released in 2002 revealed antisemitic remarks he had made privately in 1972, he apologised, saying he had no memory of the conversation but deeply regretted the comments.
The arc
Born on 7 November 1918 and raised on his family's dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, Graham committed his life to Christ as a teenager at 1934 revival meetings led by Mordecai Ham. He studied at Florida Bible Institute and Wheaton College and was ordained a Southern Baptist minister in 1939. After working for Youth for Christ, his 1949 Los Angeles crusade made him a national figure, and in 1950 he founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Hour of Decision radio programme. He went on to hold 417 crusades, found Christianity Today, and advise presidents from Truman to Obama before his death in 2018.
Legacy
Through his crusades, broadcasting, the magazine Christianity Today and the 1974 Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, Graham shaped how evangelical Christianity presented itself to the modern world, reaching live audiences estimated at more than 200 million people. He appeared on Gallup's list of most admired men a record 61 times, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1996, and was given an honorary British knighthood in 2001. After his death in 2018 he lay in honour in the rotunda of the United States Capitol.
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