Billy Graham was a truly nasty man
Let’s look at the Evangelical leader
He was as ‘godly’ as it got in post-War Protestant America. A Southern Baptist traveling evangelist from North Carolina seemed nearly divine.
I went to learn more about Billy Graham, the greatest figure in Evangelical Christian history. He didn’t seem that great to me.
Let’s study a scene in 1972.
It sets up Graham’s character — or the lack of it. He was sitting with President Nixon in the White House, chatting after a prayer breakfast. Graham didn’t know he was being taped.
In 1994, the conversation was described in a book, based on a staffer’s notes, which claimed Graham had been speaking about the “terrible problem” of Jewish control of the media. He’d added that the “satanic Jews” would have “to be dealt with.”
Asked about it by the media, Graham said that he’d only ever spoken of Jews in “the most positive terms.’’
In 2002, a redacted transcript was released.
Graham had said everything the staffer had written, and more. Jews “are great friends of mine,” he says, and they “swarm around me” because he was pro-Israel. He added:
“But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.’’
Age 83, again contacted for a response, he again denied it.
Graham died in 2018, making possible the release of the full tape from the Nixon Library. He’d said everything that had been reported.
He’d also said that Hitler and Nazi Germany “went about it wrong,” but were trying to break the Jewish “stranglehold on Germany”—and he thought America faced the same problem.
The great Christian evangelist says:
“…this stranglehold has got to be broken or this country is gonna go down the drain!”
How Billy Graham imagined going about that task would remain unknown. But one fact was clear: he lied a lot.
Born in 1918, he grew up in the segregated South.
He had no problem with it. In a 1960 interview he recalled:
“Segregation was taken for granted. If there were Negroes who chafed in their status as second-class citizens, I was not aware of them.”
He thought of Black people, he said, “in the usual patronizing and paternalistic way.” As Grant Wacker notes in a 2014 study, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, Graham “never outgrew that outlook.”
In 1936 he attended Bob Jones College for a semester, then went on to the Florida Bible Institute. Both schools were ‘white only’.
He thought of Christian men as faggy and feminine.
That’s the suggestion of Billy Graham’s ‘testimony’. In a 1958 article, he recalls his conversion when he was sixteen:
“I had always thought of religion as more or less ‘sissy stuff,’ and that a fellow who was going to be an athlete would have no time for such things. It was all right for old men and girls, but not for real ‘he-men’ with red blood in their veins.”
He learned different. He went to see an evangelist, Mordecai Ham, otherwise recalled for his “antisemitic rantings and racist slurs so notable that newspaper editors sometimes urged him to leave their cities.”
Billy Graham just recalls being told he was a ‘sinner’. The story is part of his legend. Here it is in a biography of his life written for Evangelical kids:
“He felt as though the finger of God was singling him out in front of all those people. Desperate to escape that terrible, accusing finger, he ducked behind a woman’s hat.”
If we’re reading as Evangelicals, we see a man cowering behind women, shrinking before the male-male confrontation that is ‘God’.
But God kept “calling” him.
In his official biography in 1966, Billy Graham recalls being down in Florida, as he “began to sense an unmistakable call.”
In his autobiography, Graham writes: “No sign in the heavens. No voice from above. But in my spirit I knew I had been called to the ministry.”
In a 1998 interview, Graham recalled the moment again: “All of a sudden, I just felt God was speaking to me, and he said, ‘I want to use you.’”
He received the divine finger, then went out to give it to the world.
For Billy Graham, God was all about masculinity.
He presented Christianity as a man-making exercise. “Christ could straighten your shoulder,” he writes in 1958. “He can make you the complete man you want to be. Let him take over your life!”
Billy Graham might seem to need help in the ‘masculinity’ department. By typical metrics he could even be a bit girly. He never had a physical job.
He didn’t serve in World War II. A nervous constriction of his throat, then a bad case of mumps, prevented him from going to the chaplain training program, was the story.
He seems to have been an anxious person. A 1953 newspaper profile: “Offstage, Billy Graham chews his nails, snaps his fingers and paces the floor.”
He was hypochondriac, prone to injuries, and given to ‘episodes’. The Christian journalist Philip Yancey recalls interviewing Graham over the years: “Like most journalists, I came away struck by how insecure he seemed at the core.”
But men become Christian to get more masculine!
Jesus is the only total male. That was Billy Graham’s theology. In 1954, at the Olympic stadium in Berlin, he went on and on about this deity he served:
“I’m not believing in some effeminate character. I’m believing in a real he-man, a real man who had a strong jaw and strong shoulders. I believe that Jesus Christ was the most perfectly developed physical specimen in the history of the world. He never had sin deform his body. He would have been one of the great athletes of all times. Every inch a man! I can believe in that Christ! I can follow that Christ!”
He made his way by academic fraud.
He had only a bachelor’s degree, but took to calling himself ‘Dr. Billy Graham’. That’s how he was usually known: Dr. Graham.
He’d receive many honorary doctorates, the first in 1948. But newspaper notices, curiously, have him being called ‘Dr.’ from 1945 on.
He could feel scripted, staged, a media creation. He got nationally famous in 1949, as the story goes, after newpaper baron William Randolph Hearst sent the famous memo: “Puff Graham.”
But Graham often gave off a feeling of insubstantiality, of being made of publicity. Many would dismiss him over time as “a carny barker for God” or “a hollow man stuffed with publicity.” As Harry Truman, having met him, would later say: “All he’s interested in is getting his name in the paper.”
But multitudes came to see him.
A Billy Graham ‘crusade’ was an amazing event. His own biographer, Marshall Frady, noted the “Nuremberg grandeur.” Millions came in expectation of a near-visitation from God.
The French literary critic Roland Barthes attended the crusade in Paris in 1963, recalling Graham “presented as a veritable prophet…an Inspired Being who will speak…”
Barthes adds: “If God is really speaking through Dr. Graham’s mouth, it must be acknowledged that God is quite stupid: the Message stuns us by its platitude, its childishness.”
Family was another prop in the theater.
His ‘crusades’ kept him traveling at least nine months out of every year. He’d be gone for up to six months at a time. He’d come home to rest.
His children were all so wild they were sent to boarding school. His first daughter, Bunny, recalled: “Daddy was burdened, Mother was overwhelmed. It was easier to send us away.”
Ruth rarely saw her husband, but had no need to ‘worry’. He had the famous ‘Billy Graham Rule’! That meant: no private meetings with women.
He did, in fact, meet with women privately. But it was never clear if Billy Graham viewed women as often requiring meetings. Didn’t God mostly “work” through Christian men?
In the South, his rallies were segregated.
It was his choice. A fellow evangelist and friend, Chuck Templeton, would note: “Billy’s were segregated, mine were not.”
As Grant Wacker tracks in his book, Billy Graham weirdly flip-flopped on the race issue for years. In 1951, he’d tell a newspaper he wanted to see “white stand shoulder in shoulder with black at the cross.”
He’d turn around and argue for segregation, as in a 1952 letter to the head of the Detroit Council of Churches.
What was Billy Graham’s ‘real’ view? In 1951, a Christian friend recalled talking with him about segregation. He recalled that Graham ‘saw nothing wrong with it’.
In 1953, Graham made a show of removing the rope separating the races at a ‘crusade’ in Chattanooga. A few months later, he did a segregated rally in Dallas.
Only in 1954, in response to Brown v. Board of Education, did the rallies become desegregated.
He got on board with the civil rights movement.
Or did he? Billy Graham was never one to do street marches or anything like that. He did photo ops with everyone from civil rights leaders to segregationists. He smiled in both.
Martin Luther King, Jr. is widely understood to have been thinking of Billy Graham as the typical “white moderate” when writing that the “great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom” is not the overt racist, but the “moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”
The Graham legend machine likes to call them “friends,” and produces a photo of them together from 1962. They don’t look like friends to me.
He was ever on the march against venereal disease as a “sign from God.”
Apparently diseases transmitted through sex are better than diseases communicated any other way. He was on the warpath against AIDS victims early, attack sufferers of the virus as bearing “God’s punishment” since at least 1986, as Anthony M. Petro details in a 2015 study, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, & American Religion.
It all led to a speech in 1993, in Columbus, Ohio, when Billy was slinging his lines:
“Is AIDS a judgement from God? I cannot say for sure, but I think so.”
That time there was pushback, and Graham went out in the local press doing damage control, saying he was amazed those words came out of his mouth! “I remember saying it, and I immediately regretted it and almost went back and clarified the statement.”
In his latter years he was growing senile.
During the time he continued to publish new books! But all Billy Graham’s books and speeches appear to have been ghostwritten. He’d lied about it.
The family concealed the senility. The fantasy went on to his very last days.
In his 2007 memoir, Crazy For God, Frank Schaeffer, the son of the famous Christian writer Francis Schaeffer, said his father told him that Billy Graham often spoke in private of being “terrified of dying.”
It happened in 2018, in his sleep. Having long said he drew only a modest salary from his organization, he had $25 million in the bank. 🔶
