The ‘Billy Graham Rule’ is an Evangelical hoax
Men can’t meet privately with women — because why?
To grow up Evangelical is often to be told that “godly” men don’t have private meetings with women they haven’t married. That’s the “Billy Graham Rule.”
It surfaces in public from time to time, as when Mike Pence talked it up while he was Vice President. Evangelicals love the idea.
But Billy Graham did, in fact, have private meetings with women.
His famous “rule” was created in 1948.
It wasn’t intended for all Christian men, but for himself as a traveling evangelist. As he writes in his 1997 memoir, Just As I Am:
“I did not travel, meet or eat alone with a woman other than my wife.”
The same book, however, records such a meeting. In 1989, when he was in Little Rock, Arkansas, Hillary Clinton asked him to lunch.
“I would be delighted to,” he replied, “but I don’t have private luncheons with beautiful ladies.” She offered that they could go to a public restaurant “and still have a private conversation.”
And so they met.
As his narration of the scene proceeds, Graham seems amazed to see his view of her turning from “beautiful lady” into a “genuine intellectual,” as he puts it. He writes:
“She moved knowledgeably from one subject to another — from some government project or political issue to a family or personal matter and back again. I left our luncheon greatly impressed by her.”
This scene suggests not only that Graham was willing to meet privately, but also that he had little idea women could be formidable figures—until Hillary Clinton showed him.
Billy Graham wasn’t one to see women as equals.
He was a Southerner born in 1918, and his views were retrograde even for the time. He was a raging anti-Semite, and he viewed women as little more than reproductive machines. He’d picked a girl to marry named Ruth Bell, and when hearing she hoped to be a missionary, told her:
“Woman was created to be a wife and mother.”
He essentially abandoned his wife—traveling for months at a time for the next decades. He lived his life among male staffers, moving from country to country, hotel to hotel.
On the road he had meetings with women.
There’s one mentioned in a 1982 book, when Billy Graham—startlingly—had mentioned being in the bedroom of a naked prostitute. So that’s a private meeting with a woman.
The Christian writer Elisabeth Elliot recalled they were at an event in Illinois and he’d invited her to breakfast. As she narrates:
“So, of course, when I knocked on the door he had a man there who was his guard. Nobody was ever allowed to go directly into his hotel room. He always had a man in the room next to him, and that was the person you had to go through.”
This does not say that Graham refused to be alone with her. Rather, she had to go to the room of his ‘guard’ to be allowed into his quarters.
Billy Graham regularly met with women alone.
In a 1996 newspaper interview he recalls a 1991 meeting with Joan Brown Campbell, an unmarried Christian woman, telling her about his policy of not meeting with women privately.
As the report goes, he “looked around, realized that he was meeting alone with Campbell, and added, ‘unless she’s the general secretary of the National Council of Churches!”
One has to laugh at the man who’d repeated his lines so many times they’d become divorced from all reality.
Amy Grant refers to meeting with Graham privately in 1996.
At a crusade in Minneapolis, she’d asked to talk to him about her forthcoming divorce. “Before the evening started, I had a chance to visit with Billy,” she writes later, mentioning the “tiny curtained-off backstage area where we spoke.”
They talked about their business and then went onstage.
Are private meetings with women ‘un-Christian’?
Jesus never got the memo. The meeting with Martha and Mary in Luke 10:38–42 doesn’t suggest any proprieties around private meetings.
There’s a meeting alone with the Samaritan woman in John 4, and with Mary Magdalene in John 20. As the Christian scholar Karina Kreminski observes: “Jesus did not exhibit a fear towards the opposite sex.”
The apostle Paul seems to have traveled with a woman, Thecla, his ‘true companion’, to whom he was not married. Paul often refers to working alongside with women, with no indication of sexual tensions requiring women be categorized as ‘dangerous’.
But Evangelical men ran with the “Billy Graham Rule.”
It came to express their own diseased ideas: that women are evil seductresses, out to ruin the ever-vulnerable, godlike male.
If Evangelical men had really believed in transformative religion, they’d have worked to be men who could have meetings with women, i.e. treating them like humans instead of sex objects.
I’ve never heard a sermon about that. 🔶
