A Long Life

This morning I woke up to the news that celebrated evangelist Billy Graham, the first television religious superstar, had passed away at his home in North Carolina.  He would have turned 100 this year.

Graham's charisma, his considerable public speaking skills, and his matinee-idol good looks made him a major celebrity in addition to being a major religious figure in the second half of the twentieth century.  Periodically he would have televised specials of what he called "crusades" from all over the world.  Usually singer George Beverly Shea, who like Graham lived to a ripe old age (he died in 2013 at the impressive age of 104) would sing a hymn before Graham took the stage.  Graham would always get crowds in the tens of thousands, like a major rock star, and he would deliver fiery sermons.  However, as I recall, few if any of them were overtly political.  They were nonpartisan as I remember, mostly talking about various tenets of Christianity and the need for people to get their lives right for Jesus.  He would be parodied by comedians, but he continued on well into old age until Parkinson's disease slowed him down for good and he had to retire.

At that point, one of his four children, Franklin Graham, who resembled his dad in his looks but not in any other way, took over and has turned into a real piece of work. That is not meant to be flattering to the younger Graham.  Any resemblance to him and his dad is purely coincidental.  While his dad was known to pal around with various presidents of both parties--especially Richard Nixon, which tarnished Graham when Nixon and his presidency went down in scandal--Franklin has been overtly political, a real religious extremist.  His dad wasn't that way at all. He was friends with Martin Luther King, Jr.  I had heard the late Tammy Faye Messner once say Billy Graham was in fact a registered Democrat.  I don't know how true that it is.  However,  I do know he was relatively benign on the political front compared to a lot of others.

Graham was married to Ruth Bell for many years until she died in 2007.  He met her at Wheaton College, where she was also a student.  She was a Presbyterian, while he was a Baptist, but they didn't seem to have any problem with it.

From the article:

Graham built his ministry by bringing the gospel message of tent-revival preachers into the modern media age, using any tool at his disposal -- from telegrams to telephones to satellites and the Internet -- to "win souls for Christ."

In doing so, Graham formed a bridge between the itinerant preachers like Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday who once crisscrossed the country in search of lost souls and contemporary Christian pastors like Joel Osteen, Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes.

"He saw himself as using new media to deliver a very old message," said Randall Balmer, an expert on American religious history at Dartmouth College.

That message, as Graham said during thousands of altar calls, was that salvation is offered to one and all, black and white, rich and poor, men and women, sinners and saints, so long as they believed in Jesus.