Influential evangelist Billy Graham dies at age 99

Confidant to presidents shaped religious landscape of the late 20th century

by Gregg Brekke | Presbyterian News Service

Billy Graham speaks to a crowd of 14,000 people at Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee, Florida, on Feb. 11, 1961. (State Library and Archives of Florida)

LOUISVILLE — Iconic American evangelist, the Rev. Billy Graham, died today at his home in Montreat, North Carolina. Born on his family’s dairy farm near Charlotte on Nov. 7, 1918, he was 99 years old.

Graham was well known over his 60-year career, both on the national and international stage, where he is estimated to have preached to hundreds of millions of people. One of the first evangelists to use the power of television to broadcast his revivals, Graham’s message rarely strayed from the basics of evangelical Christianity — all humans fall into sin, and repenting from those sins and accepting Jesus as one’s personal savior is the means of salvation and release from the consequences of sin.

Renowned for his powerful sermons and impassioned delivery, Graham’s 417 crusades in 185 countries often featured popular cultural personalities with conversion stories, including his longtime friend Johnny Cash. Graham was also known for his efforts to sway the consciousness of the country during the Civil Rights movement, insisting on preaching to integrated crowds beginning in the mid-1950s and lifting up the work of fellow Baptist, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his sermons.

But as civil rights leaders increased their calls to change laws and encouraged civil disobedience throughout the 1960s, his support of the movement waned. Within days of the publication of King’s famous 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, which specifically called to task white preachers unwilling to confront the evils of segregation, Graham told reporters King should “put the brakes on a little bit.”

Beginning with Harry S. Truman, Graham was a confidant to 12 presidents, including Barack Obama, yet feared his position as an evangelist would be compromised by too close of an association with the highest position in the country.

“If I had to do it over again, I would also avoid any semblance of involvement in partisan politics,” he said. “An evangelist is called to do one thing, and one thing only: to proclaim the Gospel.”

Graham’s links to Presbyterianism are tangential but important. Ruth Graham, his wife of 63 years whom he’d met while attending Wheaton College, was the daughter of Nelson and Virginia Bell, Presbyterian medical missionaries to China.

Her obituary says she “declined to undergo baptism by immersion and remained a loyal, lifelong Presbyterian. When in Montreat, a town built around a Presbyterian conference center, Billy Graham would attend the local Presbyterian church where his wife often taught the college-age Sunday School class.”

Ruth Graham’s brother, the Rev. Clayton Bell, served over a quarter century as pastor of Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas beginning in 1973. He was the main influence in keeping what was then the largest membership church in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the denomination following reunification. The church has since left the PC(USA) and affiliated with ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians.