The best way I can describe the recent PBS special on the nation’s most famous evangelist is to say it’s a woke version of the life of Billy Graham.
It’s not only that the cast of commentators departs from the ranks of Graham’s largely white, male biographers to a mélange of scholars, several of whom are female or black and whose expertise on Graham remains unclear.
It’s how the nearly two-hour special that puts a political lense on everything — yes, everything — Graham did in his life and career. The show is barely a minute old when it comes up with the following quotes:
ANTHEA BUTLER, HISTORIAN: Billy Graham is like the Protestant pope.
WILLIAM MARTIN, BIOGRAPHER: There was a war between ambition and humility. He wrestled with that throughout his life.
REV. DR. JOHN HUFFMAN: Billy was attracted to political power like a moth is attracted to flame.
RANDALL BALMER, HISTORIAN: He was drawn to politicians. It was almost like a narcotic for him.
UTA A. BALBIER, HISTORIAN: The closer he moved Christianity to politics, the more he opened up the opportunity for Christianity being used to polarize, to politicize.
UTA A. BALBIER, HISTORIAN: He opened Pandora's box the second he stepped into the Oval Office for the very first time.
So, it’s simple to grasp right off the bat where this show is going. And the show’s director admitted the main idea was the explore the mix of politics and religion, curiously right after an era when conservative politics and conservative religion were bedfellows all four years of the Trump administration. Am I being skeptical in noticing the timing of this show?
OK, so it wasn’t all politics. Fortunately, the show did give space to Graham’s life-changing decision in August 1949 to accept the Bible as the infallible Word of God even though the popular theological opinion of that times was that the Bible was full of errors. Graham knew of the complexities and contradictions that were there, yet he decided to believe that somehow the Bible was inspired by God; a belief that provided the theological ballast he needed to conduct a successful Los Angeles crusade weeks later.
I would have liked to have seen more on Los Angeles Times publisher William Randolph Hearst’s “Puff Graham” news-coverage directive that brought massive coverage to the crusade, but the gist of the special was on Graham’s relationship to politics. We hear of his troubled relationship with Harry Truman, followed by a strong friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and every president after that.
It was 1952, the year Eisenhower got elected, when Graham’s portrayed as throwing down the gauntlet to the political establishment via a rally on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: For the first time in history, a revival meeting is held on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington. 40,000 braved drizzling weather to hear evangelist Billy Graham pronounce his cures for today’s evils…
KEVIN KRUSE, HISTORIAN: He firmly believes the country needs a religious revival, and he’s now set himself up to do whatever he can to do that, to lobby political leaders, to influence them, to call on their citizens and his followers to make demands upon them.
KEVIN KRUSE, HISTORIAN: He wants Harry Truman to come to the Washington crusade. Truman refuses. Congress is much more receptive…
NANCY GIBBS, JOURNALIST: This was the first time Graham really soaked in the political dynamics of Washington whether it was with the Senate or the House, or Supreme Court justices. People were really listening to him. And these people who were themselves among the most powerful people in the country, were affirming and validating his power. It kind of went to his head.
BILLY GRAHAM: I was talking to a presidential candidate just the other day, you know, we have quite a few these days, and I was telling him that if I wanted to win the election, and call the people back to God and back to Christ and back to the Bible, I said I believe I’d be elected.
NANCY GIBBS, JOURNALIST: He says, you know, ‘evangelicals will vote one way, and I could swing 16 million evangelicals with a single word.’ Which, whether or not there is truth to that, it was a remarkable thing to say.
The PBS documentary’s take on Graham from here on out was that yes, he sought political influence, but that influence turned around to bite him in ensuing years.
Commenting on the movie, religion writer Ken Garfield, who covered Graham plenty during his years at the Charlotte Observer, wrote for Religion News Service:
The historians and scholars in the film, including William Martin and Grant Wacker, the authors of two definitive Graham biographies, chronicle how Graham sought the ear of presidents, most notably Richard Nixon, and they agree that his cultivation of political power is a blot on his legacy (one that Graham, to his credit, confessed to in later years).
But director Sarah Colt, who devoted nearly two years to Graham, sifting through 300 hours of archival video and audio, looking at nearly 2,000 photographs and conducting 19 on-air interviews, could have spent more time with some of the 215 million people Graham preached to around the world. A film so rich in scholarship is diminished only by the missing voices of those whose lives Billy Graham made sweeter.
The New York Times interviewed Colt and asked her when Graham realized that politics and religion maybe didn’t mix.
Then Watergate sort of broke Graham’s heart.
Graham was one of the last people to see that Nixon was double-dealing and wasn’t who he appeared to be. He really got sucked in. He got kind of blinded by the whole thing. He made a big mistake staying so close with Nixon, right to the bitter end when other allies of Nixon knew that there was a major problem. And he stayed very close, and they remained friends. But Graham learned from the experience. Watergate changed how he saw his role as a religious figure and the power that he had and what he should do with it.
What did Graham do differently after Watergate?
He started doing more international crusades after that. And he made some very clear public speeches where he said he had made a mistake, and that religious people should not be publicly partisan. In 1980, he definitely wanted Reagan to win the presidency, but he supported him privately rather than publicly. He always said he didn’t endorse Nixon, but he really did.
I know it’s hard to capture the full life and work of a man who preached to billions. Maybe the only way to do it is to isolate out Graham’s most interesting feature. However, I wish more could have been said about his immense evangelistic association. For example, how did Graham’s children function while their father was off on trips? Hint: Not well. Some of the poetry of Ruth Bell Graham candidly discussed these issues.
So many angles, so little time.
So much gets left out. It’s hard not to compare Graham’s embrace of various presidents and the evangelical penchant for celebrity culture with Pentecostal disenchantment with Donald Trump, post 2020 election. Yet, Graham never turned down a chance to shine. How many inaugurations do you think he was invited to in order to rain down a spiritual blessing over the two candidates?
Call it how you wish, but he wasn’t all political calculations to get more crowds. Underneath the political overlay was an evangelist, a term most media don’t use these days. It’s also clear that the shame he felt after the revelations about Nixon changed the evangelist’s life and agenda — leading to an emphasis on emerging Christian evangelists and flocks around the world.
It’s easier just to categorize these evangelicals as political animals. But in that, all subtleties are lost and maybe some of the truth was as well.