Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Evangelist
February 21 · d. 2018
also known as Billy Graham, William Franklin Graham, Rev. Graham
William Franklin Graham Jr., known everywhere as Billy Graham, was an American evangelist, born on a North Carolina dairy farm in 1918 and converted at sixteen under a travelling preacher's tent. For six decades he preached the invitation of Christ in stadiums and arenas across the world, founded institutions that outlived him, and counselled American presidents. He died at Montreat, North Carolina, on February 21, 2018, aged ninety-nine, and is commemorated on that day.
Billy Graham was sixteen years old, the son of a dairy farmer, when a tent went up at Pecan and Central Avenues in Charlotte, North Carolina, and a travelling evangelist named Mordecai Ham began to preach there. On the first of November, 1934, at the closing invitation, the boy walked forward with his friend Grady Wilson. Nothing in Charlotte marked it. The whole account of that night comes from Graham himself, told and retold across a long life; there is no newspaper that noticed a farm boy going forward in a tent.
What followed was a life spent making that same walk possible for other people. He went to school at Bob Jones College for a single semester, then to the Florida Bible Institute, then to Wheaton College in Illinois, where he met Ruth Bell, a Presbyterian missionaries' daughter born in China and schooled in Pyongyang. They married in August 1943 and stayed married sixty-three years, she keeping the house in the North Carolina mountains while he was away, which was most of the time.
In 1948, before any of the fame arrived, Graham and three colleagues sat down in Modesto, California, and wrote out four rules. Travelling revivalists before them had been destroyed by money, by exaggerated numbers, by rivalry with the local churches, and by women. So: open books, honest attendance counts, cooperation with whatever churches were there, and never alone with a woman not one's wife. It reads now like caution. It was, in fact, a young man deciding in advance what he would not become, and he did not become it. Six decades of itinerant preaching followed without a financial or sexual scandal, which is the plainest thing that can be said in his favour and not a small one.
The next year, a three-week tent meeting in Los Angeles ran eight weeks instead, and by the end he was a national figure. Then Harringay in London for thirteen weeks in 1954, where the Bishop of Durham had called the whole enterprise a menace of fundamentalism, and where two million people came anyway. That bishop, Michael Ramsey, later stood on a Graham platform as Archbishop of Canterbury.
The hardest and best of it was in the American South. Somewhere in the early 1950s, in a crusade arena still divided by ropes, Graham's head usher refused to take them down, and Graham walked down and pulled them out himself. The sources disagree about where: one account puts it at Jackson, Mississippi in 1952, another at Chattanooga a year later. They agree on the rest. It was before the Supreme Court had said anything about schools, in a country where a white preacher had every practical reason to leave the ropes alone. To a governor demanding separate services at Jackson he said, in front of the crusade audience, that there is no scriptural basis for segregation. In 1993 he put his name to an essay calling racial hatred a sin and adding, in his own parenthesis, that he shared the blame for the church's silence.
He did not always hold that line. He declined to march with Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma in 1965, and said in the 1960s that an unjust law was still to be obeyed. In 2005, at his last American crusade, an old man told an Associated Press reporter that he wished he had fought harder, and named Selma. And in the Oval Office in February 1972, believing himself unheard, he told Richard Nixon that a Jewish stranglehold on the American media had to be broken. The tape was released thirty years later. He apologized twice, the second time fully, saying he did not recall ever having such feelings and did not have them. Both things are on the record, and neither cancels the other.
At Nixon's funeral in 1994 he told a story about a bugler placed on the far side of a dome, who sounded Reveille after the Taps had finished, and he said that at the end of history the last note will not be Taps but Reveille. He was standing over the coffin of the man from the tape. He had been saying the same thing for fifty years to anyone who would come forward: that for the believer who has been to the cross, death is no frightful leap into the dark.
You will not be remembered for the thing you meant to be remembered for, and Billy Graham knew it by the end: he said he had crossed lines he should not have crossed, and that he would have stayed home with his family more and preached less. What is striking is not the regret but its lateness, arriving after the crowds and the honors, when there was nothing left to gain by admitting it. He had also, at twenty-nine and unknown, written down in advance the four things that would destroy him if he let them, and then kept to that paper for sixty years. Both are the same discipline, applied at opposite ends of a life: naming plainly what you are capable of. Which of the two is harder for you at the moment, deciding now what you will not become, or admitting later where you already have?
Graham is among the most heavily documented figures in this calendar, and the difficulty is not scarcity but density. His own words survive in published interviews, a signed magazine essay, broadcast transcripts, and an autobiography, Just As I Am (1997), written near the end of a life it describes from a distance of decades. The independent scholarly account is William C. Martin's A Prophet with Honor (1991, updated 2018), built on some two hundred interviews; Grant Wacker's America's Pastor (2014) treats what the life meant rather than what happened in it. His organization's own institutions, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, publish extensively about him and are the sole source for several widely repeated numbers. The papers themselves moved once: held at Wheaton College from 1980, relocated to Charlotte in 2019, and housed since November 7, 2022 in the purpose-built Billy Graham Archive and Research Center.
Several ordinary facts remain contested. His ordination is dated 1939 by some accounts and 1940 by others, and no denominational record settling it has been consulted here. The episode of the segregation ropes is placed by Christianity Today at Chattanooga in 1953 and by the Billy Graham Library at Jackson, Mississippi in 1952; no contemporary press account of the Chattanooga meeting has been produced, and the piece usually cited for it is a retrospective published in 2023. A widely repeated claim that Graham posted Martin Luther King Jr.'s bail during the 1963 Birmingham campaign rests on a tertiary summary and has not been verified. The often-repeated statement that he met Pope John XXIII does not survive checking: he praised the pope publicly at his death in 1963, and his own autobiography places his first papal audience in 1981, with John Paul II.
The best-anchored material is also the least comfortable. The February 1, 1972 Oval Office conversation is preserved on the White House taping system as Conversation No. 662-4, partially released by the National Archives in 2002 and posted in full by the Nixon Library in 2018, with a further 1973 telephone conversation on the same theme released in 2022. It is Graham's own recorded voice, not a hostile reconstruction, and no account of him can responsibly omit it.
The figures most often quoted for his ministry, that he preached in person to some 215 million people in more than 185 countries across more than 400 crusades, are his organization's own count and have never been independently audited. They should be read as such.
Graham was never canonized, and no process exists that would canonize him. He was a Southern Baptist, and his own denomination keeps no calendar of saints. What exists instead is a single, dated act: the Anglican Church in North America's 2019 Book of Common Prayer placed him among its optional commemorations at February 21, the day of his death, in the Ecumenical column rather than the Anglican one, worded simply "William 'Billy' Graham, Evangelist, 2018." The task force that assembled that calendar said plainly why: he was included as a paragon of love for lost souls and zeal in preaching, even if his theological convictions were not identical to those of the Thirty-Nine Articles. It is a commemoration of a vocation, and the calendar says so.
He and Ruth are buried together in the Memorial Prayer Garden at the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, at the foot of a cross-shaped brick walkway; she was interred there in June 2007, he on March 2, 2018 after a funeral held under a tent on the same grounds, in deliberate echo of the campaigns he began in. Cliff Barrows and George Beverly Shea, who stood beside him on those platforms for decades, lie in the same garden. The Library is a museum, not a shrine, and no liturgy is kept there. Between February 28 and March 1, 2018 he lay in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, the first religious leader ever to do so.
Graham's own words are quoted here from four places. The remarks on regret and on the danger of success come from an email interview with Sarah Pulliam Bailey published in Christianity Today, January 21, 2011. The line on death as no frightful leap into the dark, and the Taps and Reveille sentence, come from his remarks at the funeral service for President Richard Nixon, Yorba Linda, California, April 27, 1994, quoted from a transcript of the broadcast rather than an authoritative published text. The refusal to a governor at Jackson, Mississippi in 1952 is quoted as reported by Edward Gilbreath in Christianity Today (2018), which is also the source for the remark about obedience to an unjust law; neither carries a date or venue in that source. The 1993 self-accusation on racism is from his signed essay in Christianity Today, October 4, 1993, read here in the Billy Graham Library's reproduction of it. The Nixon conversation is Conversation No. 662-4, Nixon White House Tapes, National Archives, February 1, 1972. The 2019 calendar entry is at page 693 of the Anglican Church in North America's Calendar of the Christian Year; the task force's rationale is quoted from Ben Jefferies, "The Calendar of Saints: A Rookie Anglican Guide." All of Graham's published work remains in copyright.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant William 'Billy' Graham to preach the Gospel to the people of every nation: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.