What About the Man?: Billy Graham and the Forces of American Religion Bruce Hiebert Marshall Frady. Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Reissue of the 1979 work, with a new introduction by David Halberstam. pp. 546; Joel Carpenter. Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. pp. xiv + 335. A FRIEND OF MINE who is a former street evangelist once wrote an article critiquing evangelical methodologies. The editor ran the article under a stock photo of Billy Graham, though the article never mentioned Graham. For his perceived attack on Graham, my friend faced an unbelievable backlash, bordering on hate mail. The Reverend Billy Graham has become one of the most wellknown and beloved religious figures of the twentieth century. For millions around the world, he speaks of a religious vision that is lifeembracing and powerfully reorienting. Thousands can testify to his impact in changing their own lives. Within the American evangelical movement, he is its senior saint, if not its pope. His only global rivals in religious popularity are the Dalai Lama and the late Pope John Paul II. Yet despite his prominence, Graham is not well understood. Not surprisingly, it is his religion that people think about when they think of who he is. His fans see him as a genuine man of God. Historians, like Joel Carpenter, place him in the context of evangelical revivalism and the dynamics of that revivalism within American Bruce Hiebert, What About the Man?: Billy Graham and the Forces of American Religion, Journal of Historical Biography 2 (Autumn 2007): 84-90, www.ucfv.ca/jhb. Journal of Historical Biography 2007. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
WHAT ABOUT THE MAN? 85 life. His critics, like Marshall Frady, look at his place within the powerful forces of American civil religion. But what friend and foe alike miss, blinded by his religion, is the genius of the man himself, a genius which is not religious, but Madison Avenue. Billy Graham, as a man, is one of the twentieth century s most insightful geniuses in his understanding and use of mass media. His religious understanding is, at best, mediocre. He is not a theologian as was John Paul II, and no one will ever go to his books for wisdom on the human condition or Christian responses. His emphasis has been on one doorway into, not the makings of, the Christian life. He has demonstrated that he is politically naïve, not good at comprehending how political systems work or understanding the type of people who inhabit them. His cultural critique is one-sided, entirely neglecting the destructive power of economic and social systems. But his weaknesses in these areas areas that would presumably be important to his message and ministry are irrelevant in the face of his ability to understand and use the mass media. Billy Graham understands, like no other religious voice, how to turn a particular narrow part of Christianity into a product that can be distributed with great effectiveness through the full range of mass media. He has developed a sophisticated and integrated web of television, radio, print, film, telephone, stadium event, and internet distribution channels to dispense what can best be described as a comic-book Christianity. At the hub of the web is the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a three hundred and seventy million-dollar agency dedicated to pumping one simple message through this vast expanse of media. It succeeds marvellously, a credit not to the credulity of the American public or to the needs of American civil religion, but to the genius of the man behind the machine. In his book, Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness, journalist Marshall Frady comes closest, among those who have studied Graham, to recognising what Graham is doing. Through interviews with Graham and his associates, massive research in newspaper archives, and a willingness to track down and interview
86 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY relatively minor characters in the Graham drama, Frady brings Graham s context to life. In five hundred pages and myriad quotations, he follows Graham from his childhood in North Carolina to his Watergate chastening and explores how Graham perceives himself, how others perceive him, and what impact he has had on those around him. Above all, Frady makes sure he exposes how Graham has been used by others, from the business people who fund his campaigns out of a simplistic need to express their Christianity, to disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon, who carefully manipulated Graham in order to gain access to the votes of Graham s millions of well-wishers. For Frady, it is Nixon who finally shows the stuff Graham is made of. Nixon is the shadow hanging over all of Graham s ministry, and Frady shows how, in the 1960s, Graham s political naivety, need for popularity, and desire for recognition by the famous led him into the hypocritical service of Nixon s presidential campaigns and into his willing role as the court prophet of the Nixon presidency. Frady is also far from enamoured with Graham s Christianity. In an effort to make clear the law-and-order, civil-religious nature of Graham s preaching, Frady calls Graham s preaching in Berlin in the 1960s Wehrmacht Christianity. (403) Graham s converts, those few Frady can find, he calls instant popcorn Christians, white, weightless, with rather a paper savor. (307) Graham s message, the centre of the whole enterprise, he calls a kind of mild massconsumption commodity, a freeze-dried instant sanctity, a rather sensible and efficient salvation. (215) Such barbs are a commonplace in the pages of this book. But despite his insights into the way Graham understands himself and the way Graham s approach fits snugly into the bosom of American civil religion, Frady finally misses the reality of the man himself. Frady s Graham is a puppet, pulled, propped, and manoeuvred by the powerful of American life. His Graham is impossible to imagine as the extraordinary media manipulator capable of putting
WHAT ABOUT THE MAN? 87 together the massive and reliable media content machine he runs. Many others have tried to imitate Graham, but none have succeeded, and that tells us how powerfully insightful and competent Graham actually is, a point Frady has missed. A more positive review of Graham s work is church historian Joel Carpenter s Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism. Ostensibly, Carpenter s book is not about Graham, but about the return of Christian Fundamentalism to the centre of American life in the middle of the twentieth century. But the unavoidable central character in the drama Carpenter unfolds is Graham. For Carpenter, Graham is the Prophet who takes Fundamentalism from hard-working obscurity to national prominence. Yet Carpenter is at pains to ensure that Graham is upstaged by the forces of Fundamentalism. Graham himself gets but scattered mention in the book until just before the conclusion, when twelve key pages explore Graham s early work in the 1940s and 1950s. By way of introducing Graham, Carpenter explains: It may be extreme to claim that if the dynamic preacher from North Carolina had not been available, this revival movement might well have created him. Yet his emergence in Los Angeles in 1949 and his successes thereafter in one city-wide campaign after another were made possible by a revivalist movement that had been mobilizing for some time.(212) Carpenter is also careful to spell out the career-boosting implications for Graham s ministry of William Randolph Hearst s 1949 decision to puff Graham. And while he does an excellent job of exploring the many people and social forces stewing in the 1940s that gave rise to Graham, he clearly holds the conviction that those background figures and social forces are what led to Graham s rise. He may call Graham, the world s most prominent and influential evangelical, (237) but this is a passing comment. It is as if he had written a history of Methodism and had all but forgotten the Wesley brothers.
88 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY Neither Frady nor Carpenter ask what it was about Graham that led to his prominence. Both place him as the product of the people around him and the forces of civil religion and revivalism. Neither sees in him a particular genius, capable of taking opportunity and moulding it into a vehicle for his vision. Neither can see why a media mogul like William Randolph Hearst might have chosen Graham for his magazine covers. Neither can comprehend how the PhD-laden evangelical brain trust at Fuller Seminary could have become so thoroughly Graham s brain trust. Neither can explain why it was Graham who received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1989, ostensibly for his work in radio broadcasting. Where the mass media was concerned, Graham had a genius at two levels. The first was to see what the various media could do and how they could be used to present a type of Christian message. This was not just a genius about how specific media worked or about how to craft a message that would fit them; this was a genius that saw how to make the wide range of mass media work together as a system. Mass rallies were broadcast on television, advertised on radio and in print, and supported by books, movies, radio broadcasts, newspaper columns, a series of magazines, and web sites. Ultimately, the rallies, events gathering hundreds of thousands of people, became only the almost-incidental high points of a consistent and continuous mass-mediated barrage. Billy Graham is not the most important evangelical leader because others saw his value, but because he saw how to use every channel of mass media being developed in the world in one integrated network. In so doing, he has demonstrated a genius like no other figure of mass media before or since. The second level of Graham s media genius consisted of seeing how he himself was part of the image/message. Graham has presented a carefully cultivated image to the public by studying the best of other media practitioners and making use of his own powerful voice and good looks. He has also placed his message within a set of tight personal boundaries that have kept him and his organization absolutely free of scandal. This is not because Graham has been
WHAT ABOUT THE MAN? 89 squeaky clean (though almost so), but because he has understood how to publicly confess error and how to avoid making the same mistake twice. He also demonstrated genius in surrounding himself with people whose character and work ensured an extremely high standard of message consistency. Graham has made the extraordinary discovery of how to be a media star while living the life of a saint. Graham s only major weakness has been a failure to understand the nature of politics. Rather than seeing politics as a vehicle for manipulating systems of enormous power, systems that attract people for the power itself, and not for reasons of public image, Graham seemingly has only perceived politics as a series of massmediated events. People with political aspirations have consistently and successfully used Graham for their own ends. It is as if Graham cannot see power, only image, as if having so successfully seen into the heart of the way mass media work, he cannot see a world outside of it. This is a telling point: it explains why his Christianity is so shallow. Just as Graham could not see into the heart of someone like Richard Nixon, for whom image was a way to power, Graham cannot see into the heart of the Christian gospel, a structure of cosmic power with deep political and social consequences. All he can see is the surface of Christianity, the striking image of conversion. In some respects this failure of Graham s is not coincidental. The mass media are primarily vehicles of surface texture, not content depth, of the quick sale, not the deep commitment. It may be that it is this weakness that leads such diverse students as Frady and Carpenter to see Graham as the product of others. They, and others, miss his genius because it is hidden behind a religiosity that, in its shallowness and simplicity, misleads its viewers into seeing Graham as shallow and simple. But he is not that. The shallowness and simplicity of his message and person are a function of his media savvy. Everything about Graham and his message is a function of what it takes to make mass media work, and the mass media are not welcoming to complexity of message or person. Graham has spent his life ensuring that both message and
90 JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY person could be easily grasped no matter how briefly perceived, and he has succeeded like no other person alive today. This latter point also raises one of the key problems with the study of historic personages, especially in a world of complex social systems and mass media. Individuals of genius can only function in supportive social milieus. To understand a man like Billy Graham, we must be alert, as Frady and Carpenter are, to how the systems that place him in a position of prominence function. Yet, paying attention to those essential systems can easily cause us to miss the man at the centre. Especially when, like Graham, they have carefully crafted all of their existence to fit the needs of the system, they can come to look like nothing more than the system itself, as if pure coincidence had placed them, and not another person, at the centre. But if we avoid being distracted by the image cast, and instead look at the way the social systems have been bent to serve the desires of the person, then we can begin to discover just how powerfully this person, and not another, shaped the world. In Graham s case, a mere glance at all those who have tried to emulate him and failed demonstrates what a towering work of genius his life has been.