It was may turn out to be one of his last great gifts to
America, 93-year-old evangelist Billy Graham publicly endorsed
North Carolina’s marriage amendment shortly before the vote,
helping guarantee its passage by a large margin.
“Watching the moral decline of our country causes me great
concern,” Graham said in ads that his ministry published in North
Carolina newspapers. “I believe the home and marriage is the
foundation of our society and must be protected.”
“At 93, I never thought we would have to debate the definition
of marriage,” he deadpanned. “The Bible is clear — God’s
definition of marriage is between a man and a woman. I want to urge
my fellow North Carolinians to vote for the marriage
amendment.”
There had been some indications shortly before the May 7 vote
that the margins of victory for Amendment One were narrowing. But
in the end it received over 60 percent of the vote. As always,
cultural elites were flummoxed. Same sex marriage is supposed to be
inevitable, after all. They wonder: why won’t voters just accept it
and move on?
Graham, even in retirement, remains America’s most revered
religious figure. Now in the public eye for over 60 years, he is
possibly America’s most influential clergy ever. Who would rival
him? Colonial New England’s Puritan divines, culminating with
Jonathan Edwards in the 1750s, deeply shaped America’s religious
conscience. Evangelists from George Whitefield to Francis Asbury to
Charles Finney to Dwight Moody to Billy Sunday shaped America’s
populist religion from the late 1700s to the early 20th century. In
the mid-20th century, Roman Catholic prelates like the media savvy
Bishop Fulton Sheen brought their faith out of ethnic ghettoes and
into the mainstream of American public life. Martin Luther King,
across a tumultuous but relatively brief 15 years, became the chief
icon of the civil rights movement.
But Graham has been an unavoidable public figure since 1949, in
America, and around the world. He routinely filled stadiums before
his retirement in 2007. With Queen Elizabeth, he is among the very
few people who have personally known every U.S. president since
Harry Truman. He was close friends to at least half a dozen of
them, especially Nixon, Johnson, Reagan, and both Bushes. Graham
has known Winston Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, Konrad Adenauer,
Haile Selassie, Indira Gandhi, and several popes, along with
virtually every major public figure in American and Western public
life of the last half century. He dealt with them as an equal,
because his celebrity and following were typically as large as or
larger than theirs. He led evangelicals to become America’s largest
religious demographic as part of a wider global evangelical revival
involving hundreds of millions in the late 20th century and
beyond.
Usually, if not always, Graham has tried to avoid political
controversies and focused on his core evangelistic message.
Privately, Graham’s close links to LBJ and Nixon became political.
And each round of newly released Watergate tapes potentially
reveals embarrassing comments between him and Nixon. Since
Watergate, Graham has been more careful. As the culture wars over
abortion and school prayer exploded in the 1960s and 1970s, he
tried to remain politically aloof without compromising his
evangelical faith.
Even Jerry Falwell, after founding the Moral Majority,
encouraged his fellow Baptist to abstain from partisan
entanglements that might distract from Graham’s unique public role
as America’s chief preacher. Graham’s eagerness to befriend in
pursuit of evangelistic opportunity sometimes seemed excessive. His
trips to the Soviet Union and North Korea in the 1980s and 1990s
excessively avoided any appearance of criticism for those tyrannies
so as to gain access for his Gospel message. A friendly
acquaintance to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, he ignited needless
controversy by seemingly likening President Clinton to King David
during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But Graham has always been quick to apologize, his regrets
always seeming sincere. He’s helped to foster good will between
once suspicious Protestants and Catholics. Rose Kennedy, matriarch
of the political dynasty, once assured him that she never heard him
preach anything about which she, an ardent Catholic, disagreed. He
has successfully befriended Jews and Muslims, among other faiths,
without abandoning his conviction about the Gospel’s unique
truth.
Likely no other preacher or any public figure could have so
appropriately filled the pulpit at National Cathedral after 9/11,
when Graham, before all of official Washington in the audience, and
the entire nation on television, reassured America with words about
both justice and grace. He surmised in his sermon that “many” of
9/11’s victims had ascended to heaven without trying to identify
who by what means. Graham, with a half century of experience, was
masterful at both civil religion and evangelical
revivalism.
In defending traditional marriage to North Carolinians, Graham
naturally quoted the Bible, which he knows so well. But he knows
much more, as the witness to much of the 20th century, as the
visitor to nearly every nation, as a friend to persons of all
faiths. Graham knows humanity and the moral architecture that
sustains it. Liberal clergy, led by Episcopal and United Methodist
bishops, plus Presbyterian moderators, signed their own newspaper
ad, opposing North Carolina’s marriage amendment. They
unconvincingly claimed it would harm children, battered women, and
widows. Few listened or believed. Graham far more plausibly
appealed succinctly to ancient truth that most people in every
culture intuit: “I believe the home and marriage is the foundation
of our society and must be protected.”
Commentators pro and con were surprised by Graham’s intervention
in the marriage debate and surmised he would only have done so
under the strongest conviction. No doubt. North Carolinians and
Americans can be grateful.
