THE BIG TENT.(Billy Graham)(Biography)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 22-AUG-05

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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Billy Graham's final crusade had reached the midway point, on a sweltering evening last June in Flushing Meadows, when things took an unexpected turn. Graham, now eighty-six and using a walker, had slowly made his way to the pulpit, aided by his oldest son, Franklin. As the crowd of eighty thousand, seated on folding chairs, awaited his sermon (on the subject of making bad choices), Graham glanced across the platform and acknowledged his special guests, Bill and Hillary Clinton. " They're a great couple," Graham told the crowd. He then recalled a remark he'd once made about the Clintons when they were in the White House. "I felt when he left the Presidency he should be an evangelist, because he has all the gifts--and he'd leave his wife to run the country." At this, Hillary turned to her husband and slapped him a high five.

Bill Clinton joined Graham at the pulpit, and, taking his hand, he said, "What an honor it is to be here as a person of faith with a man I love and whom I have followed. He is about the only person I know who I've never seen fail to live his faith."

Clinton then told a story from his childhood, about attending a Graham crusade with his Sunday-school class in Little Rock. It was during a time of racial disharmony, and Graham had refused the suggestion by some city leaders to segregate his revivals. "I was just a little boy," Clinton said, "and I never forgot it, and I've loved him ever since."

There was, certainly, an element of politics to the moment. Evangelicals are not a known component of the Clinton base, and a blessing from Graham before eighty thousand worshippers has value, but Clinton is convincing on the subject of Billy Graham. We had talked a few days earlier, and the former President recollected that Graham's long-ago stand on race had occurred at a moment when young Clinton, a Southern Baptist, was questioning his own faith. "When he gave the call--amid all the civil-rights trouble, to see blacks and whites coming down the aisle together at the football stadium, which is the scene, of course, of our great football rivalries and all that meant to people in Arkansas--it was an amazing, amazing thing," he said. "If you weren't there, and if you're not a Southerner, and if you didn't live through it, it's hard to explain. It made an enormous impression on me. I was at that age where kids question everything, you know? And all of a sudden I said, 'This guy has got to be real, because he did this when he didn't have to.' " Over the years, Clinton formed a bond with Graham--friend of Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes--and when Clinton's personal troubles emerged Graham publicly counselled forgiveness. "He took sin seriously," Clinton told me. "But he took redemption seriously. And it was incredibly powerful, the way he did it."

For Franklin Graham, sitting next to Hillary on that hot evening in Flushing Meadows, hearing his father and the former President exchanging praise must have stirred some discomfort. He had unreservedly condemned Clinton's liaison with Monica Lewinsky, summoning the Old Testament example of David's carrying on with Bathsheba, and the wrath of God it had produced. "Mr. Clinton's months-long extramarital sexual behavior in the Oval Office now concerns him and the rest of the world, not just his immediate family," Franklin wrote in a 1998 opinion article published by the Wall Street Journal. "If he will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?"

In addition to the family religious enterprise, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which has some five hundred employees worldwide, a hundred-million-dollar operating budget, and a fifteen-hundred-acre training center in North Carolina, Franklin Graham has inherited his father's chiselled features and his deep Carolina timbre, but politically and theologically the son wields a much sharper sword. Billy Graham has steadfastly avoided pronouncing judgments as he nears his own end (writing that "sincere Christians may differ on whether or not abortion is ever justified," and telling Larry King that God loves even Satan), but Franklin is quite willing to voice what he deems harsh truths. Just that morning, he had told me that the United Nations will fail, because it is a godless enterprise. Abortion is murder, he said, and homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God. After the attacks of September 11th, Franklin declared that as a religion Islam was "wicked, violent, and not of the same God"--an assertion from which he has hardly retreated.

Predictably, Billy Graham's praise of Bill Clinton and his apparent endorsement of Hillary Clinton's political aspirations excited dismay among evangelicals. Several days later, when the Graham organization issued a "clarification," it was in the name of Franklin Graham. His father had only been joking about Bill Clinton becoming an evangelist, Franklin said. "President Clinton has the charisma, personality, and communication skills, but an evangelist has to have the call of God, which President Clinton obviously does not have, and my father understands that." As for Hillary Clinton, Graham continued, his father "certainly did not intend for his comments to be an endorsement for Senator Hillary Clinton."

Yet it was fitting that Bill Clinton played a part in Billy Graham's last crusade. The two men share a real, if not obvious, kinship, an intuitive communion. Long before Clinton fashioned a "third way" in politics, Graham had figured out how to triangulate American Protestant Christianity.

Graham consolidated that effort nearly fifty years ago, when he opened his first New York crusade, on the evening of May 15, 1957, at the old Madison Square Garden, at Forty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue. He described himself that night as "fearful," and, indeed, there was much at stake. It wasn't a question of Graham's establishing himself as a national religious figure; he'd already been on the cover of Time, had preached to Queen Elizabeth, and had become a pen pal of President Eisenhower. Graham and his team had every reason to expect a successful crusade. The organization's fabled promotional machine was fully operational, as evidenced by the extensive coverage accorded the crusade by the New York press. The Herald Tribune let Graham write a daily column on his reflections on the revival. Nearly a third of the campaign's initial budget, of a million dollars, was allotted to advertising and publicity, and the old Garden filled to capacity every night. What was at stake for Graham in that first New York crusade was the evangelist's final break from the fundamentalist wing that had formed him, and his hope of advancing a new evangelicalism that would survive, even thrive, in the cultural mainstream.

The events that brought Graham to that moment, and to a subsequent bittersweet triumph in New York, had huge consequences, including the marginalization of fundamentalists and the steady withering of the mainline denominations. It is largely because of Graham's bold course that evangelicalism--a heterogeneous multidenominational movement estimated to number more than fifty million born-again followers, with best-selling books (the "Left Behind" series), megachurches, and the nation's President, George W. Bush--has attained its current place in American culture as the center of gravity of Protestant Christianity.

In 1918, when Graham was born, to a moderately prosperous Presbyterian farm family in North Carolina, American Protestantism had been a unified faith for fifty years. There were doctrinal differences among Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians, but the mainline denominations, to which most Americans belonged, shared an orthodoxy that, in contemporary terms, might be called fundamentalist. Most professing Christians believed in the divine inspiration and literal truth of the Bible; the divinity of the Virgin-born Jesus Christ; the vicarious atonement by Jesus at the Cross for a fallen mankind; Christ's bodily resurrection; and the validity of Biblical miracles. There once was, in that sense, such a thing as the Christian nation, for which some religious conservatives still pine.

But the fin de siecle had brought a growing acceptance among educated people of Darwin's theory of evolution, which challenged providential creation; the discipline of "higher criticism" asserted human authorship of Scripture; scholars investigating the "historical Jesus" emphasized Christ's humanity rather than his supposed divinity. In 1907, Henry Adams, recalling the era of his childhood, wrote that "in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in...

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