American evangelist, civil rights activist, and ordained Southern Baptist preacher Billy Graham (November 7, 1918 – February 21, 2018) gained notoriety in the mid-to-late 20th century for his live sermons and broadcasts. Over the course of his career, which lasted more than 60 years, Graham became well-known both domestically and internationally as an evangelical Christian leader.
Billy Graham was regarded by one biographer as “among the most influential Christian leaders” of the twentieth century. Graham gained notoriety in the late 1940s and early 1950s for packing stadiums and other large spaces all around the world with his live sermons, which were frequently aired on radio and television and some of them are still being seen in the twenty-first century. Bily Graham sponsored evangelical live campaigns known as “crusades” every year from 1947 until his retirement in 2005, spanning his 60 years on television. From 1950 to 1954, he also presented the Hour of Decision radio program. As early as 1953, during a period of severe racial tension in the US, he rejected racial segregation and insisted on racial integration for all of his revivals and crusades.
Later, in 1957, he asked Martin Luther King Jr. to co-preach at a revival in New York City. In addition to his religious goals, he influenced the worldviews of many individuals from all origins, helping them to connect the Bible with modern secular perspectives. According to his website, Bily Graham has addressed live audiences in over 185 nations and territories, including the BMS World Mission and Global Mission events, totaling at least 210 million people.
The US presidents Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson—one of his closest friends—were all close to Graham. Billy Graham also had a longstanding friendship with Robert Schuller, the founding pastor of the Crystal Cathedral and another televangelist, whom he persuaded to launch his own television ministry. Mainline Protestant denominations valued Graham’s evangelism because he persuaded mainline Protestants who were won over to his evangelical message to stay in or rejoin their mainline churches. Despite his initial misgivings and concerns about Catholicism, which were typical of evangelical Protestants of the time, Graham went on to build friendly relationships with numerous leaders of the American Catholic Church and subsequently promoted harmony between Catholics and Protestants.
According to his employees, over 3.2 million individuals have accepted Billy Graham Crusades’ invitation to “accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior.” Billy Graham ran a number of media and publishing companies. With radio and television broadcasts, Graham’s lifetime audience probably exceeded billions of people. Graham shared the gospel with more people in person than any other person in Christian history as a result of his crusades. Billy Graham made a record 61 appearances on Gallup’s list of the most admired men and women. He had become the “Great Legitimator” by the middle of the 1960s, according to Grant Wacker, who wrote: “By then his presence conferred status on presidents, acceptability on wars, shame on racial prejudice, desirability on decency, dishonor on indecency, and prestige on civic events.”
Billy Graham Biography
On November 7, 1918, Billy Graham was born in a farmhouse’s downstairs bedroom close to Charlotte, North Carolina. He was of Scots-Irish heritage and the oldest of four children born to dairy farmer William Franklin Graham Sr. and Morrow (née Coffey). Along with his younger brother Melvin Thomas and two younger sisters Catherine Morrow and Jean, Graham grew up on the family dairy farm. The family relocated to a new red brick home approximately 75 yards (69 meters) from their white frame home when he was nine years old. His parents were members of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church when he was growing up. The Sharon Grammar School was where Graham went to school.
He began reading at a young age and enjoyed reading books for boys, particularly Tarzan. He would cling to the branches and shout like Tarzan, who was quite popular. His father claims that he became a minister as a result of such ranting. When Prohibition ended in December 1933, Graham was 15 years old. His father had him and his sister Catherine drink beer till they fell ill. The two siblings avoided drugs and alcohol for the rest of their lives as a result of this strong aversion.
An area youth group rejected Billy Graham as “too worldly” for membership. He was convinced to visit evangelist Mordecai Ham by Albert McMakin, who worked on the Graham farm. In 1934, Ham conducted a series of revival meetings in Charlotte, when Graham was converted at the age of sixteen, according to his memoirs.
Billy Graham enrolled at Bob Jones College following his graduation from Sharon High School in May 1936. He discovered that the regulations and coursework were overly legalistic after just one semester. Bob Jones Sr. cautioned him against wasting his life once he was on the verge of expulsion: “At best, all you could amount to is be a poor country Baptist preacher somewhere out in the sticks… Your voice is captivating. Your voice can be used by God. He can make good use of it.
He moved to Temple Terrace, Florida’s Florida Bible Institute in 1937. Billy Graham gave his first sermon at Bostwick Baptist Church, which is close to Palatka, Florida, while he was still a student. Graham described how he found his vocation on the 18th green of the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club, which was close to the institute’s campus, in his book. Later, on the Hillsborough River, just east of the 18th green and across from the spot where Graham frequently took a canoe to a little island in the river to practice preaching to the cypress stumps, alligators, and birds, Reverend Billy Graham Memorial Park was created. Graham was ordained at Peniel Baptist Church in Palatka, Florida, in 1939 by a group of Southern Baptist pastors. He received his Bachelor of Theology degree in 1940.
In Wheaton, Illinois, Billy Graham subsequently enrolled at Wheaton College. He made the decision to embrace the Bible as the unchangeable word of God when he was there. In California, Henrietta Mears of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood played a crucial role in assisting Graham in addressing the problem. He established it in southern California, southeast of the Big Bear Lake region, at Forest Home Christian Camp (now known as Forest Home Ministries). Graham received an invitation to preach at the United Gospel Tabernacle church on a Sunday in 1941 while he was a student at Wheaton. Following that, Graham was requested to preach at their church on several occasions, and eventually, the congregation asked him to take over as pastor.
Evangelism
Six thousand people attended the inaugural Billy Graham Crusade, which took place in the Civic Auditorium in Grand Rapids, Michigan, from September 13–21, 1947. At the age of 28, Graham would rent a large space, such a stadium, park, or even a street, and as the audiences grew, he organized a choir that might include up to 5,000 people. He would share the gospel and ask others to come forward (a practice started by Dwight L. Moody); these persons were referred to as “inquirers” and were given the opportunity to talk to a counselor one-on-one to ask questions and pray together. A Bible study guide or a copy of the Gospel of John were frequently provided to the inquirers.
Billy Graham set up circus tents in a parking lot in Los Angeles in 1949 to host a series of revival meetings. Despite the fact that Hearst and Graham never met, he garnered widespread media attention, particularly in the conservative Hearst newspaper empire. Five weeks longer than anticipated, the crusade event lasted for eight weeks. Billy Graham gained widespread attention from national periodicals and the wire services, making him a household name. They “rocketed Billy Graham into national prominence, and resulted in the conversion of a number of show-business personalities,” according to Rudy Atwood, a pianist who performed at the tent gatherings.
In order to continue his live touring revivals, Graham declined NBC’s offer of a five-year, $1 million deal in 1953 to appear on television opposite Arthur Godfrey because he had other commitments. Billy Graham organized 12-week-long crusades in London and a 16-week-long nightly crusade in New York City in 1957 at Madison Square Garden. Graham publicly stated that “apartheid is a sin” at a protest in Durban, South Africa, in 1973, which drew 100,000 attendees and was the country’s first significant mixed-race gathering. A quarter of the 155,000 individuals in Graham’s 1992 Moscow, Russia, audience moved forward in response to his appeal. He regularly utilized the altar call hymn “Just As I Am” during his crusades. He delivered a lecture at San Juan, Puerto Rico’s Estadio Hiram Bithorn at the Global Mission event in 1995. The message was translated into 116 languages and broadcast via satellite to 185 countries.
He had preached 417 live crusades at the time of his final one in New York City in 2005, 226 of which were in the United States and 195 of which were overseas.
Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), which has its main office in Minneapolis, was established by Graham in 1950. The association has several offices abroad, including in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires, and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2003. Among the BGEA ministries are:
- Hour of Decision was a weekly radio show that ran from 1950 to 2016 and was transmitted all over the world.
- Almost every market in the US and Canada broadcasts mission television programs.
- Tribune Content Agency distributes My Answer, a syndicated newspaper column that appears in newspapers all around the United States.
- The association’s official periodical is called Decision magazine.
- Carl F. H. Henry served as the first editor of Christianity Today when it was founded in 1956.
- The website for a youth discipleship program developed by BGEA is called Passageway.org.
- Over 130 films have been produced and distributed by World Wide Pictures.
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association launched “My Hope With Billy Graham” in April 2013, which was the biggest outreach in the organization’s history. Following a Graham video message, it urged churchgoers to share the gospel in small group gatherings. “The idea is for Christians to follow the example of the disciple Matthew in the New Testament and spread the gospel in their own homes.” The primary show of the My Hope America series, “The Cross” video, was aired the week of Graham’s 95th birthday.
Billy Graham and US Presidents
Billy Graham met one-on-one with twelve straight US presidents, including Harry S. Truman and Barack Obama. Graham told the media that he had encouraged Truman to oppose communism in North Korea after their 1950 encounter. After that encounter, Truman did not communicate with him for years since he did not like him. Subsequently, he always kept his discussions with presidents private.
Truman publicly expressed his disdain for Billy Graham. “But now we’ve got just this one evangelist, this Billy Graham, and he’s gone off the beam,” he wrote about Graham in his 1974 autobiography Plain Speaking. He’s… well, I shouldn’t have mentioned this, but he’s one of those fakes I mentioned earlier. He claims to be friends with every president, yet during my time as president, I never had a friendship with him. I simply don’t like that kind of person. His only goal is to have his name printed in the newspaper.
During Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, Graham started to come frequently. In order to secure the admittance of black children to public schools, he allegedly asked him to step in with federal troops in the Little Rock Nine case. House Speaker Sam Rayburn persuaded Congress to allow Graham to perform the first religious service on the steps of the Capitol building in 1952. On his deathbed, Eisenhower called for Graham.
Billy Graham grew close to Vice President Richard Nixon and backed the Quaker Nixon in the 1960 presidential contest. In August, he called a strategy meeting of evangelical leaders in Montreux, Switzerland, to discuss how to best counter Senator John F. Kennedy, Nixon’s opponent who was Roman Catholic. Graham, a Democrat by registration, was a staunch supporter of action against the foreign danger of communism and shared Nixon’s views on U.S. foreign policy. He was therefore more tolerant of Republican governments.
After being pleased by Graham’s admiration of his great-grandfather George Washington Baines’s work, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson called Graham to the White House on December 16, 1963, for spiritual counseling. Following this encounter, Johnson regularly sought out Graham’s company and additional spiritual guidance. “I almost used the White House as a hotel when Johnson was President,” Billy Graham told his biographer Frady. I could always count on him to keep me there. He simply did not want me to go.
Billy Graham would not only visit the White House private quarters, but he would occasionally kneel by Johnson’s bedside and pray with him whenever the President asked him to, in contrast to his more restricted contact with Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy. He said, “I have never had many people do that.” Graham once recounted. Graham visited Johnson at Camp David in addition to the White House, and he also met with the President on occasion when he withdrew to his private ranch in Stonewall, Texas. In 1965, Johnson became the first sitting president to travel to Houston, Texas, to participate in one of Graham’s crusades.
Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater sent an estimated 2 million telegrams to Graham’s hometown of Montreat, North Carolina, during the 1964 U.S. presidential election, requesting the preacher’s support. Billy Graham resisted pressure to support Goldwater and remained neutral in the race because he supported Johnson’s domestic policies and wanted to maintain his connection with the president. Graham’s position as the primary White House pastor was cemented after Johnson won the election. Johnson even entertained the idea of appointing Graham to his cabinet and preparing him to succeed him, but Graham maintained that he had no political aspirations and wanted to continue serving as a preacher. According to David Aikman, Graham’s biographer, the preacher had a closer relationship with Johnson than any other president he had ever known. In reality, the BGEA said in February 2025 that Graham was “probably closer to Johnson than to any other president.”
He stayed in the White House for the first night of Nixon’s presidency and the final night of Johnson’s. Graham joined Nixon as an adviser during his successful 1968 presidential campaign, frequently visiting the White House and presiding over the president’s private prayer sessions. Graham turned down Nixon’s offer of the ambassadorship to Israel at their meeting with Golda Meir.
They believed that Nixon’s appearance at a Billy Graham revival in East Tennessee in 1970 was politically safe. It attracted one of Tennessee’s biggest anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. The first president to speak from an evangelist’s platform was Nixon. When Graham chastised Nixon for his actions during Watergate and the foul language on the Watergate tapes, their friendship soured in 1973. Nixon’s resignation led to their eventual reconciliation.
One presidential funeral and one presidential burial were presided over by Graham. He participated in eulogizing the former president and presided over the 1973 funeral rituals for President Lyndon B. Johnson. Billy Graham presided over Richard Nixon’s death and official funeral in 1994 as well as the funeral services for former First Lady Pat Nixon in 1993. Graham claimed that he thought President Bill Clinton was “a spiritual person” throughout the Monica Lewinsky incident. He was recuperating from hip replacement surgery on June 11, 2004, therefore he was unable to attend Ronald Reagan’s official burial. George W. Bush made reference to this in his [whose?] eulogy.
President Barack Obama “had a private prayer” with Billy Graham during his visit to his home in Montreat, North Carolina, on April 25, 2010.
Personal Life
Billy Graham married Ruth Bell, a classmate from Wheaton whose parents were Presbyterian missionaries in China, on August 13, 1943. L. Nelson Bell, her father, practiced general surgery. At the age of 87, Ruth passed away on June 14, 2007. For over 64 years, the couple was wed.
Together, Billy Graham and his spouse have five kids. Leftwich, Virginia (Gigi) Franklin Graham (b. 1952), president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and president and CEO of international relief organization Samaritan’s Purse; Nelson Edman Graham (b. 1958), pastor who oversees East Gates Ministries International, which distributes Christian literature in China; Ruth Graham (b. 1950), founder and president of Ruth Graham & Friends and conference leader across the United States and Canada; and Graham Tchividjian (b. 1945), author and inspirational speaker; Anne Graham Lotz (b. 1948), head of AnGeL ministries.
Billy Graham had five children, nineteen grandkids (including Will Graham and Tullian Tchividjian), forty-one great-grandchildren, and six great-great-grandchildren at the time of his death in 2018 at the age of 99.
Despite never having resided in Texas, he joined the First Baptist Church Dallas in 1953. Approximately one and a half hours’ drive from his home in Montreat, North Carolina, he transferred his membership to the First Baptist Church of Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 2008.
Death
At the age of 99, Billy Graham passed away at home in Montreat, North Carolina, on February 21, 2018, from natural causes.
Billy Graham became the fourth private citizen in American history to lie in honor at the US Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C., on February 28 and March 1, 2018. He is the first religious figure to receive such recognition. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell referred to Graham as “America’s pastor” at the event. Graham was described as “an ambassador for Christ” by President Donald Trump. Jim Bakker, a televangelist, also praised Graham, calling him the best preacher since Jesus. He added that Graham paid him a visit when he was incarcerated.
Billy Graham Books
The following novels, several of which are bestsellers, were written by Graham. In the first two weeks following its release in the 1970s, The Jesus Generation sold 200,000 copies. How to Be Born Again was believed to have created publishing history with its initial printing of 800,000 copies, while Angels: God’s Secret Agents sold a million copies within 90 days of its release.
- Calling Youth to Christ (1947)
- America’s Hour of Decision (1951)
- I Saw Your Sons at War (1953)
- Peace with God (1953, 1984)
- Freedom from the Seven Deadly Sins (1955)
- The Secret of Happiness (1955, 1985)
- Billy Graham Talks to Teenagers (1958)
- My Answer (1960)
- Billy Graham Answers Your Questions (1960)
- World Aflame (1965)
- The Challenge (1969)
- The Jesus Generation (1971)
- Angels: God’s Secret Agents (1975, 1985)
- How to Be Born Again (1977)
- The Holy Spirit (1978)
- Evangelist to the World (1979)
- Till Armageddon (1981)
- Approaching Hoofbeats (1983)
- A Biblical Standard for Evangelists (1984)
- Unto the Hills (1986)
- Facing Death and the Life After (1987)
- Answers to Life’s Problems (1988)
- Hope for the Troubled Heart (1991)
- Storm Warning (1992)
- Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (1997, 2007)
- Hope for Each Day (2002)
- The Key to Personal Peace (2003)
- Living in God’s Love: The New York Crusade (2005)
- The Journey: How to Live by Faith in an Uncertain World (2006)
- Wisdom for Each Day (2008)
- Nearing Home: Life, Faith, and Finishing Well (2011)
- The Heaven Answer Book (2012)
- The Reason for My Hope: Salvation (2013)
- Where I Am: Heaven, Eternity, and Our Life Beyond the Now (2015)
Legacy
Billy Graham’s impact extended beyond his crusades. In order to further his message, he founded the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a multimedia ministry. He wrote many books, advised US presidents on spiritual issues, and established himself as a reliable source on moral and religious issues.
Despite his deteriorating health in his latter years, Graham found means to spread his message through programs like “My Hope America” and recorded sermons. He died in 2018 at the age of 99, leaving a great legacy of global influence, social effect, and evangelism.
