Billy Graham: A Retrospective – Part I

Good evening, I'm Claudius Miller, and this evening, WNC Radio has invited Professor Darius Betts, Chairman of Faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a distinguished novelist, Dr. Sam Hill, visiting professor of religion and a member of the faculty of the University of Florida and the Reverend Peter James Lee, Rector of the Chapel of the Cross and Episcopal Congregation in Chapel Hill, to discuss their reactions to Dr. Billy Graham's lectures here at the University last week. Let me begin with Sam Hill and ask Sam, what is Christian American fundamentalism? I'll begin by saying I don't think it's correct to classify Billy Graham as a fundamentalist. I would say that Billy Graham is an evangelical of a certain sort and that fundamentalism

is one type of evangelicalism. In other words, all fundamentalists are evangelicals, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. I think if the word fundamentalism deserves any usage at all as distinct from sloppy usage, and surely it does, that it refers to an interpretation of Christianity that insists that certain doctrines simply must be believed according to specified interpretations. That is, in a certain sense, it's head religion, you have to believe the following list of doctrines, no exceptions, brooked. And usually in American culture, it has meant a kind of negative stance toward society and culture. It's evil, it's going to hell in a hand basket, and righteous people should have as little as possible to do with it. I believe those two terms, probably, of two descriptions get fairly close to capturing the heart of fundamentalism. After all, lots of people are biblical literalists

who are not fundamentalists, and not even all evangelicals would classify themselves as biblical literalists. So I think we have to say something more than a certain attitude toward the Bible as being constitutive of fundamentalism. Graham does not believe in a literal interpretation of the resurrection, for instance. Oh, he most certainly does. He's certainly a biblical literalist. But he is not a fundamentalist in what sense, Sam, I missed that. All right, he doesn't put forward a list of doctrines interpreted in a certain way that you have to subscribe to with the result that you can play the testing and proving game. I can test whether you're a Christian or not. I can prove whether you're a Christian or not. Now, you could argue that one of the logical consequences of his possession is the testing and proving possibility. But for reasons that aren't all together clear to me, I guess mostly because he has good will, and he

civilized, and he's a loving person, is it? Mostly those things. He doesn't pursue that. So I wouldn't call it. He's not so much interested in keeping people out as taking people in. Is that it contrasted to some hard rock here? Now, at a theoretical level, he differentiates between the ends and the outs. But he doesn't do that to people as people. What struck me as parish pastor in Chapel Hill, in preparation for this visit, was the inclusive character of the Graham Advanced Party. One town meeting of pastors, included people from the Roman Catholics, some car borough, and Chapel Hill, evangelical congregations, the community church of Chapel Hill, Episcopalians, Lutherans, all kinds. And at no point was there an attempt from the Graham people to test us. There was a kind of assumption that by our own definition, we were all part of the Christian community and a kind of implicit acceptance that Graham is a spokesman, not the only one, maybe

one with whom we disagree on a number of things, but that a spokesman for the Christian faith. And that may be different than what Graham was 30 years ago. I don't know, but there was a tone of inclusiveness that, to me, sounded more and felt more like we were participating together as one large church, rather than competing sex, trying to test one another. Thank you, Peter. Dars, you have a well-deserved reputation as a writer, and as a writer, your perceptions are extraordinarily acute. Peter has interpreted the inclusiveness of Dr. Graham and his organization. And so, Sam is coming from a generous and good spirit. Would you suspect that that also might come from a very well-oiled sales organization that's dependent almost utterly on the mass media for its success, that it can't afford to be exclusive, it must

be inclusive as all mass media is? Well, first of all, I know nothing more alarming than to be forewarned, you have to make an acute observation. Excuse me. Please make a pedestrian observation about this, Dars. Thank you, Claudius. Although that's a cynical question, in a way, I would say some of that probably does function, and I would think Billy Graham, who knows our fallibility and original Sim, would concur with that. There's a pragmatic thing. For example, I noticed that he arrived at the auditorium, escorted by his bodyguards, who looked very much like mafia types from a distance. And I think this was disconcerting to students who had sort of visualized themselves sitting at his feet discussing theology. I also think that's a reality of a world in which famous people, famous for whatever reason, are targets for the lunatics and the sick, and the grievously

lonely of this society who feel that's the only way to become known. So although I think that is mixed, I think a larger factor is that the last 30 years have mellowed Billy Graham as a person. I think he has been educated by his travels and other cultures, where he has had to be more flexible than his early training encouraged him to be. It's one of the things that has made me like him better than I did 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10, 5. But I think I, too, have become a little less judgmental than I was when I was young and knew everything. Well, maybe that happens to all of us. Peter, as a parish minister, where relationships are personal and face to face, what caused you to support Dr. Graham's lectures here in a ministry that is of necessity and in

a long tradition of it in American life, based on talking to a lot of people at once and in a sense, contradictory of the normal congregational approach to religion. It's simply almost instrumental kind of reason, and that is that Billy Graham speaks in the idiom that most North Carolina students understand as the way one speaks of Christian faith, and if we were to have any influence and credibility in the months and years ahead in addressing or even listening to some of the students who perhaps responded to Graham while he was here, we needed to be within the larger umbrella of the Graham visit, rather than somehow standing back as we Episcopalian sometimes do and picking at perhaps one point here, then I went to a few times when he assured us from the pulpit that the world would end a few miles outside of Beirut. Maybe it will and will all be surprised,

but it was a matter of wanting to be part of the larger community and to be credible to the larger community of faith, so that one-to-one relationships can build if I'm already receiving in the mail slick little follow-up cards that say so and so made a commitment and indicated they want to be identified with the chapel of the cross, and so we're supposed to follow up on that. They're very slick. There's no question about that. I really feel like an incompetent, bumbling English vicar compared to the Graham computers and all the rest, it's a fascinating thing to watch, a very American farmer. Were you uncomfortable with the efficiency or slickness of the... I don't think though, in a way there was almost an innocent, unself-consciousness about that in the Graham, among the Graham organization,

that's just the way they operate. They operate with a large mailing list, they depend on that, and it's... it is a mass ministry. There's no question about it, and I don't think they would deny that for a moment. Darius is said, Peter, and we'll move from Darius to you back to Sam on this issue of changing relationship between Dr. Graham and that part of American Christianity, which he represents, and individuals and institutions, and maybe the society as a whole. I remember one of your predecessors at the chapel, across some 30 years ago, David Yates. I would think that David would not have supported a visit of Dr. Graham. We have no way of knowing, but that would have been my feeling, and yet you take up a poised and judicious view towards us, can you account for the change in the relationship, say, between an established

local congregation of the mainstream? Well, I suppose in many of the mainstream churches, we're also... we've also discovered in the last 15 years, many currents within the mainstream. I mean, there are people who describe themselves as evangelicals, according to Sam's understanding of that, within the mainstream churches, and we certainly have them with an hour. And I suppose the tendency I, in fact, and I'm for this, the tendency within the mainstream churches to be inclusive of many streams within the community of faith is, I think, a salutary one. And I think that's a difference. We used to divide ourselves, according to how we understood truth, and now we can hold on to our truth and understand the truth as held by others, maybe complimentary to what we hold. I think that's a difference in the last 20 years, but Sam's the historian of religion and can speak authoritatively ex-cathedral on that matter.

Well, then, a used thing, in that sense, Billy Graham's ministry has been a success that he is, in fact, his attitudes and the gospel that he preaches has changed the episcopal church among others. It's been mutual, I suppose. I think Graham has changed. I suspect the experience for Graham of the enormous disillusionment with the secular arm as an instrument of God. When he, I suspect, I have no personal relationship with him, but I suspect that he felt personally and religiously betrayed by the Watergate experience and began searching for other expressions other than the secular state as the instrument of righteousness as a constituency for ministry. That's just a hunch that I have. I don't know whether there's any legitimacy to that. Thank you for bringing up this Watergate incident because it was true that Billy Graham was a religious counselor to Richard Nixon, held services in the White House, obviously at Richard Nixon's invitation. Let's get back to Sam now and ask, well, in

what sense is Graham not, let's say, Jerry Falwell? What sense is he not political? What sense is he not hard in that sense? I don't think Mr. Graham is fundamentally a political animal. His theology doesn't incline him toward heavy involvement in the political life. If you will think about it, his political interactions were with individuals. He really counseled the man sitting in the White House far more than he ever worked for any social program or put forward any policy that he wanted to see the country adopt. I think what has happened to him is both of the others have said some kind of maturing and mellowing and growing, and let me put it this way with reference to John Kennedy. I remember when John Kennedy was elected president in 1960. The John Cogley, who was then the religion editor of the New York Times, wrote that for the first time in the history of American Catholics,

one of their own number had had to assume responsibility for all the people. Cogley saw the point, it wasn't that a Catholic could get elected and get elected. That's what everybody else was saying. That was not false, but that wasn't the heart of the point. The heart of the point was, here is a member of the beleaguered and often much despised and sometimes even persecuted American Roman Catholic community, who is now not just the president of the Catholics, but of everybody else. Billy Graham has seen, I think, that whether he likes it or not, he is a spokesman for the whole human race. He is certainly a spokesman for the Christian community in this country and Europe and Latin America and elsewhere. I doubt that that's a burden he wants to carry. I can't imagine anybody in his or her right mind wanting to fit into a slot like that, but he's a man. He's, oh, my, what a first-class human being he is. He sees what's happened and that this has come to him. It's a calling

or something in the eternal scheme of things or however you'd like to say it. He's risen to that instead of back and off from it or instead of being divisive. He's entered into it and he is inclusive and he's got pretty long arms literally and symbolically and he can reach a whole lot of people. I've got other things to say on this, but I better slow down. You're in an area that I have more than slight interest in. I think one of the things that's striking me about this is that three of you all, all of you are Christians, have spoken well of, you're almost, I haven't heard any real... Oh, I wish you'd been more challenging on the issue of nuclear war, for example. But there again, out of his own history, that's probably an expectation that's unfair for me to place on him but the first lecture on the Monday night. I thought he had an opportunity

to electrify the state really on the issue of war and peace and in effect he came out being four peace, well everybody's four peace and it would have been very interesting had he been able to say that Christian discipleship in 1982 means saying no to nuclear war, period. I got a little tired of his constantly telling the students that they just have to get rid of sex and alcohol and drugs, turn to Jesus and everything will be alright. I wondered about the gay community in Chapel Hill. What good news do they hear from Billy Graham? There are aspects that if I were ghosting his sermons and I don't think anybody does that for him, I would like to have tucked in a few things here and there. May I just add something to that and say pretty much the same thing. It's amazing that Graham has an interest in the war peace issue at all in a public way that does not grow out of his theology. Nobody in the Bible colleges he went to taught him to do that and his

whole approach is really single minded to convert the lost. So theologically, let me speak theologically for just a minute and say that all of this is a tack on. This does not bubble up out of the soil of Billy Graham's soul. This does not grow naturally out of the theology that he espouses and puts into practice in his preaching. He doesn't do it well at all. He just doesn't do it well. But I think I'm right. I think he sees that in the economy of God, he is now a spokesman and that anything that affects the human race significantly is his business and he doesn't always find a terribly strong or graceful way of getting from his central concerns to these other concerns. But he knows perfectly well that the number one ethical issue of this planet in the late 20th century and perhaps through the 21st is the question of staying alive. It's the war peace question.

And he sees that. But it's a tack on, Claudius. It doesn't naturally come out of his theology, but at least he has the good sense to tack it on. And like Peter, I get tired of the finger sense, smoking, cussing, dancing, drinking, sex, booze. Those are relatively unimportant. I would argue. Yes, but I do want to say here that I think he is speaking also to a group of college students that I also get impatient with. That is, they are the very much younger children of the rebellious 60s. They are disillusioned with public action and social action. They're not demonstrators. I don't think they're nearly as socially aware as they need to be. And in some ways, they parallel that emphasis. My assumption is, if they are serious about putting behind their ethics a theology that they will be inevitably driven back to make a kingdom in the real world and not just that me too kind of kingdom that is so tempting

to this generation. But the change here is a national change. It's a conservatism. It is a withdrawal from secular action in the name of goodness. And it's just going to take a while before we come back with a kind of renewed vigor for that, I guess. All right, so two things to which I would appreciate you're speaking because I'm sure that our listeners would be interested in. One is, what was the cause of the letter you wrote to the editor of the Chapel Hill newspaper? I only read the letter and I had to infer the cause. And secondly, I'd appreciate if you'd speak to both Peter Lee and Sam Hiller referred to as the social, political issues being sort of secondary to Graham's real life. That central to Graham's understanding himself as mission is that people take Jesus as a savior. That invitation or that demand that Graham places upon his listeners is going

to be perplexing to many people. Liberal Christians as well as everybody else in society. If you could, in some way, explain that. First, how did, well, you know, you must have a few letters showing. And as you warm up, just wax right into this. That little question I ask you about, what does it mean to take Jesus right to the Lord and save you? I'll build to that as I may. The letter was not. A little night symphony with you, too. The letter was not occasioned by, as some people have assumed, some act of suppression of my right to speak. I had a concern when I, well, first of all, I didn't want to speak at the Billy Graham program for some of the reasons that have been implied today. I find his approach to Christianity simpler than I prefer. And I was not so sure what he

would actually do when I was up there linked with him. I feel we're going to do an oral Roberts type presentation. I would at least perish of embarrassment. And I might feel I would have to leave the stage and something of this sort. So I dreaded doing it. The second reason I dreaded it was that I felt it would be unfair to the university to have me seem to speak as the chairman of the faculty or as a representative of the university. This is a great non-religious university representing many points of view, many of them totally unreligious. That's part of its vitality. And the freedom to believe what you prefer or not to believe anything at all I think is essential to a great intellectual institution. And I didn't want the two, the waters muddied in that case. I wanted to speak if I did

as an individual without carrying that baggage and just confusing things. So that was the purpose of the letter. I had very carefully said, if you're going to use my name in advertisements you will say, Daris, Betts, writer and teacher, no more. And of course the papers then came out and they said chairman of the faculty and it annoyed me. But I also feared that it did create an impression in the minds of the audience that I thought would not be correct and really would not have propriety. So there was that. Now as to the other question of I think Billy Graham is being perfectly consistent in asking people to begin by accepting Jesus. That is I think that from his theological point of view that is the entry into all other matters either of theology or philosophy or action in the world. And I don't expect that to change. That's his bedrock. The fact that it is disturbing, I can't help but think

that it was disturbing when Paul was at Ephesus and Athens and so on. And that I think you simply cannot expect a Christian evangelical preacher to get up and talk about the great spirit of the universe or something of that sort which is both palatable to everybody and essentially meaningless which requires no choice of you whatsoever is a kind of vague sentimental allegiance to vapors and spirits. And that I think he just accepts as part of the difficulty of testifying on a basic level to Christian belief. Now when I say I think he's simplistic I just want to say one thing to clarify this. I don't mean that as a as a pejorative remark. I seem to mean there are many many levels to everything whether it's literature or music or any appreciation or study or way of life. And the best parallel

that I can think of will come from my own field. I can imagine for instance a great teacher of Tolstoy or Dante or Shakespeare and he sits down with a man who says to him, I just can't get interested in your literature because I've read true confessions and it just didn't mean anything to me. I think very often the people to whom Christianity means nothing to them have read or encountered the most elemental and the crudest and the most primitive forms and they really have no idea that there are ascendancies to be made in study and in growth and in understanding and in perplexity. In fact I think the perplexity and the insecurity may be the most important. So I think that's all I have to say. Well let me see if that's all you've done. You're a dangerous man.

I have two questions. One of them is are the three of you patronizing Dr. Graham and the sense that you're saying that his fundamental message, the reason he comes and speaks is so he can say, take Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. That is for simple people and that there's a lot more to it than that but you have to overlook this elementary lesson in order to get on to the more complicated one. Secondly, how is it that taking Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior is more specific than being turned on by the great universe or whatever. I don't think beginning is patronizing. I think Billy Graham himself is a more complicated man and has a much more complicated faith than he can deliver from the platform. Witness for example, his fielding of questions from the faculty at the faculty lunch. I

think he is a man who studies a great deal but I don't believe that it's behooves him to get up and analyze either Thomas Aquinas or the great builders of the faith in philosophical terms when he is speaking in a quick oral delivery directing people to make a decision or a commitment. That by simple, I simply mean that that is a first step. I think thereafter everyone has a lifetime of effort to incorporate that. I accept Jesus Christ as my Savior which is a kind of formulaic, oh I don't know, mumbo jumbo in a way, but it is asking someone that you make the commitment that from now on you will endeavor to order your life and thinking under those terms as if there is at every moment a divine top to life that there may not have been before and that does irrevocably alter everything that you do.

Well, I don't think we're patronizing because Graham makes me uncomfortable not because I'm uncomfortable with some of the intellectual aspects of his system of thinking but rather as a Christian, whether I like it or not, I have to come to grips with this cross-centered faith. Is it a Flannery O'Connor's phrase that one is haunted by Christ if one is a Christian and perhaps I'd like to have a faith that I could deal in my head more fully but no, I've got one that is centered on a first century Jew of complexity and difficulty and abrasiveness and I've got to deal with that and if that means accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, I've got to sign on and I think every Christian does if he's going to use that title for himself or herself as one way of understanding one's life. I think that I simply have to concur that whatever the language and the particular formulations

that Billy Graham produces, the heart and center and soul of the Christian faith emerges clearly in his proclamation. It's a costly way. One of the things that I wanted to say Peter in response to your comment earlier about Graham uses the idiom that is so generally understood in this culture is, A, yes, of course you're 100% right and B, that any time you are locked into a particular idiom, you are likely not to hear enough or not very much, I fear sometimes that mass of angelism, not simply in the hands of Billy Graham but anyone else, doesn't carry the weight, it's intended to carry. You don't fault anybody for this, this is a cultural and historical phenomenon more than it is anything else.

But I really think to most of his hearers, he has an insufficiently developed sense of the tragedy and fallenness and sin-riddenness of the human race. In one sense, if this sounds patronizing, then I'm simply miscommunicating what I intend. In one sense, it's too easy. The sharpness there, the pointedness is there, the cold commitment is there, the radical nature of Christian discipleship, all of that is there. Yet in another sense, it can so easily all be finished. That's not what he intends, that's not what he says, that's not what he means, but a lot of people hear that and you can get from that formulation of the Christian message to that conclusion, I think, too easily and all of us want to buy into something as cheaply and easily as we can. I had a colleague years ago, an Englishman, a Christian, who said he couldn't really subscribe to American revivalism or

evangelicalism because it didn't take sin seriously enough. It was too liberal. Well, it's a little clever, it's a little cute, it's also profoundly important. I guess, as a kind of classical Christian, or that's what I like to think of myself as being, I really believe in the tragedy of the human condition and the fallenness of the human condition. And there is a sense in which, anytime you can fix things up even by God's grace as readily as the conversion experience is alleged to do, I find myself saying, come on, dig deeper. You're on the right track, but you're not saying it well enough. And I guess my one real complaint with the whole revivalist tradition, and indeed much of evangelicalism, is that it just doesn't, it's not good enough. That's a harsh thing to say or apparently, I don't mean that. The Christian faith is grander and deeper and better than we heard.

But it's a step in, and it's a step in. Oh, it's a step in. Those people who come to church for the first time to hear the B-monor mass, that's a different idea. That's good. And then they began to deal with some of the complexity and richness of it all. Yeah, that's right. And the letters of Paul certainly make clear that all those converts fell and fell and fell and fell again. No, that's right. With Darius Betts' touching reminder of the inconsistency of the early Christians, we suspend this evening's conversation in mid-air as it were. Darius Betts, the distinguished novelist and chairman of faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Sam Hill, visiting professor of religion at UNC Chapel Hill from the University of Florida, and the Reverend Peter James Lee, director of the Chapel of the Cross and Episcopal Congregation in Chapel Hill, will resume their conversation

next Thursday evening at 6.30 as they explore some of the personality changes undergone by a mainline congregational Christianity in the United States in the past 30 years. This is Claudius Miller for W.U.N.C. Chapel Hill.