MY SENIOR YEAR OF college included the opportunity to attend a Billy Graham Crusade, held at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina, an easy drive from the Citadel in Charleston. I can still see Graham’s striking figure as he walked onto the stage. I also remember that Johnny Cash was among the special guests on the program (full disclosure: I failed to appreciate the legendary Cash on that day, perhaps due to my stronger affinity for hard rock and heavy metal at the time). Graham’s message that day was based on Daniel 5:27 (“You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting”), and while I remember little that was remarkable about the message itself, the response to the invitation at the end was stunning. It is one thing to see the masses make their way to the front of the stage on television, but altogether different to see people all around you and elsewhere in the stadium descending the stairs and walking the field toward Graham. It was truly amazing.

Grant Wacker’s America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation was a pleasure to read and merits responses of many kinds; for me, I have found myself thinking of Graham in a way unanticipated. Should this evangelist also be regarded as a kind of public theologian? Labels like “public theology” and “theology of public life” are often connected to those of a scholarly bent who consider questions around the possibilities of theological discourse in a pluralistic public square or theological interpretations of concepts like the nation state or a just society. In Graham we are presented with a figure who was clearly not an academic in temperament or presentation but someone with a distinct and clear (some would say basic) theology who had tremendous influence on the United States and beyond. If he indeed was someone who not only reflected but helped shape the American ethos and did this as a religious figure, perhaps there is a sense in which he can be said to be a kind of living expression of a public theology.

Elsewhere I have stated that the Dutch theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper was a living public theology, but he was someone who was both an academic as well as a politician; Graham was neither and did not see this as a problem. Nonetheless, as Wacker argues, Graham spoke both for and to the times, and while doing so he was more than a voice beckoning the masses to come to Jesus. He was an evangelist whose words not only interpreted the concerns and fears of many but also gave the public a theological lens for interpreting their context and personal lives.

Was Graham’s theological expression the deepest, most penetrating or insightful? Few would make such a suggestion. But here is where it can be easy to miss the significant fact that a basic theological approach to world events and the big questions of life is sufficient for more people than I might care to admit. Whether the questions are about political ideologies or cultural currents, simple (though not necessarily simplistic) concepts are welcomed by Christians who may never read a word written by those of us who give considerable attention and energy to deeper understandings and refined articulations of the theological interface with public life. Graham was a figure with significant public trust; this includes the fact that many wanted to know from him how they should think about and engage the world. He may have never thought himself more than an evangelist at heart, but his words and his influence on a magazine like Christianity Today are truly dimensions of public theology.

Graham’s public influence and career also raise questions about the trajectory of evangelicalism on matters of public concern. In particular I ask, “How much of a shift can we detect over the years?” Wacker outlines Graham’s development on matters of race and civil rights, and we see him move from someone who failed to see problems with segregation to one who recognized the need for racial change in both hearts and the structures of society, though the latter was also dependent on personal transformation. As I reflected on the manner in which Graham was a symbol of, and barometer for, the evangelical movement, I wondered about the prospects for evangelicalism’s continual transformation on the complicated issues connected to race and the pursuit of a more just society. Without question, there have been advances in the evangelical world on matters of race, including a greater willingness to address race as more than a matter of personal prejudice and legal segregation. Still, there remains considerable work to be done. Not only is there need for more evangelicals to reckon with the stubborn, lingering structural effects on society because of the myriad forms of racism, but perhaps at the deepest level there is a need to identify and address the way that the modern concept of race (that renders a fictive notion of “whiteness” as normative) resembles a mutating virus that needs radical gene therapy. There are many well-intentioned evangelical Christians who would not agree with this latter statement, but this is not surprising because it is as hard to see as one’s own genetic code: without the right tools and training we can easily fail to notice what is present but beneath the surface. Can the majority of evangelicals learn to see and address this deep problem and move past individualistic understandings and strategies for the problem of race? Here I regard the change in Graham over the years as a harbinger of change for the larger movement. Call me an optimist, but this is not a mere pipe dream since my hope is in God ultimately and history reveals surprising changes.

My last reflection, on national loyalty, stems from an observation about Graham’s interaction with Catholicism, particularly regarding the concern about John F. Kennedy’s presidency in light of his religious identity. Wacker observes that Graham knew that “if the President were a true Catholic he would place his loyalty to the pope above his loyalty to the Constitution.” As I read this quote I found myself thinking about the proper loyalties of Bible-believing Protestants. The degree to which patriotism has been connected to Christian identity, or perhaps assumed as proper to evangelical Christian beliefs, has been the subject of much conversation. It is certainly more complicated than slogans chanted by advocates of a Christian America or the polar opposite. The question of ultimate loyalties is a bit more like a moving target because the life of nations is not static; we only need look at Europe to see countries that have had an official state church and become quite different after secularization. Similar to judicial interpretations of the Constitution, some Christians might choose to consider the question of loyalties through a historical view of the foundational ideas while others look at the idea of a nation as a living, developing sociopolitical reality. In either case, it seems to me that Christian priorities in a nation like the United States are a perpetual challenge because we are not in a country established on the basis of a divine visitation; God did not send an emissary to the framers of the Constitution with a declaration that this was an exceptional nation. A further complication is that Christian identity is not defined by national boundaries. God’s people are spread around the globe and significant consideration ought to be given to how we assess our loyalties to those brothers and sisters in other nations. Should Christians have care for and loyalty to their nations? In my view it is proper for Christians to seek the best for their homes and winsomely participate in the structures of society, all the while being wary of the temptation to make national fidelity a cloaked form of idolatry. Returning to Graham, I wonder how he thought of national loyalty in relationship to fidelity to Christ, perhaps especially given what he learned over the years in his (largely pastoral) relationship to US presidents. Perhaps a future domain of exploration would be the extent to which Graham’s opinions about national loyalty played a role in the larger evangelical consciousness. Meanwhile, the task remains for Christian leaders in the church and academy to continually refine the way we speak of loyalty to God, God’s people, and the lands they call home.

When I began reading America’s Pastor I had never thought of Billy Graham as a public theologian, but I now find myself with a broader perspective on / vista to meaningful expressions of Christian engagement with public life. I say this with gratitude to Dr. Wacker for his important and nicely written contribution.

IN OCTOBER 1992, I interviewed Billy Graham, the final piece for a PBS documentary that would eventually be called Crusade: The Life of Billy Graham. Securing the interview had been, to say the least, laborious. Graham himself was willing and eager, but his handlers—those I came to call “the suits in Minneapolis” (at that time the headquarters for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association)—deployed an impressive arsenal of delays, dodges, and diversions in an attempt to derail the meeting. But I persisted and finally received a call instructing me to meet the evangelist in Vienna on October 28, between 10:00 and noon.

Graham himself, however, couldn’t have been more gracious, and in fact he and his aide had stopped by our hotel the night before to see if we wanted to have dinner together. Although he made sure to visit the hotel’s beauty shop for makeup before heading to the hotel room where we had set up for filming, once he settled in he was relaxed and expansive.

I asked him about civil rights and various public figures he had known throughout his career. Everyone, of course, was “his friend” or his “good friend”—John Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Charles Templeton, Lyndon Johnson—and, predictably, he reserved special praise for Richard Nixon, “one of the great men” he had known.

My final question had to do with his legacy. How, I asked, did he want to be remembered by history?

Graham’s response was vintage Graham, a three-part (trinitarian, I suppose) reply. His initial instinct was to adopt the Carolina “aw-shucks” persona: “I’ve never thought about that,” and, “I’m not sure anyone will remember me.” Second, he nodded toward the camera and allowed as how, well, perhaps people might remember him if they saw television productions like the one we were filming. Then what struck me was the rapidity with which he pivoted to his answer. The response itself was fairly predictable and, I have little doubt, sincere: He wanted to be remembered as someone who had been faithful in preaching the gospel. But what was utterly clear to me was that, despite his initial protestations, he had thought about it and had done so at some length.

This is not a criticism. Not at all. Musing about one’s mortality, or immortality, is a very human trait, and Graham’s patent honesty, albeit an honesty reckoned in his demeanor more than his words, made me like him more. But the question that prompted Graham’s response is worth raising again—in light of Graham’s age and in the wake of Grant Wacker’s wonderful book, America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation. How will Graham be remembered by history?

The evangelical world of my childhood could be divided into two camps: those who liked Billy Graham and those who didn’t. (This formulation borrows shamelessly from George Marsden’s handy, if offhanded, observation that an evangelical, as opposed to a fundamentalist, is anyone who likes Billy Graham.) My family was firmly in the Graham camp, and we regarded his detractors—Carl McIntire, the Bob Joneses, Bob Shuler, Jack Wyrtzen—as marginal cranks. (Some recent historians, by the way, have accorded these “fighting fundies” an importance far, far greater than their actual influence.)

With Graham, what was not to like? My family didn’t have television until 1963, but once we switched it on, there he was in black and white—preaching the gospel to the masses and then, during the altar call, turning insouciantly toward the camera (below him, stage left) to address the audience at home, informing us that we, too, could “make a decision for Christ.” We’d already done so, of course, all of us. But how could we not be impressed with how smooth this man was? Add to that, as my preacher father assured us, his theology was sound and he was uncompromising in his faith. Like the young Bill Clinton, I too sent some of my allowance money to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.

A second importance of Billy Graham was his very public friendships with world leaders and especially with a succession of American presidents. For evangelicals hunkered into our subculture in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Graham provided us with vicarious satisfaction. Maybe we were not quite so marginal as we knew we really were if the president of the United States spent time with Billy Graham, one of our own!

And, finally, when the televangelists scandals hit in the late 1980s—Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Oral Roberts, Robert Tilton, Marvin Gorman, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell—Graham was not implicated. In fact, any talk of legacy must include the fact that over the course of at least six decades in the public eye, no one has ever raised a credible charge of impropriety against Billy Graham.

The burden of this very long prologue is to say that I approach the question of Graham’s place in history with an enormous reservoir of good will toward him. I think he is a remarkable man, a person of integrity and rare talent. To take one tiny example, anyone who has looked into a television camera knows how difficult it is to deliver one’s lines, even if they are prepared and memorized; to do so extemporaneously—and flawlessly—is no mean achievement. When I’m asked by reporters who will be the next Billy Graham (a favorite question), my answer is unequivocal: no one. Graham came to prominence at a unique moment in history, I explain, when new media were emerging. He and his “team” exploited those media brilliantly to create the twentieth century’s first, and arguably most influential, religious celebrity. No, I conclude, there will never be another Billy Graham.

Wacker’s book on Graham (the author shies from the term biography) clearly falls into the appreciative category. The book is thoroughly researched and gracefully written, and to read it is to stand at times alongside Wacker in astonishment and admiration. One of my favorite chapters is the one on letters sent to the evangelist; Wacker weaves these missives into a collage that provides eloquent tribute to the preacher who has no peer. Wacker’s genius is that he functions as a kind of maestro, cueing the materials at just the right moment, allowing the story to tell itself. That’s not to say that the book is uncritical; Wacker is not afraid to render judgments when appropriate, though he does so gently. For the most part, however, he stays out of the way, and I suspect, both from reading the book and on the basis of my long friendship with the author, that Wacker and I share similar predilections toward Graham.

If I were to offer a “Yes, but” on Graham’s legacy, it would center around his political machinations. And here, in the interests of transparency, I should probably confess that I have never quite forgiven Graham for endorsing Nixon over George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election, even though Graham himself apologized to McGovern for some of his comments during the heat of that campaign.

My qualms, however, reach deeper than that. While conducting research for God in the White House at the Kennedy presidential library, I came across a letter from Graham to Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for president, dated August 10, 1960. The letter, as you would expect, was cordial. Graham noted that rumors were flying that he, Graham, intended to raise the so-called religious issue (Kennedy’s Roman Catholicism) during the general election campaign. Graham acknowledged that he would probably vote for Nixon, his friend, but he assured Kennedy that he would not in any way raise the religious issue.

Eight days later, on August 18, 1960, Graham convened a gathering of American Protestant ministers, including Norman Vincent Peale, in Montreux, Switzerland, to discuss how they could thwart Kennedy’s election in November. The upshot of that meeting was a behind-closed-doors gathering of Protestant ministers at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington just after Labor Day, the traditional start of the general election campaign. Once again, the agenda was how to sound the alarm about the prospect of sending a Roman Catholic to the White House; the obvious beneficiary of such calculations, of course, was Nixon. Later in the same campaign, Graham visited Henry Luce at the Time & Life Building and, according to Graham’s autobiography, said, “I want to help Nixon without blatantly endorsing him.” Graham drafted an article praising Nixon that stopped just short of a full endorsement. Luce was prepared to run it in Life magazine but pulled it at the last minute.

I suppose you can contend (and Wacker presents the case) that Graham never technically broke his promise to Kennedy. But that argument is Jesuitical, not evangelical. Everyone has lapses, of course, and Graham was likely blinded by his loyalty to Nixon—an astigmatism amply demonstrated in the ensuing years, especially as the Watergate scandal unfolded.

If that were the only instance of Graham’s political duplicity, I’d be willing to drop the matter. Unfortunately, similar skullduggery attended other politicians and other political campaigns. In the 1976 campaign, shortly after Nixon’s resignation and not long after the first of Graham’s serial renunciations of politics, the evangelist wrote to Gerald Ford, the Republican nominee, and offered him a spot on the platform at one of Graham’s crusades. Graham noted that such an appearance had worked well for Nixon and that it would similarly provide a political boost for Ford in his campaign against the Democratic nominee (and avowed evangelical), Jimmy Carter.

Long before the 1980 campaign, Graham convened a dozen fellow preachers in Dallas for “a special time of prayer” and talk about the upcoming presidential campaign. Carter’s liaison for religious affairs had only recently returned from a visit to the evangelist’s home in Montreat, North Carolina, with a report that Graham “supports the President wholeheartedly.” But that support was apparently less than robust. The Dallas guest list, formulated by Graham himself, included his brother-in-law, Clayton Bell; Rex Humbard and James Robison, both of them televangelists; and a roster of well-known Southern Baptists: Charles Stanley, Jimmy Draper, and Adrian Rogers, the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention, who had recently visited Carter at the White House and declared it “one of the highlights of my life.” The ministers, gathered at Graham’s behest, occupied nearly an entire floor of the hotel. “It really was Billy’s meeting,” Robison recalled. “What he wanted us to do was pray together for a couple of days and to understand something very significant had to happen.” The unmistakable subtext of the gathering was the need to rally behind someone who could mount a challenge to Carter. The upshot of the meeting was an overture to Reagan encouraging him to challenge Carter for the presidency.

Later in that campaign, on September 12, 1980 (coincidentally, twenty years to the day after Kennedy’s famous speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association addressing the “religious issue”), Graham called Paul Laxalt, US senator from Nevada and chair of Ronald Reagan’s election campaign. Laxalt’s memorandum following the call indicated that Graham offered to help “short of public endorsement.” Eleven days following that phone call, Graham sent a letter to Robert L. Maddox, Carter’s religious liaison. “I wanted to discuss the religious situation and the political campaign,” Graham wrote. “As you know, with the Lord’s help I am staying out of it.”

In 1960, eight days had elapsed between Graham’s letter of assurance to Kennedy and the Montreux gathering. During the 1980 campaign, eleven days separated Graham’s phone call offering help to the Republican nominee and his pledge of neutrality to a staff member of the Democratic nominee.

Wacker and I have corresponded previously about these matters, so I have some idea how he will respond. Some of his responses are already embedded in the footnotes of America’s Pastor.

I guess I’m less interested in arguing the specific points of each betrayal—yes, I’ll call it that—than in the overall shape and direction of Graham’s political activism. And here again I readily acknowledge that my own political proclivities inform my critique. At the risk of overstatement, the real tragedy of Graham’s machinations is that they played a role in changing the course of history—not in a narrow sense, but in a larger sense. I have little doubt that Nixon would have been reelected in 1972 without Graham’s help; to suggest otherwise is ludicrous. But if you step back to take in the larger picture, you watch the most influential evangelist of the twentieth century lending his endorsement to the man who has little competition for the dubious distinction as the most mendacious politician in American history. Let me say that again: the most mendacious politician in American history. I suppose it’s possible to admire Graham’s loyalty while simultaneously questioning his judgment, but a man who so assiduously stoked his own celebrity bears greater responsibility. And Graham supported Nixon not only in 1972 but throughout Nixon’s entire career, despite the unspeakable things Nixon did throughout that career. Similarly in 1976 and 1980. In both cases, Graham, though less overt, supported politicians and, therefore, policies that I would argue represent a betrayal (that word again) of the best of the evangelical tradition, a tradition that historically sought to avoid the scourge of war and to address the concerns of the poor, women and minorities, those on the margins, those Jesus called “the least of these.”

The collateral damage of Graham’s political intrigues was that evangelicalism came to be identified with a political movement largely at odds with the New Testament teachings of Jesus and with the noble tradition of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, a movement that I believe will be viewed someday as a tragic aberration in the history of evangelicalism. Graham was not solely responsible, of course, but he played a role—a not insignificant role.

And that certainly will weigh in the ledger in any accounting of Billy Graham’s standing in history.

I WANT TO BEGIN with a relatively neutral description of a person: twentieth-century American evangelist Billy Graham was not a listener. The less neutral description would be to say that Billy was not a good listener, but let’s take a minute before we hustle to such condemnatory judgment. Using only the data in Grant Wacker’s biography of Billy Graham, however, we can simply observe that Billy was not someone who listened: who needed to listen, or wanted to listen, as a practice of his professional life. Never once in a four hundred page biography do we hear of a moment when Billy listened to someone. We hear instead about how well, and how much, he spoke at them.

For those who loved Billy, this might seem an undue criticism. For his acolytes Billy Graham was meaningful because they felt he connected to them. In Wacker’s words, this meant that Graham “knew how to speak both for and to ordinary Americans with consummate skill” (15). Wacker doesn’t pretend that Graham spoke with ordinary Americans. Wacker assumes only that Graham must have spoken to them and for them because the audiences kept filling. By the time he retired from the road in 2005, Graham had preached to nearly 215 million people in person in ninety-nine countries and perhaps to another two billion through live closed-circuit telecasts (21). Such a tally suggests that he spoke to a lot of people. Did he speak for them? In 1973 on an airport tarmac in Seoul, South Korea, Graham preached to more than 1,100,000 people, delivering the Good News “to what may have been at that time the largest gathering of humans for a religious purpose in history” (21). In a 1978 Ladies Home Journal survey, under the category “achievement in religion,” the preacher outstripped everyone except God (22). Do figures of such appeal necessarily speak for those who come to hear them? And can we ever know, one way or another, if they do?

There have been already several excellent reviews of Wacker’s biography (the most historically acute is this assessment by Molly Worthen in the Nation). Not one review of American’s Pastor has failed to describe how disciplined and fair-minded the biographer was in his craft, nor has anyone questioned the epochal omnipresence of Billy himself. I want to endorse unequivocally these reviews. They praise well Wacker’s accomplishment, especially his effort to determine Graham’s multivalent leadership during the many decades he dominated the American pulpit, writ large. Because I respect Wacker enormously as a historian, and because I know him well as a teacher, I don’t want to use this opportunity to comment on his biography of Graham as a particular work of scholarship. Instead, I want to consider the man he profiles, Billy Graham, and think about how it is that Graham became such an epic figure in the landscape. Given the facts so scrupulously supplied by Wacker, the answer is hardly apparent.

“A great pastor he was not,” Wacker observes, reflecting on Graham’s early years at a Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA) tabernacle (8). Later, in a chapter where Wacker devotes more attention to what individuals wrote in letters to Graham, he reiterates this appraisal: “The pastoral office played the least important part of his story” (249). Why, then, does Wacker, echoing the perspective of so many adherents and political leaders, see Billy as American’s Pastor? Wacker never quite makes this clear, though I do think there are several reasons for this title subsumed in his biographical emphases. In what follows, I hope to expose these more subliminal reasons for a title that is so at odds with its subject. In the many manuscript pages between these two grim assessments of Graham’s nonexistent commitment to the intimate labor of ministerial life, Wacker works to organize the nature of Graham’s life into thematic chapters that expose how a relatively uninteresting middle-class boy with limited theological range became the “pope of lower Protestantism.” For any student of evangelicalism, there are many familiar tropes to Billy’s biography: the early discovery of his talents, the rapid ascendancy following signal crusades in major urban areas, the strategic use of his thin Protestant message as counter-programming to the various cultural threats of his times, and the savvy supervision by his business arm, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, to manage the transmedia permeation of his person into the world. The sawdust trail is strewn with the specters of young men seeking renown through the spectacular circulation of their physicality as a message for your redemption. These men did not focus on communities, but on the circulation of their message. No one would call Charles Finney or Billy Sunday a pastor. Like Graham, these men were more mediums for a message than mentors for the struggling people who listened.

The physicality of the medium cannot be underestimated. Wacker doesn’t shy away from admitting how much loving Billy Graham was, for his fans, about watching him, seeing him, and wanting to see more of him. Rarely have I read a biography as transfixed by the appearance of its subject as America’s Pastor, a compulsion perhaps justifiable as a reflection of a broader documentary interest in Billy’s attractiveness. As Wacker says, “for a better part of sixty years, virtually every newspaper article about Graham commented on his appearance” (81). Wacker never explores what makes Billy attractive, he just takes his handsomeness as axiomatic; after all, Billy is white, tall, with no blemishes and no disabilities. And this is just the premise:

If good looks and smart attire provided the base, Graham’s manifest easiness in his own skin materialized on televisions and even behind stadium pulpits as old-fashioned Southern charm. On talk shows in particular he came across as dashingly photogenic. He proved a lively guest, blessed with a quick smile, ready quip, and easy-going banter. . . . He often said that in all settings he sought in one way or another to present the gospel. It was a remarkable (and instinctive) balancing act: a serious message lightly delivered. (301)

Graham complemented this stunningly beige public personality with a character that similarly lacked chicanery. “Graham represented a man of uncompromised sincerity and integrity,” Wacker argues, pointing to the fact that Graham had apparently committed no adultery, mismanaged no monies, and had no major beef with contemporaneous preachers (27). For being a baseline inoffensive guy who achieved significant acclaim, one biographer called Graham “America’s most complicated innocent,” and another historian observed he was “the least colorful and most powerful preacher in American” (28).

The color in Billy’s story is that he seems to indicate an apogee for middlebrow evangelical celebrity. Wacker is especially interested in the incredible fame Graham achieved, a fame based largely on a relentless circulation of his particular embodiment of the preacher. Graham didn’t forge new idiom or distil new ideas. He embodied and expressed a relentlessly familiar story, one that in many ways became secondary to his sheer presence. In his attempt to explain who Graham was, Wacker reaches at one point for Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope John Paul II, analogies which are incommensurate (as Worthern explains) to who Graham was and how he would endure. More appropriate are figures like Colonel Sanders and Andy Griffith, both of whom Wacker also invokes. What Billy, Col. Sanders, and Andy have in common, Wacker explains, is that they represented an acceptable form of Southerner, the one who doesn’t remind you of segregation as much as they invoke seemingly innocuous white pleasures: of fried chicken buckets and aw-shucks morality, of unlocked jail cells and cooking as the transom of affection. Taking Wacker’s observation to a slightly darker place, Marshall Frady suggested in his 2006 biography that Graham sought “to transform and pasteurize the whole world . . . into a Sunday afternoon in Charlotte” (112). What strikes any non-evangelical reader is the way these analogies pull us pretty quickly from the obvious achievements in religion to other franchised locations in the pop scene. Wacker never considers Graham alongside other middlebrow religious sensations of his time. We never hear about Graham as he might compare to Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman, Jack Kornfield, or Louis Farrakhan. Instead we hear of Graham relative to a pope, a civil rights martyr, an American businessman, and a sitcom star. This is because Graham is bigger than these laboring low-level stars of strictly religious acclaim. He is someone who isn’t just a preacher. He is a celebrity.

Wacker knows that Graham emerges in a moment of nascent celebrity culture. Yet he doesn’t mention that this word, celebrity, appeared initially as an epithet that encapsulated annoyance toward mass culture. In the mid-twentieth century, Daniel Boostin wryly described the celebrity as a “manufactured” person. The rapidity with which a person can become “a household word overnight” was what defined celebrity, and distinguished a celebrity from other figures on the landscape.1 Boorstin’s greatest frustration is that believers mistake this rush of interest—this clamoring for the name, the face, the voice, the personage—with meaningful connection. It is one thing to be vaguely interested in a celebrity; it is another thing altogether to attach to them any kind of value. And, for Boorstin, celebrities have no value other than their circulation, i.e., “the test of celebrity is nothing more than well-knownness.”2

For Boorstin, we make a fatal category error when we attribute substance to someone who is known for being known. We think that this renown is enough to become itself a talent worthy celebrating with further attention. But this is a mere projection of their celebrity presence. For Boorstin, there would have been no question about it: Graham doesn’t speak for you. You’ve just made him be the one that you want; you’ve made him the one that you want to see because you see him everywhere.

Some may be wondering: what was it that this person, this medium, said? In general Billy’s sermons were about forty minutes apiece. We hear from Wacker that those sermons were given in a strong voice, with fast delivery, using simple words and abundant physical bombast. We also hear that they were filled with bad jokes, inaccurate facts, and “preposterous” versions of scriptural texts supplied without much theological rumination (26). With these limits to Billy’s sermonic content, why did we listen to him? Why do we choose to listen to men who listen so poorly to us?

Wacker suggests that Billy’s persuasive power is his confidence, and that maybe what everyone can’t stop enjoying is the pleasure of borrowing from his seemingly unceasing well of certitude. Wacker calls Graham “humble” several times, but this wouldn’t be a word anyone would use who watched Billy preach. I think humble is a word that describes well Wacker’s relationship to his subject and to religious actors generally, but humble Graham is not. Billy is ferociously certain about a view of the world that is encompassing of everyone in it. During his heyday as a circulating preacher, Graham articulated confidently a series of simple theological ideas: that you only need one text to understand all things; that this text is very clear; that Jesus was sinless and he paid for our sins; that if you repented you’d have a better life; and that life everlasting would be better than this life. And, most of all, Graham repeatedly expressed the idea that “Christians could be confident that Christ would return at the end of human history.” It is a bundle of news offered as the Good News.

Many people—professional nerds and everyday readers—could reasonably contest the clarity of these points. Those outside the language games of Christianity could get caught up in what the death of one person has to do with the redemption of others. Those who first encounter the Bible (even if it is just Billy’s preferred Living Bible) could disagree strongly with characterizing it as a simple document. Whatever our disagreements might be about the content of Graham’s message, what we historians must see is that it is not a humble message. It was a message that was certain about what matters, what does not, and how you can be good with God. Love for Graham was, in part, love of, and desire for, his confidence that the good could be so simple. Billy may have performed a spiritual humility, but he swaggered in this message. He acted as if what he knew was what it is to know anything. This was what he sold: confidence that whatever the Cold War hijinks triggered our anxieties, and whatever the individual sin tugged at our heart it would all work out, eventually.

Throughout his life, Graham would read the newspaper “for particulars about developments that might serve as indicators of where humans stood in the unfolding of history” (46). This is a person who thought the world did not have much to teach him; the world simply revealed what the Bible predicted. At times Wacker refers to Graham as curious, but this word is never quite discernable in Billy’s life story. Billy seems to have been singularly focused on repeating the same message, over and over, without wondering what makes people believe otherwise, or live otherwise, than he does. Before interviews with journalists, “he did not assume a false familiarity or seek to break the ice with chitchat” (108). Interaction suggests interest in something outside yourself, outside your purpose, when Graham’s monomaniacal purpose was to spread only the Good News.

This was a resolutely redacted idea of human survival, one resistant to any notion of human diversity. For much of his career, Billy had a daily syndicated newspaper column, titled “My Answer,” in which he addressed a wide array of human problems. These questions and answers bore no dates. The reason? “Graham based his answers on the Bible, and the Bible was timeless and universal.” In a later compendium of these columns, Billy wrote, “The Word of our God stands forever as an unchanging source of answers to all of life’s problems” (40). Human life, however distinct from Graham’s life or experience, was not to be treated as if difference existed. The answers to all questions were the same answers: the answers taken from a text that he said gave all answers. Perhaps this is why it doesn’t matter to Graham, or to his readers, that he didn’t exactly write these columns. (In the early 1970s, he told a reporter that a man “helped” him with it.) The truth is the truth no matter the vessel. Of course, this isn’t quite true: his vessel was particular: white, without blemish, and without disability.

This doesn’t mean that Graham wasn’t interested to represent diversity—he’d share a dais with a Catholic or a Muslim if the moment called for it. But he didn’t pretend to be interested in people. And for this less than engaged relationship to others, many people said “he was the most charismatic man they ever met” (98). Wacker’s explanation for the relationship Billy had with his public was that they simply desired to be near his simple authoritative simplicity. “Proximity to him became proximity to normative authority,” Wacker concludes. “He represented the right way to do things” (99). Perhaps another way to put this is that they sought to connect to his significant distance from blemishes, dynamism, or general human weirdness. Unlike the sawdust trail characters that preceded him, Graham offered an evangelicalism that had no excesses and no miracles, no personal sin or disobedience. He was the Chevy Malibu of public figures: ubiquitous, yet nondescript.

Reading about Graham is, more than anything, a profile in white power and its easy maneuvering through regular difficulties (or, as Wacker says, Graham seemed to represent not only Establishment Evangelicalism but also Establishment America) (17). At 29, Graham became the youngest college president in the nation. At the time, he held only bachelor’s degrees from Florida Bible Institute and from Wheaton College. Contemporary social psychologists would observe that this kind of endorsement of a young man with few relevant credentials is unsurprising. There is a special kind of relationship—called sponsorship—in which communities advocate for the mentee.3 Credentials and skills, as well as experience, are manipulated or circumvented to favor workers with certain social characteristics. The primary example of this is when men with less experience in a particular job are hired as supervisors for it.4 Or when a young man without any advanced degrees becomes a college president.

Wacker is clear that Graham is hungry for such power, and isn’t bothered by the shortcuts he took or advantages he had on the way to getting it. He didn’t want to be enviously looking at power; he wanted to be power. After it became widely known that he engaged in a grotesquely anti-Semitic dialogue with Richard Nixon, Graham’s explanation exposed the social hunger that drove so much of his power-interested hustle. “If it wasn’t on tape, I would not have believed it. . . . I guess I was trying to please. I felt so badly about myself” (195). This quotation is the only one in Wacker’s biography that suggests fissures in Billy’s confidence. The man who seemed so easy in interviews, so quick to a silly quip, and so redundantly verbose to every question, suggests here that a lot of it—maybe all of it—was a performance obsessed with pleasing those for whom he performed. “Hundreds if not thousands of publically disseminated photographs showed presidents standing, sitting, talking, dining, or golfing with the preacher,” Wacker writes. “He praised [the presidents] frequently and lavishly” (219). Fraternalism is rarely the result of some transparent recognition of mutuality. It is usually a desperate hold onto threatened social superiority.

At the end of his life, Billy confesses no darkness or doubt. He seems to have zero recollection of any bad days. He continues a lifelong resistance to contemplativeness. At the end of his life, Billy continues to enjoy the restful refusal of reflexivity that defined his celebrity. In his biography of Billy Graham, Marshall Frady remarked that when Graham spoke, America heard itself speaking to itself (220). As the American Century has now, definitively, drawn to a close, we may look back and see Billy as representing something less joyous than the apex of evangelical expressiveness. We might instead see his career, his cheery circulation, as a mark of the beast. As Billy searches the newspaper looking for indicators, the loudest one of all may not be the bird flu or unrest in Jerusalem. It may in fact be his unconscious empire, the one that was a metonym for his country’s unceasing imperial confidence. I do not know my Bible like Billy knew his, but I think I remember that the man of sin may not appear to us as an obviously slimy Devil. He will, we know, arrive instead with a careening smile, an easy way with people, and a message to lull us from the true collective labors of the good. “The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words . . . it was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation” (Rev 13:5–8). What if Billy was precisely not America’s pastor, but instead the sign of the Armageddon we deserve for believing in him, for listening to him when he never valued what it might be to listen to us, to listen to those who had so much to share with him about our persistent, intractable, and unresolved sorrows? Since I am not a theologian, I cannot wager well into this discernment. As a historian, I can only observe responsibly that it is not clear that Billy Graham propelled the world toward something better. He lived, he was known, and he moved many people. This we know for sure, and we will remember, always.

IN AMERICA’S PASTOR: BILLY Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, Grant Wacker offers a compelling and nuanced biography of one of America’s most influential religious figures. Yet what sets Wacker apart is his ability to seamlessly weave the dynamics of Graham’s career into broader reflections on the American cultural milieu. Graham’s fame was not only a product of the man but the moment. By focusing on both Graham and his context, Wacker simultaneously illumines Graham’s ministry and broader trends in American culture. The chapters in America’s Pastor collectively carry the reader on an illuminating journey of how Graham shaped and was shaped by modern America.

Wacker does not intend for America’s Pastor to be a conventional biography (5). Instead he organizes his chapters thematically rather than chronologically. This approach affords each chapter an internal coherence that Wacker accomplishes without precluding a consistent argumentative thread spanning the entire work. Throughout America’s Pastor, he probes Graham’s significance for the relationship between religion and American culture, and Wacker effectively demonstrates that Graham shapes and is shaped by both realities. Indeed, he claims, “Graham’s rise was fueled by his ability to adopt and adapt the trends of the age” (98). With this in mind, Wacker’s goal is interpretive as much as it is descriptive because one of his guiding inquiries is the question of precisely how this adoption and adaptation occurs.

In terms of method, Wacker’s approach provides an effective way to account for the sheer longevity of Graham’s ministerial career. A thematic structure enables Wacker to engage crucial aspects of Graham’s sixty-year ministry with sustained focus that renders his accounts of various aspects of Graham’s career rich, but digestible. In this regard, it is equally significant that Wacker provides an accessible text for those without specialized knowledge.

This approach is instructive for broader scholarship because he models how to offer a sympathetic reading that resists hagiography. Perhaps the most illustrative example of this approach is Wacker’s account of how Graham shifts his perspective on racial injustice in America. While Wacker does not sugarcoat the limitations of Graham’s perspectives, he refuses to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Instead, he affirms the occasions that Graham stood against segregation, acknowledges the moments Graham wavered, and demonstrates how Graham’s views were in dialogue with his own time (123). Wacker recognizes that Graham was not exactly a trailblazer in the area of racial justice in America. Graham never marched for Civil Rights or endured imprisonment, and he preferred to engage issues of personal piety and conversion. Yet Wacker affirms the moments in which Graham stood against segregation during his ministry career as well. Wacker’s sympathetic evaluation of Graham’s career provides a model for scholars insofar as it does not judge Graham by the standard of perfection. The question is not “Did Graham make mistakes?” but “What can we learn from Graham’s successes and shortcomings?” Wacker reminds us that even imperfections can become sites for fruitful discussion.

In terms of tone, it is clear that Wacker has a deep respect for Graham, and he is honest about his own investment in the evangelical tradition that Graham inhabited and helped to create (3). Most of the criticisms of Graham in the book come from either Graham’s contemporaries or critical biographers of Graham, rather than from Wacker himself. Nonetheless, America’s Pastor does not present itself as an apologetic work. Rather, Wacker simply prefers to give the benefit of the doubt to Graham when possible while still affirming problems or inconsistencies in Graham’s views or practices when appropriate (3). Wacker’s decision to include critical reflections from other scholars as well as a few of his own reservations is ultimately an act of trust. It involves an authorial decision to trust that the reader can analyze the relevant data and draw her own conclusions regarding Graham. While there is certainly room in scholarship for more opinionated reflections about Graham or other topics, there is something to be said for this style of argumentation. Wacker’s approach also reiterates how he prioritizes objectivity over both bias and biographical tidiness. Wacker models an approach to biography that is broad yet selective, descriptive yet analytical, and sympathetic yet critical. The result is an account of Graham’s life and ministry that tells us as much about the man as the world he inhabited and helped to shape.

America’s Pastor is an important work, not only for the answers it provides but the conversations and questions it has the capacity to provoke. For example, what does Graham’s career teach us about the relationship between the American preacher and American politics? Wacker reveals how Graham’s concern for soul-saving did not preclude him from engaging issues such as communism and nuclear disarmament. On the other hand, Wacker notes Graham’s distinction between partisan politics and moral politics and Graham’s hope to engage only the latter (221). This distinction suggests that Graham viewed certain political issues as beyond the scope of his primary ministry. America’s Pastor can help raise important questions about the nature of politics, the political responsibility of Christian preachers, and how preachers might negotiate this responsibility alongside other ministerial concerns.

A second question that America’s Pastor might gesture toward concerns the relationship between Christian ministry and secular power. Wacker identifies Graham’s knack for building friendships with those in power, including several US presidents. Should proximity to secular power shape a preacher’s priorities and methods, and if so, how? What does it mean for a preacher to be a prophetic voice in the American context? While Wacker does not intend to provide definitive answers to how Christian preachers should engage prophecy or power, America’s Pastor has the imaginative capacity to push readers toward considering such important issues.

America’s Pastor could also inform contemporary conversations about the relationship between ministry and money. Wacker notes that though Graham enjoyed a great deal of success, he resisted a lavish lifestyle (153). This approach contrasts many contemporary preachers within the Prosperity Gospel movement, for example, who model and promote an aesthetic of wealth as a sign of spiritual validation. Graham provides a counterexample to such trends. For Graham, success was marked by his faithfulness to a simple message of God’s invitation for all people to repent of their sins and enter into a transformative relationship with Jesus Christ. With all the success that came with Graham’s massive ministry and the possibilities for distractions, the degree to which he maintained this singular focus is admirable and instructive.

Since Wacker acknowledges the significance of numbers in terms of audience sizes, conversions, and how numbers impacted Graham’s publicity, it would be interesting to see Wacker reflect more on how Graham’s legacy relates to the Prosperity Gospel, which also boasts impressive numbers. The Prosperity Gospel is arguably the fastest growing segment of Christianity in the world and began its ascendency during the postwar years alongside Graham’s own rise to fame. In chapter 7, Wacker spends a paragraph briefly distinguishing Graham’s message from his Prosperity Gospel contemporaries, but it would be illuminating to probe how both the Prosperity Gospel and Graham’s evangelicalism each found massive success drinking from the same wellspring of American culture (274). Several scholars, including one of Wacker’s former students, Kate Bowler, have noted how the Prosperity Gospel draws from dominant American cultural motifs, such as individualism and consumerism. Both individualism and consumerism contributed to Graham’s success, with the former buttressing Graham’s emphasis on personal conversions and Wacker noting how the latter contributed to the commodification of religious icons during the postwar years (68). Since Wacker is interested not only in Graham’s relationship to American religion but how religion relates to culture, deeper engagement with the ways American culture was appropriated by the Prosperity Gospel might have further magnified the uniqueness of Graham’s own appropriations.

Another point of connection between Graham and Prosperity Gospel preachers concerns the impact that individualistic sensibilities inform their respective political postures. In the case of each, the priority of the individual lessens the theological impetus for broader sociopolitical engagement, particularly at the sermonic level. Graham’s preaching was primarily about addressing the individual’s relationship with God, rather than her potential socioeconomic plight or the causes of such plight, for example. Prosperity Gospel preachers rarely push for political action because an individualistic focus renders their social responsibility pedagogical rather than political. More specifically, the Prosperity Gospel generally assumes that the individual believer has spiritual authority over unjust societal systems that would otherwise prevent socioeconomic mobility. The social responsibility of the Prosperity Gospel preacher then becomes pedagogical because they primarily intend to inform the believer of their spiritual authority over secular systems and the capacity that they have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps through faith, verbal affirmations of God’s favor, and overall piety. Such convictions are deeply wedded to individualistic sensibilities, not unrelated to the individualistic sensibilities of Graham. The points of connection between Graham and Prosperity Gospel preachers are that their respective individualistic convictions each undermine the impetus for more politically conscious preaching (albeit for different reasons) and both are deeply American. Both Graham and the Prosperity Gospel also evidence Wacker’s assumption that American religion and American culture are deeply connected.

In America’s Pastor, Grant Wacker offers us a rich and compelling portrait of one of America’s most beloved and revered figures. He presents Billy Graham as an everyday Southerner with an unusual gift for relating to people across various demographic and social lines and an unwavering commitment to preach the Christian Gospel. Wacker sufficiently nuances why Graham’s message was so compelling, whether that be sermon content, the style and cadence of his preaching, the aesthetics of mass meetings, the rise of mass media, or the increase in postwar celebrity culture. Yet Wacker also demonstrates how Graham’s life and ministry were in constant dialogue with American culture. From the American individualism that shaped Graham to the form of evangelicalism that he helped to foster, Graham is a product of a cultural context that he helped to produce. By aiming for an interpretive rather than merely descriptive account of Graham, Wacker illumines what Graham has meant for America’s past and gestures toward how Graham’s life might be a lens for understanding the present.