Title: Just As I Am
Author: Billy Graham
Date: 1997
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0-06-063387-5
Length: 735 pages of text, plus photo inserts and index
Illustrations: 4 photo inserts, 8 pages each
Quote: “[I]f anything has been accomplished through my life, it has been solely God’s doing, not mine, and He—not I—must get the credit.”
That’s Billy Graham’s official accounting of himself, and he sticks to it, although the facts of his long and lively career show that God at least started the process by giving the preacher extraordinary amounts of talent, energy, and stamina.
The memories included in these 735 pages are not padded out with detailed descriptions of exotic landscapes. Accustomed to biographies of people who have lived shorter lives at a slower pace, I find Graham’s anecdotes a little too terse. It’s possible, while reading this book, to blink your tired eyes and miss a good story that’s been condensed into two or three lines. Graham was born in 1918 and was only semi-retired in 1997; a list of cities where he’d done evangelical crusades fills four closely printed pages.
Reading some of the stories of how the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association got into countries that had been hostile to Protestant evangelism, I find an obscure English ballad running through my mind: “Billy broke locks, and Billy broke bolts, and Billy broke what was in the way...” This is unfair; it’s not the effect Graham is trying to produce. He’d be the first to say that God was the one who broke the barriers and opened the doors, and that many other people’s talents contributed as much to the success of his visits as his own talents did. Some of those other people are major characters in the story, identified by first names or even nicknames, like “Bev” (George Beverly Shea) and “Mike” (Martin Luther King, originally christened Michael King). At the same time, there’s no room for doubt that Graham enjoyed what he was doing. If you are going to become a legend in your own time, you might as well enjoy doing it.
Well-known preachers tend to have well-developed extrovert traits. They like attention, find it easy to like almost anyone who pays attention to them, and are vulnerable to all the sins of the flesh. From the perspective of personality psychology, nothing is more natural than that these men succumb to extravagance if not sexual lust, but Christian-phobics love to make a scandal every time a minister behaves the way a man of similar talents and temperament, an actor or a politician, is expected to behave. Graham is not too modest to tell young preachers for whom he has become a role model about the strict rules that protected him from scandal. They are good rules. More ministers, and more politicians and perhaps even more actors, should adopt them. Of course, the rule that a married man should never have a private conversation with a woman other than his wife has worked in ways that were harmful to women’s professional success. There is no particular reason why this has to be the case. Women who want their husbands to be above reproach could network with one another and find ways to compensate for whatever another woman might lose by not providing a basis for rumors.
By avoiding common or garden variety “fleshpots and harlots” scandals, Graham of course rose to a position where he was subject to criticism for buddying up with influential men. He never met a head of state he didn’t like...although the first story in the book explains why he didn’t really hit it off with Harry Truman. Sincere Protestants like Graham and sincere Catholics like John F. Kennedy were trying hard, in the 1960s, to bridge the gaps that had created unchristian infighting in the past, so naturally Graham took every opportunity to befriend Kennedy. Jimmy Carter was trying to dodge Christian-phobic hostilities by keeping his religion private, but as a good Southern Baptist he respected Graham’s ministry. By 1980, the chance to receive spiritual counsel directly from Graham had become one of the perks of the presidency, and Just As I Am describes Graham’s personal relationships with all the Presidents of the United States as well as a few foreign leaders.
This includes Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Which of those two men was more repulsive is a question unlikely to be resolved during my lifetime. Both of them had remarkably unattractive faces; both of their administrations were remembered as times of national turmoil, and although most of the controversy about these Presidents was really about a war neither of them had started, some of it was about their own personal selfish, amoral, tacky behavior. I find Graham’s account of having respected Hannah Nixon, and wanted to help her son act according to her faith, a little more credible than the phrase “my close friendship with Lyndon Johnson.” Throughout pages 400-500 of this book, readers may need to remind themselves frequently that Graham had already committed to a decision to spend time attempting to convert the unenlightened.
Graham also pleads guilty to having participated in the making of one of those dreadful movies about “Appalachia,” or Appa-LAY-shia. Pardon a rant here. Even the actual town of Appalachia was misrepresented in mass media images in the mid-twentieth century. Imagine a bunch of clueless tourist-types coming into your neighborhood, talking to the family nobody else ever talks to, taking pictures of the condemned building, completely ignoring the places where you live and work, then telling the world that the riffraff family story is your story and the condemned building is your home, office, or school, and you’ll understand why people who live in some part of the Appalachian Mountains have been known to react to stereotypes of Appa-LAY-shia by growling, “There’s no such place.” The mythical Appa-LAY-shia in the mass media has always been a figment of the imaginations of, mostly, people with evil intentions. Publicizing the worst case of neediness in a community may be intended to help a needy family or school, and may even have that effect, but in the long run it does no favor to the community.
Page 397 of Just As I Am gives an interesting example of the distortion that took place in so-called documentaries about Appa-LAY-shia. Graham describes a film crew approaching a private home and finding an old lady at home alone. Graham calls the house “a shack.” This choice of words does not accurately reflect the condition of the house—whether it was a small, plain, but solid and well maintained building, or a shabby, dirty, crumbling one, or even an outbuilding—but the strangers’ conversation with the lady of the house suggests that it was the frugal but serviceable kind of “shack.” A lot of strange men drive up to this house and ask the lady if she has a $20 bill. Under the circumstances she couldn’t be blamed for lying if she had money in her pocket, but frugal people of this lady’s generation usually deposited sums greater than $5 in the bank. She tells them she doesn’t have a $20 bill. What would she do with one if she had it? “Give it to somebody that needed it.” Graham doesn’t seem to have guessed what the lady was thinking. As I read this anecdote, I can guess. She was thinking where her weapons were, and where the rest of the family were, just in case these wandering lunatics tried to raid the house. That is unfortunately the way old ladies who do talk to strangers, when they are home alone, have to think. But you throw that scene into a montage of stories about the hardest welfare case in this town and the pellagra patients in that town, and instead of being a normal, even normative, picture of the way old ladies behave in America, it starts to look like evidence that anybody in Appa-LAY-shia who was not actively begging for a handout was probably too senile or stupid to know that he or she needed one.
For an encore these guys could have filmed a lot of footage of burnt-out slums immediately after an urban riot, as it might have been the U Street neighborhood in Washington, D.C., and packaged it with the message, “This is where your Congressional Representatives are forced to live! Vote them a pay raise!” They didn’t do that, because too many people who realized how fraudulent it was would have been watching their so-called documentary. They got away with doing it in a predominantly rural part of the country, because many of the people who lived there were accustomed to the way certain local panhandlers carried on and did not choose to pay much attention to it. Reality is, and was even in the 1930s, that more of the obscene wealth in the United States tends to be concentrated in coastal areas than in mountain areas. Reality is not that genuine poverty, as people in any other part of the world understand it, is common in any part of the United States. When Americans are what can reasonably be called poor—as distinct from “owning only a small house and two old cars and one small bank account”—the cause of their poverty is, and always has been, more specific than merely living in a particular place. Poverty definitely existed in Appalachia, or more precisely in the mining camps that weren’t accepted as belonging to towns like Appalachia, in the early twentieth century, but it was caused by the operating policies of the coal companies.
Frugality and simplicity are also relatively widespread in rural areas such as the Appalachian Mountains. In fact, the mountains attracted religious groups that preached frugality and simplicity as a religious discipline. People who belonged to these groups might have built or bought a house with more than three rooms if they had several children, and might have painted the clapboards if they had noticed that paint was a rather cheap way of extending the “lifespan” of a board, but they chose to live in the type of house that was sometimes called “a shack.” Spending very little money on themselves, having money saved up for their old age and money to donate when an emergency created a need, was a point of honor for such people.
A record of these people’s incomes and expenses would have shown incredibly small balances on both sides. In my neighborhood it was generally agreed that two men had made sure everyone had food, fuel, and clothing during the Great Depression. One of those men was my grandfather and the steady economic base on which he based his philanthropy peaked, after the war, at $35 per month, supplemented by selling crops and doing odd jobs. Such people did not consider themselves poor, nor were they considered poor—often they were the ones others appealed to for financial aid. They had a different lifestyle and a different view of money, something closer to a monastic lifestyle, in this respect, than to a bourgeois lifestyle. The “Landed Poor” always tried to be modest and gracious about it, but saw themselves as an upper class, whether they owned a $20 bill or not. They did not fit into any category recognized by Marxist theory; their existence disproved Marxist theory. Their existence, therefore, irritated the living daylights out of Marxist-influenced thinkers in the early twentieth century, and “progressives” like the Roosevelts tried to belittle and penalize this uniquely American social class whenever possible.
People in Seattle or Omaha could hardly be blamed for accepting Eleanor Roosevelt’s guilt-crazed fantasy about Appa-LAY-shia as fact, but for Billy Graham to have fallen for it shows how badly miseducated a good Christian and a gifted preacher can be.
End of rant. Graham admits to a “narrow focus” on preaching the essential doctrines of Christianity to the exclusion of almost everything else. This narrow, obsessive quality may well be what makes some men Great Achievers; and Graham was among his century’s greatest. But it seems to me, as I read his memories of filming Appa-LAY-shia in the early 1960s and then his memories of the years I remember too, that Graham failed to notice a number of things.
Graham and the dozens of people who helped him produce Just As I Am obviously expected that readers would be interested in celebrity gossip, of which Graham has a great deal to share. He doesn’t divulge any secrets about the Presidents, the other heads of state, or the helpful little Polish clergyman who later became Pope. He seems, in fact, too good at being a Southern Gentleman to have allowed himself to notice that President Johnson wasn’t one. He does discuss his spiritual conversations with them. The last of the four photo sections is devoted to celebrity photos, including the Queen of England, the Pope, and North Korea’s “dear leader,” for whom Graham may be the only man in America who can find a charitable word to say, as well as our own Presidents. Graham’s ministerial relationship with each President after Truman gets a whole chapter of text.
Graham’s evangelical ministry can be compared with what C.S. Lewis had called Mere Christianity. Graham preached the basic idea, let people belong to any denomination they liked. The controversy about his ministry at first, and the success it enjoyed later, are both probably due to Graham’s independence, his ability to befriend Republicans or Democrats, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, or creepy foreign dictators, impartially.
In 1997, Billy Graham was trying to face facts: “I know that soon my life will be over.” In 2007 an admirer who bought one of Graham’s other books from me said, “He will never die.” For Christians who expect the literal return of Christ, the prediction that this or that religious person will never die is technically reasonable, although the question of exactly what the physical process of their regeneration would be called then becomes more interesting than such speculation probably needs to be. Graham did, however, develop Parkinson's Disease and die in the usual way in his late nineties.
Rarely in any age has anyone been a lifelong Christian, died old, and left behind a record so clean that the only controversy about the person's service to Christ is whether the person was too liberal, too tolerant, too willing to shake hands and promise the blessed hope of salvation to anybody. Billy Graham was that one.
This book will be useful to anyone interested in the history of the twentieth century’s ecumenical religious movement and/or the Presidents of the United States, as well as ministerial students and admirers of the Graham family.
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