hile Billy Graham was leading a revival in Los Angeles in 1949, William Randolph Hearst looked at the handsome thirtysomething evangelist with flowing blond hair and famously directed editors in his publishing empire to “puff Graham.” Some six decades later, the preacher had become a silver-haired retiree whose Parkinson’s disease kept him largely out of view, but the puffery never stopped. When Graham died this week, he was hailed by President George W. Bush as “America’s pastor,” and even more lavishly by Vice-President Mike Pence as “one of the greatest Americans of the past century.” President Bill Clinton praised him for integrating his revivals. Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called him “the most important evangelist since the Apostle Paul.”
Graham’s accomplishments are, without doubt, legion. The widely cited estimate that he preached to some 215 million people is likely in the ballpark. And while the nineteenth-century lawyer-turned-evangelist Charles Finney must be credited with inventing modern revivalism, Graham perfected and scaled it, turning evangelicalism into worldwide impulse that has transformed Christianity in recent decades in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
