Three reasons Billy Graham captured the world's attention
Christianity Today
November 6, 2026
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Courtesy of Wheaton College / Edits by CT
Recently my wife, Katherine, and I moved into a senior living complex in our hometown of Cary, North Carolina. Soon afterward the building manager, a young man from Ghana named Godfred, knocked on our apartment door. He had seen a stack of books about Billy Graham outside the door and wondered if he could borrow one. “Sure, but why?”
Godfred responded quietly in precise, British-accented English, “I grew up in a prosperity church in Ghana. But listening to Graham on the radio one Sunday afternoon changed my life.”
How did a farmer’s son from North Carolina, born more than a century ago, change the life of a young African man more than 5,000 miles away?
I visited Graham four times at his mountaintop home in Montreat, North Carolina, when he was in his early 90s. His assistant said, “Billy, Grant is writing a book about you.” Graham responded, kindly but simply, “Why?”
After taking a moment to gather my thoughts, I said, “You have done some important things.” He smiled. “No, the Lord has done some important things through me.”
Nearly two decades after our first conversation, as the world marks what would have been his 108th birthday, I think the Lord worked through him in three key ways: natural gifts, a compelling story, and a powerful message.
On November 7, 1918, Billy Graham came into the world on a prosperous dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina. He was destined to become one of the most influential figures in Christian history.
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Graham preached face to face to 77 million souls on six continents. Between 1955 and 2017, he notched a berth on Gallup’s “Most Admired Man” 61 times—nearly twice the number of his closest rivals Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Jimmy Carter. Believing that spoken words were evanescent while print lived forever, in 1956 Graham founded the fortnightly Christianity Today, which became one of the most widely read Christian periodicals in the world.
Given Graham’s modest origins—a few years at an unaccredited Bible institute in Florida, plus a Wheaton College degree but no graduate work or auspicious family connections—American religious historians found his rise challenging to explain.
George Marsden famously quipped that in the 1950s and 1960s an evangelical was “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” William Martin contended that Graham represented most Americans’ “best selves.”
Recently Molly Worthen told me, with reference to Graham and other leaders, that the essence of charisma is that it offers followers “a transcendent narrative about their place in the world that answers more questions than the existing narratives.”
Since Graham’s death in February 2018, a steady stream of books and articles about him have continued to appear. Taken together, they highlight Graham’s natural gifts, story, and message.
Graham’s influence pivoted on natural gifts largely bestowed by his Scottish roots. He enjoyed rugged good looks, a staple of his newspaper coverage from the outset. In 1954 the London Evening News called him “Charles Atlas with a halo.” Six decades later, multiple obituaries remembered the evangelist as “Hollywood handsome.” He had an athletic physique, blondish hair (typically a bit too long), and a smile to die for.
When a journalist asked a Graham associate if God cared about appearances, the associate grinned and said good looks “reduce resistance.” Graham also had a timbered baritone voice, instinctive affability, and wit—a trait that caught many off guard.
Graham could be starstruck with himself, but given the magnitude of his gifts, his self-congratulatory moments were remarkably few and short-lived. More importantly, by all accounts he was a man of genuine, down-home humility. Always a Southern gentleman, he greeted visitors with a hearty handshake, a glass of iced tea, and questions about sports, dogs, and grandkids. He inevitably deflected most queries about himself.
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And then there was the Billy Graham story—popular, theological, and secular. Rural Charlotte wasn’t exactly the sticks, but it hardly portended the fame ahead. Graham’s rise to celebrity started with, as the press would have it, a picture-perfect marriage to Ruth Bell Graham, the daughter of medical missionaries to China, and their five picture-perfect children.
The popular version of the Graham story saw him grooving into personal friendships with ten presidents and at least four first ladies. He also enjoyed 12 visits with Queen Elizabeth; preached in person and by live cable and satellite feed in most counties; and held private meetings with world luminaries such as Winston Churchill, Pope John Paul II, and Golda Meir.
Some of this flurry was just schmoozing with high-profile friends, but other instances involved earnest backstage conversations with front-stage results. This was the theological side of the story. Graham held countless meetings with local ministerial committees, for example. In those meetings, Graham sought cooperation with fundamentalists and Pentecostals on his right, mainliners and liberals on his left, and Catholics, Latter-day Saints, and Jews wherever. He determined to honor his youthful pledge to work with anyone who would work with him—as long as they did not ask him to change his message.
The theological story also cast Graham as a model for proper Christian behavior. To be sure, he strenuously disavowed that role, stressing that he needed forgiveness just like everyone else. But for millions, his life really did serve as a blueprint.
How so? For one thing, Graham taught evangelicals how to take a seat at the table of public discussion. That meant offering charity to adversaries even when they lied (especially when they lied) and identifying the right priorities. To paraphrase historian Andrew Finstuen, Christ came not to save us from mistakes or bad habits but from sin, which alienates us from God. Graham knew this and preached it.
Yet despite the gravity of his message, he kept a sense of humor. After a discussion about nudity in Playboy with TV talk show host Merv Griffin in November 1983, Graham grinned saying he had turned down $25,000 to write a story for the magazine. When Griffin asked, “With your shirt on or off?” Graham shot back, “Well, I don’t know. That wasn’t in the contract.”
Graham tried to lead by example when it came to moral issues like sex, money, honesty, and criticizing others. He advocated for keeping sex within the context of (heterosexual) marriage. He placed himself on a publicly stated salary and submitted to public audits. Except for one early incident —which he regretted—Graham declined to criticize others. And he refused to exaggerate the attendance numbers at his events. Reporters wasted a lot of time trying to come up with misdeeds by Graham and his team, but they never succeeded.
Graham’s story took political forms, too. This was the secular version. Like most men of his era, he was slow to get the memo on women’s equality. He warmed then cooled then warmed again to civil rights. And like many of his contemporaries, he met the 1950s with a blunderbuss aimed squarely at Moscow. Eventually he determined to shoulder nuclear disarmament—provoking venomous criticism from the left as well as the right—but Graham never flinched.
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Graham did blunder from time to time. His most conspicuous tumble involved his sycophantic friendship with Richard Nixon, which earned him the nickname “White House Chaplain” during the Vietnam and Watergate eras. Unfortunately, it also earned him a reputation for antisemitism. A toxic Oval Office conversation in 1972 about Jewish control of the media came to light in 2002. Despite Graham’s repeated, heartfelt apologies, that conversation tarnished his reputation.
Graham’s most crucial legacy lay in the power of his message. Natural gifts and different versions of his story formed the opening acts, but never more than that. In Graham’s hands, the message appeared in many ways—crusade, radio, and TV sermons, as well as books, feature-length movies, and countless media appearances. Yet they all centered on the historic Christian pillars of human sin and divine forgiveness. Regardless of the stated text, every sermon went back to John 3:16: “For God so loved the world …”
Graham was no theologian and never pretended otherwise. He prized effectiveness over eloquence, simplicity over erudition. Most services, especially those in the great stadiums of the world, ended with the dramatic tension of a call for “inquirers,” as he called them, to stand up and walk to the front to signal repentance and desire for a new life in Christ. Over six decades, inquirers turned in more than 3 million decision cards.
Did the conversions stick? The answer depends on whom you ask, but sociological data suggest that most did. Many of the millions of letters that flooded into Graham’s headquarters spoke of the shackles of addiction, marriages on the rocks, kids gone astray, fears of death, and loneliness. No matter how badly you have messed up your life, the preacher urged, Christ offers forgiveness and a new start.
When I asked my building manager, Godfred, about the day he heard Graham on the radio, he said the evangelist preached on the text “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15). Nothing flashy. Just a simple but profound word that came to this young man—and so many others—at just the right time.
The message lived.
Grant Wacker is the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Christian History at Duke Divinity School. He holds a BA from Stanford University and a PhD from Harvard University. He is the author or co-editor of nine books including One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham.
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