Billy Graham: Born a rural Southerner, he was leavened by the suburban Midwest, and he left a rural legacy

Billy Graham in 2006
(C. Ommanney, Getty Images)

The best obituaries tell readers how a life was lived and why it mattered. For Billy Graham, who died this morning at 99, in his home on a North Carolina mountain, two good ones are from The Charlotte Observer, his hometown paper, and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was based for more than 50 years, until 2004.

"Growing up on a dairy farm" at what was then the south edge of Charlotte, "Graham’s first idea of heaven was playing baseball and courting girls," the Observer's Tim Funk writes, with help from former religion editor Ken Garfield. "But after answering the altar call at a revival during the Depression, he went on to become a pastor to U.S. presidents and a globe-trotting preacher whose crusades altered lives."

The StarTrib cobbled together an obit written largely by former staff writer Martha Sawyer Allen with updates from current staffers and The Associated Press. It says Graham "took that peculiarly historic American theological concept — decision theology, honed by fire-breathing circuit-riding preachers — and made it palatable in the middle-class, suburban America of the 1950s."

Funk writes, "Evangelical Christians who had been ridiculed since the Scopes Monkey Trial of the 1920s for believing in the literal truth of the Scriptures suddenly saw Graham – one of their own – reading the Bible in the White House with President Eisenhower." Funk notes that newspapers played a role: William Randolph Hearst, "who liked Graham’s strident anti-communism and religious zeal," told his publishers: “Puff Graham.”

From the StarTrib: "Graham walked that narrowest of American cultural lines, right down the middle between religious liberals and conservatives. He brought Christian evangelism into the mainstream of American political and social consciousness, yet was scolded by many conservatives for being too liberal." But he "refused to speak to racially segregated crowds," Funk notes, and that began in 1953, before the civil-rights movement really began.

Graham's portfolio included journalism; he was a founder of Christianity Today, a conservative magazine "that enjoys praise from liberals," the StarTrib notes. "It was started as a counter to the Christian Century, which had been started in 1900 by America’s Protestant mainstream theologians." The magazine released a special issue on Graham, with an article by Duke Divinity School's Lauren Winner on his rural youth.

Graham also left a rural legacy, at Wheaton College in suburban Chicago, where he earned an anthropology degree in 1943 and then pastored a suburban church. The school has a Billy Graham Center with a Rural Matters Institute, which says "There is an emerging movement to plant churches in rural areas. As more people and resources move to urban settings, the rural heartland has gradually become under-resourced, overlooked, and often forgotten. . . . Rural church-planting strategies are markedly different from strategies in any other context. RMI was created to provide support, learning, and community for those working in non-urban contexts in North America."

"Graham would most likely have never become the leading spokesman for postwar American evangelicalism had he not passed through Wheaton," which broadened his world view, Steven P. Miller writes in the book Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. The Star Trib says, "He never changed his message, but he often tempered it to his audience. In the Upper Midwest, he talked of salvation but also of grace."