Word: grahamism
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Templeton charged him with committing intellectual suicide. But Graham came to believe doubt was a dangerous distraction from his calling. He decided the Bible was the one true Word in its entirety and never wavered. Looking back today, Graham says, "I had one great failure, and that was intellectual. I should have gone on to school. But I would talk to people about that, and they'd say, Oh no, go on with what you're doing, and let others do that. I do regret I didn't do enough reading, enough study, both formal and informal...
...conviction that confounds his critics. "I would never seek to solve the ethical problems of the 20th century by quoting a passage of Holy Scripture, and I read the Bible every day," says liberal Episcopal Bishop John Spong of Newark, New Jersey, who used to deliver newspapers to the Graham farm as a boy in North Carolina. "I wouldn't invest a book that was written between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 150 with that kind of moral authority." Graham, for his part, wouldn't think of doing otherwise...
...Biblical purity, however, did not protect him from conservative attacks. Over the years, strict Fundamentalists came to see Graham as a traitor for his willingness to work with everyone -- Catholics, Anglicans, even liberal modernists -- to bring the unchurched into the tent. "Fundamentalist is a grand and wonderful word," Graham says now, "but it got off track and into so many extreme positions." Their hostility pained him far more than the sneers of liberals. "I felt," Graham admits, "like my own brothers had turned against...
...Graham's power as a spiritual leader came from authenticity and fervent conviction, it did not mean he was incapable of change. In the 1950s Graham's warnings about a diabolically inspired Soviet empire helped inspire his frightened audience to seek solace and protection in faith. By the 1980s he was joining the peace movement. Graham was pilloried in 1982 for speaking to a staged "peace" conference in the Soviet Union and resolutely downplaying religious repression. His supporters argued that in private he lobbied the Kremlin on behalf of Jewish and Christian prisoners. Ruth Graham, herself fervently anticommunist, opposed...
Back at home Graham was always an interested, although cautious, student of politics. In public he was careful to keep his role spiritual: it took an act of Congress in 1952 for Graham to be allowed to hold the first religious service on the Capitol steps. But in private he pestered Truman about the need to turn back communism in Korea and encouraged Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock to enforce school desegregation. According to Martin, so involved was he in counseling his friend Richard Nixon that the defeated candidate would write in 1960, "I have often told friends...