Author Description

For more than forty years, Billy Graham has been the dominant figure in the burgeoning worldwide movement of Evangelical Christianity. He has preached in person to nearly seventy million people in more than seventy countries, and to hundreds of millions of others on radio, television, and film. He is, quite possibly, the best-known and most-admired religious figure of the twentieth century. In this thorough, carefully documented and gracefully written account of the famed evangelist's life and ministry, William Martin raises and answers key questions about Graham's character, contributions, and continuing influence on the world religious scene. Drawing on nearly two hundred interviews, access to never-used archival materials, personal observations of Graham's crusades and conferences in the United States and Europe, long conversations with Graham himself, and decades of research on Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christianity, Martin chronicles Graham's ascent from preaching in front of saloons to addressing huge throngs in the world's largest arenas; his development of procedures for holding evanglistic crusades; his abandonment of a narrow Fundamentalism in favour of an openhearted approach that has created an impressive spirit of ecumenism; and his success in avoiding the scandals that have rocked the "electronic church". With the aid of documents from six presidential libraries and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Archives, Martin also examies the evangelist's friendship with scores of world leaders. He gives particular attention to the controversial relationships with President Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, and the charge of critics that Graham's claim to be offering his powerful friends nothing more than spiritual counsel was merely a thin veil over a hawkish postion on Vietnam, a waffling stance on civil rights, and a strong strain of partisan politics. In the final portion of the book, Martin describes how Graham's lifelong determination "to do some great thing for God" led him to organize mammoth international conferences that have helped forge a coalition crucial to the worldwide spread of Evangelical Christinaity, and to pursue efforts to enhance religious freedom in Eastern Europe and China. - Jacket flap.