c. 2005 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) Politicians have a “Last Hurrah.”
Athletes take a “Victory Lap.”
For Billy Graham, who announced the current New York City crusade would be his final one in America, it’s a “Last Hallelujah.”
Graham, the nation’s most prominent religious leader for more than 50 years, is 86 years old and suffers from prostate cancer, fluid on the brain, deafness in one ear, and a broken hip requiring the use of a walker. Yet, he presses on with his evangelistic message.
Like another religious icon, Pope John Paul II, Graham preaches sermons of faith and hope despite physical pain and an awareness death may be near. Like Karol Wotyla, Billy Graham is a “Lion in Winter” who will not easily surrender to the inevitable.
I attended his Manhattan news conference, and it was clear Graham still commands attention. There were 21 television cameras and the familiar whirl of still cameras clicking with their flash attachments. Graham remains big news in America’s media capital.
He no longer comments on political issues as he once did, and Graham admitted “I went too far” in becoming entangled with political leaders and public policy.
He surely “went too far” in his 1972 secretly taped White House conversation with President Richard Nixon. Graham’s anti-Jewish remarks represent the low point of his career when he told the president Jews control the American media: “This stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.” Incredibly, Graham agreed with Nixon’s previous bigoted words about Jews and their alleged influence in the United States.
“You believe that?” Nixon asked Graham following the “stranglehold” comment.
“Yes, sir,” was the reply.
“Oh, boy,” said the president. “So do I. I can’t ever say that but I believe it.”
In the same conversation, Graham mentioned he has Jewish friends in the media who “swarm around me and are friendly to me.” But, he tells Nixon, “They don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country.”
Tragically, Graham failed to stand up to Nixon by rejecting the president’s obscene remarks. We expect great religious leaders to speak truth to power. Instead, Graham agreed with Nixon and added his own hostile remarks. Since the tapes were released in 2002, Graham has begged the Jewish community’s forgiveness for his mistake and offers personal repentance “on my hands and knees.”
So it was not surprising his first comments at the news conference were warm words of friendship and appreciation for the Jewish community. His remarks set me thinking about Graham’s long, often unknown, positive relationship with Jews, Judaism, and the State of Israel.
I met Graham in 1977 in Atlanta when the American Jewish Committee presented him an interreligious award. Many Christians were surprised by my organization’s action, and some Jews were critical. After all, Graham’s single message was, is, and will always be the Gospel. But Graham deserved the AJC award.
In those years he worked effectively behind the scenes at “the highest levels” in Washington and elsewhere in support of Soviet Jewry. The Jews in the former Soviet Union were not free to immigrate to Israel and other lands of freedom, and the repressive Communist regime curtailed Jewish religious life and freedom of conscience.
At the same time Graham produced the film “His Land,” a glowing cinematic tribute to modern Israel and its people. The movie attracted critical acclaim and large audiences of both Christians and Jews.
In 1973, Graham publicly criticized the excesses of some Christian missionaries. Citing New Testament verses from the book of Romans, he declared:
“I believe God has always had a special relationship with the Jewish people. … In my evangelistic efforts, I have never felt called to single out Jews as Jews. … Just as Judaism frowns on proselytizing that is coercive, or that seeks to commit men against their will, so do I.”
In 1996, he was again critical when the Southern Baptist Convention, Graham’s denomination, adopted a resolution to actively single out Jews for conversion.
I met Graham in 1991 during an earlier Crusade in New York City. He was very sensitive to the Jewish community and made clear he never targets any specific group for conversion.
No one knows how history will ultimately treat Billy Graham. But I am certain we will never see his like again. That’s the way it always is with a true “original.”
MO/JL END RNS
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)
Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of Graham at his Tuesday (June 21) news conference in New York. Search the site for several historic shots of the 1957 New York crusade that launched his evangelistic career.
