From The Editor of this blog: Steve Hayes is my oldest internet friend going back to when we only had email to communicate. Steve lives in South Africa and is a cleric in the Serbian Orthodox Church. I highly commend his blog. Steve is a fount of wisdom.
The death of Billy Graham was followed by a flood of posts on social media, some praising him to the heavens as more honourable than the cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the seraphim, and others damning him as a would be war criminal who urged US President Richard Nixon to kill a million people in Vietnam.
I thought I would steer clear of all the hype, and not read any of it, pro or con, until a few internet friends posted things that I thought worth paying attention to.
First was Jim Forest of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, who met Billy Graham in 1988 when he visited the USSR at the invitation of the Russian Orthodox Church, on the occasion of the celebration of a millennium of Christianity in Russia:
At the airport waiting for our flight to Kiev, I asked Graham what had led him to undertake his first trip to the USSR in 1982 despite advice from Vice President Bush not to go. "I had been briefed at the Pentagon about what would happen if there was a nuclear war," he replied. "I had been to Auschwitz and seen how limitless is our capacity for evil. And I was thinking about Paul saying in his first letter to the Corinthians that he was called to be all things to all people. I realized I had closed myself to the people in the Soviet Union. So I felt I had to say yes to the invitation I received from the Russian Orthodox Church inviting me to take part in a peace conference they were preparing in Moscow."
Speaking in Kiev, he gave a vintage Graham sermon: "My grandfather never dreamed of the changes that have happened in our world -- space travel, color television, travel from continent to continent in a few hours by jet airplane. But some things never change. Interest in religion never changes. The nature of God never changes." He spoke about God's love for each person, a love we cannot damage by our sins. Graham recalled a Moscow lady who told him, "I am a great sinner." He responded, "I too am a great sinner, but we have a great savior." He recalled Prince Vladimir and his conversion. "He turned away from idols and destroyed them, opening a new path in life not only for himself but for millions of others right down to our own time. God never changes, but you and I must change just as Prince Vladimir changed a thousand years ago." He ended his sermon saying, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." (see Jim Forest's book Religion in the new Russia).
I also heard John Gatu of Kenya, who preached immediately before him, who in my opinion preached much better.
I said as much in response to Irving's Facebook post, but that is not the full story. Facebook lends itself to the visual equivalent of sound bites -- one-liners that never tell the full story. That is why I prefer mailing lists and possibly blogs for discussing such things.
And there was a story behind that sermon that deserves to be told again.
The rally at which Billy Graham was the main speaker was the culmination of a 10-day conference, the South African Congress on Mission and Evangelism.
The conference was organised by the South African Council of Churches and African Enterprise, an evangelistic (and Evangelical) organisation.
The organisers wanted to make the conference as widely representative of South African Christianity as possible, and, in particular, to bring "Evangelicals" and "Ecumenicals" together (they weren't too bothered, at that stage, about the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox, whose presence would probably be even more scary to Evangelicals than the Ecumenicals).
SA Congress on Mission and Evangelism Rally at Kings Park stadium, Durban, at which Billy Graham preached. 17 March 1973.
And if anything was going to bring the Evangelicals in, it was Billy Graham, who was a hero to most of them. So he was there as bait. The Evangelicals would come to hear Billy Graham, they wouldn't come to hear John Gatu, no matter how well he preached.
And the bait worked.
Billy Graham Rally at Kings Park, 17 March 1973
Many Evangelicals remained suspicious, and shied away from the Ecumenicals, whom they regarded as "political" (if anyone deserves that epithet today, it's Evangelicals, especially American ones) and too
focused on the "social gospel".
But many overcame their suspicions and joined in.
I heard Billy Graham preach on one other occasion, at Earls Court in London in 1966. On that occasion I and those with me handed out pamphlets critical of some of Billy Graham's comments on the Vietnam War. The pamphlets were produced by the Christian Committee of 100, of which I had become a hanger-on.
Billy Graham rally at Kings Park, Durban
I had been told by several Anglican clergy that they did not approve of Billy Graham, because they did not like "emotionalism". The way they described it, it sounded as though he had an almost hypnotic effect on the crowd, getting them all worked up. But I was disappointed.
I was less than impressed with his preaching on that occasion. Far from being emotional, it was rather dull and boring, and there was no appeal to the emotions at all. But on both occasions it clearly worked for some people, who went forward to commit their lives to Jesus Christ as Saviour.
For some of them it may have been a recommitment. I've seen many people respond to such "altar calls" again and again. An Anglican monk once told me that he did at a Billy Graham crusade. As he got up to go forward, the ushers stopped him, and said "Not you."
"Why not?" he asked
"It's for those who have committed their lives to Christ."
"But I have."
"No, it's for those who have committed their lives to Christ today."
"But I do, every day."
So the Evangelical ritual of the "altar call" is not necessarily well understood outside Evangelical circles, but Billy Graham's preaching nevertheless influenced a lot of people and, I believe, brought many closer to Christ. He was certainly the best-known itinerant evangelist of the 20th century.
So what Billy Graham said in South Africa that day may have helped some white Evangelicals to see that racism wasn't OK for Christians, and thus he may have planted some seeds that germinated and helped in some way to end apartheid 20 years later.
But at the time it was a huge disappointment. It could have done with a bit of "emotionalism". There were 50000 Christians there, of all races (the government had demanded that they be segregated, but they weren't, people sat anywhere they liked). They were expecting something to happen, but it didn't. John Gatu preached a far more stirring sermon, and perhaps he should have spoken last, and sent out the crowd as manic street preachers, and they probably would have done it.
Billy Graham started off well -- saying that though we all come from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds, we are all one in Christ, and waved his arm round the packed stadium and said "This is the church".
And then he proceeded to preach a sermon full of bad cliches and mediocre pulpit jokes. If he had taken up the consciousness of unity that was beginning to emerge, and expounded on it, something might have happened. It was ready to happen. Fifty thousand black and white Christians gathered together, of all
races, all classes, sitting together. There might have been a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We could have prayed and sang and exchanged the kiss of peace, and it would have been great, but
it fell flat. About a fifth of them came forward for the appeal at the end. For the rest of us, there was nothing more. We could leave, so leave we did. A great anticlimax.
The third piece is from Brenton Dickieson, who writes in his blog about Billy Graham, C.S. Lewis, and Me | A Pilgrim in Narnia. I think he comes closer to giving a balanced assessment of Billy Graham than many when he writes:
Graham leveraged early superstardom to do very specific things that shaped American Christianity for the next three generations. In particular, Graham’s insistent and consistent ecumenism, his global interest, and his unapologetic views of racial integration—even going so far as to bail Martin Luther King, Jr. out of jail—are imprinted upon post-WWII American Christianity. In particular, it was Billy Graham who shaped what is now known as evangelicalism, distinct from and overlapping with both fundamentalism and mainstream liberalism. With all the things we may quibble about, for millions of people around the world, Graham made faith personal.
Brenton Dickieson is a student of C.S. Lewis, who, like Billy Graham, influenced many Christians, not through his preaching, but through his writing. In his blog he describes how Lewis met Billy Graham, and their impressions of each other. It really is worth a read.
“And just what is it,” my friend asked, “that was so Christ-revealing about Berrigan’s life?”
When he died last year, age 94, obituaries focused on the anti-war aspects of Berrigan’s life: he was eighteen months in prison for burning draft records in a protest against conscription of the young into the Vietnam War; then there was a later event in which he was one of eight people who hammered on the nose cone of a nuclear-armed missile. No one has kept count of his numerous brief stays in jail for other acts of war protest. He was handcuffed more than a hundred times.
But it raises other wider questions too.
For the last few years the "mainstream" media have focused on the phenomenon of the "religious right", but fifty years ago the focus was more on the "religious left", exemplified by people like Daniel Berrigan, protesting against the Vietnam War.
I first learned of Daniel Berrigan in 1969, through a radical Christian magazine called The Catonsville Roadrunner. The magazine was inspired by the actions of Daniel Berrigan and his brother Philip, who with several others had broken into an office containing records of military conscription and publicly burnt them. It became a legendary act of Christian civil disobedience
Ikon magazine cover, designed by Hugh Pawsey, my fellow student at St Chad's College
Jim Forest himself was involved in a similar act of civil disobedience in Milwaukee, for which he was jailed.Those were interesting times, the late 1960s and early 1970s, the age of hippies and moon landings and radical Christian protests. Inspired by The Catonsville Roadrunner I and a group of friends launched our own radical Christian magazine in South Africa, called Ikon.
So I want to turn Jim Forest's question around. Not "Why should Orthodox Christians be interested in the life of a Jesuit priest like Daniel Berrigan?" but why did so many people involved in the radical Christian scene of the late 1960s become interested in Orthodoxy?
One factor may have been that at that time Orthodoxy was peculiarly powerless.
In 1968 I visited St Sergius Orthodox Church in Paris, and there was a seminary in the crypt of the church where the students lived in humble and primitive conditions -- sleeping cubicles separated by threadbare curtains, and an open drain running down the middle of the floor. That, to me, represented the poverty of him who came to be poor among the poor, rather than the power and prestige needed to maintain a religion.
Most of the traditionally Orthodox countries were under communist or Muslim rule, and in those places Orthodox Christians were treated as second-class citizens, and deprived of civil rights. Many Orthodox Christians in the West were refugees and asylum seekers. or children of refugees and asylum seekers.
Another reason for the attraction of Orthodoxy for radical Christian activists was that Orthodoxy had a firm theological base. In the West, theological liberalism led to political conservatism and vice versa. Theological liberalism was embarked on a project to adapt the Christian faith to the modern world, and that meant adapting Christianity to support the status quo. Radical Christians wanted to change the status quo on earth, so that God's kingdom would come and God's will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
G.K Chesterton said that the modern young man would never change the world, for he would always change his mind. Christians who are always changing their theology will never change the world.
This can be seen in the media expectations of Roman Pope Francis. They are looking to him to bring about change in the Roman Catholic Church. Will he change the theology and bring it up to date? But most of the time they are disappointed, because he criticises the state of the world from the point of view of existing theology -- the wars, civil repression and exploitation that continue pretty much as they did in the 1960s.
There is much talk about "progressive" theology and "progressive" politics, but what do we mean by "progress"? As G.K. Chesterton put it, more than a century ago now:
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: a wild page from any Prussian sophist makes men doubt it. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. It does mean that the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us. We are not altering the real to suit the ideal. We are altering the ideal: it is easier.
Silly examples are always simpler; let us suppose a man wanted a particular kind of world; say, a blue world. He would have no cause to complain of the slightness or swiftness of his task; he might toil for a long time at the transformation; he could work away (in every sense) until all was blue. He could have heroic adventures; the putting of the last touches to a blue tiger. He could have fairy dreams; the dawn of a blue moon. But if he worked hard, that high-minded reformer would certainly (from his own point of view) leave the world better and bluer than he found it. If he altered a blade of grass to his favourite colour every day, he would get on slowly. But if he altered his favourite colour every day, he would not get on at all.
And that is why I think that some radical Christian activists have been attracted to Orthodoxy. And that complement's Jim Forest's point about why Orthodox Christians should be interested in people like Daniel Berrigan -- because people several people who have shared the interests of Daniel Berrigan have also become interested in Orthodoxy. So by all means buy and read Jim Forest's book about Daniel Berrigan.
