American evangelist
Billy Graham
AD 1918–2018 · Also called William Franklin Graham Jr.
An American Southern Baptist evangelist whose decades of "crusade" preaching, radio, television, and advising of successive U.S. presidents made him one of the most recognized religious figures of the twentieth century, preaching in person to an estimated 200 million people worldwide.
Life and work
Graham grew up on a North Carolina dairy farm and, after a conversion experience at a revival meeting as a teenager, trained at Bible colleges before rising to national prominence through his association with Youth for Christ and, decisively, his 1949 Los Angeles crusade, which was extended for weeks amid substantial newspaper coverage and drew wide public attention.
Graham went on to hold hundreds of large-scale evangelistic "crusades" across six continents over the following decades, adapting radio and then television broadcasting to reach unprecedented audiences, and founding the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to support the organizational scale his ministry required.
Graham became an influential, if often controversial, spiritual advisor to every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, and worked, not without criticism from some quarters, to insist on racially integrated seating at his crusades in the American South well before this became legally mandated, inviting Martin Luther King Jr. to pray at a 1957 New York crusade.
Later in life Graham expressed regret over some of his political entanglements, particularly recordings revealed decades later of private conversations with President Nixon containing antisemitic remarks, for which Graham publicly apologized. He largely stepped back from a formal political role in his later ministry, focusing on straightforward gospel preaching.
Graham's ministry emphasized a simple, direct evangelical message calling listeners to personal decision for Christ, and the organizational and technological model he pioneered — mass media evangelism paired with local church partnership and post-crusade follow-up — became a template widely copied by later evangelists.
- Occupation
- Evangelist, broadcaster
- Places
- Charlotte, North Carolina
- Dates
- AD 1918–2018
Questions and debates
Recordings released decades later revealed Graham making antisemitic remarks in a private 1972 Oval Office conversation with President Nixon; Graham later apologized publicly, saying the comments did not reflect his actual views or ministry.
In their own words
"The Bible says..."attributed, frequent crusade refrain
Recounts his life and ministry in his own words, published 1997.Just As I Am (autobiography)
Further reading
More people
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