Followers the world over honor Graham on his 90th birthday

Evangelist Billy Graham, who turned 90 on Friday, is frail from multiple falls and ailments, far from the strapping revivalist who roamed the globe for six decades.

Yet before Graham retired in 2005 to his mountainside log cabin in Montreat, N.C., he preached to 215 million people – and changed the course of American Protestantism.

“Today’s generation thinks his significance is his popularity, not his role as the architect of moderate evangelicalism,” said Susan Harding, an anthropologist of religion at the University of California-Santa Cruz.

“He created a new way to be a conservative Christian, not fundamentalist, not a judgmental separatist. A Billy Graham Christian could be more educated, more worldly and take for granted that Christians have work to do in this world.”

Blending faith, activism

Graham taught Christians to wed their beliefs to social activism, a blending “that would have been alien to their parents’ generation,” said John Wilson, editor of “Books & Culture.” It is a sister publication of “Christianity Today,” founded by Graham in 1956.

To do this, said William Long, a former professor of religion and humanities at Reed College in Portland, “he burnished off the fine points – the notion that you needed a certain kind of baptism or doctrine.”

“He went straight for the essential Gospel message: Jesus Christ died for you. People date the beginnings of their relationships with God to their encounters with Graham – the most continuing symbol of religious vitality in American life,” Long said.

In modern times, Graham became known as much for what he did not do as for what he did.

He was the evangelist who did not rip off millions (Jim Bakker) or run with prostitutes (Jimmy Swaggart) or build a megachurch (Joel Osteen) or run for president (Pat Robertson) or run a Christian political lobby (Jerry Falwell).

Moreover, “his personal gifts were immense: honesty, humility, savvy, a rich voice and Hollywood looks, sexual and financial integrity, administrative skills,” said Grant Wacker, professor of Christian history at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

Graham also was adept with a “corny but effective humor,” Wacker said. He notes that YouTube has a tape of Woody Allen interviewing the evangelist, who draws almost as many laughs as the caustic, agnostic comedian.

“He wasn’t judgmental in any way. He referred and deferred to God’s judgment, not his own. And he didn’t claim to know in advance what that judgment was,” Harding said. “He was ecumenical in the good sense of the word – accepting of a wide range of faiths.”

That also provoked abiding criticism, Wacker said. Reinhold Niebuhr, then the nation’s most prominent theologian, called Graham simplistic, and evangelist Bob Jones denounced him as “doing more harm to the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man.”

But stories about Graham’s last years on the public stage became more like movie box-office coverage, with statistics on turnout and celebrities lauding the aging superstar of the pulpit.

A eulogy and an apology

Two more substantive stories: his eulogy for his wife, Ruth, in 2007, calling her “the finest Christian I ever met,” and his apology in 2002 for anti-Semitic remarks made in 1972 that were revealed when tapes from Richard Nixon’s office became public.

Graham was tarnished by his friendship with Nixon, Wacker said, and his “naive” support of the Vietnam War, or lack of awareness that his name gave someone legitimacy.

“He never got over the good fortune of being a Southern farm-boy-made-good, always acutely aware of his lack of advanced education. He has a certain kind of wide-eyed innocence as he reached out in amazement to all those people who flocked with him,” Wacker said. “He enacted America’s idealized self. He’s modeling the kind of person people wish they were.”

Now, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has gathered tens of thousands of birthday greetings, chiefly stories of lives changed by God. Later this month, son Franklin Graham will present them at a dinner with family and friends.