The once and future Billy Graham
By RAY WADDLE

The new Billy Graham statue in downtown Nashville, shadowing the Southern Baptists’ national offices, inspires emotion, affection and occasional grumbling that the rock-solid rendering is a form of idol-worship.

To me, the statue testifies to a world-altering preacher who remarkably never fell prey to moral or financial shenanigans.

But it triggers a question: which Billy Graham are Baptists honoring – strident young lion or mellow lion in winter?

Now 88 and in ailing retirement, Graham has been America’s leading evangelist nearly 60 years. The statue harkens back to the Graham of decades ago – the vigorous young preacher from Cold War days, when Protestants were in charge and Graham was unofficial chaplain to the (usually Republican) White House.

In the 1960s and 70s, his fiery TV crusades urged born-again salvation and fear of hell. He made every non-Baptist kid in America momentarily doubt his own brand of belief. Real Christianity seemed to mean embracing those mournful hymns and endless altar calls, a 19th-century Protestant style that Graham borrowed and perfected. Waves of new evangelists adopted the formula, pressing audiences to make a decision for Christ this very minute, lest they die tomorrow and lose their eternal soul.

Then something happened. Graham got older. And he cooled down. He never slackened his theme of Jesus, but the temperature of his hawkish passions subsided. In the 1980s he soured on the arms race. He visited the Soviet Union and came home speaking of the spiritual hunger he found there. This of course disappointed all the cold warriors who wanted him to condemn Russian oppression in the usual way.

He withdrew from political food fights, the source of so much pompous religious boasting now. Instead he underscored the love of God and the rewards of Christ. He failed even to condemn the liberals in his own denomination when an epic power struggle in the Southern Baptist Convention preoccupied churches into the 1990s. Some brethren preachers condescendingly assumed he had gone soft in old age, never imagining that the serenely graying Graham might be growing into new biblical wisdom, a forgiving patriarch in the spirit of Ecclesiastes.

Talking to Newsweek last summer, Graham reaffirmed the authority of the Bible but said scripture is open to interpretation. He stressed Jesus is still the way but refused to condemn non-Christians: “Those are decisions only the Lord will make. … I spend more time on the love of God than I used to.”

When people stroll past the downtown statue in future days, what will they see? I see Billy Graham: the world’s most far-reaching evangelist, scripture’s unwavering evangelical ambassador. Also a sweet-tempered man, humble enough to allow age to season his reading of truth and his hope of heaven.

(Columnist Ray Waddle, a former Tennessean staffer, can be reached at ray@raywaddle.com.)