The Country-Grown Candide

By LANCE MORROW

BILLY GRAHAM: A PARABLE OF AMERICAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

by Marshall Frady; Little, Brown; 546 pages; $12.95

His predecessors belonged to a fiercer school of Gospel-booming sockdolagy: back-country camp-meeting divines, like Charles Finney, exhaling vivid damnations and, later, out of the '20s, Billy Sunday, in white spats and straw skimmer, ranting indictments of "hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, sponge-columned, mush-fisted, jelly-spined, four-flushing Christians."

In postwar America, Billy Graham delivered a somewhat mellower, suburban version of revivalist hellfire. "In the end," writes Biographer Marshall Frady, "it was somehow an oddly denatured variety of the harsh vinegars of frontier Calvinism --reconstituted into a kind of mild, mass-consumption commodity, a freeze-dried instant sanctity, a rather sensible and efficient salvation." Graham's ministry transcended the traditional churchly limits. The things of God and the things of Caesar became intermixed. Graham's soul seemed to resonate in exact sympathy with the politics, culture and morale of his constituency. He ascended to world celebrity, almost always on lists of the ten most admired men, a fixture of magazine covers and TV events, the pastor and golfing companion to Presidents. John Connally once pronounced him "the conscience of America." A Graham associate went farther: "Never having been sullied himself by defeat or tragedy, eternally optimistic and enthusiastic, Billy Graham is America."

Frady refines that conceit a bit and uses it as an underlying premise of his splendid biography: to many who have been ambushed by change, "Graham has become the only familiar American paragon left; the last hero of the old American righteousness." Through the racial convulsions of the late '50s and '60s, and then Viet Nam, writes Frady, "there finally began to hang over the country, worst of all, forebodings of some actual loss of our own native rectitude, of America's constitutional decency. Perhaps no one is finally so dear as he who returns and restores to us assurances of our goodness. And that was to become Graham's ultimate service as a prophet to Middle America through out the decades after the war."

Frady, son of a Southern Baptist preacher and author of a shrewdly vivid biography of George Wallace, approaches Graham with a complicated and sympathetic understanding. He also lavishes upon Billy an extravagantly garish prose style, a hot-wired Southern lushness of phrase and fluorescence of effect that would be insufferable were it not so accurate, so funny and, sometimes, so moving.

To the conventionally sophisticated over the years, Frady observes, Billy has never seemed "much more than a kind of marcelled Tupperware Isaiah," who, when he so energetically preached, resembled "some dandily appareled young department-store floorwalker caught in gales of epilepsy." The man who wore J.C. Penney suits as bright as Crayolas was a "country-grown Candide."

Yet Graham has seldom suffered from the usual suspicions of Gantryism and fraud. He has always possessed a bright, generous and translucent character that reminds Frady of Melville's Billy Budd. The child of hard-working North Carolina farm people, Billy grew up so alarm ingly full of energy that his parents once took him to a doctor to see if he was nor mal. He was: an intense, passionate normality has been one of the reasons for his astonishing success. As an adolescent, he went dusting wildly over North Carolina back roads in his father's Plymouth, necked with girls until his lips were chapped and, after high school graduation, struck out for South Carolina as a drummer of Fuller Brushes.

After the Florida Bible Institute, and a lifelong commitment to Christ that he made one night on the 18th green of the school's golf course, Graham knocked around as a Youth for Christ evangelist. In 1949 he went to Los Angeles, pitched his "Canvas Cathedral" and began the eight-week crusade that abruptly launched him, at 31 , toward his great spiritual celebrity. William Randolph Hearst, heartened by the anti-Communist messages that Billy packed into his sermons, sent his editors a memo: "Puff Graham." Hearst reporters descended on the Canvas Cathedral; before long, A.P., I.N.S., TIME, Newsweek, Quick and LIFE turned Graham into a national figure.

Graham's ministry, as his critics have emphasized, became utterly entangled with the powers of this earth. He was close to Richard Nixon for years, but at last grew retchingly ill when he read the transcripts of the White House tapes. After much puzzlement, he blamed Nixon's behavior on "sleeping pills and demons." Graham has always expressed a truculent love of authority, a desire for social discipline, for a certain orderliness that he seems to consider almost a necessity of the soul. He has been capable of aggressive anti-intellectualism. He displayed what Frady calls his "capacity to trivialize the awesome" when, after the My Lai massacre, he submitted: "We have all had our My Lais in one way or an other . . . with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act, or a selfish deed." His definitions of sin and evil have not always done justice to the subject; he tends to concentrate on the homely offenses of drink ing, gambling, lying and even nagging.

Yet Graham endures, a religious conglomerate and spiritual institution, be loved by millions, a man who in his worldwide crusades has been personally beheld by more people than anyone else in history. He has gone on, preaching to his multitudes the snares and sinfulness of the world and the glories of heaven to come. "Boy," he once said, "I sure hope they have a golf course up there!"

Lance Morrow

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