Irregular Books

There’s a small industry that exists just to make Billy Graham look good. I’m sure you think I’m exaggerating when I say that, but I’m not. Up in Minnesota, of all places, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association fills up an entire large office building, where cubicles full of employees work at a furious pace to pump out promotional literature, arrange for appearances, and design public relations materials for nationwide distribution. Billy Graham isn’t so much an individual any more. He’s a brand name for a very enterprising group of religious zealots.

The fact that donations to “Billy Graham” end up in large part supporting public relations efforts to make the man look good is one thing you won’t read about in book entitled “The Faith of Billy Graham”. You won’t read about Billy Graham’s faith in religion-as-business. You won’t find one word about self-promotion in the book because the entire publication is just another product of Billy Graham’s self-promotion machine. One of the basic principles of marketing religious enterprise is to never acknowledge the big money that’s rolling through the accounts.

The mass-production of “The Faith of Billy Graham” through the work of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and its affiliates is evident in the poor quality of the text. It doesn’t seem intended to be coherent as a whole. Rather, the book appears to be a compilation of material pasted together from here and there. The book jacket tells us that the theme that ties together the collection of materials is how “to deal with today’s growing tensions and frustrations.” That’s a broad topic that could include practically anything, and the book leaves it at that level, with a frustrating lack of organization and focus. Whatever topics Graham explores are only briefly dealt with. How anyone could seriously discuss “today’s growing tensions and frustrations” in just 127 short pages is beyond me.

Graham’s ideas as expressed in this book are familiar and predictable, a rehashing of standard Southern Baptist ideology. A fan of Graham would be better served by going over his old newspaper columns, which addressed the questions of Christian readers. An equivalent amount of depth is available in this book - an advice column for those who already follow a book that’s supposed to have all the answers.

“The Faith of Billy Graham” is described by some Christian insiders as a valuable, limited-edition hardcover, but it hasn’t lived up to its own hype. I picked up my copy from a dealer at a used book show for 25 cents. I know this dealer from my days in Memphis. He recognizes a valuable book when he sees one, and he charges high prices for it. “The Faith of Billy Graham” was in what he calls his “junk book box” along with other books that he considers to be more trouble to hold than to sell for pennies.

This book is written as homage to Billy Graham, for his followers who already think they know what Billy Graham thinks and do not need to be convinced to follow along with his perspective. For anyone else, there is a surprising lack of persuasive argument. As much as Billy Graham is celebrated as a skilled speaker, his words ring flat in this book.

A sure sign to readers that “The Faith of Billy Graham” will never rise above celebration and unreserved support for Graham’s religious preachings is that the introduction, by Cort Flint, fails to offer any real analysis of Graham’s words. A serious work would begin with an examination of the trends and themes that underlie the author’s words, but no such examination is found here. Instead, a literal-minded summary and some expressions of personal fondness is all that the reader is provided.

When confronted with a book that offers such an unrelentingly positive image of a public figure as “The Faith of Billy Graham” does, I take care to evaluate the book according to what it’s missing — the parts of the story that it intentionally omits, hoping that the reader won’t notice.

So, what’s left out of this book? What parts of the “The Faith of Billy Graham” does this book not tell the reader about?

It turns out that Billy Graham has a lot of faith in secrecy and deception. After decades of cover-up, the truth about Billy Graham’s less-than-compassionate attitudes came out. Audio tapes of Billy Graham and Richard Nixon discussing a conspiracy of Jews to ruin America have been released by the government. It seems that part of Billy Graham’s faith is to hate Jews and indulge in the conspiracy theories of paranoid politicians. Billy Graham has acknowledged that he made the comments. It is an historical fact that Reverend Graham has supported the kind of Jew-hating that has more of a place in neo-Nazi skinhead ideology than in a genuinely mainstream cultural movement.

Billy Graham’s faith in bigotry and anti-semitism? Now why isn’t that in this book? More importantly, why hasn’t Billy Graham told the public about these attitudes at all up until now?

You know why this book doesn’t include these details. “The Faith of Billy Graham” is a book compiled for the sole purpose of making Billy Graham look good. Anything unflattering about his personal history is left out. Anything that makes his religious judgments seem questionable is left out.

In “The Faith of Billy Graham” we have only partial truth. Is that the kind of resource we really need to develop ourselves spiritually?

If you want a one-sided piece of schlock that will offer a predictably rosy picture of religion and evangelism, “The Faith of Billy Graham” is for you. If you’re looking for something more sophisticated than the literary pretensions of Grit magazine, look elsewhere, oh spiritual seeker. This bitter, angry leader of corporate religion is not for you.