Friday, April 25, 2025

Billy Graham

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Ticking clock in Charlotte: Billy Graham has already answered the 'who comes next' question

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Journalists and religion scholars started talking – seriously – about the retirement of the Rev. Billy Graham back in the mid-1980s.

I remember that when the evangelist's 1987 Rocky Mountain Crusade was announced, people were already preparing lists of where he could go "for the last time" to do full-scale crusades before semi-retirement. It wasn't a long list.

In the 1990s, a news hook for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was its efforts to extend the reach of crusades by using satellite signals to other locations – multi-site events. That way, more people could hear Graham preach live, in real time, since he was really starting to limit the number of boots-on-the-ground events.

Of course, people were already asking the question: "Who is the next Billy Graham?"

Some of the nominees on those early lists are now approaching retirement.

I bring this up because of an interesting piece that ran the other day in The Charlotte Observer that, I imagine, gives us a hint of what that newspaper is planning for its memorial edition for the pulpit legend, who is currently 98 years old.

How many pages will there be in that special edition? How many new and pre-written stories will they run on the day after his death? Can you imagine receiving this assignment from your editor: Sum up the life of Billy Graham in one story. You have about 2,000 words. (Actually, I can imagine that. I already know that I will have 750 words, because that's the assigned length for my syndicated "On Religion" columns.)

You can see hints of what is to come in the current Observer feature's overture:

Who will be the next Billy Graham?
The Charlotte-born Graham is now 98, lives quietly in his mountain home in Montreat, N.C., and hasn't preached to a packed-stadium crusade in 12 years.


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New York Times offers lots of whispers (hint, hint) about Pence's patient waiting game

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Sooooooo ... Did anyone read the OTHER big mainstream news feature involving the vice president?

There was, of course, that tsunami of digital ink about Mike and Karen Pence and their attempts to follow the marital example of Billy Graham rather than Bill Clinton. But there was also a long New York Times feature the other day about the vice president that ran with this calm, friendly headline: "Amid White House Tumult, Pence Offers Trump a Steady Hand."

GetReligion readers can read this report in one of two ways.

First of all, it does contain obvious references to the rather striking differences – at the level of personal style and, by implication, faith and character – between President Donald Trump and his squeaky clean evangelical vice president. This led to some nice turns of phrase, such as Pence being a "Hill-wise former Indiana congressman who is typically a palliative presence in an administration of piranhas." Hold that thought.

At the same time, you can read this story as a kind of Game of Thrones parable. Note, for example, that the Times team may have broken some kind of journalism record for the number of off-the-record sources used in an article about a vice president. This is one of those stories that delights inside the Beltway politicos, forcing them to grab a high-lighter pen and play the old "name that White House aide" game.

Read this way, Pence is seen as a kind of quiet, wise Washington pro who is waiting for the other Trump shoe to drop. Thus, the Times notes that "Mr. Pence’s dad-in-the-Norman Rockwell-painting demeanor masks a shrewd political intelligence." In the current White House, Pence is "jarringly out of place, a clean-cut 1950s Republican cheerfully navigating the chaotic 'Mad Max' landscape."

The implication, of course (one senses the presence of Democrats starting research for attacks on a Pence presidency) is that Pence has been muddied just by agreeing to play ball with Trump in the first place.

This is where the religion angle starts to show up.

That’s the challenge he’s faced since accepting the job of Mr. Trump’s straight-man running mate last summer. Many Pence advisers, including his wife, Karen, were wary of the offer.


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Regarding Trump, Ike, Billy and that handy journalistic planning device called the 'tickler'

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Regarding Trump, Ike, Billy and that handy journalistic planning device called the 'tickler'

From the invaluable Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Tickler noun

1: a person or device that tickles.

2: a device for jogging the memory; specifically: a file that serves as a reminder and is arranged to bring matters to timely attention.

Most scribes employ No. 2 to some extent, whether with old-style manila folders or in electronic form. Attention to the calendar paid off with a Feb. 19 feature by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s well-respected Peter Smith on the 50th anniversary of the local “Duquesne Weekend,” which inaugurated the Catholic Charismatic movement.

Further examples:

Political reporters’ datebooks will mark the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s presidency, or perhaps the July 20 half-year point, as useful points to assess the new administration. Another peg comes June 14 when history’s oldest president turns 71 (while refusing to provide full medical data, as with his tax returns).

Religion beat specialists could use those same calendar pegs to examine pro and con reactions to how the new president is handling questions of keen religious interest, overtures to this or that religious faction, or whether he ever attends church services, if so where, and if not why. Or this: Is the liberal Christian Century correct that Trump has obliterated the “civil religion” preached by prior presidents?

Speaking of presidents, ticklers will list the National Prayer Breakfast the first Thursday of each February. The 2017 version roused great expectations after a religiously and morally bizarre campaign, and President Trump’s first outing did not disappoint. He recalled childhood “in a churched home,” suggested prayer might help Arnold Schwarzenegger achieve his own “tremendous success” on TV, and remarked “the hell with it” during a fond mention of the Senate chaplain.


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Better late than never: New York Times gets around to running a Cliff Barrows obituary

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Through the decades, I have been assigned many different tasks as a journalist – but I have never had to write a full-scale obituary. Thus, I admit that I don't know how long it takes to write one of those features.

Oh, I've written plenty of columns about religious leaders who have died, columns that served as features or sidebars adding (I hoped) interesting details to the coverage that newsrooms were providing in traditional obits. But I have never written one of those long, detailed obituaries that attempts to provide an overview of a public figure's life.

Of course, the more important the public figure – at least in the eyes of journalists – the earlier editors will assign an obit specialist or feature writer to put some basic material on file, "just in case." I am sure that elite American newsrooms already have large packages of features ready on Caitlyn Jenner and the Kardashian crew.

So what does it mean when a newspaper of record – that would be The New York Times – produces its own obituary about someone's life almost two weeks after the person died and obits ran in other publications? In other words, what is the statute of limitations on an obituary? Better late than never?

Quite a ways back – Nov. 16, to be precise – I ran a post focusing on the obituaries for the Rev. Cliff Barrows, the musical director for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association who was also one of the famous evangelist's closest friends and advisors. The local paper on this story, The Charlotte Observer, tried to show the behind-the-scenes role that Barrows played in Graham's life and work. In other words, there was much more to this story than a man directing giant choirs at evangelistic crusades. The Associated Press obit? No need to go there.

I noticed, at the time, that The New York Times ran the AP story on its website. This did not surprise me. I would imagine that the life and work this Graham associate was not on the radar of many editors in that newsroom.

Later – as in Nov. 25 later – the Times ran its own Barrows obit. Why the delay? Did someone simply forget to do one? Did it take that long to get an in-depth feature done?


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God help us: How will our digital supermen define what is and what is not 'fake news'?

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God help us: How will our digital supermen define what is and what is not 'fake news'?

We have two important journalism subjects – both linked to religious issues – that are currently generating lots of heat in the "America after 11/8 cultural meltdown" among America's chattering classes.

No. 1: What is "fake news" and how can it be stopped before it generates more help for Donald Trump?

No. 2: What, precisely, does the term "alt-right" mean and how can the enlightened powers that be in digital technology and mass media (think the gods at Twitter and Facebook) crack down on it to prevent dangerous people from continuing to pump their views into the body politic.

Of course, for some experts, "fake news" (they aren't talking about Rolling Stone) and the alt-right overlap quite a bit. There are times that truly nasty stuff in the alt-right filter up into the mainstream through websites that may not be alt-right themselves, but they run lots and lots of paranoid fake news.

Now, before we get to the religion angles of all of this fake news stuff – the subject of this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to tun that in) – let's face another blunt reality: How people define the terms "alt-right" and "fake news" often tell you as much about their beliefs and convictions as it does the folks who genuinely deserve to be covered with those nasty labels.

So what does "alt-right" mean? Let's ask the online version of an Oxford dictionary:

alt-right
(in the US) an ideological grouping associated with extreme conservative or reactionary viewpoints, characterized by a rejection of mainstream politics and by the use of online media to disseminate deliberately controversial content:


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Memory eternal, Cliff Barrows: A strategic voice inside the Billy Graham team

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Back in the mid 1980s, people were already starting to talk about the Rev. Billy Graham doing his "final crusades." Thus, when the Graham team came to town for the Rocky Mountain Crusade in 1987, that event was hailed as the great evangelist's last major event in Denver and the press handled it that way.

I was at the Rocky Mountain News (RIP) at the time and flew back to Charlotte, where I had worked for the Charlotte News and the Charlotte Observer, and then drove up into the mountains to spend most of a day interviewing Graham. I was planning on writing a magazine piece on Graham's marriage to the brilliant, and very independent, Ruth Bell Graham – so we talked quite a bit about issues linked to marriage and family.

In that context, Graham made an interesting comment about the core team that built the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and made the strategic decisions that set its course.

For some reason, he said, writers keep underestimating the role played by music director Cliff Barrows. The youngest member of the team was much more than the man who directed stadium-sized choirs and served as emcee for Graham events of all kinds. What they didn't understand was how important his voice was in private, offering counsel and advice at strategic moments, stressed Graham.

Now Barrows is gone, at age 93. Sure enough, the Associated Press obituary for Barrows – at least the one I am seeing online – is 126 words long and it seems even shorter than that. The basics are there, barely.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Cliff Barrows, the long-time music and program director for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has died after a brief illness. He was 93. ...
The two men met in 1945 while Barrows was on his honeymoon, and together they went on to form the association. Barrows traveled the world with Graham since his first crusade in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1947. Barrows also hosted the weekly Hour of Decision radio program for more than 60 years.

As you would expect, the tribute in The Charlotte Observer is much, much longer and captures more of this man's role in the Graham organization, even if key links are not made explicit.


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Working-class folks: What Bill Clinton knew, and Hillary Rodham failed to learn

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If you have followed Bill Clinton's career closely through the decades, as I have, then you know that at one point Southern and Midwestern Democrats thought that he was the future of the party, a centrist who could understand the concerns of working-class Democrats and even his party's moral conservatives.

After all, in Arkansas he was even willing to compromise and seek some kind of centrist position on abortion. Few remember that, over in Tennessee, the young Sen. Al Gore at one time had an 80-plus percent positive rating from National Right to Life.

But there always was a nagging problem, even before Bill Clinton's libido jumped into the national headlines. Her name was Hillary Rodham Clinton and it was pretty clear that she was 1960s Wellesley College right down to the core (even with her complex Chicago roots).

So when it came to issues of class, culture and (early on) even morality, there was Bill Clinton and then there was Hillary Rodham Clinton. This leads us to a news feature in the Washington Post that had to catch the eye of long-time Clinton watchers: "The Clintons were undone by the middle-American voters they once knew so well."

The byline was just as important – David Maraniss. We're talking about the veteran reporter who wrote "First In His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton."

Surely Maraniss would see the cultural, moral and religious ghosts in much of the coverage of Hillary's great defeat? That would be yes, yes and no. Here's the overture:

Few Americans knew the voters who rejected Hillary Clinton better than her husband. He lived among them growing up, and then studied them with a fanatical intensity during his political rise.
But now, with any notion of a dynasty dead and gone, one explanation for the stunning political demise of the Clintons might be the extent to which they moved away from a middle-American sensibility into the realm of the coastal elite, from McDonald’s to veganism to put it in symbolic terms, making it harder for Hillary to bridge the nation’s yawning social divide.


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The life of Howard E. Butt, Jr.: What do most readers think 'evangelist' really means?

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As many GetReligion readers may know, I grew up in Texas. One of the unfortunate side effects of my heritage is that I know more than my share of jokes about the family that built all of those H-E-B grocery stores that are a part of Lone Star state culture.

Yes, the patriarch of the family was named Howard E. Butt.

Butt was quite a man and, no matter what you may have heard, his daughters had perfectly normal names – like Mary Elizabeth. The Butt family was known for many positive things, including the fact that under his leadership the H-E-B chain gave as much money to charities, year after year, as federal law would allow it to give.

This brings us to the second generation, led by Howard E. Butt, Jr., who died the other day. The Religion News Service obituary for this well known Texan opened like this:

(RNS) Howard E. Butt Jr., the Texas evangelist and radio personality who was expected to take over his family’s successful grocery business but instead devoted his life to Christian causes, has died. … He was 89.
Butt was the former head of the H.E. Butt Foundation, which takes as its mission “the renewal of the Church,” and runs retreat programs and a Christian camp for children. He was perhaps best known, though, as the fatherly voice of one-minute radio spots, called “The High Calling of Our Daily Work,” in which he gently preached that people should make Christianity the cornerstone of their life’s work.

Once again, we are dealing with a very strange use of the much-abused word “evangelist,” a topic that has been written about more than once here at GetReligion.

The bottom line: There is no question that Butt was, like his father, an “evangelical.” But was he an “evangelist”? Does that word help readers understand this man's life work?

Be honest. When you read the word “evangelist,” what images appear in your mind? For some, they think of images like the movie clip at the top of this post As I wrote nearly a decade ago, concerning this term:


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