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Son of a preacher man

By By Louise Branson

Franklin Graham paces behind an open-air stage looking every inch an aging rock star - leather jacket, tight black Levi's, cowboy boots, slicked hair. In this outdoor arena, the ecstatic screams of teenage girls fill the night as his warm-up act, heartthrob Christian rock star Michael W. Smith, sings of the death of Columbine High School student Cassie Bernall.

As the strains of the poignant ballad fade, Franklin - as he is called by everyone - bounds to center stage.

Giant screens flash his image, magnified to superstar proportions, into the still night, visible for miles around against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains. For the older members of the multigenerational audience, the feeling is surely one of deja vu: Franklin, 48, is the image of his father, Billy Graham, the world's most famous preacher, when he was younger. Same tall build, same jutting chin and piercing eyes.

Spotlights following the son catch tears glinting in his eyes. Is he thinking, perhaps, of what Smith told him, high-fiving and back-slapping before the show? "This, man, is going to be a special festival. This is your hometown, man."

Indeed, it is: the Kidd Brewer football stadium in Boone, North Carolina, at Appalachian State University, the campus where Franklin barely managed to earn a business degree. Boone is where he has a home and runs a worldwide charity organization.

He is for the first time bringing to his hometown one of his "festivals," an updated version of Billy Graham's famous evangelistic "crusades," which used to go from town to town like a Barnum & Bailey Circus in an era before TV's ascendance.

Franklin the preacher, though, is not Billy Graham. At least not in style. There is none of his father's trademark pantherlike prowling or physical domination of the stage. The son is low-key, restrained. He has relied on Smith to prepare the audience's emotions with his song about Bernall, who was initially reported to have been killed after telling her teenage assailants that she believed in God. Video footage had earlier been flashed on the screens of Bernall talking, two months before her April 1999 death, of her efforts to "live for Christ."

"I had the privilege of being with Michael at Columbine when they held the memorial service," Franklin tells the hushed crowd, which organizers estimate at more than 11,000. He describes, in his Jimmy Carter-like accent, the great impact of the grieving Columbine parents he met and of the huge memorial service in a parking lot. Thirteen people died when two students opened fire at the Littleton, Colorado, high school.

"Friends," he warns apocalyptically, "we've got just a little window here on earth. We're here like a vapor and we're gone, and the question tonight I want to ask is: What are the obstacles that are keeping you from God's presence?"

Everyone knows what's coming. It's the key moment in every evangelist revival meeting: an invitation to the audience to come forward and publicly turn their lives over to Jesus. To be "born again." To have God, as Franklin puts it, erase the files of everything that has gone before. And that, he assures them, is what will happen.

"We're all going to die," Franklin solemnly tells the crowd, adding that even he is going to die. Being born again tonight will ensure delivery to heaven, he says.

Slowly, surely, they begin to come forward. Men, women, children. Hundreds of them, making their way toward the stage to give their lives over to Jesus. Franklin's festival, just like his father's crusades, is reeling them in. And not just this one. Since 1990, he has held more than 50 festivals in the United States and around half that many in countries from Australia to Britain.

As in the priestly dynasties of old, Franklin Graham is preparing to take over from his father and become the Billy Graham of his generation. For the past five years, he has been his father's designated successor to head the vast Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, based in Minneapolis. One of America's biggest Christian organizations, it counts millions of active donors and a budget of well over $100 million a year. It also produces Hour of Decision, a radio show heard on 600 stations, as well as TV shows and movies. Franklin plans to merge it with his own charity, Samaritan's Purse.

More will be involved, though, than the practical running of a growing religious empire. The association is founded on the Billy Graham name and charisma. Franklin plans to stamp it with his own personality and brand of preaching and, as he puts it, to "take it to a new level."

Can he really succeed his father as one of the most powerful moral and religious voices in America and the world as well as an intimate of presidents, leaders, and celebrities? Billy Graham's reputation around the world is, after all, largely based on the phenomenon of a Southern farm-boy-turned-preacher befriending and counseling every American president since Harry Truman. Being Queen Elizabeth II's guest at Buckingham Palace. Persuading hard-line communist leaders in places like China, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union to let him preach in their countries. Hobnobbing with Johnny Cash. And so many others.

Billy Graham insists it was all God's doing. Franklin says that God, having called the father, is now calling the son.

Watching Franklin, preaching with confidence and surrounded by people who seem to imbue him with almost cult-figure status, that seems unquestionable. Franklin already has the attention of the high and mighty. A close friend of the extended Bush family, Franklin delivered the invocation at George W. Bush's inauguration as president last month after his 82-year-old father was advised by his doctors not to accept the invitation. Franklin also gave the blessing at the Republican National Convention. And he attended some events at Bill Clinton's White House. It seems only a matter of time before he emerges into greater prominence as his father fades from the scene.

But the succession is not as straightforward as it may appear. Like an American Prince Charles, Franklin has waited in the wings to take over from a parent reluctant to let go. Indeed, as Billy Graham was released from three months' treatment at the Mayo Clinic in September for Parkinson's disease and other ailments, he was still declaring he should not be counted out of the preaching business. Not yet.

The words seemed to come from some deep well of feeling that somehow he had been counted out. And not for the first time. In a George magazine interview in 1995, Billy Graham and his wife were asked about the succession. Ruth Graham, who has long pushed for her elder son to take over, turned to her husband and asked in a prompting way: "Who is going to take your place?"

"No one takes my place," he replied.

Franklin is taking this in stride, at least publicly. He does not want to press his father. The aging Billy Graham should, he says in an interview, "have whatever comfort zone he needs," and besides, the succession "is not something Daddy likes to talk about."

All adding to the impression that though Billy and Franklin have often compared their relationship to the biblical story of the prodigal son, it bears all the hallmarks of a classic father-son power struggle.

The middle-aged Franklin has come a long way from his early rebel days. The fourth of five children - and the first boy - he grew up bristling with resentment at his father's fame and long absences from home on preaching missions. And at "always being introduced as Billy Graham's son."

"I was a born and bred Southern boy," he says of his rural upbringing in a log cabin near Asheville, North Carolina. He was raised largely by Ruth, a strong and devout woman, the daughter of former missionaries to China, and by three older sisters whom he admits he pestered relentlessly.

He describes an early Huckleberry Finn sort of existence. He loved the outdoors, hated studying, and rebelled when he could. His parents sent him as a teenager to a Christian boarding school on New York's Long Island in an effort to instill some discipline. But he broke the rules - he particularly delighted in sneaking off to smoke cigarettes - and insisted he would never, ever, be a preacher like the man he still calls Daddy.

One is tempted to psychologize, to see his behavior as that of a boy craving the attention of the man who was too busy saving the world or conferring with world leaders and Hollywood celebrities, who was gone from home for months at a time in an era when travel was slow. It was his mother who stayed home, the single parent taking care of the family.

"It may sound trite, but it's true," he says. "Without my mother's faithful, dependable, strong presence on the home front, my father's worldwide preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ to millions might never have been possible."

In one telling scene in his 1995 autobiography, he describes his father taking him on an outing from his hated boarding school: "Daddy called me one day in the middle of the semester to say he was going to be in Washington that weekend at the invitation of President Lyndon Johnson. Daddy had asked if it would be OK to bring me with him, and the president had said yes.

"I wanted to spend time with Daddy," he complains, "but this was not my idea of weekend fun. . . . Now I would have to stay dressed up in a suit and tie and listen to grown-ups talk about things that didn't interest me in the least."

When he persuaded his parents to let him return home for his final year of high school, he was not completely tamed. He would taunt police by driving his car fast through town, convinced that they would not go after him because he was Billy Graham's son - though he got a shock when they finally did. He later got thrown out of LeTourneau College in Texas because he kept a date out overnight. Deep down, he says, he felt out of control - drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, chasing girls, and with no clear idea of what to do with his life.

A spiritual turning point came as he spent his 22d birthday in Switzerland attending a conference on evangelism with his parents, Franklin says in his book. His father took him on a long walk. "Your mother and I sense there is a struggle for the soul of your life," the father said. "You're going to have to accept Jesus Christ or reject him. We love you. Our home will always be open to you. But you have to decide. We pray that you'll make the right choice."

"Oh, yeah, Dad," Franklin replied. "Sure, you're right." He was furious. "I want to be away from him," he thought. "I don't want this conversation." But on a trip to Jerusalem soon after, he opened his Bible in his hotel room. His eye fell on I Corinthians 10:13: "God is faithful. He will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it."

It was his epiphany, Franklin writes. "What Daddy said about making a decision is exactly right," he thought and fell to his knees. "God, I've sinned against you and I'm sorry," he said. "I'll give you my life. But you'll have to make something clean out of it.

"I had no idea what God would do with my life."

It took another man, not his father, to provide the answer: Bob Pierce, the founder of World Vision, who went on to start Samaritan's Purse. The charity raised and delivered aid to dangerous, war-torn places like Lebanon. Pierce drew Franklin into the organization in 1976, asking him to take over after his death (he died three years later). Franklin was able to indulge the rebel adventurer in himself, doing such things as driving a Jeep from England to Lebanon, or dashing across disputed borders to bring help to the needy. Most important, he was doing good in a way that was not his father's.

Today, Samaritan's Purse helps out in major conflicts and disasters, including the Kosovo crisis in 1999, when it built a tent city in Macedonia to house fleeing refugees and then helped them fix up their homes as they returned. It is also famous for a Christmas project that delivers presents to needy children around the world.

After a fitful start, Franklin also began preaching. Unlike his father, he did not take to it at first. It was one of his father's associate evangelists, John Wesley White, who first asked Franklin to preach in 1983. Franklin refused. The stadium crusades converting people, he says, were for his father. His place was in the trenches, reaching out to the needy.

"But the man didn't give up," Franklin says in the interview, shaking his head. "I'd put down the phone after telling him no, and the next day he was asking me again. Finally I agreed, but it was several months away and I figured he'd forget."

White didn't. In 1983, Franklin took to the stage before a thousand people in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. He was nervous, ill at ease. His delivery, he says, was wrong. When he asked the crowd to come forward to accept God into their lives, they sat uncomfortably in their seats. Franklin felt humiliated.

"Don't you ever ask me to do this again," he raged at White. "I am not Billy Graham." But White kept after him. Franklin then spoke in Juneau, Alaska, in 1989 to an audience packed with drunks and prostitutes - the kind of people evangelists like to reach out to. Forty people came forward that night. White convinced Franklin that he should continue, giving 10 percent of his time to preaching.

Then, in June 1995, Billy Graham collapsed with a bleeding colon the night before he was scheduled to preach in Toronto. An aide called Franklin and asked him to take his father's place. By the time he arrived, the crusade's organizers had selected another evangelist. Franklin was crushed.

His reluctant father, who had refused until that point to discuss how his organization would fare after him, was spurred to name him his successor, despite resistance from many of the older men on the evangelistic association board who felt Franklin lacked maturity.

That decision, perhaps unintentionally, changed Franklin in an important way. He had finally won his father's approval. He was no longer the boy trying to please Daddy, he was the prince succeeding the king. It gave him the confidence to become like the man he vowed he would never be: his father.

"I cannot fit Daddy's shoes, nor would I wish to - we are different people," Franklin declares, picking up the theme that defines his life. It is the morning after the opening of his festival in Boone, an unpretentious town named after Daniel Boone, set high in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is a good two hours' drive southeast to the airport in Greensboro, North Carolina. Franklin is wearing a khaki shirt that brings out the startling green of his eyes beneath the black baseball cap with the logo of his beloved Indian brand motorcycles.

We are at the headquarters of his Samaritan's Purse, a sprawling wood-and-stone building on the outskirts of Boone that he built into a multimillion-dollar charity after Pierce died in 1979.

Daddy is everywhere in spirit: Photos of Billy Graham meeting with the rich and famous hang on the walls. But there are photos of other Grahams, too, together as a family and with celebrities: Franklin's wife, Jane Austin Graham, with Elizabeth Dole, for example. The suggestion is one of a family enterprise, with Billy as the founding father. As if forecasting the future, one photo shows, outlined against a halo of bright lights on a stage, three generations of Graham preachers: Billy, Franklin, and Franklin's son Will, 25, now training in a seminary.

If Billy's presence hovers, though, it is Franklin's adventurous spirit and personality that most stamp the place. Mounted moose heads hang on the walls of the light and airy offices, game bagged by Franklin or others. On the dining room wall is the skin of a bear that Franklin says he killed as it attacked him. Above the main entrance is a large framed photo of one of eight planes Franklin pilots. Yet more photos show Franklin in the refugee camps and ravaged cities and towns where his charity reaches.

It is Samaritan's Purse, without question, that has enabled Franklin to emerge from his father's shadow. He has, he says, as if used to underlining the fact for his critics, "never worked for Daddy." And, what's more, his charity is an even bigger and better-known organization than his father's in some countries, including Canada and England. Revenues - $118 million in 1999 - are similar.

Indeed, the business skills Franklin honed through running Samaritan's Purse could be crucial in keeping the Billy Graham Evangelical Association vibrant and growing. Franklin approaches his organization much as a hands-on CEO, keeping close control of people and budgets - essential for any business, religion included, that wants to grow. By contrast, Billy Graham, Franklin says, "has always avoided day-to-day details," tending to hope problems will just go away. "And I realize they won't just go away."

Franklin also employs people who are young and can-do; there is a cultural gap between his Samaritan's Purse and the evangelical association, where the people tend to be older and more conservative. It is an open secret that some there still resent his takeover, but Franklin believes he will be able to smooth over the dissension.

"There is an older group of people in my father's office, and you want to deal with them gently," he says. "My father still sees things through the Great Depression. He still remembers the sacrifices this country made in World War II. That's part of his life. No question his team has been molded through the circumstances of their lives. I see things from a little bit of a different perspective."

Friends and critics may sometimes have commented that Franklin does not have the same intellectual curiosity and depth as his father. But his personality and skills may be more suited to this changed, TV-and-Hollywood-dominated era. Just as Billy was the man of his time, Franklin may be the man of his.

In another contrast with his father, Franklin is not the distant, often-absent father and husband that Billy was. As if underlining that, his three grown sons and teenage daughter are all here for the festival, whooping it up in the next room as he talks, as if it were Christmas or Thanksgiving. One son is home from the US Military Academy at West Point, New York. "They are everything to me," Franklin says, grinning at the noise.

He gives his wife the most credit for keeping him grounded. "That could never happen," he laughs when it is suggested that he could succumb to the cult of personality that seems to surround him. "You can't believe your own publicity. If I started thinking this was me . . . I've got a wife who'll remind me from time to time."

"That's true," confirms Jane, a homemaker who conveys an air of solidity. She keeps their modest 150-year-old farmhouse off-limits to outsiders to preserve the family's privacy. "When people meet me," she says, "they get a bit of a shock - I'm not glamorous as they expect." Still, she acknowledges that it is nearly impossible for any of the Grahams to be anonymous, much as they may try. "People treat us normally and help us blend in," she says. "But there are times, too, when we can't forget."

America, since its founding, has always had a preeminent preacher playing the unofficial role of national evangelist. Billy Graham has filled that position for the past 50 years.

Keith J. Hardman, professor of philosophy and religion at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, is a leading expert on Christianity in America. "Christians have seemed to have room for just one person, one major star, in their countenance," he says. He cites such dominant preachers as Jonathan Edwards in Colonial times or Charles Finney in the 19th century.

"As you study this phenomenon over the centuries," he says, "you find there have been a lot of very competent people who have been runners-up and who would probably have been very prominent had it not been for the major star."

So what about Franklin? Hardman was among several experts polled in a New York Times survey in January 1999 that identified Franklin Graham as one of five most likely successors to this unofficial role. The other four evangelists were Argentina-born Luis Palau, whose ministry is based in Portland, Oregon; Franklin's sister Anne Graham Lotz, founder of the AnGel Ministries; Greg Laurie, pastor of the Harvest Christian Fellowship in Riverside, California; and Bishop T. D. Jakes, whose ministry is in Dallas.

"Franklin is not necessarily more competent," says Hardman. "They are all good people, very capable, competent people." His personal pick, should Franklin not achieve pre-eminence, is Luis Palau, who has also held festivals in different parts of the world. Franklin, though, has a major advantage with his name and his position as his father's successor at the head of the evangelical association. "Obviously," says Hardman, "there's loads of PR value in [the Graham] name."

The early 21st century poses another challenge to any person hoping to fill this unofficial, popelike role. National receptiveness has been damaged in an age of self-help gurus, motivational speakers, mega-churches, and TV preachers. It was also dented when the religious right dominated the Republican Party in the 1980s, politicizing religion and alienating many, particularly women, with its antiabortion stance. The reputation of Christian evangelists and revivalists was also set back by the financial and sexual scandals of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart.

Franklin clearly understands this. He has a politician's instincts for keeping himself, and appearances, scrupulously clean. A zealous bookkeeper, he pays himself a reported salary of around $150,000 annually. He says he always has his eye on the bottom line and allows no more than 13 percent of his budget to go to operating costs. If donation revenues fall, he says, he will cut staff rather than allow the percentage to rise above 25 percent.

He defends his use of private planes as a way to get around and back to his family quickly. "I don't play golf or tennis, and I don't belong to any country clubs or go for massages," he says. And should anyone think he is reckless flying planes, he points out that twice a year he updates his piloting skills.

He also, like his father, refuses to take political sides, though his heart is clearly with the Republicans. With his friend George W. Bush now president, he seems poised to become, as his father, a regular presence at the White House. "It's not a role that I seek or that is a goal or a wish of mine," he says, in words that echo what he once said of preaching. "But if they asked me for advice, I would certainly want to give it."

Expect him, in other words, to be high on the 2001 guest list for the Lincoln Bedroom.