Billy Graham His Life and Influence

In Billy Graham: His Life and Influence, David Aikman gives a detailed account of the life of the world's most well-known, and perhaps influential, evangelist. We might expect a biographer to be biased in favor of his subject, but not so here. Though Aikman greatly admires Graham, his book is surprisingly balanced.

In chapter one, Aikman tells us that Graham's "manifest weakness" was that he "went out of his way to avoid offending people," and he uses much of the remainder of the book to convince us of that. To his credit, Graham is a supporter of civil rights, and he was a friend of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But according to Aikman, his early stand on segregation depended upon which part of the country he was in. While his evangelistic crusades were integrated in the North, crusades in the South were conspicuously segregated. "We follow existing social customs in whatever part of the country in which we minister," Graham once stated. When asked why he refused to speak out on the issue of segregation, he said that "Communists were behind most of the civil rights agitation in the United States." Read the rest HERE