Joe Biden was being pressed to justify his habit of inappropriately (“uninvitedly?”) touching women. Characteristically, Biden both apologized and made jokes about the complaints. Ironically, roughly two years before the Biden story broke, the current vice-president, Mike Pence, was criticized for following what is often called “The Billy Graham Rule.” The rule, established early in the evangelist’s career and followed as a protocol by his whole team, most famously governed Graham’s behavior with women who were not members of his immediate family; in short, he refused to be alone with them—ever. It is unclear if Joe Biden ever wished he had followed Graham’s example. No matter. Our focus on Billy Graham and women, especially one woman.
After the Pence story broke, the media and the internet were rife with comments on “the rule,” some praising the practice, some condemning it as demeaning to women and to men. Law professors declared the practice to be illegal; comedians wove it into their monologues. Some Christian writers praised the rule as comforting to wives while other Christian writers declared the policy to be harmful. In addition to providing another opportunity to attack an already unpopular administration, the discussion inspired renewed interest in Billy Graham.
What did the world’s most famous preacher think about the role of Christian women? Ellen Ott Marshall quotes two articles from 1969 and 1970, respectively, in which Graham gave his opinion, an opinion crafted to answer the arguments of the increasingly vocal women’s movement. In Graham’s own Decision magazine he insisted the Bible teaches a woman’s “primary duty…is to be a homemaker.” The next year, in The Ladies’ Home Journal, he opined, “Wife, mother, homemaker—this is the appointed destiny of real womanhood.” This, although Graham insisted Jesus was the true source of women’s liberation.
No wonder Anne Graham Lotz felt her parents’ displeasure as she began her preaching/teaching ministry.
Yet, there were influences in Graham’s life, even in the earliest days of his career, that may have eventually, though unintentionally, produced a broader vision for women in ministry.
From 1947 to 1952, Graham served as president of Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis. Founded in 1902 by William Bell Riley as a safe enclave to train young ministers where they would be shielded from the ravages of liberalism, the school, by 1947, functioned as a Bible school, liberal arts college, and seminary. In its earliest decades, female graduates often became missionaries, evangelists, and pastors both abroad and in the United States. By 1930, however, voices within the school’s administration and faculty began questioning the propriety of preparing women for public ministry. In September 1931, professor C. W. Foley wrote in The Pilot, the school’s widely-circulated magazine: “It is a plain as anything could possibly be, that a woman is not to take the oversight of a church, or publically preach or teach in the man’s appointed place.” Foley based his argument, in part, on the claim that a woman in public ministry was “inconsistent with the subordinate position God had assigned her.” By 1935, Riley seems to have concurred in denying women a place in public ministry. This shift reflects the pattern reported on elsewhere in this study.
Though Foley and Riley denied women a place in public ministry, what could not be denied was the evident success of Northwestern Schools’ female graduates who were serving as evangelists and pastors. Such women could be found in churches throughout the upper Midwest and as far away as China. Chief among them were Minnie S. Nelson, who served several pastorates where she was involved in “[r]esurrecting dead churches” and “uniting divided ones,” while still traveling and preaching; and the evangelistic team of preacher Alma Reiber and singer Irene Murray, who began ministering together in 1910 and were still working as “school-sponsored evangelists” as late as 1937.
In 1948, Minnie Nelson wrote an autobiographical sketch of her years in ministry. Her passion for service is evident; in addition to her work as a pastor she recalled, “My pulpit has often been the radio, street corners, country schoolhouses, taverns, jails, hospitals, and hundreds of homes.”
Trollinger focuses on Alma Reiber as an exemplar, not only of female graduates of Northwestern Schools, but of male graduates as well. “Alma Reiber,” he writes in his biography of Riley, “was a wonderful example of the graduates the Northwestern Bible School produced at its most successful. Northwestern inculcated Reiber and her comrades with a burning desire to serve as Christian warriors who would advance the cause of truth in an unfriendly world.” As president of Northwestern Schools, Graham doubtless heard of the accomplishments of women the school had sent to become pastors, evangelists, and missionaries. While that knowledge may not have been enough to cause Graham change his early opinions about women in public ministry, it may have become part of a “data bank” that could not be ignored in his later years.
Another incident, occurring just on the cusp of Graham’s rise to fame, also involved a woman, a woman who deserves to be better known among American evangelicals. Unfortunately, her role at a crucial time in Graham’s pilgrimage is sometime omitted or forgotten. Indeed, Graham biographer Walter Martin presents her simply as a rich woman who taught a large Sunday school class and had famous friends in Hollywood. Yet, when she died, Graham said he doubted if any woman other than his wife and his mother had had so much influence on him.
Henrietta Mears (1890-1963) was born in Fargo, North Dakota, into a prominent banking family. Financial reverses associated with the Panic of 1893 forced the family to resettle in Minneapolis where they again prospered.
Henrietta was converted at age seven and from that age continued to exhibit a depth of commitment unusual in a child. At age twelve she taught her first Sunday school class and continued teaching classes for most of her life. After receiving her degree from the University of Minnesota, where she studied chemistry, she taught high school and later became a principal.
In 1927, while teaching a girls’ class in William Bell Riley’s First Baptist Church (Minneapolis), she wondered if God might be calling her into full-time Christian ministry. Her class for eighteen year-old-girls had grown from five (who called themselves “The Snobs”) to over five hundred, an accomplishment sure to draw attention. At Riley’s suggestion, Henrietta and sister Margaret took a sabbatical that included a stay in California. The sisters visited Hollywood Presbyterian Church whose pastor Stewart P. MacLennan had met Henrietta in Minneapolis and had been impressed with her. He asked her to speak several times at the church. At his invitation, she agreed to become the education director at the church.
In 1928, she and Margaret moved to California. Within two years, Mears helped the Sunday school at Hollywood Presbyterian grow from a few hundred to over four thousand. Dissatisfied with the quality of Sunday school literature available—she believed it boring and ill-suited for children—she began writing her own. Her material was unique in that it was graded, specially prepared for different ages in the Sunday school. Many churches found the material useful and asked Mears for copies. As a consequence, in 1933, Mears and some business partners founded Gospel Light Press to meet the need for good quality, evangelical Sunday school literature.
Mears became convinced ministry to college students was crucial. She taught a popular class for these students who were often at critical junctures in their pilgrimages. In 1937 this conviction led her to found the Forest Home Conference Center where students could hear clear Bible teachings from some of the world’s best teachers and be challenged to a greater commitment to Christ. These conferences would continue for more than a quarter-century.
In 1948, Mears invited a rising young evangelist to be one of the speakers, Billy Graham. As president of Northwestern Schools, Graham was the youngest college president in the US; and as an evangelist for Youth for Christ, he had had great success in calling men and women to Christ. Unknown to Mears, he was also facing a spiritual crisis.
Graham’s good friend and fellow YFC evangelist Chuck Templeton had begun to have doubts about the reliability of the Bible and the relevance of the message both he and Graham had been preaching. Templeton had also been invited to Forest Home for the conference. With seventy-year’s hindsight, it’s clear the mountain retreat became a battleground: the prize was Billy’s heart.
There had been previous skirmishes. Templeton had once traveled to North Carolina to challenge Billy’s traditional faith. The impact of Templeton’s campaign on Graham was telling; in the first issue of Christianity Today (October 1956), he spoke of his struggle. He said the doubts had impacted his ability to preach with authority, and added, “Like hundreds of young seminary students, I was waging the intellectual battle of my life.” In his autobiography, Graham admitted he had determined that should the crisis go unresolved, he would leave the ministry and become a dairy farmer. Templeton, brilliant and charismatic, aimed to win Graham to his brand of urbane skepticism.
At the same time, Mears, along with British historian/evangelist J. Edwin Orr (another conference speaker), set out to assure Graham of the Bible’s trustworthiness. While Templeton taunted him, Mears and Orr prayed with him and for him. But both Mears and Orr were also able to discuss the scholarship Templeton found so attractive. Of Mears’s, Graham wrote, "She had faith in the integrity of the Scriptures and an understanding of Bible truth as well as modern scholarship. I was desperate for every insight she could give me."
Although, A. J. Appasamy stresses Orr’s involvement in helping Graham through the struggle, Graham focuses on Mears’s role. He speaks of having “times of prayer and private discussion with Miss Mears at her cottage.” Apparently, these were far from dispassionate discussions of modern theological options. Graham recalled, “I ached as if I were on the rack, with Miss Mears stretching me one way and Chuck Templeton stretching me the other.”
Of course, this struggle ended with the now-famous “stump prayer,” that moment when Graham resolved to preach the Bible as God’s Word, despite being unable to resolve all the questions he may have had. In time, Graham would describe Mears as "the great Christian educator and Bible teacher who had been so instrumental in my spiritual growth in Los Angeles." Billy Graham might have found his way through this period of doubt without Henrietta Mears’s help; that she was so instrumental earns her the gratitude of all who have benefited from Graham’s ministry.
Wendy Murray Zoba described Mears as “the ‘grandmother’ of modern evangelicalism.” I won’t quarrel with the accolade, though I understand if some might question why I would include Mears in this account. After all, she probably would have never accepted ordination and always believed herself teaching under the authority of the pastor—avoiding using the pulpit in most cases. Yet, even when she subordinated herself to the pastor, she believed she functioned as an equal, possessing a “strong sense of authority.” Vonette Bright, wife of Campus Crusade founder Bill Bright, in whose home Mears lived for several years, recalled, "[S]he could be impatient with a person who did not give her an opportunity to do what she had been called to do."
Jennifer Tait wrote, “Henrietta would never allow herself to be called a "preacher," though others attributed the title to her. She believed that preaching was a male role and preferred "Teacher," which became the loving nickname her friends and students called her.” This was a somewhat ironic stance for a woman bred in fundamentalism; after all didn’t Paul say, “I do not permit a woman to teach?” Obviously, she had found “wiggle” room, perhaps because she knew—deep in her heart—her beloved Paul would not have asked her to deny her obvious gift. But I digress.
I have spent so much time on this important woman because she was an important woman—in Billy Graham’s life. Knowing he was almost certainly aware of women like Alma Reiber and sensing his clear admiration for Henrietta Mears, we might have expected Graham to have held an advanced view of women as he emerged on the American scene. As we’ve seen, that wasn’t the case.
Ellen Marshall’s analysis of Graham’s viewpoint implies the evangelist failed to see its inherent contradictions. In short, Jesus liberates women but not to do what he frees men to do. She cites William Martin’s biography of Graham at length to illustrate.
Given his own marriage to a strong and capable woman, Graham had to admit that ‘in one sense, the husband and wife are co-equal in the home; but when it comes to the governmental arrangement of the family, the Bible…teaches that man is to be the head of the home…He is the king of the household, and you, his wife, are the queen.’ A proper queen, he said, would prepare the king’s favorite dishes, have the meals on time, make their home as attractive and comfortable as possible, and feel ‘it is her duty, responsibility, and privilege to remain at home with the children.’
This prompts Marshall to write:
I do truly believe that Graham values equality and freedom for all people and that he believes that Christianity ensures these things. And yet his argument for gender-prescribed vocations is deeply inconsistent with these core commitments. To put it simply, one cannot simultaneously affirm equality and freedom and prescribe vocation according to gender.
Regardless of gender, all people must have equal freedom to pursue their own sense of vocation, whether that is primarily in the home or not. Vocational discernment is not a matter of fulfilling a biblically prescribed duty but of prayerful consideration of one’s gifts, attentiveness to one’s calling, and accountability to one’s deepest commitments to self, to family, and to community. Vocational discernment is not a matter of adhering to rules. It is about crafting a life that is authentic and meaningful.
She is more succinct when she says, “Either we are all equal, with the same range of freedom, or we are not.” She further challenges what she sees as Graham’s insistence that women are made to be mothers (mothers who stay at home) and his persistent observation that world-changers tend to be sons (who have been shaped by godly, stay-at-home mothers) with no hint that daughters might be world-changers other than indirectly.
She further challenges Graham’s charge that any woman who does pursue a vocation outside the home is guilty of pride and rebellion. Instead, she suggests women who do not use their gifts to benefit a world wider than their household may, like the man in the parable, be guilty of burying her talents. She is, however, careful to avoid judging either the women who work outside the home or those who don’t.
Marshall doesn’t expend much effort in exploring changes in Graham’s opinions over nearly five decades. That is regrettable. During that half-century there was a movement toward a broader understanding of what God is about in the world. For instance, many in Graham’s denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, once believed “speaking in tongues” either to be demonic or an expression of mental illness. The libraries of some Baptist colleges catalogued books on Pentecostals under “cults.” Although such harsh judgments are seldom made today, key leaders believe the convention’s chief doctrinal statement presents “a de facto cessationist” position; that is, Baptists who claim to follow the statement are expected to teach that spiritual gifts such as tongues ceased at the end of the apostolic age. By 1987, Graham acknowledged God had “used the charismatic movement throughout the world to wake up a lot of communities”; at the same time, conceding many “godly people” have the gift of tongues, a gift they have found to be life-changing.
Graham vexed wife Ruth when he announced his new opposition to the death penalty, having concluded it was too often unjustly and wrongly applied—nothing suggests Ruth ever changed her mind. Though part of a denomination where many ministers still condemn using any form of alcohol, Graham insisted the Bible does not teach teetotalism and admitted taking an occasional drink of wine—at bedtime. Formerly known for his hawkish stance, the evangelist came to believe the arms race was detrimental to nations’ economies and ultimately made peace less likely. From seeing feminists as prideful rebels he came to acknowledge “women have been discriminated against.” And, while never abandoning the evangelistic imperative to call each man and woman to trust Christ, he became more supportive of a gospel with explicit social implications. He would eventually say of himself: “I am a man who is still in process.” Though he was speaking of his new appreciation of the “peace movement,” the description applies to other long-held views.
Including the issue of women’s ordination. Early in the 1970s Graham began to move toward a more supportive position on women in ministry. From 1975 to 1977, he had moved from uncertainty on the issue to saying, “I don’t object to it like some do because so many of the leaders of the early church were women. They prophesied. They taught.” Having grounded his still somewhat modest support on scripture, he then turned to the modern church to observe: “You go on the mission fields today and many of our missionaries are women who are preachers and teachers.”
Apparently, he even conceded women might one day be accepted in the role of pastors. William Martin outlines Graham’s position:
‘I think [women as pastors] is coming probably, and I think it will be accepted more and more. I know a lot of women who are far superior to men when it comes to ministering to others.’ Men might resist giving them full rights in the church, but such women ‘are ordained of God whether they had men to lay hands on them and give them a piece of paper or not. I think God called them.’
By the mid-1980s, Graham was allowing a few such women to lead prayer and take more visible roles in his crusades, thus “quietly [placing] his stamp of approval on women ministers.” Graham, who eschewed the term “inerrancy” because of its divisive nature, might not have called himself an “egalitarian” in the debates over women in ministry but his position was far from that of John R. Rice.
While Marshall’s essay on Graham’s view of women is helpful, she does not stress a very significant matter. Years ago, Billy Graham denied being a “fundamentalist.” Not everyone believed him. After all, he regarded the Bible as the Word of God; he believed Jesus was born of a virgin; he claimed Jesus had died for sinners and had risen again; he preached that Jesus was coming again; he insisted all need to repent and be born again. He sure sounded like a fundamentalist. But critics who made that charge missed two important points. Billy regularly acknowledged those who disagreed with him were still good Christians and, more significantly, he sometimes changed his mind. Not traits most fundamentalists exhibit.
