His greatest legacy may be one that will be impossible to measure, in the tens of thousands of itinerant evangelists that his organization trained. I don’t think any single person will be the next Billy Graham, in part because evangelical Christianity has become, in significant measure because of what Graham did, so large and diverse and multi-faceted that no one person can dominate it, regardless of talent or dedication. It’s just not going to happen.

The 20th century’s most influential evangelist, Billy Graham, died on the morning of February 21, 2018, at his home in Montreat, North Carolina. He was 99 years old.

William Martin is the author of the best narrative biography of Billy Graham, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story (William Morrow, 1991), written at Billy Graham’s request, with unprecedented access, but with the promise of complete academic freedom.

In March it will be reissued by Zondervan with four new chapters, bringing Billy Graham’s life up to the present, along with with information about the ministries of his children.

Martin currently serves as the senior fellow for religion and public Policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute, which interviewed him about Billy Graham’s life and legacy.

The following is adapted from the transcript of that interview (with some additions) and posted with permission.

Why was Billy Graham so widely known and admired?

Graham, of course, achieved a great deal more than most people ever think about achieving in a lifetime. He was probably the dominant religious leader of his era; no more than one or two popes, perhaps one or two other people, could come close to what he achieved.

He was the key leader and the major spokesman of the evangelical movement during the last half of the 20th century. That movement has become one of the strongest in all of world Christianity and world religion, and he played the major role, though not the only important role, in that.

Through what means did Graham come to exercise this level of influence?

1. Crusades

He did it by his crusades, held all over the world in more than 80 countries; he preached in person to more than 80 million people and live over television to more than 200 million people. Just in itself, that was important in that it brought many people directly into Christian churches for the first time, and it plugged an even larger number back into their churches, into their Christian faith, on a much higher voltage line than they’d previously been connected to.

2. Conferences

He organized conferences that brought evangelical leaders from all over the world—people who thought they were pretty much alone—and brought them into a sense of being part of a great movement. These conferences also taught them and showed them how to cooperate with each other, so they could accomplish a great deal more.

3. Training Evangelists

Graham sponsored conferences in Amsterdam in 1983, 1986, and 2000, where his organization personally trained tens of thousands of evangelists in how to do the everyday nuts-and-bolts work of personal evangelism. And there were smaller versions of those conferences in other countries. Those are the people who will be Billy Graham’s true successors. I’ve often been asked, “Who’s going to be the next Billy Graham?” I think it’s not any one person, but these tens of thousands of preachers trained by his organization.

4. Media

Graham was one of the true pioneers in the use of radio and television, including satellite television, in ways that went beyond what we often think of as “television evangelists.” He was really quite creative in that. He founded Christianity Today magazine, which has become the flagship publication of evangelical Christianity.

5. Political

He was a friend and counselor to virtually all of the Presidents since Harry Truman, and, of course, it meant a lot to evangelicals to think, This is our man, and our man is welcome in the halls of power, not only in this country but in other countries as well.

6. Public Stature

He’s one of the best-known, most admired people in the world, showing up repeatedly on lists of “most admired” people in the country or the world.

You have described Graham as a statesman not only for evangelicalism and Christianity but for the United States. Can you explain?

Interestingly, he sought the association with Presidents assiduously during the late 1940s during Truman’s administration; that turned out not to be successful, an embarrassing episode that still embarrassed Billy Graham all his life. Truman thought he was a publicity seeker.

But Graham was much more successful in his association with Dwight Eisenhower and became a friend, a confidante, a golfing partner, and that’s where he met Richard Nixon . . . Throughout Eisenhower’s administration in the 1950s, when Graham would go to foreign countries to hold crusades, he would ask the White House if there were any messages that it would like for him to deliver. And he would often meet with heads of states in other countries, and when he came back he would debrief and say, “This is the situation as I see it, here are the things that would need to be understood and recognized.“

The Soviet Union and other Communist countries counted him as an enemy. They saw him as very much an anti-Communist and a spokesman of the United States, so he was barred from some places or resisted in some places because he was seen as an ambassador without portfolio.

Tell us a little bit about Graham’s complicated relationship with the Presidents and how it evolved throughout the years.

During the 1950s, Graham was certainly one of the two or three most famous religious people in the world. That was an advantage for him. It spoke well of evangelicals for their major spokesman to be walking in the halls of power in this country and in other places. And it didn’t hurt the President. For the President, whether it was Eisenhower or Johnson or Nixon or Reagan or Clinton or the Bushes, for the President to be a friend of Billy Graham’s meant that people could look and say, “That man must be a good man, perhaps even a Christian man; therefore, since he is a friend of Billy Graham’s, his policies must be good policies, perhaps even Christian policies.”

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