Simon Cox Blog: Here’s How America Is Praising Its Best-Known Preacher: Billy Graham

Wednesday, 21 February 2018

Here’s How America Is Praising Its Best-Known Preacher: Billy Graham

The late, great evangelist is garnering countless tributes after his death at 99.

The world hasn’t seen anyone quite like Billy Graham.

Americans remembered the significance and scope of Graham’s groundbreaking ministry in tributes and tweets for hours after his death Wednesday morning at age 99.

In addition to familiar nicknames like “America’s pastor,” leaders referred to Graham as the most influential evangelist in America, modern history, and the world. Both “Billy Graham” and “Evangelist the Rev” trended on Twitter.

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), called him “the most important evangelist since the Apostle Paul.”

“He preached Christ, not himself, not politics, not prosperity,” tweeted Moore.

The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (a Catholic) said it was “probably not too much to say that Billy Graham invented late-modern, globalized evangelicalism.”

An estimated 2.2 billion people heard Graham preach over his decades pioneering radio, television, and online evangelism, according to statistics by LifeWay’s Facts & Trends magazine. The ministry reports that 2.2 million people made decisions for Christ at Graham’s crusades.

“An epic era of evangelical history has come to an end. Billy Graham was not only a titanic figure in evangelicalism, but in world history and perhaps represents the last of a kind,” wrote Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

“He dominated 20th-century American evangelicalism and remained a major figure on the world stage throughout most of the 20th century in a way that we can envision no evangelical leader in our times.”

President Donald Trump echoed Mohler’s sentiments in a tweet ...