Billy Graham

In the autumn of 1949, a thirty year old evangelist named Billy Graham was pitching a tent in Los Angeles for what organizers expected to be an ordinary three week revival. It ran eight weeks instead, drew national press coverage after newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst reportedly ordered his editors to promote it, and turned a relatively unknown Youth for Christ preacher into a household name almost overnight. Graham had no broadcasting operation, no radio program and no formal organization behind him. He had only a growing reputation and, increasingly, an audience larger than any tent could hold.

The turning point came the following summer at a crusade in Portland, Oregon. Graham had been approached about starting a national radio program to carry his preaching beyond whatever city he happened to be visiting, and by his own later account he set what he expected to be an impossible bar: he would commit to the project if listeners pledged twenty five thousand dollars in a single night. The money came in almost exactly as asked, roughly twenty four thousand dollars collected during the service itself and two more five hundred dollar gifts delivered to his hotel room before midnight.

There was, at that point, no legal entity to receive the money at all. Graham's business manager, George Wilson, filed incorporation papers within weeks, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association came into existence on September 15, 1950, built quite literally to hold funds that already existed for a radio program that had not yet gone on the air. Hour of Decision followed within two months, and the association Wilson incorporated to receive one night's pledges grew into the organizational backbone of six decades of crusades, publishing and broadcasting.

Billy Graham was ordained a Southern Baptist minister, but almost everything he built after 1950 was designed deliberately not to look like a denominational ministry. His crusades were organized with local committees that spanned Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Pentecostal congregations working together, a cooperative model that departed sharply from the revivalism of earlier generations of American evangelists, whose campaigns were more often tied to a single church or movement. Hour of Decision, Christianity Today and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's later television and film work were all built to reach across those same denominational lines rather than to build up his own.

Over 417 live crusades between 1947 and 2005, Graham preached across more than 185 countries and territories, including a twelve week campaign in London and a sixteen week run at Madison Square Garden in 1957 that drew an estimated 2.3 million people in person. His own organization counts at least 210 million people reached live over that span, a figure it reports about its own founder rather than an independently audited count, and describes his lifetime broadcast audience, radio, television and film combined, as likely running into the billions once decades of syndication and rebroadcast are counted.

He advised or met with every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, wrote more than thirty books, and remained, by most public measures of American religious life, one of the most recognized Christian figures in the country from the 1950s until his death in 2018 at age ninety nine. The broadcasting infrastructure he built to answer a single midnight deadline in Portland outlived him by only two years before its own final program went off the air.