Integrity

On this date a year ago I summarized my own five years of professional relationship with Billy Graham, the eminent evangelist, for the purpose of illustrating my opinion on the most striking factor about him as I knew him.  That related to his spiritual integrity, illustrated in Scripture with the magnificent concept that Christians should follow the model of Christ for their lives.  He did that well, and emerged as the most admired (appreciated) of all persons in his field during his lifetime that held up long after his age and health closed down his activation.  For many years he emerged among the ten most admired persons in the World, often among the first three or four named.  I have worked with better administrators, better preachers, better insights, better educators, but none who were better in following Christ, as it appeared to public insight and reality.  This last may account for the fact that worthy persons (known to me) joined with him to provide an excellent organization; an attractive presentation; a well-funded Christian ministry with adequate sophistication and talent.  That context can be embellished faithfully for us and history.

On two occasions in my life I have bought copies of gossip magazines.  Both attracted my attention because of religion.  One of these occasions was the other day when I saw at the check-out counter a copy of one of the publications so objectionable to me.  The purchase was based on the cover where there appeared four men, once eminent as active Christian ministers.  The main emphasis was on Graham.  In his closing years he has sometimes not photographed well in printed media.  If prepared for a photo-shoot he would present well in the tenth decade of his life, but the casual approach does not now serve him well as once it did.  In this copy the cover shot makes him look like he just had a shot of vinegar, and the one inside shows him leaning, perhaps with some uncertainty, on a walker as he moves through an open door.  It is my opinion that there is, perhaps without any objective for good or ill, a stacking procedure that may cause belief, even action, that the factual report of this or that context would not support.  The copy distorts. My interest here is not in the men in the major article of an issue of a paper.  My opinion of Graham as a person, and in his primary purpose to follow Christ cannot be higher than it is.  My purpose here relates to stacking.  Decades ago I researched the Communist leader William Z. Foster who led the Party in the United States from its founding just after World War I until well into the Roosevelt era, when Earl Browder forged the Party as the American ally with Russia in World War II.  Foster took over again as Browder faded and the Communists moved to the Cold War period.  He was strongly critical of United States policy and actions.  Foster ran for President of the United States three times and garnered over a million votes.  When asked by my doctoral committee what I found in the rhetoric of Foster that had not been noted before, my response was first, stacking.  On one occasion, speaking at Madison Square Garden, Foster offered 15 points in American action that, more or less, were true in the way they were presented, but one was a stern refusal of the German Airlift generated by President Truman saving Berlin during the post-war period.  By getting loyal Americans to agree on all the other points it was relatively easy for Foster to gain ground on the only one he cared about at the moment.  He did not want any resistance to Communist Russia and the treatment of the German situation following World War II that had isolated Berlin. Truman won this one.

To immerse a point among many others is a clever ruse to gain approval for an idea or action that would not be acceptable if presented alone on its own merit.  Speakers and writers do it often, and by repeating it may gain their preferred response.  Recently in the debate over same-sex marriage the stacking and repetition seems to have achieved considerable traction for listeners and readers who will latch on to this or that in forming their views about the issue.  Truth and fiction are not to be determined by the number of times a point is advanced, or the grooming of a point among many other flowers of ideas that accompany it.  The public is much influenced by the point made at the moment, its repetition, and its conjured contexts.  There is a different context between the other persons in the article above to Billy Graham.   The ministry and life of Graham did not belong in the article’s over-all negative implications.