Billy Graham in Ireland: ‘He Put It over with Love’

Last month in Belfast, I read the remark made by a veteran reporter as he looked ahead to July the Twelfth. “Anything about Ireland at the present time is bound to be controversial,” he complained. “If you just stood up and recited the bare facts it would be controversial.” During the current troubles nearly 400 civilians, police, and soldiers have died violently in Northern Ireland; thousands have been injured or lost their homes; bombs, bullets, and brutalities are daily occurrences; and residents effectively hold whole urban districts against the forces of law and order. All this in an area only slightly bigger than Connecticut, with a population of no more than 1.5 million—and the best record of church attendance in the British Isles.

Ask why, try to get behind glib, simplistic answers, and the visitor finds himself in a world both fearsome and bizarre, where things stand on their head, words are never to be taken at quite their face value, and smokescreens come from more than gas canisters. The further removed one is from the situation, the easier it is to comment on it. Here is a land in which the scribe must steer cannily between the Scylla of sensationalism and the Charybdis of conformity, all the time with the depressing knowledge that his attempt at a middle course will be unappreciated and misunderstood.

Into this unpromising situation last month came Billy Graham. He came because he was invited, aware that meddling is folly (Prov. 26:17), denying that he was “a five-day wonder who can provide sweeping answers,” but with love and compassion in his heart and the unswerving conviction that God can settle any problem. His message did not vary, whether spoken to people in recently bombed streets where he was movingly made welcome, to a Queen’s University audience, or to leaders in church, state, and business world. The pain and conflict of Ulster was symptomatic of that of the world (he cited a daily average of five murders in New York City), and the same God offered “healing for your bleeding.”

Only in one quarter was his visit overtly resented. While Billy Graham was preaching salvation (“Ye must be born again”) in a service marking the close of Dr. Tom Fitch’s ministry at Ravenhill, Belfast, Dr. Ian Paisley in his own pulpit nearby carried out a well advertised plan to preach malediction on the American visitor. He quoted extensively from a book he had written purporting to “expose” Graham (on sale were similar attacks on The Living Bible and Good News For Modern Man). “The church which has Billy Graham in its pulpit,” he pronounced, “will have the curse of the Almighty upon it.” In pastoral prayer he thanked God that a bomb being handled by IRA officers a few hours earlier had accidentally exploded, killing several of them. He did also express sorrow that innocent lives had been lost. Paisley said he had turned down a lunch invitation to meet Graham in London (as he had on the present occasion) because he did not have fellowship with “those who deny the faith.” Listing forthcoming events, he apologized that no buses could be used for the forthcoming Sunday-school outing as all were needed in connection with a protest march. One could see why notebooks and tape recorders are unwelcome in his church. But nothing in Ulster is clear-cut; Ian Paisley the politician is much more compassionate, as certain of his Catholic constituents willingly acknowledge.

Though Graham rightly declined to allow himself to be drawn out on the political situation in Northern Ireland, his visit showed incidentally how in these regions fallacies abound. Here are six of the more characteristic:

1. This is a holy war. Northern Ireland, said Bernadette Devlin, is “the place where people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ.” The humanist eagerly grasps this line of thought to support his own cynical thesis: that all would be well if only they could get the violence off the streets and back into the churches where it belongs. From peaceful England an Irish Roman Catholic priest valiantly called on the Dublin government to “hand over guns which were going rusty to the freedom fighters of the North.” On the other side, Orange Loyalist Songs, 1971, is an astounding effusion that belongs as little in the twentieth century as the sort of chalked slogan that consigns to the bad fire “the pope and his two sons.”

Whatever the cause of Ulster’s agony, holiness has nothing to do with it. Satanic activity, as Dr. Graham declared in a TV interview, often takes advantage of great religious movements, and the “professing” are sometimes shown to be anything but Christian. Baptist minister Herbert Carson of Bangor knows this all too well, for he tells of the disruption by Protestant bully boys of evangelistic meetings aimed to reach young people. “Noisy and ribald derision greeted mention of the name of Christ. But they were equally ready to lapse into their Orange songs. They proudly wore their Protestant badges.” Mr. Carson speaks about the other side too:

Sometimes things go wrong and potential murderers become the victims of their own crime, as the bomb intended to kill and maim and destroy proves to be the killer of its own makers. But in such cases a strange thing happens. The potential murderers suddenly hurled into eternity are given a full Roman Catholic funeral with a requiem mass … Roman Catholic priests continue to recognize as Christians those who bear the guilt of human blood [The Gospel Magazine, May, 1972],

2. Ulster Catholics all seek incorporation in the Irish Republic. Far from substantiating this, opinion polls sponsored by a Belfast newspaper show that only a small minority think like that. American researcher Richard Rose (Governing Without Consensus, 1971) found independently that only 13 per cent of those questioned wanted to take any measures necessary to bring Ulster into the Republic. It might not be irrelevant to point out that the latter’s standard of living and welfare benefits are appreciably lower.

3. The Republic would eagerly incorporate Northern Ireland. This bears closer examination. Would a country whose Protestant minority numbers no more than 5 per cent, and which is probably the most “Catholic” in the world, really welcome as fellow citizens one million Protestants, many of them bitterly anti-Catholic, whose representatives in the Dublin parliament could offer a serious threat to the disunited Catholic parties? For many in the south, an Ireland united is a dream—romantic, glorious, but impracticable. Partition, at once ignored on tourist-board maps and lamented as a shameful thing, has for half a century been a splendid rallying point, a magnificent complaint. “The Irish are proud of their problem,” asserts Peregrine Worsthorne. “Few nations can boast such a life-enhancing curse, live under a shadow that casts so little gloom, suffer a burning grievance that provides such lasting pleasure … One dreads to think what would happen to the Irish if it were done away.”

Heightening the anomaly is the Roman Catholic hierarchy, which adopts an ambivalent position toward the north. It is said that the bishops will “play it rough” to avoid a situation involving challenge to their privileges or to their church’s stance on vexed subjects such as mixed marriage, divorce, and contraception. Coupled with this is the arch-enemy Communism, espied in civil-rights garb. One can see their dilemma: given a united Ireland, it would be difficult to contain a creeping infection that would endanger the age-old ecclesiastical apartheid.

Further alarm is now being caused by signs that the Dublin government might consider amending the Republic’s constitution to make more acceptable the prospect of a united country. This comes under attack from the opposite quarter also. “Ulstermen,” scoffs T. J. O. Hickey, “remain contemptuous of the Republic at her toilet, repairing her charms for them.” That may be so, but twice during my recent visit I heard the mind-boggling suggestion that Ian Paisley may yet be the first president of the newly united homeland. The reasoning behind this would be devious anywhere but in Ireland—and may conceivably have nothing to do with the fact that the president is currently no more than a figurehead.

4. The IRA’s sole aim is a united Ireland. Since the IRA rejects the Dublin administration (which has now taken vigorous measures against it), to envisage the sort of government acceptable to the former is difficult. Even if we discount alleged Maoist influences, one can’t help asking if The Cause itself is not everything to IRA men—that kind of perpetual hopeful traveling that arrival would spoil, for it would bring to an end a brand of frightful terrorism and licensed thuggery that has become a way of life. Said an Irish woman to this writer: “One wonders how or why it has escaped the hundreds of journalists flooding Ulster … that the IRA has an endless source of recruits by simply walking into ghetto homes and threatening the men of the family with what will happen to them if they don’t undertake IRA missions. Meanwhile they impose a weekly levy on each family to finance their operations.” What kind of united Ireland could possibly satisfy such men? If the “Official” wing maintains the truce announced during Billy Graham’s visit (“he’ll get the credit for it,” wryly murmured an Irish M.P. at Westminster), the “Provisionals” still pursue their bloody work. Even they, however, must have been considerably shaken when their womenfolk defied them in calling for peace—a hopeful development.

5. Because the civil-rights movement has been infiltrated by Communists and others with ulterior motives, its basic principles are discredited, its grievances unfounded. The argument needs only to be written down for the illogic to be exposed.

6. There have been no discriminatory practices in jobs, housing, and local government. The impression is given that it would be disloyalty to the Protestant cause to admit any injustice. Often added here are references to the Stormont government’s program of “reform,” with no sense of the incongruity that this program in itself implies something is in need of reform. I said earlier that in Ulster “things stand on their head,” and the trade unions are a prime example of this. In Britain associated almost entirely with the Labour party, the unions are in Ulster linked very largely with that party’s enemies, the Unionists. This in turn might be thought to operate against the movement’s traditional concern with social justice and the brotherhood of man. The biggest firm in Belfast, whose 10,000 employees might by proportion be expected to include some 3,600 Catholics, has in fact only about 500. Perhaps, however, the Cameron Report (Disturbances in Northern Ireland, 1969) is finally having an impact, for I found last month that denials of discrimination were now neither so often nor so vehemently made.

The latter subject came up continually during Billy Graham’s public and private meetings. He was careful not to underestimate the problem (“you can’t turn the Queen Elizabeth in mid-Atlantic on a coin”), but told his listeners he found encouragement in Birmingham, Alabama, where remarkable progress has been made over eight years in a city notorious for bombings, shootings, and discrimination. It now shows a marked relaxation of tension, he said, and dialogue is continuing.

Therein could lie the nub of the matter in Northern Ireland, for when I asked a prominent Belfast businessman what he thought the Graham visit had achieved, his answer came without hesitation: “A gathering together of many different people in one place, even though none of us would be wholly acceptable to all of us.” If Billy Graham had done nothing else, he had provided a meeting place and a focal point; in approaching him they found each other on a non-political, non-sectarian occasion.

But Billy Graham had done more than that, even though (and this is significant) his word to those thus brought together contained little that would have been irrelevant to audiences in Sydney or Cincinnati, Belgrade or Brussels. “We can work together even if we don’t worship together … The whole Christian world is concerned about what is happening here, but violence is worldwide … Political problems stem from religious ones … Spiritual awakening could move the world, and could begin in you here today … Jesus Christ has become an inescapable topic of conversation to students in America.…”

The latter is true of Belfast also, for one of my chief memories of Billy Graham’s visit is of an address on “The Needed Revolution” at a meeting in Queen’s University sponsored by the four chaplains (Catholic included). I have known many academic audiences, but none so quiet and attentive as this (at two points I braced myself for heckling that did not come), and I have never known the evangelist to speak with such power. Not for the first time I marveled at humor perfectly chosen and timed—and used for that unmistakable end to which all his activity is directed. Commented one student after the meeting, “He put it over with so much love.”

The second memory is of a TV interview in which Billy Graham was asked how trust could be restructured after years of mistrust. Following the best precedent he answered in a story. In the post-Mau Mau period in newly independent Kenya, premier Jomo Kenyatta said to white settlers fearful about their position: “I forgive you.” Then, after a dramatic pause, “Will you forgive me?” Concluded Billy Graham, “It has to start with someone who can say, ‘I can find it in my heart to forgive because of God in my heart.’ Such love can be given only by the Holy Spirit, whose principal fruit is love.” No application was necessary. The reference to Northern Ireland could not have been clearer.

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