A week after Billy Graham finally went off to meet his sponsor, here's Christopher Hitchens with some typically robust comments on the man. He'd been asked what he thought religious fundamentalists actually believe:
Still missed.
"Some religions simply are rackets: Scientology, for instance, or Mormonism. It's nothing more than the record of a successful con job."
Whilst I greatly admired and liked Hitchens, I considered his attitude to mainstream religion (such as Christianity) as somewhat unfair and at times unworthy of him. Billy Graham was in general a good man and he freely, repeatedly and openly apologised for those remarks recorded with Nixon. Incidentally, I imagine such comments are par for the course in today’s Labour party but you will see no apologies there.
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Hitchens mentioned James Templeton but the person he was referring to was Charles Templeton who was a very good friend of Billy Graham’s.
He didn’t share Hitchens distaste. And although he does admit that Graham was intellectually shallow and perhaps dishonest, he doesn’t say that Graham admitted this the way Hitch does.
He tells the story Hitchens referred to towards the end of this page. http://www.templetons.com/charles/memoir/evang-graham.html
Here is the key part:
I had said. “But Billy, it’s not possible any longer to believe the biblical account of creation. The world wasn’t created; it has evolved over millions of years. It’s not a matter of speculation, it’s demonstrable fact.”
“I don’t accept that,” he said, “And there are reputable scholars who don’t.”
“Who are they?” I said. “Men in conservative Christian colleges?”
“Most of them, yes. But that’s not the point. I believe in the Genesis account of creation simply because it’s in the Bible. I’ve discovered something in my ministry: when I take the Bible literally, when I proclaim it as God’s Word, I have power. When I stand before the people and say, ‘God says,’ or ‘The Bible says, ‘the Holy Spirit uses me. There are results. People respond. Wiser men than you or I have been arguing questions like this for centuries. I don’t have the time or the intellect to examine all sides of each theological dispute, so I’ve decided, once and for all, to stop questioning and to accept the Bible as God’s Word.”
“But Billy,” I protested, “you can’t do that. You don’t dare stop thinking. Do it and you begin to die. It’s intellectual suicide.”
“I don’t know about anybody else, “he said, “but I’ve decided that that’s the path for me.”
NOTE: Templeton asked Graham to go to graduate school with him and Graham would have but only if it would have been outside the USA.
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Mick Hartley 
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