Books: The Country-Grown Candide

BILLY GRAHAM: A PARABLE OF AMERICAN RIGHTEOUSNESS

by Marshall Frady; Little, Brown; 546 pages; $12.95

His predecessors belonged to a fiercer school of Gospel-booming sockdolagy: back-country camp-meeting divines, like Charles Finney, exhaling vivid damnations and, later, out of the '20s, Billy Sunday, in white spats and straw skimmer, ranting indictments of "hog-jowled, weasel-eyed, sponge-columned, mush-fisted, jelly-spined, four-flushing Christians."

In postwar America, Billy Graham delivered a somewhat mellower, suburban version of revivalist hellfire. "In the end," writes Biographer Marshall Frady, "it was somehow an oddly denatured variety of the harsh vinegars of frontier Calvinism —reconstituted into a kind of mild, mass-consumption commodity, a freeze-dried instant sanctity, a rather sensible and efficient salvation." Graham's ministry transcended the traditional churchly limits. The things of God and the things of Caesar became intermixed. Graham's soul seemed to resonate in exact sympathy with the politics, culture and morale of his constituency. He ascended to world celebrity, almost always on lists of the ten most admired men, a fixture of magazine covers and TV events, the pastor and golfing companion to Presidents. John Connally once pronounced him "the conscience of America." A Graham associate went farther: "Never having been sullied himself by defeat or tragedy, eternally optimistic and enthusiastic, Billy Graham is America."

Frady refines that conceit a bit and uses it as an underlying premise of his splendid biography: to many who have been ambushed by change, "Graham has become the only familiar American paragon left; the last hero of the old American righteousness." Through the racial convulsions of the late '50s and '60s, and then Viet Nam, writes Frady, "there finally began to hang over the country, worst of all, forebodings of some actual loss of our own native rectitude, of America's constitutional decency. Perhaps no one is finally so dear as he who returns and restores to us assurances of our goodness. And that was to become Graham's ultimate service as a prophet to Middle America through out the decades after the war."

Frady, son of a Southern Baptist preacher and author of a shrewdly vivid biography of George Wallace, approaches Graham with a complicated and sympathetic understanding. He also lavishes upon Billy an extravagantly garish prose style, a hot-wired Southern lushness of phrase and fluorescence of effect that would be insufferable were it not so accurate, so funny and, sometimes, so moving.

To the conventionally sophisticated over the years, Frady observes, Billy has never seemed "much more than a kind of marcelled Tupperware Isaiah," who, when he so energetically preached, resembled "some dandily appareled young department-store floorwalker caught in gales of epilepsy." The man who wore J.C. Penney suits as bright as Crayolas was a "country-grown Candide."