Professor Graham: Billy Graham’s missions to colleges and universities

Billy Graham has consistently been portrayed as a prominent example of anti-intellectualism. What this perspective misses is that from the time he decided for Wheaton College, his life and career unfolded as a series of pilgrimages to elite universities. To be sure, Graham was not an intellectual, nor was he simply a paradox of anti-intellectual intellectualism. Rather, Graham’s relationship to intellectual life is best understood as an expression of intellectual virtue. For all of his moments of anti-intellectualism, the arc of Graham’s cast of mind bends toward curiosity, mutual understanding, courage, and, most of all, humility. In this way, Graham contrasts with the polarized situation of intellectual life in America past and present, and, as a target of both theological liberals and theological conservatives, he represents a critical figure of American ideological centrism.