Throughout the six decades of Billy Graham’s career, his wife, Ruth Bell Graham, served as the only true constant in his life other than his faith.
Despite long separations when Graham was on the road preaching, Ruth, who died Thursday at age 87, remained his bedrock, often speaking up to offer advice, yet just as often staying silent so that he could focus on his mission.
“There would have been no Billy Graham … had it not been for Ruth,” said the late T.W. Wilson, a key member of Graham’s staff, in A Prophet With Honor, William Martin’s biography of the evangelist.
Graham was the first to acknowledge his wife’s importance. “Your counsel, advice, encouragement and prayer have been my mainstay and at times I have almost clung to you in my weakness, in hours of obsession, problems and difficulties,” he wrote in a 1963 letter to Ruth from Los Angeles, according to Patricia Cornwell’s biography, Ruth, A Portrait.
In a statement issued Thursday, Graham, 88, praised his wife as his “life partner” and said “we were called as a team.”
“No one else could have borne the load that she carried. She was a vital and integral part of our ministry, and my work through the years would have been impossible without her encouragement and support,” he said.
On the surface, Ruth perhaps seemed a stereotypical preacher’s wife: She stayed home in North Carolina to raise their five children and kept herself — and her personal needs — out of the spotlight. Her independence in the domestic arena allowed Graham a certain freedom from family responsibilities and granted him the ability to travel widely on his many crusades.
“The self-abnegation she learned in childhood probably prepared her for the role she played in [Graham’s] life,” said Randall Balmer, professor of American religion at Barnard College in New York, and author of a documentary on Billy Graham. “She had to adjust her sense of calling and mission to fit what he had in mind.”
Ruth Bell was born in 1920 in China to missionary parents. By the time she met Graham at Wheaton College in Illinois at age 20, she was used to a life of service, hardship and separation from loved ones. Originally, she planned to follow her parents to the mission field. However, she decided instead to marry Graham in 1941 and resigned to “slip into the background,” as she wrote in her journal.
Although she preferred to stay behind the scenes, her impact on her husband was all too evident. Early in his career, she read her King James Bible over and over and clipped newspaper and magazine articles for sermon ideas. Raised in a family that prized intellectual inquiry, she brought to the marriage a thirst for knowledge and a worldly perspective.
“She proved for him a real, serious introduction to things overseas,” said Mark Noll, professor of Christian thought at Wheaton College, the Grahams’ alma mater. “This was important given the fact that from the early ’60s through the ’90s Billy Graham was much more active in other places in the world than the United States.”
Her experience among missionaries, where women served in the same spiritual trenches as men, also shaped her view of gender roles. “Billy was brought up in a house where the women did not question the men, while in the Bell house, that’s all we did,” she said in Cornwell’s biography.
Ruth’s steadfast adherence to the Presbyterian Church, rather than joining her husband’s Southern Baptist denomination, further broadened Billy Graham’s outlook.
“He was more flexible than other evangelists, and his domestic influence was crucial in that regard,” Noll said. “He never got hung up on American denominational issues. That’s very much a missionary characteristic, particularly in places like China where there was a very small Christian population, and all denominations had to learn to get along.”
Together with her sense of humor and love of practical jokes, Ruth’s disdain for the trappings of fame and power kept Billy Graham grounded, friends said.
“When he got home she put him right back on track. She didn’t kowtow to him,” said Cornwell, who grew up near the Grahams in Montreat, N.C., and first met Ruth Graham when she was 9 years old. “She wasn’t the typical spouse who loved being ‘Mrs. Billy Graham’ in a negative sense. I hate to think what might have happened to him if she had been.”
Although Billy Graham acted as an informal adviser to several presidents and the Grahams considered the Nixons and Bushes friends, Ruth was never completely comfortable with the mix of politics and religion. When President Lyndon Johnson asked Graham’s opinion on potential running mates in the 1964 election, Cornwell recounted, she kicked her husband under the dinner table, telling him, “You are supposed to limit your advice to moral and spiritual issues and stay out of politics.”
“She kept him humble. There were temptations to be a presidential candidate, and other ambitions,” said Eddie Gibbs, professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and the training director for a three-month Graham crusade in England in 1984. “But he always came back, saying my calling is as an evangelist. My hunch is that she was the steadying influence in the background.”
While Billy Graham ministered to millions, Ruth, in keeping with her dislike of the spotlight, tended toward a smaller scale. She befriended convicted felons, troubled teens and drug addicts, and in 1975 convinced Graham to help evacuate a 16-member family from Vietnam. Several years ago, she slowed her ministries due to failing health.
Though she rarely spoke of those she aided, her efforts could not have helped but reinforce for Graham her talents and her faith, reminding him of his belief that “our marriage was planned in heaven,” as he wrote to Ruth in the 1963 letter quoted in Cornwell’s book.
“She never tried to be a theologian or lecture him. It was just a quiet influence,” Cornwell said in an interview. “It was not what she said, but what she was.”
Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere:
Christianity Today published an obituary for Ruth Graham on June 14, 2007.
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association also has a memorial site for Ruth. The press release above is from A. Larry Ross and Associates, Billy’s longtime personal publicist and spokesman. Ross’s site has photos, video, and more information.
The Billy Graham Center Archives in Wheaton, Illinois, (not to be confused with the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C.) has wonderful photos, recordings, and documents.
Obituaries on Ruth Bell Graham include those from the Associated Press, Asheville Citizen-Times, Charlotte Observer, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, News14 Charlotte, and other sources.
CT Liveblog has more responses to Graham’s death, including:
Kay Warren on Ruth Graham | “I have admired her all my life”
Ruth’s children remember their mom | “For her, self-sacrifice was a way of life.”
A mother lode | “You might say ‘What’s so wonderful about God saving the daughter of missionaries? They’re good already.’ Don’t you be fooled.”
President Bush on Ruth Graham | President recognizes “a remarkable woman of faith whose life was defined by her belief in a personal, loving, and gracious God.”
Public invited to Ruth Graham funeral in Montreat | Internment at Charlotte library will be private.
Ruth Graham and Richard Nixon | Remembering a personal — and public message.
Official Ruth Graham sites and newspaper obits | Where to find mainstream media coverage — and where the media is getting some of its information.
One mother writing about another | Frederica Mathewes-Green on Ruth: “She often told her children, ‘There comes a time to stop submitting and start outwitting.'”
Anne Graham Lotz on her mother’s death | “She taught me by her example that Jesus is everything.”
Ruth Bell Graham Dies at 87 | “Ruth was my life partner, and we were called by God as a team,” says Billy.
Christianity Today articles by and about Ruth Graham include:
Putting Pressure in Its Place | Ruth Bell Graham on the purpose of stress. (May 8, 1981)
Afraid of the Right Things | One fear puts all others in proper perspective. (March 4, 1983)
Moved into the Presence of God | Ruth Graham tells what book has influenced her the most. (September 2, 1983)
A Living Birthday Letter | Ruth Graham’s life is a letter crafted especially for people like me who dread the thought of growing old. (Wendy Murray Zoba, June 12, 2000)
What Ruth Graham Taught Me About Prayer | A powerful way to make God’s words your own. (Today’s Christian, July/August 1999)
Ruth Graham also wrote “To Hear Your Voice,” “Powerful Prayer,” and other columns for Decision magazine, a publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Patricia Conwell’s biography of Ruth Graham, Ruth, A Portrait, is available from ChristianBook.com and other retailers.
Walter Cronkite narrated a Public Radio International special on Ruth Graham. Interviews with family members and friends and photos are available on the program’s website.
RuthBellGraham.com expired in 2005 and is now a cybersquatter’s site, but its content is still available at the Internet Archive.
