IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

For a book so full of grace, the Bible is remarkably tough on sons, especially the firstborn. There is Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, who barely escaped becoming the bloody covenant of his father's faith. Esau, who traded away his birthright for a mess of pottage. And the firstborn of the Egyptians, who paid horribly for their country's bondage of the Israelites.

The New Testament has less to say about the trials of being son and heir, but it does include a figure who would one day be of interest to William Franklin Graham III. That is of course the prodigal son, who, responding to pressures that have gone unrecorded, abandoned the straight and narrow and squandered his money before seeing the error of his ways and throwing himself on his father's mercy, and God's. He once was lost, and then was found.

Franklin Graham, lost once but now found, talks about his birthright with some humor, a jokiness that belies the fact that there have been times when the divine plan for him was hard to divine. "If I had understood the messages people were sending me on the day I was born," he says, "I might just have crawled right back in where I'd come from and taken a rain check!"

And indeed the words of congratulation were portentous. "Welcome to this sin-sick world and the challenge you have to walk in your Daddy's footsteps," wrote one well wisher. "Dear Little Billy Frank Jr. ...We heard...that your Daddy has new help for preaching God's truth...So grow up fast," said another. That was the fate prescribed for the boy born, after a succession of three girls, in Montreat, North Carolina, on July 14, 1952. He was heir presumptive to the world's most famous preacher, Billy Graham, a name already thundering out of the evangelical South, resounding through the nation and around the world in one mammoth revival meeting after another. A Catholic fan wrote the father: "I'll bet that your new boy will be a Catholic some day, maybe priest, bishop, or cardinal, possibly Pope." But little Franklin's father was already the Protestant Pope, a man who would soon be hailed by admirers as the greatest evangelist since the Apostle Paul.

So ominous were the hosannas that the son, almost as soon as he was able, began denying his legacy, turning primogeniture into prodigality, forgoing the joys of the spirit for postwar America's version of pottage: alcohol and tobacco, motorcycles and rock 'n' roll. He fought so hard against being Billy's kid that he became a sort of Billy the Kid. It would be years before his flight from God, fueled by a fear that God would not accept his foibles, gave way to the fear of the emptiness without Him; years before he realized he could embrace his father's calling and yet remain himself. "I've lived with this all my life," Franklin says patiently today. "I cannot be him." But he can inherit his kingdom, although not without a struggle of a different sort. The events that have led him finally to sit at his father's right hand constitute a story of human frailty and redemption, of the burden of being the son of a famous and charismatic father, and of the politics and jealousies and battle for power in the oldest and most influential evangelical organization in the world.

His face recalls his father's. the eyes are not so deep set; the jaw may not be quite so Rushmore ready. But the resemblance, if not deceiving, is striking. The voice, but for being perhaps a semiquaver deeper, is the very one that has moved millions. Yet evidence abounds of the Franklin Graham difference. In his office in Boone, North Carolina, are artifacts not associated with his father: the half-dozen military rifles mounted on the wall. A little way down the road stands his beloved Harley-Davidson Wide Glide. Hangared at a nearby airstrip is the six-seat twin-turboprop Mitsubishi plane in which he logged 450 hours last year as a pilot. "If there's a machine or device that makes noise, goes fast and blows smoke," he has written, "I want to have one." Or at least try one out. In 1987 neighbors called the local sheriff when he took on the task of chopping down a neighbor's tree--with 720 rounds of machine-gun fire from a borrowed weapon. Not exactly the kind of Christian soldier one usually finds at a revival meeting.

He is a solid man, 6 ft. 1 in. and 208 lbs. He is polite, his yes sirs and no sirs bespeaking good breeding, a breeding that might be called hard fought. Franklin's father, always off on a crusade, was a distant if benevolent presence. The boy's rearing was left largely to his spirited mother Ruth. "Stubborn but never villainous" is her description of the result. Franklin began smoking as a child by picking up discarded butts, and it became a potent symbol of rebellion. Ruth at one point attempted aversion therapy by making him smoke a whole pack, but she hadn't reckoned on his strength of will: "By the time I finished all 20," he writes, "I must have vomited five or six times...but it gave me great satisfaction not to give in." On another occasion the mother, provoked beyond reason during a fast-food jaunt, locked her son in the car trunk. When she opened it again, he cheerily placed his order for "a cheeseburger without meat, French fries and a Coke."

High-spirited sparring gave way to something more sullen when Franklin was sent off to a Christian boarding school on Long Island, New York. "Whatever was expected of the student body, I wanted to do the opposite," he says. "I got a kick of staying one step ahead of the 'law.'" If Billy was the ultimate preacher, then Franklin made a run at being the ultimate Preacher's kid: fighting, taunting the police of Montreat into high-speed car chases and cultivating a fascination for firearms and rock music and a taste for hard liquor. By the time he managed to get himself expelled from a tiny technical college in Texas for keeping a girl out overnight (their plane was socked in by fog), it had already become clear that an addiction to piloting small airplanes was overwhelming any commitment to real study. At 19 he persuaded his father to let him deliver a Land Rover from London to a religious hospital in Jordan. He made the trip steering with one hand and brandishing a bottle of Scotch in the other.

It was a symbolic, petit-mal rebellion, negligible in the context of the 1960s. (Or the '90s: writer Pat Jordan once described Franklin as "a nice man dressing to look bad.") But in the moral universe of serious Evangelicalism, it signified something more troubling: a distance from God, or worse, a willful turning away from his face. That is certainly how Franklin understood it. "I prayed and attended church," he says. "But I found the things in the world pleasurable and fun, and I didn't like being around Christian people." He had come to identify full Christian commitment with hated authority: "I was afraid if I surrendered my life to Christ I'd have, like, spiritual handcuffs on me. I had this picture of this God in heaven who had, like, a big stick, and if I surrendered my life, he'd just wait for me to go to the left or right and clobber me." At the same time, he yearned: "Something was missing. There was that emptiness you can't explain. There wasn't that joy; there wasn't that fulfillment."

His spiritual crisis, like that of many others, was resolved through Billy Graham. Billy and Ruth had not been overbearing about Franklin's religious life, but on his 22nd birthday in 1974, he recalls, his father confronted him, saying "You can't continue to play the middle ground. Either you're going to choose to follow and obey him or reject him." Feeling resentful, Franklin left shortly afterward to assist a Graham friend with a tour of the Holy Land. But several days later, in a hotel room in Jerusalem, he reread what might be called the New Testament's great amnesty clause, Romans 8: 1: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." Then, as Franklin writes, "I put my cigarette out and got down on my knees beside my bed. I was his...The rebel had found the cause." Now all he needed was a job.

A month after Franklin was born again, a Graham friend named Bob Pierce who ran an international-aid mission invited him on a remarkable two-month tour of the Far East that included China, Indonesia and India, with its "hundreds of millions of people," as Franklin writes, "locked in the darkness of Hinduism...bound by Satan's power." The combination of small planes and benighted heathens proved irresistible to a man whose maternal grandparents had been missionaries to China. Pierce died of leukemia three years later, and Franklin, who by then had graduated from college, married and become a father, took over the mission.

Between 1978 and 1995 Franklin built the tiny organization, called Samaritan's Purse, into a $32 million-a-year operation providing food, medicine and other aid in global crisis zones, while preaching the gospel to its beneficiaries and anyone else in the area. With Franklin--often literally--in the cockpit, Samaritan's Purse parachuted into places like Bosnia, Haiti, Ethiopia and, immediately after the bombing, Oklahoma City. The second half of Graham's autobiography, Rebel with a Cause, recounts with obvious relish various acts of charitable and evangelical derring-do, from dodging P.L.O. cannon fire while aiding an evangelical church in Beirut to training chaplains for the right-wing contra insurrection during the Nicaraguan civil war to jockeying a disabled plane into a remote village in Turkey. "I got it both ways," he once told GQ magazine. "When I die I'll go immediately to the presence of God, and yet in life I had a blast." Samaritan's Purse, like a few similar organizations, has been criticized in the foreign-aid community for evangelizing in situations when lifesaving should have been paramount. (General Norman Schwarzkopf has also sniped in print about Franklin's insistence on sending thousands of Arabic-language New Testaments into Saudi Arabia while the general was trying hard to honor Islamic sensibilities during Operation Desert Storm.) But in hot spots like the Rwandan capital of Kigali, the outfit's reputation is solid.

The Lord had not clobbered Franklin for being what he was; he had not handcuffed him. Instead he had set him free. He had taken the very daredevil traits that Franklin thought he had developed to spite him and had turned them to his own good ends. Not only that, but he had arranged for Franklin to achieve the elusive goal of every great man's son: to find his own place in the world. Billy Graham was the world's best preacher, but he had never piloted a six-seater in search of savable souls nor had an evangelically sound reason for carrying a .38 in an ankle holster. If this had been Franklin Graham's only and final job, he could have happily left it at that. But it was not his only and final job.

The "invitation" is the soul of a revival meeting. All that precedes it is aimed at the moment when the preacher asks the audience to "come forward" and accept Jesus. It is the event's punch line, its consummation: if a preacher is a salesman, it is the clinching handshake; if he is a fisherman, it is the taking in of the net. Billy Graham's nets were always filled to breaking. In 1983 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Franklin Graham's net was empty.

Franklin now claims the urge to preach first came upon him in 1985, watching his father speaking before thousands in Romania, years before the Iron Curtain's rending. John Wesley White remembers differently. White is an associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (B.G.E.A.), the corporate entity that includes Billy and all who help him spread the Word; associate evangelists preach crusades in towns too small for Billy. Franklin, newly born again, had given testimony at several of White's revivals, and Billy reportedly took notice. White remembers a conversation one day in the early 1980s: "You know, Franklin can communicate," the father said. "I think he has the gift of evangelism, but I'm not the one to get him to start. Could you do something?" In November 1983 White finally coaxed Franklin out in front of a crowd of 1,000 in Saskatoon. It was a disaster. "You can't be tentative and feeble and be an evangelist," explains White matter-of-factly. "He gave the invitation. And there was nothing. I mean, nothing." Not one of the 1,000 came down. A mortified Franklin told White, "Don't you ever ask me to do that again. I'm not Billy Graham!"

But White did not give up. "I believed in him," he says quietly. "There was great work to do out there, and he was pivotally placed." Franklin, "under duress," tried again in 1989 in Juneau, Alaska. He preached one of his father's favorite sermons, the story of the blind man Bartimaeus, whose sight Jesus restored. The revival's first night was successful, White says, but the second was something more: "They packed the place, drunks and divorces and prostitutes. He gave the invitation, and they poured down. It was a miracle, and he knew it."

From then on Franklin dedicated one-tenth of his time to preaching. He preached in auditoriums and gyms, in towns like Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and New Philadelphia, Ohio. After his 36th crusade, in May 1994 in Charleston, West Virginia, his father, having watched him for the first time, hugged him and told him he was proud of him. In September Franklin preached in Raleigh, North Carolina. In the audience was his older sister, Anne Graham Lotz, herself an inspirational speaker and long considered the child who had inherited the greatest share of Billy's gift. Afterward, Lotz told Business North Carolina magazine, she embraced her brother, looked him in the eye, and said, "Franklin, the mantle is passed."

Between father and son, there are differences in style. If the father is known for the plainness of his preaching--what made him absolutely impossible to ignore was not his turn of phrase or his way with a parable, but his utter, breathtaking conviction--then the son's style is, if anything, even more unadorned. The older man would pace the stage pantherlike, an outsize Bible often waved aloft in the left hand, his right index finger jabbing forward as if to impale Satan against the horizon. The son stands as though his feet were in cement, his posture as unyielding as his message.

"Religion can't save you," he intones. "Being a church member can't save you. Being an Anglican can't save you. Being a Catholic can't save you. It's about having a relationship with Jesus Christ." And he can deploy at least one gospel weapon unavailable to his father. "People might say: come on, you've got it made. Your father is Billy Graham! You have a perfect position before God. No, I don't. No one can choose God for you. You must choose."

Meanwhile Franklin himself waited to be chosen. Billy Graham had become frail, his body besieged by Parkinson's disease. He had not stopped preaching (or receiving great honors: as recently as last week, he and Ruth made it to Washington to commune with Bill Clinton and receive a congressional medal from Newt Gingrich). But his focus was narrowing drastically. Ruth became increasingly vocal in her belief that Franklin should eventually be his father's successor. Billy, however, remained publicly noncommittal, exacerbating the sense of distance that had always pained his son. "I had known for a number of years that Daddy hoped I might take over the B.G.E.A.," says Franklin, "but we really had not had any discussions. He didn't say it to me." (In fact, Billy still will not admit to having considered the possibility until 1995.) Early last year Franklin actually broached it himself, only to be evaded. "I said, 'Daddy, at some point you and I have to have a conversation about the future, because if you want me involved, you need to tell me. If you don't want me involved, then I need to know that too.' He just kind of nodded like, 'Well, yeah, maybe.'"

Billy, who has always been preternaturally sensitive to conflict, may have been reflecting resistance within the B.G.E.A. core team, at least two of whose members had grave reservations about his son's advancement. The B.G.E.A., founded in 1950, is the Rolls-Royce of revival ministries, perhaps the most efficient such machine ever assembled. It boasts 525 employees, 1995 revenues of $88 million and an unsurpassed mailing list of 2.7 million active donors. Its massive crusades, planned and realized with the precision of military campaigns, have long set the industry standard. It also produces Billy's Hour of Decision radio show, carried on 660 stations; frequent prime-time telecasts; two Christian feature films a year; and a monthly magazine. Several hundred people are employed just to dispense advice to the 300,000 beseechers who write each year. And all this without a spot of scandal.

Some B.G.E.A. officers, Billy included, had mused publicly about shutting it down completely when he was gone. Another option, more comfortable to many career employees, was to take it out of crusades and turn it into an evangelical foundation. For all its other strengths, the B.G.E.A. had failed to produce in-house heirs, having sloughed off the last truly qualified candidate, Presbyterian minister Leighton Ford, who left to found his own mission in 1986.

Yet Franklin's candidacy did not strike all as an ideal solution. Notes an insider: "If someone had asked me several years ago if Franklin was the man to take over, honestly I would have said, 'Good luck!'" Says William Martin, Billy's biographer: "I think there was some question as to whether someone without much crusade experience was going to be able to just step in as the embodiment of the organization that for close to 50 years had the No. 1 crusade evangelist."

Another cause of the executive committee's reluctance to anoint Franklin may have been his run-in with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a self-policing organization his father helped found. In 1992 the council suspended Samaritan's Purse while it looked into Franklin's compensation and use of the company plane. Word leaked to the National Enquirer, which purported to quote Billy saying Franklin was "going to destroy what I've worked for years to build." Franklin pulled out of the council, calling its members "crummy little evangelical busybodies" who were "jealous of me." Two years later, he rejoined, more punctilious about his accounting, but bad feelings lingered.

Additional bones of contention were the $40 million of B.G.E.A. money that Franklin, as a board committee chairman, directed toward the Cove, a beautifully appointed Bible-study center in Montreat that is the only brick-and-mortar institution Billy built to outlast him; and Franklin's insistence that the B.G.E.A. must stay in revivals rather than becoming just another religious foundation. But most likely what put off Franklin's opponents was simple culture clash. "You're dealing with people who have been in this organization a long time and remember the day I was born and might still view me as a kid compared to them," he says. His preferred wardrobe--cowboy boots, jeans, black snap-button shirt and leather jacket--could be seen as a provocation. Even after forswearing wine in 1989, he maintains that "alcohol can be good if it is used in moderation," an unusual stance in the strictly teetotal world of his father's generation of Evangelicals. And then there was that incident with the neighbor's tree, about which his only known explanation was that he hadn't realized it would require so many rounds. Martin describes the conflict as "the Rotarians dealing with the gunslinger."

Exactly how deeply the Rotarians felt became clear last June, when Franklin received an urgent phone call from Toronto. Despite his Parkinson's and other ailments, Billy had rarely missed a crusade. But on the day before he was scheduled to address 50,000 people in the Toronto SkyDome, he collapsed with a bleeding colon. From his hospital bed, Billy had an aide call Franklin with a plea to take over, and the son jumped on a plane, flew to Toronto and began frenzied preparation. Only the following morning did he learn that the crusade's local organizers, reportedly after consulting with Billy's staff, had decided to use another of the organization's preachers. Months later, still furious, Franklin explicitly connected the incident to the politics of succession. "Listen, people will shoot you for $20; for $90 million, who knows?" he told Business North Carolina. "I wouldn't touch B.G.E.A. leadership with a 10-foot pole." Although, he added, if his father asked him personally he would give it "prayerful consideration."

Which is what finally happened. Toronto, says Franklin, had "kind of got Daddy thinking." One night, after they had preached a joint crusade in, of all places, Saskatoon, Billy called him to his hotel room. "He said, 'Franklin, I'm really dreading the board meeting that's coming,'" because his ill health had made "some changes" necessary. He produced a sheaf of letters he had received from executive-committee members, letters he said he had thus far shared only with Ruth. They had a common thread, he explained,"...and that's that you're to be the one to take it over. And, Franklin, I agree with them, and if I present this to the board I want to know what you're going to say." Franklin did not hesitate. "I said, 'Daddy, if this is what you feel in your heart, I would accept that.' We had prayer, and we discussed some general things."

Last Nov. 7, on Billy's birthday, the 32-member B.G.E.A. board announced that it had voted, unanimously, to name William Franklin Graham III vice chair, with direct succession as chair and chief executive officer "should his father ever become incapacitated." The disposition that had seemed assured at the moment of Franklin's birth in 1952 had finally come to pass.

There are some, however, who might question the worth of his inheritance. The revivalist, traditionalist branch of American Christianity that Billy Graham led from the obscurity in which it had languished roughly since the 1925 Monkey Trial is now the most vital and aggressive spiritual force on the national landscape. A 4,000-respondent poll by the University of Akron lists Evangelical Protestant as the most common religious self-identification in the U.S. (26%), followed by Catholic (23%) and mainline Protestant (17%). Beliefs closely associated with Evangelicalism--that salvation comes only through faith in Jesus Christ, and that the Bible is inerrant, or utterly truthful--are held by almost half of all Americans. And yet the Graham influence over this important movement is not what it used to be. Evangelicals have never been a single church with a hierarchy, explains Mark Noll, director of the Institute for Evangelical Studies at Illinois' Wheaton College, but rather "a network of networks." During his extended prime, Billy spoke for many of these. If his gradual journey from a narrowly exclusive vision of Christianity to the embrace of almost anybody willing to accept Jesus alienated the movement's Fundamentalist wing, it brought untold numbers into the fold. It resonated particularly well during the prosperous post-World War II years, with the emphasis on American unity.

Finally, though, unity became outdated. The evangelical population, although slower than the rest of the country to adopt the post-Vietnam adversarial spirit, caught up and produced a generation for whom, Noll says, "ideological combat has become de rigueur." The movement's energy, once generated by the fervor of Christian witness, appears now to flow more from the red-hot political engagement of such Christian Right warriors as broadcast executive Pat Robertson; Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed, his protege; and the less renowned but perhaps more influential James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family. Weakening the Graham clout further is what many experts see as a decline in the popularity of arena evangelism as other mediums usurp its religious and social functions. Competition from television and megachurches, says biographer Martin, raises the question "as to whether people will still come to that kind of thing, absent an opportunity to see Billy Graham."

Musing further on these converging trends, Martin suggests diplomatically that "the movement has become sufficiently mature and multifaceted that no single person can dominate it in the way Franklin's father did. And it's not clear yet if Franklin has any desire for that kind of influence." In fact, Franklin has been relatively quiet about what he hopes to do with the ministry, bowing in part to Billy and in part to other board members. He will admit to wanting to reach out more to the inner city ("We're losing in this country to Islam") and to make the crusades' musical component less churchy and more accessible. (The Quick and the Dead, a Christian punk band, has played at one of his crusades, singing: "I'll dress like a woman. Bare my butt. But sometimes I wish I was me.") But his general approach, he says, is "You don't tinker with it if it ain't broke." He is actually a somewhat limited man, lacking Billy's curiosity about and respect for the intellectual and theological worlds, and for all his personal magnetism, he is uninterested in playing politics, even within the confines of evangelical gatherings. He offers little to contradict Martin's picture of a fairly conservative caretaker of his father's apparatus, unwilling and perhaps unable to push it back into the center of the zeitgeist. And yet no one else has his father's blessing. Says Billy: "Franklin is a leader. When he walks into a room, people sense his presence." Or, as the prodigal's father might have put it, "Bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us celebrate with a feast."

It is raining in Sydney, Australia, and Franklin Graham is nervous. Once he might have slugged back a Scotch; now a diet Coke will have to do. It is always tough being a stand-in, and worse still if you're substituting for a legend. In fact, when illness forced his father out of this series of revival meetings, the organizing committee in Sydney simply dissolved itself. Ultimately another group decided to take a chance on Franklin but moved the revival from a downtown venue that could have held 50,000 people to an open, grass amphitheater--no seats, just turf--with a capacity of just 15,000. Not that overcrowding will be a problem: only about 7,000 will show up in the rain. Nonetheless, the saving of even one soul is a triumph for Jesus. Graham says a quick prayer. Then he is onstage. Witnessing.

He works hard for a miracle, and a small one occurs. Over eight days of crusading in Australia, Franklin Graham eventually posts an audience turnout to establish him in the ranks of the big-time preachers: 114,000 people, the largest numbers of his career. But the response in Sydney could actually be more significant. The crowds may be modest, but over three days, 1,555 out of 25,000 who attended have answered the invitation, coming forward to profess their relationship with the risen Christ. The actual ratio is 6.1%, a better record than Billy's over three previous Australian swings. And over 80% of those responding are under age 25. They are the future of arena revivals, the harvest of souls still waiting to be taken--by one Graham or another.

"God's not finished with him," insists Franklin of his father. "He's a warhorse. Daddy in his latter years is having some of his biggest meetings. He set the attendance record for the SkyDome in Toronto. He set the attendance record for the Georgia Dome. Broke it." And then the son is suddenly full of the Spirit. "As our society falls apart, as crime increases, when, as the Bible says, the love of most grows cold, people want to know, Does God care? Am I just here on earth to breathe so many cubic meters of oxygen and eat so many cows and pounds of potatoes in my lifetime and then die, and that's it? Is there some kind of plan that has been ordained before time for me? They want to know. The Gospel message is the message of love. God so loved the world, everything that's in it, that he sent his son Jesus Christ to die for it. That's how much he loved it. He wanted to make a way for you and me, an escape for us to get to heaven. All we have to do is just believe it and recognize him, ask God for forgiveness and invite Christ by faith into my heart."

Franklin Graham does enjoy preaching. It just took him a while to figure it out.

--Reported by Richard N. Ostling/Boone

With reporting by RICHARD N. OSTLING/BOONE