When Hillary Clinton Persuaded Billy Graham to Break the “Billy Graham Rule”
Let’s talk about how Billy Graham himself recalls agreeing with Hillary Clinton to break his “Billy Graham Rule” and to eat lunch with her alone while having a private conversation in which he finds himself admiring her more than ever, an admiration that only grows.
But first, we may have to talk about how Mike Pence himself says glowing things about Hillary Clinton too, although he’s not admitted to coming to his assessments of her as directly as Billy Graham has. Second, we can let Billy Graham himself talk about what’s being called the “Billy Graham Rule.” Third, then, we can let Billy Graham talk about when Hillary Clinton persuaded him to break this rule. Fourth, we may want to talk about how Billy Graham and Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are friends, how the evangelist endorsed her for President and how he personally talked with her, ostensibly in private again, to support her through her decision to stay with her husband after his private infidelities with a White House intern were made public and how Billy Graham considers her a warm and spiritual person whom he continues to admire and to stay in touch with. Fifth, we may not have to talk about Mike Pence again, although we may want to say something more about the Billy Graham rule.
So first, we recall how a couple of days ago, Ashley Parker writes an article for the Washington Post, the title of which invokes the culture war in America: “Karen Pence is the vice president’s ‘prayer warrior,’ gut check and shield.” In it, Parker summarizes a bit from another article:
In 2002, Mike Pence told the Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.
Parker may have the wrong date for the Hill article. Although it isn’t extant online, there are direct quotations ostensibly from that earlier article in a 2013 blog post by Craig Fehrman:
- In 2001, the newly-elected Pence talked to The Hill about his marriage: “He never dines alone with a woman who is not his wife. And when his wife is absent, he never attends events where alcohol flows. ‘If there’s alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room standing next to me,’ Pence said. As it happens, Pence frequently turns down invitations for drinks or dinner from male colleagues. ‘It’s about building a zone around your marriage,’ he observed.”
And there’s lot of social media response, isn’t there? Vice President Pence seems to be committed to the so-called “Billy Graham Rule.” Mike Pence may have admired Hillary Clinton at various points to the point where he would not even want to be at a private lunch with her for all of her charm lest she come between him and “the best-looking brunette” as he refers to Karen Pence; but he’s disparaged Hillary Clinton more recently, and his built “zone around” his marriage to “the best-looking brunette” would seem as solid as ever.
Second, here is how Billy Graham says he came up with what others have been calling “The Billy Graham Rule.” This is from page 128 of his autobiography, Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham:
Third, then, here is how Billy Graham describes when Hillary Clinton persuaded him to break this rule with her. This is also from his autobiography, starting with page 650, where he discusses his admiration for Bill Clinton:
We notice in his own words how he feels about Hillary Clinton during and then after their private lunch conversation.
Fourth, Billy Graham continued to admire Hillary Clinton to the point where he tells Bill Clinton that he should let her run for president. Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy report for Time Magazine:
At the last of his 417 crusades, the one held in New York City in June 2005, evangelist Billy Graham made an unscripted proposal.
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton were sitting with him on stage in Flushing Meadows when Graham greeted them as his “wonderful friends of many years.” “I told him,” Graham said of President Clinton, “when he left the presidency, he should become an evangelist, because he had all the gifts.” Graham paused, and added with a smile, “And he could [let] his wife run the country.”
Gibbs and Duffy continue in their article, noting the following:
Hillary Clinton reports that the evangelist fulfilled a pastoral role during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and helped the First Lady endure the ordeal. At that time, Clinton says, Graham was “incredibly supportive to me personally. And he was very strong in saying, ‘I really understand what you’re doing and I support you.’ He was just very personally there for me.”
She added: “The entire world was judging my decisions and my actions and there weren’t very many people who, frankly, were understanding, and he was. He said, ‘You know, forgiveness is the hardest thing that we’re called upon to do. And we all face it at some point in our lives and I’m just really proud of you for taking it on.”
They allude to other reported-on conversations between Billy Graham and Hillary Clinton of a personal and private nature. And in this same article they point to a source:
Details of the Clinton-Graham conversations are reported for the first time in The Preacher and the Presidents, Billy Graham In the White House, which is being published this week. An excerpt will appear in TIME magazine this Friday….
Of Senator Clinton, Graham said he liked her as a person. “I keep up with her,” Graham said. “I think a lot of Hillary… She is different from the Hillary you see in the media. There is a warm side to her — and a spiritual one.”
Fifth and finally, just a few weeks before Donald Trump named Mike Pence as his choice for Vice President, Tracey Bianchi wrote in Christianity Today an article with this title:
“Ladies Who Lunch—with Men: Do your coworkers follow the Billy Graham Rule?”
Bianchi’s essay was hardly some culture war response to anything Mike Pence had pledged as a Christian evangelical politician building a “zone” for his marriage to “the best-looking brunette.” She does say “Billy Graham’s personal decision for his ministry became a ‘rule'” – and we know that this was personal for him so he wouldn’t become an Elmer Gantry. And we know that Hillary Clinton helped him not hold strictly to this personal decision. Bianchi ends her article by giving this sage advice modeled by Jesus, by Hillary Clinton, and by Billy Graham:
Rather than let fear and mistrust inform our partnerships, let’s choose mutual respect like Jesus modeled when he chose to work alongside and honor women—even if that means going out for lunch.
BLT 
It also makes me wonder that where it seems to be positive and subjective for Graham, it is negative, defensive and objectification for Pence.
Thanks for your comment, pvcann! Yes, there seems to be a sharp contrast between how Graham and Pence apply the rule in the end.
And yet I’d caution us not to fall into a binary way of “either / or” thinking that leads to these sorts of rules and to their wide application against other human beings in the first place. For example, Ty Griggs says he has “been most surprised at how strongly people feel about the rule on both sides.” There seems to be polar opposition:
And even in the construction of the rule there seems to be an assumption of a binary difference between males and their female counterparts (or for those husbands in hierarchical male-chief marriages their complements or their helpmeets). Griggs observes:
What’s striking to me is the literary origins of this rule. Again there’s this sort of pure ideal of a good preacher set against a very flawed and fallen sort of evangelist. Billy Graham and his male colleagues have read the novel Elmer Gantry by the Nobel Prize winning Sinclair Lewis (or perhaps they’ve watched the film version in which Burt Lancaster plays the preacher). Out of this anti-Elmer-Gantry ideal, the real-life preacher and his pals come up with their “informal understanding – shared commitment to do” list. The “Billy Graham Rule” not to be alone with a woman is the only item on the list of ‘to dos’ “to uphold the Bible’s standard of absolute integrity and purity for [male] evangelists” that has a Bible verse associated with it. At least it’s the only one that Billy Graham places a Bible verse rationale next to in his autobiography.
The real ironies in this, I think, are that Elmer Gantry was seduced in church, in public, and not alone, in private, with a woman. We might return to the text, and read:
And for Emer Gantry to follow 2 Timothy 2:22 KJV would require him not only to flee youthful lusts in private lunches with women but also also to avoid women in his congregation altogether:
The rule seems based in the binary and requires the segregation of men from women. It’s not just extreme masculinist Christians who do this by the way. Extreme masculinist Muslims do it too. With a bit of a warning as to how ugly and awful this is, let me share this link to a few photos:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3377187/Screaming-agony-woman-caned-crowd-close-proximity-man-not-married-Indonesian-region-s-sharia-law.html
Pvcann, I like how you get us to see “where it seems to be positive and subjective for Graham.” This to me seems very important.
For Graham, much credit is due to Hillary Clinton.
I was sitting by the window having breakfast, my wife of 49 years just across the room, meditating on this post, and happy in my spirit that Kurk had posted – he doesn’t do this very often any more, and thinking that maybe I should respond, for conversations are rare these days in the blog world, when it occurred to me that Jesus had this conversation alone with a woman at a well in Samaria.
And I thought, it is not the private thought but the public image. Evangelists concerned for their public image are contrary to the Gospel, any gospel. This is not evangelism, but a business. We are not saving souls but collecting revenue, even if it is lawfully distributed. These days the ‘safe’ churches are in the hands of the insurance companies and protect their assets from suit by having people who work in the church get police record checks, and follow the rule that only three people can gather, not two or three. Is the Spirit not to be trusted with two?
With respect to sex and gender, I think the talk is all wrong. We have failed to know the love of God and no amount of hedging around our internally roasting deserts can remedy us. The hedges must be burned.
Speaking personally, I, from about age 13 onward, should not have had lunch with anyone alone or with others ‘at the board’. I appreciate beauty and competence and am greatly attracted to others – though at my age and after things like cancer treatments, the pitcher is broken at the fountain. But the love of God is not constrained. And we are to learn self-control but not by isolation. And we are to learn respect for the other of all stripes, but not solely through a legal framework. And we are worthy of hire, but not through exploitation of desire or fear. God teaches these things. And we learn this by our faith in the death of Jesus, or by our faith in the reality of the circumcision, or by our faith in the mercy of the Holy One. And we learn painfully through our own failures so there is something to rejoice about: that the reality of God has seeped through our defenses from before we were born and tried and found wanting. But such a want is to be filled by the ultimate other – see Job 42.
וַיָּ֣מָת אִיּ֔וֹב זָקֵ֖ן וּשְׂבַ֥ע יָמִֽים
blessings to the real KG and his correspondents.
Thank you, Bob, for taking time to share your thoughts and perceptions so richly. “Jesus had this conversation alone with a woman at a well in Samaria.” All sorts of rules are broken in that short story. There’s this little detail in it about this man being not just alone with that woman but also thirsty and tired. The rule of HALT of many in AA and in NA and in SA and in AlAnon and so forth is violated. (Don’t find yourself hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.) Those are subtle details as to the vulnerabilities of this man and that woman. The story highlights the fact that he is a man and she a woman, he a pure Jew and she not, and so forth. To make a rule out of 2 Tim. 2:22 KJV or out of the AA Big Book or any such thing when people are in the mix seems a little difficult for all people. Thank you for you blessings. And blessings to you, my friend, and to your wife of 49 years, and to your children.
I think it’s a good idea not to dine privately with a woman. I’m not saying I would lust after any woman – a granny does nothing for me – but if I was to have dinner with a beautiful woman, I would naturally be drawn to her, even if I wasn’t married. Beautiful women are designed by God to attract men, and if you want to not give in to temptation, first recognize what would create temtation. Look how Hillary was able to fool Billy Graham into thinking what a fine Christian woman she was by just acting like a Christian. I’m sure she didn’t discuss with him how she smeared a young girl who was raped, just because she thought it was her duty under the law to do so. How can she justify her faith while accepting bribes as a public official? Why does she call people like me ‘deplorable’, when what we want is for the government to stop stealing money from taxpayers to redistribute? Why was it so important for her to have lunch in person with Graham in front of all of Washington, instead of respecting his wishes and instead have a phone conversation? Don’t you think part of what Graham wanted was to not ever give Ruth cause to worry? Wives have good reason to worry when their husbands have private dinners with beautiful women. If nothing else, how does she know that when he makes love to her that night that he’s not imagining bending over his dinner companion instead?
Trackback 3. to this post here seems originally to be posted here.