I know that death is going to come to me in the near future, Graham said
• Christian Fundamentalism
Billy Graham, the son of a dairy farmer outside of Charlotte, N.C., was 16 when he committed to Christ while watching a fire-and-brimstone Baptist preacher. Ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1940, he took over a radio show and caught fire, then quit a pastorship for full-time evangelism around the country. Radio made him bigger still during a series of tent rallies in Los Angeles in '49. Others had used advertising, publicity campaigns, staffs of specialists and singers to refine revivalism, but Graham is credited with perfecting it. The accessibility of his message has led to mutually beneficial relationships with every U.S. president since Truman.
Even in his twilight, Graham spoke powerfully at the National Cathedral in Washington on a national day of prayer after the Sept. 11 attacks. Weeks later a Gallup poll found that he was America's fifth-most-admired man, behind President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Pope John Paul II. "He is an icon essential to a country in which, for two centuries now, religion has been not the opiate but the poetry of the people," wrote Yale University professor Harold Bloom, author of "The American Religion."