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The Soul-Crushing Legacy of Billy Graham

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Billy Graham saved my soul. In 1973, I was ten years old, growing up in a working-class clan in North Carolina, and I had a problem: I liked boys. Also, men. And even though my family's Methodist church served up the mildest form of Protestantism – no dire warnings about fornicators and sodomites and feminists from our pulpit – it was impossible not to know, from a million cultural cues and a fair number of spankings I'd received for "acting sissy," that this was not good. So when I heard that the world's most beloved televangelist was coming to Raleigh that September for one of his extravagant "crusades," I begged my parents to take me. It didn't take much. They knew what they were dealing with. Maybe Billy Graham could straighten out their boy.
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Graham was then at the apex of his powers, both religious and political. Since the late 1940s, when two of the country's most powerful publishers – William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce – helped turn the ambitious blond hunk of North Carolina farmboy into a national celebrity, Graham had merged old-time fundamentalism with modern media to create a wildly popular civic religion. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association produced movies, radio shows, magazines and syndicated newspaper columns. Its crusades were television spectacles watched by millions of families like ours. They sometimes became headline news: Just a few years earlier, a single night of "

Source :- rollingstone
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