The prodigal son no more: Inside the world of Franklin Graham

Yahoo

18-04-2025

BOONE, N.C. — The first thing you notice in Franklin Graham's office is not the framed note from the president of the United States, signed 'Your friend, Donald Trump.' Or the large photographs of his parents, or one of their eldest son, head bowed, clasping hands with former President George W. Bush and his wife in a circle of prayer.
It's the animals, their taxidermied remains circling the room like remnants of Eden, or rejects of the ark. The glory of God's creation, preserved and stuffed. A bear. A squirrel. An Alaskan musk ox — 'some of the warmest wool on the planet,' says the hunter, who also happens to be one of the most influential evangelicals in the world, and the CEO of not one, but two global organizations whose central aim is winning the world for Jesus Christ.
It was his father's goal, too.
Long described as 'the prodigal son' of the late Billy Graham, at 72, Franklin Graham has reached a stage of life where his own name is taking precedence over his father's. Many young people today don't know who Billy Graham was, but recognize the orange shirts worn by volunteers of Samaritan's Purse, the humanitarian organization that Franklin Graham took over when he was just 27.
Franklin Graham still heads that organization with no plans to retire, and he's also CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, which continues his father's work. He'll preach in London, Brussels and Buenos Aires this year, and also convene the European Congress on Evangelism in Berlin in May.
He's the prodigal son no more, hasn't been for more than 50 years. The boy who was suspended from school and started smoking the discarded cigarettes of workmen at age 8 is now the grandfather who only gets in trouble for his full-throated support of Trump. (He was at the White House this week, attending a dinner Wednesday and speaking at a Maundy Thursday service.)
Billy Graham, who died at age 99 in 2018, famously associated with American presidents. George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton even attended the dedication of the Billy Graham Library in 2007. Barack Obama visited Billy Graham at his home in North Carolina, and Donald Trump was at the evangelist's 95th party. Ronald Reagan credited Billy Graham with influencing him to pray more frequently.
Franklin Graham, too, has tried to be a positive influence on the current president, encouraging him to be less profane in his language. 'We're all flawed, every last one of us. ... No one's a greater sinner than another,' Graham has said when asked why he associates with Trump, given some of the president's past behavior.
But Graham's critics are not satisfied with that explanation. The publisher of Baptist News Global has called him 'the poster child for Christian nationalism,' and David French, writing for National Review, accused him of 'blatant hypocrisy' for supporting Trump after calling out Bill Clinton for adultery in The Wall Street Journal in 1998.
One of Graham's associates at Samaritan's Purse told me that his boss is not as political as people think — that his focus is on God and his ministry, but in a Trump-driven media landscape, anything he says or does related to the president is going to make news. And the fact is, Graham is in a position to influence the president, who has recalled going to see Billy Graham preach with his father, as well as Vice President JD Vance, who as a child watched Billy Graham preach on TV.
Graham, who, like his father, eschews the title 'Reverend' — at the office, people call him Franklin or Mr. Graham — would say that there is power in the name of Jesus. And that even when things don't look possible by human standards, we have to leave room for God to work.
I should note that although my last name is Graham, there's no relation, having married into the name and found no familial connection. That doesn't matter to Franklin Graham, who says he is always delighted to talk to another Graham, and who later jokingly refers to me as 'Cousin.' He has the light heart of his mother, Ruth Bell Graham, a daughter of missionaries who disciplined her children firmly, yet with a sense of humor, and asked that the stone marking her grave in Charlotte say, 'End of construction, thank you for your patience.'
We are seated in Graham's spacious office in Boone, a few miles from his alma mater, Appalachian State University, where Graham earned a degree in business in 1978. When, a year later, he was asked to take over the small California ministry called Samaritan's Purse after the founder, Bob Pierce, died of leukemia, he relocated the ministry to Boone, wanting to stay close to his roots. He lost the ministry's three secretaries in the process, and basically just inherited Pierce's mailing list.
Graham lives about an hour and a half from the mountain retreat where he was raised, two hours from where his parents are buried. He told his daughter, podcaster Cissie Graham Lynch, that he wanted his own children to grow up in the country, knowing country people — a life in which children played in creeks, not in swimming pools in gated communities.
He also wanted his children to grow up with a father who was more present than his own father was. Despite traveling internationally for his work (most of his hunting has taken place in Texas and Alaska), Graham said he tried to never be away from home more than 2 or 3 weeks at a time. His father, in contrast, was once gone for six months while preaching in Australia, leaving his wife to be the strongest influence on his children's life when they were young.
Ruth Bell Graham was up for the task, although her oldest son (there were five siblings: three daughters and two sons) was especially challenging. As Franklin Graham recounts in his autobiography, 'Rebel With a Cause,' published in 1995, she once tried to get him to stop smoking by having him smoke 20 cigarettes, one right after the other, thinking that the experience would cause him to shun tobacco. (It didn't — only dedicating his life to Jesus at age 22 did.) She also once put him in the car trunk on a short trip because he wouldn't stop pinching his sisters — even serving him his meal in there.
Those are the sorts of practices that might result in a visit from Child Protective Services these days, but this was the 1950s, a time when parents were free to discipline their children as they saw fit, and Graham, who reveres his mother, sees nothing wrong with it. Even at the time, he wrote, he was laughing about being put in the car trunk.
The family lived on 150 acres in Montreat, North Carolina, in a log home that Ruth Graham had designed when Billy Graham's increasing public profile required that they have more security. Although they lived in relative seclusion in the mountains, where Franklin learned to hunt with a .22-caliber rifle his father gave him when he was 10, the house was frequently filled with friends and visitors — except when his father was home. Ruth Graham wanted the home to be a retreat, a place of rest, for her husband when he wasn't working, and so the pace of life slowed when Daddy came home. Billy Graham would take Franklin camping when he was home, but because of the frequency of the travel, Franklin also found role models in other men: the property caretaker who taught him how to use a chainsaw and erect a barbed-wire fence, and the pastor of a local Presbyterian church, who took him hiking and target shooting.
It's impossible not to think, while sitting in Graham's office, surrounded by taxidermy, about Barack Obama's infamous remark about working-class voters 'clinging to guns and religion.' It was a catalyzing moment in politics, akin to Hillary Clinton's 'basket of deplorables' and Joe Biden calling Trump supporters 'garbage,' that has contributed to the working class migrating to the Republican Party, enabling Trump's easy reelection. Guns are common in country settings, not just for hunting, but for practical reasons — the need, for example, to put down a suffering animal quickly, or to defend a family that lives far from a police station. Ruth Graham herself was a good shot — there's a family story about how she shot the head off a snake that was menacing children playing in a nearby creek.
Hunting has been recreation for Graham throughout the years — as has been flying. He got his pilot's license at 18 and still flies everywhere he goes for Samaritan's Purse, although he doesn't travel as much as he'd like to these days. Too many responsibilities, he says. In the early days of the ministry, he'd be among the first of the Samaritan's Purse team at a disaster site, and still tries to go when he can. His annual Easter message — which will be broadcast at 10 a.m. MDT Sunday on Fox News and on multiple other stations at various times throughout the day — was filmed at the site of homes destroyed in the California wildfires earlier this year.
'Easter is not the same for many people this year,' Graham says in the trailer for the 30-minute message. 'Can there be hope in a place of ashes? The message of Easter gives us a clear answer to that question.'
As it does with other natural disasters, Samaritan's Purse partnered with California churches to provide not just financial help, food, clothes, furnishings and other resources for people affected by the fires, but also sent volunteers to sift through the ashes to recover anything that survived the fire, such as coin collections, jewelry and any other items that could be salvaged.
Many other nonprofits, of course, provide humanitarian assistance in the U.S. and around the world, including The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Red Cross, which is perhaps the most well known. What marks Samaritan's Purse is not only its scale and swift response — Jason Kimak, the senior director of North American Ministries at Samaritan's Purse, says they can be anywhere in the world in 36 hours, anywhere in the U.S. in under 12 — but also their insistence on bringing the gospel, as well as relief. With aid comes a Bible (the New King James version, stamped on the side with 'The Billy Graham Training Center Bible') and what is commonly known as 'the message of salvation.' Always ready to share the gospel — you never know who might need it — Kimak offered me a tract: 'Steps to Peace With God,' in English and in Spanish.
Acceptance of that message, of course, is not required for aid, but the ministry keeps up with those who do make a profession of faith. Somewhere, Billy Graham, whose preaching is estimated to have influenced 2.2. million people to become Christians, must be proud.
While the headquarters for Samaritan's Purse is nestled in a residential community in Boone, its warehouses are about 45 minutes away, in North Wilkesboro, a little past the halfway point to the Greensboro airport where the ministry's planes take off.
On the day I visited the warehouse, a group of homeschooled children from Gastonia were touring the cavernous facility, where giant crates of supplies are stacked, along with water purification systems and mobile units equipped for every sort of medical need: from surgery in the field, to dental work, to vision clinics equipped to not only examine eyes, but produce eyeglasses, free of charge, within an hour.
While much of the ministry's work is international, in recent years, there have been critical needs at home. Samaritan's Purse had field hospitals in tents in Central Park during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has been active in disaster response after Hurricane Helene tore through the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina in the fall of 2024. Samaritan's Purse helicopters flew food, oxygen, medicine and other supplies into areas near Asheville where roads had been destroyed, and now are helping to build homes for people who were displaced.
Three days after the 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar on March 28, the organization dispatched a DC-8 cargo plane with tents and supplies for an emergency field hospital, staffed with volunteer nurses and doctors; a second plane would follow with six water filtration units, emergency shelter materials, hygiene kits, solar lights, household water filters, blankets, mosquito netting and other supplies.
In Boone, Franklin Graham oversees the efforts, while wishing he could be on the ground. His own experience in field work began late in his teens, when, as he puts it, 'looking for an excuse to get out of school,' he convinced his parents to let him drive a Land Rover from London to Mafraq, Jordan, for a man 'who had been liberated of his car by the Palestine Liberation Organization.'
After that, he spent two months volunteering for a mission hospital there, doing physical labor, like mixing concrete and digging ditches. He still supports and visits that hospital regularly, and remains friends with one of the nurses he met on that trip. Aileen Coleman is now 95.
She said in an email, 'When I first saw Franklin Graham, he was a long-haired teenager climbing out of that Land Rover. We told him what our expectations were while he was helping at the hospital, and he said, 'Yes, ma'am.' We didn't have to tell him again. I think many people in those days felt like he needed to be a clone of his father. But where we were out in the desert, people didn't know who Billy Graham was — Franklin was free to just be himself.'
Her clinic, the Annoor Sanatorium for Chest Diseases, treats about 20,000 people from Jordan and surrounding countries who have tuberculosis and other diseases, and also offers dental care. Coleman said that Graham and Samaritan's Purse have been a blessing. 'They have helped us without telling us what to do,' she said.
The experience in Jordan colored what Graham thinks should be done for young Americans who are struggling today.
'That made an impression on my life,' he told me. 'I think it's great for young people to get involved early into things other than just trying to make money, to serve themselves. For me, I saw the sacrificial life of these women — their prayer life, the way they sacrificed opportunity to do the Lord's work.'
Children and young people in America, he said, need more exposure to the rest of the world.
'it's important that they have an opportunity to travel overseas and see the world how it is,' he said, adding that, then, they need to be presented with opportunities beyond enrolling in college for a four-year degree.
'When I went to high school, they had shop, and they'd teach you how to work on a lawn mower, how to work with your hands. Those things are important, those skills are important. You learn basics, like working on a lawn mower, and those guys are (the ones) who can work on a jet engine one day. We're missing a whole generation of people who know how to produce and make things. ... Guys that know how to weld, they make good money. Guys that know how to work on a jet engine, make good money. Somehow we don't appreciate that kind of education anymore.'
Most of all, however, Graham worries about the nation's moral decline. His own temporary rebellion from the straight and narrow, marked by drinking, smoking and reckless living, can seem almost quaint compared to drug and pornography addictions that many young adults are struggling with today. After getting a stern ultimatum from his father at age 22, Graham made an abrupt U-turn, a week later kneeling and surrendering his life to God. The next day, he quit smoking, and a few days later, he bought a ring and proposed to his girlfriend of four years, Jane Austin; they were married a few weeks later by his father. And not long after that, he was invited to travel with Bob Pierce, the founder of the small California ministry who later turned the keys of Samaritan's Purse over to him.
'I want you to see the things that must break the heart of God,' Pierce told him.
It was from Pierce that Graham got the concept of 'God room' — the space in which God goes to work when human capabilities fail. As Pierce explained it, it's 'when you see a need and it's bigger than your human abilities to meet it. But you accept the challenge. You trust God to bring in the finances and the materials to meet that need. ... Then you begin to watch God work. Before you know it, the need is met. At the same time, you understand you didn't do it. God did it. You allowed Him room to work.'
A photo of Pierce hangs on the wall near the entrance of the Samaritan's Purse warehouse in North Wilkesboro, and the 'God room' idea permeates the ministry, which is, in large part, funded by what staffers call 'the widow's mite' — small donations from ordinary people of modest means. They donate to support Samaritan's Purse either for a specific cause — such as the wildfires or hurricane relief — or make monthly donations or pledge through its annual Christmas gift catalogue, which gives supporters the opportunity to choose a gift from an array of needs, such as providing a child a musical toy lamb that plays 'Jesus Loves Me,' supporting a missionary doctor, financing Bibles or even a church, or sending a couple to Alaska for 'Operation Heal Our Patriots,' which helps military couples who are struggling in their marriage recover their love and strengthen their relationship.
Pierce's influence is strong, but stronger still is the influence of Billy and Ruth Graham, whose children began and ended every day with scripture reading and family prayer — kneeling on the floor with their parents, in the evening after their father watched the news.
Franklin Graham continues the morning practice today in his ministries: Every Samaritan's Purse employee begins their day at 8 a.m. by praying with their colleagues and studying a few verses of the Bible. Then, it's off to juggling his responsibilities between the BGEA and Samaritan's Purse, a still exhilarating combination of administration, ministry and preaching, while keeping his pilot's certification up-to-date. And, lately he makes time to watch the news, like his father used to do every night.
'The last four years, I didn't want to watch the news. Now that Trump's in office, I can't wait to watch the news. What hand grenades did he throw today? News is fun to watch again,' he said.
As for the future, Graham will keep doing what he's been doing since he committed his life to God in 1974.
'God doesn't give you life's road map,' he told me. 'He gives you one step at a time, one day at a time. For me, it's taking those steps every day. And letting him guide you and lead you and direct you. ... Life changes, as you get older. I'm just grateful for the opportunity, I'm grateful for what God has done.'