Oral Roberts and Billy Graham had long, fascinating careers that shaped evangelicalism in the 20th century. They were both born in 1918 and they both rose to early fame, but Graham traveled a much easier path than Roberts. Graham’s family ran a prosperous dairy farm in North Carolina and he graduated from Wheaton College, one of the leading evangelical schools in the country. The gregarious Southern Baptist minister seized upon the many opportunities that always seemed to come his way: hosting a Sunday night radio program as a young pastor, a job as Youth for Christ’s first full-time representative, and being offered a college presidency when he was only 29.
Graham assembled a close-knit ministry team and launched his own crusades that eventually rivaled Billy Sunday’s in size and public attention. People couldn’t get enough of Graham’s fervent fundamentalist preaching leavened by his honeyed southern accent. Graham hosted the nationwide radio program Hour of Decision, which had a weekly audience of 15 million, wrote a syndicated newspaper column, My Answer, that also reached 15 million people. Graham leaned on rich businessmen to fund his enterprises. Industrialist J. Russell Maguire propped up Graham’s film business and oilman J. Howard Pew bankrolled Graham’s magazine, Christianity Today. Graham’s clean-cut image and anti-communist messaging were irresistible to wealthy conservatives. Oilman Sid Richardson introduced Graham to Dwight Eisenhower, which placed the minister at the highest reaches of American power.
Oral Roberts was never comfortable in such rarefied air. He was raised in poverty in rural Oklahoma and stuttered from an early age. At 17, he contracted tuberculosis in both lungs and wasted away in bed. The family took him to a tent revival run by a divine healer, and Roberts said he felt the power of the Lord and could breathe normally again. The stuttering stopped, too. Roberts became a Pentecostal Holiness preacher, and like Graham, found the life of a pastor too dull. He launched an independent healing ministry in 1947, and traveled from town to town promising miracles to ever-growing throngs of believers.
Roberts tapped into grassroots networks of Pentecostal businessmen to sponsor his crusades. One of the most important was Demos Shakarian, a dairyman who chaired the local committee for Roberts’s crusade in Los Angeles in 1951. Shakarian told Roberts he wanted to start a group that would encourage spirituality among businessmen. The organization, the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International, broke across denominational lines and introduced Pentecostalism to the middle class. Shakarian entered the inner circle of Roberts’ advisers.
Early on, Roberts perceived the power of television. His no-nonsense style and darkly handsome visage came across well on TV. His organization, the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, excelled at direct-mail fundraising — by the end of the 1950s, the ministry was the largest receiver and sender of first-class mail in Tulsa. Nearly all of the letters sent to Roberts contained appeals for healing.
Perhaps out of jealousy, Pentecostal denominational leaders were uncomfortable with his independent success. The Pentecostal Holiness church considered revoking Roberts’ ministerial credentials in 1953 because some leaders felt his healing revivals were incompatible with church teaching. The Churches of Christ called Roberts a fraud for his faith-healing claims. One critic accused Roberts of paying people on his TV program to falsely say they had been cured.
Many of these conflicts were aggravated by Roberts’ blustery personality. In contrast to Graham, who maintained relationships with barons like Henry Luce of Time and Life magazines, Roberts was less at ease with the press. When Roberts tried to explain his belief system to reporters, he lashed out when they mischaracterized it. Roberts had difficulty overcoming the lingering cultural bias of Pentecostal believers as “snake handlers” and “holy rollers.”
Roberts threw himself into building his university and stopped his traveling crusades in 1968 — the same year he left the Pentecostal Holiness denomination to be a Methodist minister. Roberts resuscitated his television ministry and disseminated a teaching he called “seed-faith,” a precursor of the “prosperity gospel.” Roberts’ fundraising appeals grew increasingly desperate as he aged. He may be best known for tearfully saying “God could call Oral Roberts home” unless he raised $8 million in 1987. Roberts stayed up in his campus’ Prayer Tower until the money flowed in from his “faith partners.”
Graham never reduced himself to such maudlin displays. He continued with his global crusades well into old age and relished his status as “America pastor” who would preside at inaugurations, openings of presidential libraries, and events of national mourning. What Graham did for fundamentalism — smoothing out its rough edges and repackaging it as a more moderate “evangelicalism” — Roberts did for Pentecostalism.