Salvation in Christ Jesus was offered in National Statuary Hall May 16 at the disclosing of a statue of the enduring late global evangelist Billy Graham, which has John 3:16 and John 14:6 carved in its base.
“Friends, God’s grace is undeserved, but through Christ it’s freely given. And it’s by trusting in God’s sacrifice that we’re saved,” US Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) said in the disclosing ceremony. “If you’ve not made a choice for yourself, I hope, I pray, that you’re going to.”
US House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and members of Graham’s family joined the North Carolina Congressional delegation in unveiling the statue that replaces that of early Twentieth-century North Carolina governor and staunch white supremacist Charles Aycock.
“Today, we acknowledge that he’s a greater representation of our state than the statue it replaces, which brought memories of a painful history of racism,” Cooper said. “Not that Rev. Graham was perfect—he would have been the primary to inform us that. … But he believed, as lots of us do, that there may be redemption, and he gave his life to remembering that message.”
US Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) honored Graham as a trailblazer in race relations.
“During an era within the Nineteen Fifties when leaders within the South openly embraced segregation, it was Billy Graham who spoke out against it,” Tillis said, describing Graham as having been a staple within the Tillis family. “He insisted in his sermons that they be integrated. He shared his platform with Black ministers, including one named Martin Luther King Jr.
“Rev. Graham was blessed with the gift that bridged differences,” Tillis said, “and brought us all together.”
In his prayer, US Senate Chaplain Barry Black described Graham’s life as “the sunshine of morning at sunrise on a cloudless day, and just like the brightness after rain that brings the grass from the earth.”
Image: Kent Nishimura / Getty Images
Billy Graham statue within the US Capitol
The late evangelist’s son Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, said his father would have been uncomfortable with such laud, but thanked leaders for bestowing the glory.
“He would want the main target to be on the one he preached,” Franklin Graham said. “He would want the main target to be on Jesus Christ the Son of God.”
His father believed the Scripture inscribed on the statue’s base, Graham said, and indeed your entire Bible “cover to cover. He didn’t understand all of it, but he definitely believed all of it, every word of it.”
The Southern Baptist evangelist led tons of of 1000’s to Christ through a decades-long global ministry of evangelistic crusades, authored 33 books and counseled several US presidents. He and Ruth, his wife of 64 years until her death in 2007, had five children and various descendants.
Speakers extolled Graham’s life and legacy, remembering him because the “leading ambassador of the Kingdom in our lifetime,” as Johnson put it, and as a person, in Cooper’s words, who “treated all with dignity and respect.”
Sculpted by Charlotte-based artist Chas Fagan, Graham’s remarkable likeness stands 7 feet tall, bronzed and holding an open Bible in his left hand, his right gesturing palm-down above the page.
“His Bible is open specifically (to) Galatians 6, verse 14,” said Johnson, who himself held Billy Graham’s study Bible during his closing remarks.
The Southern Baptist from Louisiana noted that imprisoned men at Angola in his home state made the plywood casket Graham was buried in after his death in February 2018 on the age of 99.
“Rev. Graham humbled himself to look after the poor, and prisoners, the forgotten, the lost and the least of those, exactly what the Scripture tells us to do,” Johnson said. “He believed that even the poorest sinner might be a co-heir with Christ. And those men who made his casket had come to consider that message too. And they believed it through the influence of Billy Graham and the Graham family.”
The North Carolina General Assembly approved the statue in 2015. Graham joins Civil War-era N.C. Gov. Zebulon Vance in comprising North Carolina’s Statuary Hall statues. Each state is allotted two.
Graham joins three other Americans who’ve received the nation’s three highest honors of the Congressional Gold Medal, lying in state and having a statue within the Capitol, Johnson noted. Others are Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Ronald Reagan, and Civil Rights leader Rosa Parks.
