Billy Graham has died.

The great evangelist walked the earth for 99 years.

Here's the USA Today report. Excerpt:

From the gangly 16-year-old baseball-loving teen who found Christ at a tent revival, Graham went on to become an international media darling.... Presidents called on Graham in their dark hours, and uncounted millions say he showed them the light. He took his Bible to the ends of the Earth in preaching tours he called "crusades."....

Franklin has mocked both Islam and LGBT rights...

That's not the right tone for an obituary. "Mocked"? That's a hostile characterization, and I don't even want to look up the actual quotes on the theory that it's inaccurate. It's simply inappropriate for an obituary. [ADDED: I missed the "Franklin." Only the son is accused of mockery. That makes the offense I'm feeling much less bad.] Let me retreat to my go-to news source, the New York Times:

A central achievement was his encouraging evangelical Protestants to regain the social influence they had once wielded, reversing a retreat from public life that had begun when their efforts to challenge evolution theory were defeated in the Scopes trial in 1925.

But in his later years, Mr. Graham kept his distance from the evangelical political movement he had helped engender, refusing to endorse candidates and avoiding the volatile issues dear to religious conservatives.

“If I get on these other subjects, it divides the audience on an issue that is not the issue I’m promoting,” he said in an interview at his home in North Carolina in 2005 while preparing for his last American crusade, in New York City. “I’m just promoting the Gospel.”....

He was not without critics.

That's an appropriate tone.

Early in his career, some mainline Protestant leaders and theologians accused him of preaching a simplistic message of personal salvation that ignored the complexities of societal problems like racism and poverty. Later, critics said he had shown political naïveté in maintaining a close public association with Nixon long after Nixon had been implicated in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in.

Mr. Graham’s image was tainted in 2002 with the release of audiotapes that Nixon had secretly recorded in the White House three decades earlier. The two men were heard agreeing that liberal Jews controlled the media and were responsible for pornography.

“A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine,” Mr. Graham said at one point on the tapes. “They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.”

Mr. Graham issued a written apology and met with Jewish leaders. In the interview in 2005, he said of the conversation with Nixon: “I didn’t remember it, I still don’t remember it, but it was there. I guess I was sort of caught up in the conversation somehow.”...

This is the right way to present the negative, with specific facts. It's important for us to remember how and when anti-Semitism is expressed in America. If it weren't for the recordings, you wouldn't believe Graham would have said that. He himself seems to have found it hard to believe he said that. Or so he told us, if you believe him. But the important important belief is: Jesus:

Mr. Graham drew his essential message from the mainstream of evangelical Protestant belief. Repent of your sins, he told his listeners, accept Jesus as your Savior and be born again. In a typical exhortation, he declared:

“Are you frustrated, bewildered, dejected, breaking under the strains of life? Then listen for a moment to me: Say yes to the Savior tonight, and in a moment you will know such comfort as you have never known. It comes to you quickly, as swiftly as I snap my fingers, just like that.”...

Much more at the link.

Let me add that I listened to Billy Graham sermons many times in the 1960s and loved them. These were brilliant speeches — powerfully persuasive and simply beautiful.