The Rev. Billy Graham, the North Carolina farm boy who became “America’s Pastor” to the nation, evangelist to the world, confidant of presidents, and senior statesman of evangelical Protestant Christianity, died Wednesday morning. He was 99.

A spokesman for his organization, Mark DeMoss, said Reverend Graham, who suffered from symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, died at his home in Montreat, N.C.. “He just wore out,” his doctor said, according to Mr. DeMoss.

He preached in person to 215 million people in 185 nations, according to his Billy Graham Evangelistic Association — more than anyone in history except possibly the late Pope John Paul II.

Reverend Graham told listeners that God loved them and sent his only son to die for their sins. Then, as a choir sang the fluid strains of the conversion hymn “Just As I Am,” he urged them to come forward and commit or recommit to Jesus Christ. More than 3.2 million did so across the decades, according to his association, with countless others responding to his TV broadcasts and other media outreaches.

“I have just one message,” he told the Block News Alliance before his third and final Pittsburgh crusade in 1993. “And that is that God loves you, he is interested in you no matter what your background, and he wants to forgive you and change you, if you will let him come into your life.”

Listed a record 61 times on Gallup’s annual survey of 10 most-admired men, Reverend Graham started mixing fire-and-brimstone revivalism with hawkish Cold War politics. He later mellowed into a voice of civility and moderation.

“He symbolized the best of evangelicalism, in terms of his integrity, theological balance and, by and large, savvy political and social understanding,” said the Rev. John White, president emeritus of Geneva College in Pennsylvania and a former president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Reverend Graham had critics throughout his career, both for his religion and for his politics.

Some of his early fundamentalist allies spurned him for cooperating with other Protestants and Catholics. His onetime mentor, Bob Jones, Sr., said he did “more harm to the cause of Jesus Christ than any living man.”

Others lamented that Reverend Graham never marched for civil rights or other social reforms. He did eventually insist on desegregated audiences in the American South and South Africa and gave a crucial on-stage endorsement to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1957 crusade in New York.

‘I made a mistake’

In a 2005 interview with the Associated Press, Reverend Graham said he regretted that he didn’t battle for civil rights more forcefully.

“I think I made a mistake when I didn’t go to Selma” with many clergy who joined the Alabama march led by Reverend King. “I would like to have done more.”

The Rev. Eugene TeSelle, a professor emeritus of church history and theology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, commended Reverend Graham’s humility and piety but saw him as “notoriously naive about people in power, most notably Richard Nixon.”

“He seems to have been overly impressed by them and had an inflated view of his own influence on them,” Mr. TeSelle said.

Some old critics came to respect the evangelist.

“I don’t think Billy Graham has a mean bone in him,” prominent Lutheran church historian Martin Marty once said.

When criticized, “he would immediately say, ‘I have a lot to learn,’ read his critics’ books, and go talk to them.”

Born Nov, 7, 1918, William Franklin Graham, Jr., would claim rebirth 16 years later at a tent revival.

He attended the fundamentalist Bob Jones University and Florida Bible Institute. He briefly honed his powers of persuasion as a door-to-door Fuller Brush salesman.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1943.

That year he married Ruth Bell, who grew up in Asia as the daughter of medical missionaries.

She would raise their five children largely alone in their log house in the mountains above Asheville, N.C., while he traveled the world.

Found his calling

Raised a Presbyterian and ordained a Southern Baptist, Reverend Graham found his calling with the group Youth for Christ, which mixed revival preaching with athletic stunts and wholesome vaudeville acts. “We used every modern means to catch the attention of the unconverted — and then we punched them right between the eyes with the Gospel,” he once said.

Reverend Graham started his own ministry, which he nearly quit after a June, 1949, crusade in Altoona, Pa. He recalled that event as a “flop,” riven by dissension and meager results, although local accounts were more positive.

Later in 1949, he rocketed to a lifelong orbit in the firmament of American religion, politics and celebrity culture.

He drew multitudes to a Los Angeles crusade. When a mobster joined the ranks of converts, publisher William Randolph Hearst reportedly ordered his newspapers to “puff Graham.” They did, but he outlasted the puff.

He assembled a remarkably long-lived team that included song leader Cliff Barrows, who died in November, 2016, at 93, and soloist George Beverly Shea, who died in, 2013, at 104.

Reverend Graham became the standard-bearer for evangelical Protestantism, a post-World War II conservative movement that emphasized conversion and piety but shunned the legalism and cultural separatism of fundamentalism.

He founded evangelicals’ flagship magazine, Christianity Today, and organized conferences that trained thousands of often-literally barefoot evangelists from around the world.

“These are the people who will be Billy Graham’s true successors. It’s not any one person,” said William Martin, author of the 1991 Graham biography, A Prophet With Honor.

Reverend Graham held revivals in scores of cities worldwide.

His encounters with impoverished, persecuted Christians abroad humbled him. “I sometimes wonder if I am a real Christian when I see the depth of their faith in the midst of such suffering,” he told the Block News Alliance in 1993.

Reverend Graham robustly took on the cause of anti-communism rather than civil rights, making preaching against the atheist regime part of his sermons for years.

Later, his anti-communist rhetoric faded, and he advocated for nuclear disarmament at a 1982 Moscow peace conference, where he confessed to have undergone three conversions in life: to Christ, racial equality, and nuclear peace.

Reverend Graham’s relationship with a dozen consecutive U.S. presidents was both rocky and legendary.

Harry Truman saw him as a young self-promoter, but beginning with the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Reverend Graham became an unofficial White House chaplain.

He quietly built support among prominent ministers for Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty and Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election. He served as a sounding board for Gerald Ford before the latter pardoned Mr. Nixon.

He prayed with President George H.W. Bush as the Gulf War began. President George W. Bush credited his own redemption from heavy drinking to a conversation with Reverend Graham in the mid-1980s.

He counseled President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, after the president’s adultery was made public. President Barack Obama made a short visit to Reverend Graham’s home. The evangelist met Donald Trump in 2013, but there’s no record of their meeting since Mr. Trump took office.

Reverend Graham suffered most from his close association with Mr. Nixon. During Watergate, his vouching for Mr. Nixon’s credibility ended up damaging his own.

Along with many other honors, Reverend Graham received the $1 million Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1982 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1996.

He will be buried by his wife at the Billy Graham Museum and Library.

The Block News Alliance consists of The Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Peter Smith is religion editor for the Post-Gazette. Contact him at:petersmith@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1416, or onTwitter @PG_PeterSmith.

First Published February 21, 2018, 1:31 p.m.