Who was Mordecai Ham?

Mordecai Ham (1877—1961) was an American evangelist and Baptist preacher. His preaching famously converted Billy Graham at a 1934 revival meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ham preached in churches, revivals, and on the radio for over sixty years. He engaged in the cultural debates of his day, including prohibition and evolution. At the time of his death, people remembered Ham for his fiery style, his thousands of sermons, and Graham’s conversion.

Ham grew up in Allen County, Kentucky. His family attended a Baptist church. He professed faith in Jesus Christ at an early age. Ham soon believed God called him to be a pastor. He attended Ogden College and Bowling Green University in Kentucky and then became a Baptist minister. Ham briefly pastored a Baptist church in Oklahoma City, but he primarily traveled around the South and preached at revival meetings. These meetings were events in which an out-of-town minister came to share the gospel. The pastor focused on converting unbelievers. Ham spoke at hundreds of revival meetings during his six decades of ministry.

Billy Sunday, the leading American evangelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, significantly influenced Ham. He adopted Sunday’s passionate preaching style and relentless nationwide travel. In 1934, Ham was fifty-seven and an experienced evangelist. He journeyed to Charlotte, North Carolina, to preach. Two teenage boys among hundreds of others attended the meeting. In most accounts, the boys’ parents encouraged them to attend, but they resisted. They heard about student protestors at the revival and decided to see if anything exciting would happen. They couldn't find seats, but an usher urged them to stay and found two empty chairs.

During the sermon, one of the teenagers felt like Ham was preaching directly to him. His name was Billy Graham, and he committed his life to Jesus after attending the revival meeting for several more weeks. In almost eighty years of ministry, Graham shared the gospel with an estimated 2.2 billion people through his revivals. He and his friend from the night of the revival, Grady Wilson, spoke at Ham’s funeral in 1961.

Ham engaged in the cultural issues of his day that were relevant to Christianity. The two most important ones were prohibition and evolution. Like Sunday, Ham enthusiastically supported the prohibition of alcohol in 1920. During his travels across the United States, Ham heard stories of husbands who spent much of their salary on alcohol and mistreated their families. Even after the repeal of prohibition in 1933, Ham continued to warn about the dangers of alcohol.

Evolution was another controversial issue. In 1925, the state of Tennessee prosecuted the science teacher John T. Scopes for promoting evolution, which broke state law. As he traveled across the South, Ham warned about evolution’s dangers to Christianity. He argued that any system that denied God’s direct creation of the earth and great love for people contradicted the Bible’s teaching.

Ham encountered other controversies throughout his lengthy career. At the age of thirty, he married a fifteen-year-old girl. Despite the age difference, Ham’s actions were legal. In 1908, girls could marry at the age of twelve with their parents’ permission in Kentucky.

Many of Ham’s most controversial statements dealt with racism and antisemitism. He grew up in the South in the nineteenth century and died before the Civil Rights Movement achieved most of its victories. He generally supported Jim Crow laws but would occasionally preach in African-American churches. Ham also made divisive statements about Jews and Catholics. He longed for the days of the early nineteenth century when the largest churches in the U.S. were made up of white Protestants, and nobody believed in evolution. Ham opposed the changing demographics in the U.S. due to widespread immigration of Catholics and Jews between the 1880s and 1920s.

In his obituary, newspapers recorded that Ham claimed to have brought one million people to the Christian faith. Throughout his life, however, Ham credited all converts to God’s power. His greatest legacy, however, is his influence on Graham.