The impact of Billy Graham on California is historic, but many may not know the life-changing influence that California had on the greatest Christian evangelist of all time. Without California, Billy Graham’s ministry may never have existed at all. While studying for an anthropology degree at Wheaton College in the early 1940s, Billy Graham desperately struggled with doubts regarding the reliability of the Bible as the Word of God . “The particular intellectual problem I was wrestling with, for the first time since my conversion as a teenager, was the inspiration and authority of the Scriptures.