EDITOR’S NOTE: Everyone has a story — some more well-known than others. Across Western North Carolina, so much history is buried below the surface. Six feet under. With this series, we introduce you to some of the people who have left marks big and small on this special place we call home.
Medical missionary, Christian magazine publisher and father-in-law to the Rev. Billy Graham, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, 1894-1973, is buried in Piney Grove Cemetery in Swannanoa.
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A quarter of a century serving the medical needs of the Chinese people formed Dr. L. Nelson Bell’s views on the world. His leadership, and his daughter, would change the religious and political landscape of the United States. The echos of their legacy can still be heard in the evangelical caucus of Americans today.
Lemuel Nelson Bell was born in Longdale, Virginia on July 30, 1894. Bell’s father was a director for the Longdale Mining Company.
Bell attended Washington and Lee University where he excelled in both law studies and baseball.
In 1913, Bell marched in the inaugural parade for the first term of his distant cousin President Woodrow Wilson.
Bell supposedly switched his educational track from pre-law to pre-medicine after a friend asked him if he had ever thought of being a medical missionary.
Bell transferred to the Medical School of Virginia, graduating in 1916 at age 21.
Bell married his childhood sweetheart, Virginia Myers Leftwich, on June 30, 1916. The couple had five children together: Rosa, Ruth, Lemuel Jr. (who died in infancy), Virginia and Benjamin.
Bell was offered a major league baseball contract with the Baltimore team, but he turned it down to pursue his mission: ministering with medicine.
In December of 1916, the Bells arrived in China as missionaries. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Bell would attain the rank of chief surgeon at the Love and Mercy Hospital in Tsingkiangpu, roughly halfway between Shanghai and Nanjing.
When the Bells arrived, China was in political turmoil after the ousting of the final dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, in 1912. Since then, China had been meddling with democracy, but the effort largely failed, restoring the country to the warlord states of old.
At the youthful age of 23, Bell became the administrator of the hospital. Due to the small staff at the hospital, Dr. Bell became proficient at all manner of surgeries. He reportedly operated on 15 patients per day.
Dr. Bell treated his medical practice as a joint venture. While treating the wounds and ailments of the Chinese, Bell would administer to their souls as well, preaching the Gospel to his patients.
Bell became so proficient in Mandarin that he could tell jokes to his Chinese patients. The locals reportedly began to call Bell ‘Aihua,’ roughly translating to ‘Lover of the Chinese.’
Under his leadership, the hospital expanded rapidly. With 380 beds, Bell’s hospital attained the status of largest Presbyterian hospital in the world.
While intimately aware of the sins of the reigning Nationalist regime, Bell remained positive that their governance could benefit the Chinese people, encouraged by Chiang Kai-shek’s faith in God. The anti-Christian position of the Communists threatened his ministry in the country.
When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1937, the United States ambassador demanded that all missionaries evacuate. The Bells staunchly refused, remaining dedicated to their commitment to the Chinese, regardless of the circumstances.
Amid mounting pressure from the outbreak of World War II and the declining health of his daughter, Virginia, Dr. Bell made the difficult decision to depart from his post after nearly 25 years in 1941.
After returning to the United States, the Bells settled in Montreat, North Carolina due to the Presbyterian conference center being located there and a large missionary community inhabiting the area.
Dr. Bell resumed his medical practice once settling in the Asheville area, serving as a surgeon at all the local hospitals including Memorial Mission Hospital.
Ruth, the Bell’s second daughter, married Rev. Billy Graham on Aug. 13, 1943, in Gaither Hall on the campus of Montreat College. Ruth has often been cited as integral to the success of Graham’s ministry, always being his right-hand woman. Their marriage inspired a generation of evangelical Americans.
Rev. Graham and Dr. Bell became very close friends, with Bell becoming an advisor for Graham’s crusades.
To combat the expansion of liberal theology in his denomination, Bell founded the Southern Presbyterian Journal in 1942. Later renamed the Presbyterian Journal, Bell was forced to abandon his publication when its editors supported a split in the Presbyterian Church in the United States split in 1971. The journal suspended operations in 1987.
Serving on several foreign mission boards, Bell made it his mission to rail against Americans subsidizing hospitals abroad, claiming it weakened the integrity and longevity of the hospitals. Bell’s hospital in China had not taken foreign monetary assistance for that reason, instead asking each patient to pay what they could to keep the doors open. When a patient could not afford the minimum payment, Bell was known to pay the fee himself.
Bell retired from medical practice in 1956 after sustaining two heart attacks, but his work was not done.
Bell’s greatest achievement came with the assistance of his son-in-law Billy Graham and oil tycoon J. Howard Pew. The group released the first issue of Christianity Today in 1956. The publication had the same goal as the Southern Presbyterian Journal, to combat the spread of liberal theology in the Church, yet this time its audience was not just Presbyterians, but American evangelical Christians. Bell served as Christianity Today’s executive editor and publisher from the beginning to the day he died.
Christianity Today remains in circulation, now one of the most read Christian publications.
Bell used his publications to rail against the Social Gospel movement, which he saw as corrupting the primary mission of the Church, to spread the love of Jesus Christ.
He also used them to spread his ideas on the Civil Rights movement. In his master’s thesis, Jonathan Israel Bennett described Bell: “He was an unshakeable defender of segregation and campaigned against interracial marriage. He believed in the God-ordained difference between the races,” yet “[believed] that individual Christian conversion, coupled with intentional acts of kindness between the races, could solve the nation’s racial problems.” Bell seems to have held this belief in connection to another belief, one which dates back to the ancient philosophers, that morality cannot be legislated, it must be taught.
Around this time, Bell hosted a weekly broadcast on Black Mountain’s Christian radio station. The show was recorded at his Montreat Bible Class.
In 1972, an aging Dr. Bell was elected as the moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the highest office in the denomination.
Bell consulted President Nixon before he made his historic trip to mainland China in 1972.
Dr. L. Nelson Bell died in his sleep on Aug. 2, 1973, at the age of 79. In his obituary in Christianity Today, the editor wrote of Bell, “He witnessed just as easily with a scalpel in his hand as with a Bible.”
A few hundred yards from where his daughter and son-in law were married stands the L. Nelson Bell Library on the campus of Montreat College, serving both students and the community.
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