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INTRODUCTION

Billy Graham's New South

IN JUNE 2005, an elderly Billy Graham returned to New York City, five decades after a foundational moment in his evangelistic career, when he had led a crusade that stretched on for four months in that most secular of American locales. This time, stricken with prostate cancer and symptoms of Parkinson's disease, among other health problems, and reliant on a special lectern that allowed him to sit while preaching, the white-haired Graham held only three services during what was billed as his final domestic crusade. Most of the 230,000-plus attendees knew what to expect from this evangelistic lion in winter. Many elements of Graham's services had remained largely unchanged since the 1950s: the bass-baritone of soloist George Beverley Shea, the volunteer choir and ushers drawn from area churches, the climactic and solemn moment of invitation, and—of course—the presence of celebrities and politicians on the crusade platform. The highest-profile guests in Flushing Meadows were Hillary and Bill Clinton, who feted the evangelist. Standing with Graham at the pulpit, the former president said his admiration for the evangelist had its origins in an integrated Graham rally he had attended as a child in Little Rock, Arkansas. Clinton elaborated on that 1959 service in an interview with the New Yorker: “When he gave the call—amid all the civil-rights trouble, to see blacks and whites coming down the aisle together at the football stadium, which is the scene, of course, of our great football rivalries and all that meant to people in Arkansas—it was an amazing, amazing thing. If you weren't there, and if you're not a southerner, and if you didn't live through it, it's hard to explain. It made an enormous impression on me.”¹

As journalists filed datelines that read like obituaries, Graham's status as the grandfather of modern American evangelicalism seemed to set him above the ebb and flow of history. The 2005 New York crusade coverage was a commentary on both the grace of time and the thoroughly mainstream status of Graham's brand of Christianity at the start of the twenty-first century. In the decades following the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and Watergate, Graham had softened his tone and had impressed former critics by embracing nuclear disarmament and criticizing the Christian Right. He also benefited from an irenic demeanor that grew more convincing with age. His refusal to cast stones in the culture wars, as numerous commentators observed, stood in refreshing relief from the rhetorical gauntlets thrown down by Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and even Graham's own son and heir apparent, Franklin. Billy Graham, one writer noted, had “figured out how to triangulate American Protestant Christianity,” how to cultivate mainstream appeal without burning conservative bridges. The new consensus saw Graham as “a source of unity” for the nation, left and right alike. He had come to represent the better half of an evangelicalism that again stood as the ascendant religious force in American society. His more controversial days—1971, for example, when two Southern Baptist dissidents branded him a “court prophet” in the Nixon White House, or 1958, when a Deep South governor echoed the sentiments of many segregationists in castigating him as a southerner whose “endorsement of racial mixing has done much harm”—seemed more distant than his first crusade in New York.²

The past resurfaced often enough, however, to suggest the fallacy of evaluating Graham solely by the standard of his sanguine final chapters. Three years before the 2005 New York crusade, Graham sloughed off a final round of residue from the Nixon years: the release of a recorded White House conversation in which the evangelist appeared readily to affirm the president's anti-Semitic ranting. With the help of a leading evangelical public relations specialist, Graham responded to the disclosure with swift, if somewhat puzzled, contrition, apologizing to Jewish leaders for words he could not remember uttering.³ He had long stressed that his flirtation with politics had come to an end. Still, only two years earlier, on the cusp of the 2000 presidential election, Graham offered effusive support for Republican candidate George W. Bush, who credited the evangelist with sparking his journey toward born-again Christianity.⁴ And a decade before this second Bush assumed office, Graham had spent a night in the White House with George H. W. and Barbara Bush watching television coverage of the start of the Persian Gulf War—a fact the president soon recounted at the National Prayer Breakfast.⁵ During an era when religion and politics consorted brashly and unapologetically (and when Graham no longer commanded sustained media coverage), these incidents drew merely passing attention.

Clearly, the snapshot of Graham in New York City captured only the twilight of a remarkable career that dated back to the end of World War II. Since the early 1950s, Graham has never relinquished his status as one of the most recognizable and respected of Americans, someone who has mingled comfortably with the powerful, while retaining the common touch. As scholar of religion Joe Barnhart recognized in the early 1970s, the evangelist functioned during his peak years of influence as a kind of conduit through which flowed much of the zeitgeist of the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet Graham was not, as Barnhart went on to contend, merely “an innocent tool of complex dynamics which he may little understand or appreciate.”⁶

Rather, Graham was a public actor in his own right—a point this book seeks to demonstrate. In engaging political leaders and the pressing issues of his times, he made important decisions that, while always weighed against his higher priorities as an evangelist, reflected his own values, his own notion of the social and spiritual good. Graham's power, that is, was simultaneously readily visible and more than what met the eye.

Nowhere was Graham's public and private sway more evident than in his native region of the American South, the central (although not the exclusive) purview of this book. Graham's national and international prominence has understandably obscured the southern origins and identity of the Charlotte-born evangelist, who possesses a distinct drawl, whose grandfathers both fought for the Confederacy, and who has made Montreat, North Carolina, his primary residence since 1945. He was a southerner by birth and remained one by choice. Likewise obscured are the keen ways in which Graham paralleled and influenced the course of the post–World War II and post–civil rights era South. Bill Clinton understood this influence, yet voiced only one facet of it on the crusade platform in New York. During the decades after 1950, the South experienced two significant, related shifts away from its status as a “Solid South”: the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance.⁷ Through Graham's social ethic, which I term evangelical universalism, as well as the political ethic it helped to inspire, which I term the politics of decency, the evangelist had a hand in both trends.

A World—and Regional—Figure

This book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South. It considers the important role Graham played in creating that South, focusing on his behavior and rhetoric regarding the overlapping realms of religion, politics, and race, particularly during the decades after 1950. In these years, the North Carolinian maintained a visible and controversial presence in a region witnessing the civil rights movement and the beginning of political realignment. Alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, regional booster in Atlanta, southern apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration, Graham functioned as a type of regional leader—a product of his times and a player in them, a symbol and an actor. His evangelical Christianity mediated the emergence of a post–civil rights era South simultaneously more open to desegregation and more amenable to Republican Party politics.

Graham's life can tell us much about the modern South in all its ambiguities; viewing him through the lens of southern history can, in turn, enhance our understanding of the evangelist. Like most southerners of his generation, he grew up in a part of the country that was rife with segregation laws, solidly Democratic, and overwhelmingly evangelical. His career coincided with the end of the first two characteristics, although not the third. From the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, he came to support desegregation, discreetly consulted with Martin Luther King, Jr., and advocated racial tolerance in such national publications as Life and Ebony. At the same time, Graham remained a member of a Southern Baptist congregation led by the outspoken segregationist W. A. Criswell—and, in the eyes of several conservative moguls, the evangelist was a viable candidate for the 1964 GOP presidential nomination.

Graham held his first intentionally desegregated southern crusade in 1953, before most of the landmark events of the civil rights era. As he began holding desegregated services (that is, services with racially mixed seating patterns) throughout the Upper South, he received public criticism from ardent segregationists. The evangelist largely avoided the Deep South until the mid-1960s, when he visited Alabama and held highly publicized rallies and crusades in the aftermath of racial violence in Birmingham and Selma. The pinnacle of Graham's career coincided with the first term of the Nixon administration and the fitful emergence of what commentators began calling the Sunbelt South.

Starting with President Dwight Eisenhower and continuing through Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, politicians looked to Graham for regional leadership on civil rights matters, particularly among the evangelist's presumed constituency of white southerners. The evangelist consulted with Eisenhower about the Little Rock desegregation crisis and in subsequent years met with a host of regional politicians, including Alabama governor George Wallace. Later, Graham supported the Office of Economic Opportunity (the principal agency for implementing Johnson's War on Poverty) and acceded to a Nixon administration request to record television and radio spots promoting obedience to school integration and busing laws. Yet Graham was more than just a consultant or figurehead. Although nominally a registered Democrat throughout his adult life, he paralleled—and in certain respects, spoke for—those white southerners, many of them with moderate inclinations, who supported Eisenhower, backed Johnson, and then voted Republican again, for Nixon.⁸ Through his relationship with Nixon, in particular, Graham functioned as a political strategist and abetted the president's controversial, if not always successful, “southern strategy.”

This is a story Graham scholars have inadequately explored and southern historians have largely ignored. As a popular (and popularizing) figure, Graham has always received more attention from journalists than from academics. The earliest scholarly study of Graham, a 1960 biography, casts him as the somewhat atavistic flagship evangelist of a new Great Awakening. During the Nixon era, a generation of scholars offered informed, often lively, polemics about an evangelist they viewed as an agent of civil religion and a spokesperson for the “silent majority.”⁹ Graham eventually drew more attention from academic historians, who ably treated him in relation to a number of broad trends, such as Cold War religiosity and the emergence of modern American evangelicalism.¹⁰ Several recent studies have focused on aspects of Graham's social ethic.¹¹ Missing is a comprehensive treatment of Graham's influence on his native South, despite the fact that a committee of prominent historians, journalists, and public intellectuals ranked him as the fourth most influential southerner of the twentieth century, behind only King, William Faulkner, and Elvis Presley.¹²

Two broad interpretations have dominated portraits of the modern South that took shape during Graham's career. Some have cast the South as a dynamic region of economic vitality and demographic relevance (the foil of the Rustbelt North), while others have seen it as the birthplace of a popular conservative ascendancy traversing both faith and politics (the foil of the bicoastal liberal elite).¹³ These seemingly contradictory interpretations are evident in the constructed landscape of the region. The banking center of Charlotte, North Carolina, and the fundamentalist bastion of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, can be seen to symbolize modernity and reaction, respectively, while Newt Gingrich's booming Cobb County, Georgia, and Pat Robertson's colossal Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) headquarters in Virginia Beach blend elements of both. Those interpretations are embodied in an equally diverse range of political symbols, including Richard Nixon's and Ronald Reagan's outreach to the white South, Jimmy Carter's and Bill Clinton's New South personas, and George W. Bush's vaunted electoral “base.” Significantly for this book, all of these symbols also intersect in some way with the life and career of Billy Graham. The evangelist was born in 1918 in what half a century later became a thriving section of Charlotte, briefly attended Bob Jones College (then located in Cleveland, Tennessee) in 1936, operated an evangelistic office in suburban Atlanta from 1964 to 1976, and dedicated the CBN building in 1979.

Recalled at the close of Graham's remarkable sixty-year run as an evangelist and pastor to kings and commoners alike, such intersections might appear as coincidences or asides in a career that has taken place mostly outside the South. They might also be viewed as mere epiphenomena of the larger historical forces that, through the blessings of time and place, propelled Graham toward fame and influence. After all, the evangelist has not resided in his hometown since the mid-1930s, lasted less than one semester under the thumb of Bob Jones, Sr., maintained his organization's official headquarters in Minneapolis until the present century, and moved comfortably among political figures as liberal as Sargent Shriver and as conservative as Strom Thurmond. For these and other reasons, many Americans, regardless of their theological and political leanings, see Graham as a transcendent icon—and, in an era of culture wars and intense partisanship, as a beacon of stability and graciousness. He has, indeed, become all of these things. However, it would be unfortunate for our understanding of Graham's historical legacy, as well as recent southern history, if his familiarity was to overwhelm his complexity.

Graham, Evangelicalism, and Social Change

Any attempt to interpret how Graham affected his home region of the South requires a step back to consider the influence of modern American evangelicalism on public life. This, in turn, necessitates a historically grounded understanding of evangelicalism that distinguishes it from fundamentalism, its older sibling. Modern evangelicalism has its roots in the pointed doctrinal debates (and periodic divisions) that riled American Protestantism during the early decades of the twentieth century. Fundamentalism, an identity both chosen and ascribed, strongly resisted the influence of theological liberals (eventually termed “modernists”) who saw a need to reinterpret their faith amid the challenges posed by biblical higher criticism and Darwinian scientific inquiry. Fundamentalists sought to hold the doctrinal line in what they came to view as a fallen, secularized society. Beginning in the 1940s, evangelicalism in its modern sense emerged as a moderate critique of the fundamentalist hard line. Most of these “neo-evangelicals” had few serious theological qualms with fundamentalism, yet they did desire greater engagement with society at large. By the late 1950s, the divide between fundamentalists and evangelicals had widened to the point of self-conscious differentiation. While fundamentalists initiated the breach, evangelicals like Graham were aware of the public relations benefit of distinguishing themselves from their confrontational (and often controversial) brethren.

Since the 1970s, evangelicalism has boomed both as a badge of identity and as a subject of inquiry for journalists and scholars, in the process stretching the limits of the term's conceptual clarity. At least one prominent historian of American Christianity has recently wished it good riddance as a unit of analysis.¹⁴ As a historian, I appreciate how giving such a term descriptive power risks belying the tensions, fluidity, and general diversity of American Christianity. Yet I also recall my own experiences coming of age in a small Shenandoah Valley community. As a bookish child, I was aware of the theological differences between my rural Mennonite congregation and the Southern Baptist church back in town—especially on matters of military service. Still, despite their overall lack of interaction, the Mennonites and Baptists of Stuarts Draft, Virginia, shared much more than the practice of adult baptism. My own decision to declare my Christian faith came at the young but not preternatural age of ten, and featured elements that might have occurred inside both sanctuaries: the response to an anticipated invitation during the annual revival week, the singing of “Just as I Am, Without One Plea” and “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling,” the slow walk forward, the laying on of hands. In worship style and other respects, my fellow congregants drew inspiration not from the prophetic martyrdom of their sixteenth-century Anabaptist forebears but rather from the evangelical instincts of neighboring believers.

Evangelicalism was an avowed, internalized identity for many of the subjects considered here—including, of course, for Graham. Like “liberal” and “conservative,” “evangelical” has become a pervasive modifier that, while often frustratingly vague and perpetually contested, has joined the pantheon of American identities. During the years considered here, evangelicalism stood apart from Protestant liberalism and most other forms of mainline denominationalism, as well as from Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Analytically, evangelicalism remains a useful category for interpreting the type of cross-denominational faith Graham and many others upheld—a piety too specific for the label “Protestant” or “conservative,” yet obviously much too broad for “Baptist” or “Pentecostal.”¹⁵ My intention is not casually to disregard important distinctions among the many traditions that inform modern American evangelicalism, be they theological, denominational, or regional in substance. The very nature of Graham's ministry, however, has lent itself to an elision of such categories. Evangelicalism has worked most influentially on a large and small scale, as a sweeping social force and as a discrete movement within individual souls. The same is true of the expression of evangelicalism most identified with Graham: revivalism.¹⁶

This book employs an expansive understanding of evangelicalism as operating simultaneously on theological, sociological, and temperamental levels. Evangelicalism holds to doctrinal orthodoxy and biblicism, while emphasizing the born-again moment, a personal relationship with God, and the importance of sharing the good news of salvation. It also features self-conscious, cross-denominational networks of like-minded believers. Finally, evangelicalism can be seen as an attitudinal posture with several leanings. It tends toward individuation and a pietistic emphasis on the correspondence between personal conversion and the transformation of character. Also, during the years considered here, it evinced a habitual wariness toward nonreligious social institutions, along with a more forthright skepticism about religious and political liberalism—stances rooted in ambivalence about the status of evangelicalism in American society.

The above characteristics have applied to evangelicalism in both the South and the nation at large, even though the southern variety has tended to maintain distinctive institutions and communities of discourse. Within the South, even into the present century, evangelicalism has often functioned much more as a general faith.¹⁷ It has served as a kind of informal establishment or point of reference in keeping with the broader American tradition of church-state separation and denominational pluralism. Significantly, Graham bridged both the national and the more particularly southern varieties of evangelicalism.¹⁸

Delineating the sociopolitical space Graham occupied as a postwar white evangelical requires understanding the nature of his social ethic, here termed evangelical universalism. This social ethic, which subsequent chapters explore in detail, featured three coexistent (if not always complementary) tenets: that the individual soul is the primary theological and political unit in society; that relational solutions greatly surpass legislative ones in resolving social problems; and that Christians should, in most cases, acquiesce to ordained governmental authority. This ethic was the product of a self-conscious evangelical pedigree that extended back to the transatlantic revivalism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet evangelical universalism held particular implications for postwar America. In the case of Graham, it is the key to appreciating the depth of his larger impact on the American South.

To a somewhat surprising degree, historians of recent southern religion have shied away from acknowledging the full range of white evangelicalism's influence on social change.¹⁹ Such reticence reflects the legacy of earlier scholars who offered what might be termed the crisis motif of southern religious history, stressing the extent to which the white church in the South had not addressed the full needs of its society, particularly in the area of race relations.²⁰ This emphasis, despite its obvious applicability to numerous facets of the southern religious landscape, can distract from the diverse ways evangelicalism has influenced the modern South.²¹ This is certainly true for Graham. Take a 1965 remark attributed to Graham concerning the role of the church in social issues, to the effect that “the church should not answer questions the people aren't asking.” The line, which appeared during a time when the civil rights movement was very much in the headlines, resurfaced in a 1967 Atlantic article critical of white southern Christianity. Two decades later, a historian used the same remark to cast Graham as emblematic of a white southern “flight from reality,” yet remained unaware of one complicating factor. The words came from the advance text of a sermon given in Dothan, Alabama, where the evangelist was holding desegregated revival services, much to the displeasure of the local Citizens’ Council.²² The moral limitations of white southern evangelicalism during the civil rights era, then, are not the only story worth telling.

The crisis motif tends to obscure how Graham's type of evangelical Christianity was capable, in its own way, of shaping change in the South.²³ Those influences shifted with time. During the immediate postwar years, as Graham and many other mainstream white southern Christians began to distance themselves from Jim Crow apologetics, evangelical piety dulled as a weapon in the segregationist arsenal. That phenomenon, however, scarcely implied larger shifts toward theological or political liberalism—a reality the 1970s Sunbelt ideal only reinforced. Indeed, the rise of a highly organized Christian Right and the growth of televangelism occurred as the civil rights era came to an end.

The interpretations of Graham and evangelicalism embraced here have a number of implications that extend beyond the purview of southern history. This book treats Graham, first and foremost, as an evangelist but also, at times, as a politician, a spokesperson, and a regional leader. Similarly, evangelicalism is understood primarily as a faith perspective and identity but also as a posture with profound sociopolitical implications—or, put more simply, as the expression of born-again Protestantism in the American public sphere. The book seeks to avoid making either religion or political culture a residual product of the other.²⁴ Likewise, the intention here is not to reinforce what is sometimes an unfortunate division between how religious history is written by scholars trained in the field of religious studies and those housed in history departments. If political historians risk caricaturing evangelicalism as refleively otherworldly or as merely a cultural component of economic conservatism, historians of evangelicalism have too often employed a language of insularity, focusing on the minutiae of terminology and social networks. This book aspires instead to model a dynamic middle ground between treating religious language with the sophistication it deserves and situating evangelicalism in relation to larger changes in political culture. It offers a kind of history in which the worlds of faith and politics at times intersect seamlessly, in which religious and secular actors and motivations overlap and blend, sometimes without clear distinctions between them.²⁵ Hence, the social ethic of evangelical universalism possessed a secular corollary, the politics of decency, which invoked “law and order,” along with evangelical faith, toward moderate ends.

In the life of Graham, as for the South as a whole, such blending was often an everyday phenomenon. This was true even though many southern evangelicals have historically tended to cast the seamless quality of the religious and political spheres as seemless, drawing from variations on the venerable Southern Presbyterian doctrine of the “spirituality of the church” (emphasizing the duty of the church to reinforce, rather than impede or challenge, the social order overseen by the state) or the Southern Baptist notion of “soul competency” (stressing the primacy of the individual soul and conscience before God). Both perspectives—or, later, their mid-twentieth-century articulations—were selectively employed to limit the social responsibilities of the church during the civil rights era.²⁶ Graham knew these traditions intimately. He was baptized into a strict Calvinist denomination (Associate Reformed Presbyterian), was nurtured by a mother with ties to the Plymouth Brethren, was rebaptized as a Southern Baptist during young adulthood, and married into a prominent Southern Presbyterian family a few years later. Thus, although this book seeks to counter the tendency of political histories not to take religion seriously, it also adopts a respectful suspicion toward the many mid-century religious figures, Graham included, who tended to characterize their work as solely conversion centered and, hence, wholly nonpolitical.

By analyzing Graham as a significant historical figure, this book treats him as a serious actor and, at times, as a powerful symbol. Graham's familiarity and seeming consistency can sometimes dull an appreciation for his complexity—not as an intellectual or original thinker but, like many politicians, as a public figure with a telling knack for locating the pulse of sociopolitical change. Certainly, someone who (to cite a few among many achievements) contributed more than any other single person to the renaissance of evangelical Christianity in post–World War II America, once addressed an audience of one million during a crusade service in South Korea and routinely met with the leaders of such nations as India, Ethiopia, and Israel scarcely requires justification as a subject of historical analysis.²⁷ Yet even these high-profile achievements do not fully capture his roles as a political actor and, importantly for this book, as a regional leader.

Gaining insight into these sides of Graham necessitates analyzing both his private and his public dimensions, weighing the Graham of crusade services and press conferences against the Graham of private correspondence and backroom consultations. These spheres, which sometimes (but by no means always) conflicted with each other, constituted parts of a whole. In his public role, Graham was an effective communicator, more consistent than charismatic, with an ability to think on his feet and a talent for staying on task. In his private role, he was an energetic networker greatly attracted to politics and eager to seek out political leaders, whom he selectively attempted to influence, for whom he sometimes did bidding, and by whom he occasionally let himself be used.

Graham was always more of a political creature than either those who praised or dismissed him would concede. He was more of a political creature than even he could admit. Not unlike a rather different communicator par excellence, Ronald Reagan, Graham offers a profound commentary on the underappreciated synergy between innocence and influence, along with the analytical challenge of untangling the two. In Graham's relationships with public figures, he combined an obvious degree of ingenuousness with a much more subtle dose of savvy. This book, then, emphasizes Graham as an independent actor whose actions were also open to myriad influences and applications.

The central story of the book concerns the birth of the post–civil rights era South—and Graham's contribution thereto. Ultimately, Graham represents an illuminating lens through which to consider the relationship between evangelical Christianity and sociopolitical change in the American South. As such, he suggests American evangelicalism's particular relationship to evolving social and political currents—how revivalism and evangelical public theology, while embracing traditional forms of belief, can also sanction new expressions of those same values. These dynamics have resulted in a mercurial mixture of continuity and discontinuity that has made the post–civil rights era South an intriguing and challenging region to interpret. In his simultaneously influential and circumscribed roles as evangelist, peer of political leaders, and regional spokesperson, Graham was both a nexus for, and driver of, many developments central to the creation of the post–civil rights era South. He supplied an acceptable path upon which white southern moderates could back away from Jim Crow, and his postsegregation rhetoric portended the emergence of “color blind” rhetoric within mainstream conservatism. Through both his involvement in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations and his deep social ties in the South, the evangelist also created space for the decades-long process of political realignment. In the end, Graham suggests the peculiarly evangelical nature of the South's rapprochement with modernity. Such is Billy Graham's New South.