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CHAPTER TWO

Evangelical Universalism in the Post-Brown South

Christ was not so much a reformer as he was a transformer. —Billy Graham, 1963

We must respect the law, but keep in mind that it is powerless to change the human heart. —Billy Graham, 1958

THE BRAND OF REGIONAL leadership Graham adopted required that he convincingly differentiate himself from leading figures on the southern right. One such person was W. A. Criswell, his pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas. In February 1956, the firebrand Criswell delivered a well-publicized address to a joint session of the South Carolina legislature in which he endorsed segregation in both society and the church. Elsewhere in Columbia, Criswell castigated integrationists as “a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up.” Echoing many of his fundamentalist peers, he blasted the “spurious doctrine” of the “universal Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man.” Graham was soon pressed for a response to this rhetorical gauntlet. He averred that Criswell and he had “never seen eye to eye on the race question. My views have been expressed many times and are well known.”¹

In truth, Graham's views were only beginning to enter public consciousness during a time when the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott and the contemporaneous school integration crisis grabbed the headlines. Such developments cast a spotlight on his identity as a southerner. National politicians, such as President Dwight Eisenhower, and national publications, such as Christian Century, looked to the evangelist to exert regional leadership concerning desegregation and race relations, as did a number of persons inside the South. During the latter half of the 1950s, Graham stopped merely responding to the events occurring around him and started carving out his own space and agenda.

As the decade continued, Graham gradually emerged as a regional leader. He published articles about race relations in national publications, consulted with southern church leaders and national politicians on racial matters, and, finally, held rallies in the aftermath of racial crises in Clinton, Tennessee, and Little Rock, Arkansas. In national venues, although less commonly from the crusade pulpit, he criticized legalized Jim Crow, condemned racial violence, and dismissed biblical justifications for segregation. At the same time, he remained publicly skeptical of legislative or judicial solutions to the civil rights crisis, preferring instead to stress the evangelical themes of neighborly love and the transformation of society through individual conversions. His perspective drew from a social ethic rooted in nineteenth-century evangelicalism, but also reflected the predicaments of racial moderation in the postwar United States.

Talking About Race

As Graham formalized his desegregated seating policy in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown decision, which declared de jure segregated public schooling to be unconstitutional, he grew more vocal on the subject of race. Beginning in 1955 and continuing into the early 1960s, he used national media outlets to communicate his views concerning race relations and civil rights. In a March 1955 interview on Meet the Press, Graham questioned whether segregation measured up to the standards of either Christianity or the American nation.² The timing of the comments, delivered a few days before he departed for a crusade in Scotland, allowed him to avoid direct criticism at home while enhancing his image abroad. Upon his return to the United States, though, Graham made similar remarks during an appearance before the National Press Club.³

When speaking to southerners, Graham remained less strident in tone. At a 1956 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) gathering in Kansas City, he called an earlier resolution in favor of the Brown decision a “courageous stand” and argued that the SBC should lead in the area of race relations (just as the denomination had always led in matters of evangelism). In Oklahoma City, the Black Dispatch ran a brief article touting these remarks in anticipation of a Graham crusade in that Jim Crow city. In Kansas City, though, the evangelist chose not to use the more prophetic language of a draft speech in he which warned that, should his denomination fail on the race issue, “we may eventually find our spiritual power waning and our thrilling statistics only hollow echoes.” He also supported a decision at the convention to table further discussion of racial matters.⁴

The evangelist's first widely disseminated foray into racial issues came with an October 1956 article in Life magazine, published by Graham supporter Henry Luce.⁵ Life writer Hugh Moffett prepared the original draft based on interviews with the evangelist, who offered his final revisions two weeks before publication. Graham published the article with some reluctance and apparently passed along a draft for moderate Tennessee governor Frank Clement to peruse. The essay partially fulfilled a promise Graham had made to President Eisenhower to provide leadership in promoting racial tolerance and moderation.⁶

The Life article most likely did not change the minds of Graham's liberal detractors. The “vast majority of the ministers in the South,” he wrote of both black and white clerics, were “not extremists on either side” of the race issue. They supported desegregation of such services as public transportation, hotels, and restaurants, while remaining skeptical of the current feasibility of school integration in the Deep South. Observing a decline in race relations since the Brown decision, most ministers who had talked with the evangelist “confessed that the church is doing far too little about it.” In the article, Graham announced his policy of holding “nonsegregated” services and systematically dismantled two common Old Testament proof texts for segregation: the Hamitic curse and the commandment that Israelites separate themselves from other peoples. In the Hamitic curse, Noah, not God, had cursed Canaan, offspring of Noah's son, Ham (and Noah had done so after awakening from a drunken slumber). The condemned descendants of Canaan, Graham confidently asserted, were white Canaanites, not black Africans. As for the Israelites’ purity, their social separatism was along religious, not racial, lines. Moreover, Graham added, Jesus had specifically countered the racialism of his own people by praising gentiles and moving among the outcast Samaritans. For the present day, Graham's solution for improved race relations involved “more than justice: the principle of the Golden Rule, the spirit of neighbor-love, and the experience of redemptive love and forgive-ness.”⁷

The backhanded dismissal of mere legal remedies (“more than justice”) reflected the slipperiness of Graham's prescriptions, along with the conservative assumptions underlying them. Draft references to Graham crusades as “fully ‘integrated’” (rather than “nonsegregated”) and to segregation as “both UnAmerican and UnChristian” (terms he had used on at least two previous occasions) did not appear in the printed version, while more politically ambiguous anecdotes survived the final editing.⁸ For example, after attacking biblical defenses of Jim Crow, Graham noted that black attendance at his desegregated services had not approached that of his segregated 1952 crusade in Jackson, Mississippi. Negroes, he declared, balked at legalized segregation but often preferred to mingle among themselves. Graham also told of an idealistic, integrationist minister who became a racial moderate after moving to the South. While seeming to endorse basic legal remedies to Jim Crow, Graham voiced a modest version of the strongly held position of his father-in-law, Nelson Bell, that some forms of voluntary segregation were permissible. (Bell participated in a roundtable discussion of prominent southern church leaders, the transcript of which appeared alongside Graham's article. The panelists argued against the existence of biblical sanctions for segregation, yet—like Graham—generally avoided discussing specifics in the area of social policy.) The evangelist also defended his native South. “Prejudice is not just a sectional problem,” he wrote, labeling criticism of the South “one of the most popular indoor sports of some northerners these days.” He ended with a story suggesting a distinctly regional model for improved race relations:

Shortly after the close of the Civil War, a Negro entered a fashionable church in Richmond, Va., on Sunday morning while communion was being served. He walked down the aisle and knelt at the altar. A rustle of shock and anger swept through the congregation. Sensing the situation, a distinguished layman immediately stood up, stepped forward to the altar and knelt beside his colored brother. Captured by his spirit, the congregation followed this magnanimous example. The layman who set the example was Robert E. Lee.⁹

Despite the mixed signals inherent in invoking a Confederate hero on behalf of racial tolerance, Graham clearly called for the church to take a greater role in fostering improved race relations. He did so in explicitly evangelical terms. “The church, if it aims to be the true church,” he wrote, “dares not segregate the message of good racial relations from the message of regeneration, for…man as sinner is prone to desert God and neighbor alike.” The most lasting advances in race relations would thus derive from individual conversions to Christ's message of salvation and love. “Any man who has a genuine conversion experience will find his racial attitudes greatly changed,” the evangelist concluded.¹⁰

Graham published three similar national articles—in Ebony, U.S. News and World Report, and Reader's Digest, respectively. The Ebony piece—which appeared in September 1957 with the somewhat exaggerated kicker, “Southern-born evangelist declares war on bigotry”—contained a more strident tone than the Life article. The difference was attributable both to the magazine's primary readership, upwardly mobile blacks, and to the timing of the article, which appeared in the aftermath of a New York City crusade during which the Graham team had made special efforts to appeal to African Americans (including inviting Martin Luther King, Jr., to give the invocation at a service). That crusade had also finalized Graham's rift with leading fundamentalists, who were distraught by his willingness to associate with liberal Protestants (as well as, one can assume, King). The official crusade invitation had come from an affiliate of the National Council of Churches. Perhaps the break momentarily freed Graham to speak more candidly about social issues. In the Ebony article, he promised a revival “to wipe away racial discrimination” and supremacist sentiments. More important, for the first time to a national audience, Graham overtly came out in favor of antisegregation legislation, echoing comments he first made when speaking to a black Baptist congregation in Brooklyn. He did not clarify exactly what such laws would entail, however, and quickly added that, absent Christian love, they would result in “nothing but cold war.”¹¹

In 1960, Graham contributed his thoughts on race relations to Reader's Digest and U.S. News and World Report. His words there reflected the significantly more conservative politics of those venues. He called for Christians to “banish Jim Crow from their midst” and again endorsed basic legal remedies, yet he also warned of excessive “belligerence” among both black and white integrationists. While “convinced that ‘Jim Crow’ must go,” he added that society “cannot make two races love each other and accept each other at the point of bayonets.”¹² Although Graham embraced the end of Jim Crow on both moral and political grounds, he endorsed only remedies that he believed would not result in the kind of racial tensions present in Little Rock and other desegregation hotspots. Such friction-free solutions were, of course, difficult to identify.

Graham's public commentaries on racial matters lacked intellectual depth and exposed the evangelist to charges of inconsistency. A glaring dearth of symmetry existed between his passionate calls for ending personal prejudice among Christians and his significantly less enthusiastic support for dismantling the actual legal structures of Jim Crow. Like a candidate running for office, Graham avoided committing himself to all but the most general of prescriptions for combating racist practices. Unlike most politicians, however, Graham claimed spiritual and moral authority as a minister of God; he implicitly asked to be held to a higher standard than other public figures. Despite his tepidness and inconsistency, though, he proffered to his audiences something other than, as critics then charged (and have charged since), a simple belief that “religion, like politics, had a duty to uphold the status quo.”¹³

Evangelical Universalism

In explaining his positions on racial and other sociopolitical matters, Graham drew from and updated traditions rooted in nineteenth-century American evangelicalism. He evinced an evangelical social ethic centered on the individual soul and will, and predicated on the universal commonality of divinely created humans. This ethic, here termed evangelical universalism, viewed the individual soul as the primary theological and political unit in society, prioritized relational over legislative solutions to social problems, and it tended to acquiesce to the ultimately inscrutable realm of ordained legal authority. According to this ethic (which should not be confused with the inclusive soteriology, or doctrine of salvation, also called “universalism”), the most effective forms of social change emanated from the conversion of individual souls.

These beliefs, or ones similar to them, contained a rich heritage. Graham voiced them from the assumption that evangelical Christianity held a special relationship with American society that—if protected and nurtured—would permit the nation to fulfill its most fundamental values. Many antebellum evangelicals, for example, had seen themselves as having a unique responsibility to ensure the endurance of the young nation's republican foundations. Electing “Christian statesmen” to office might help, but so would a strong evangelistic witness.¹⁴ Proponents of this “custodial,” or guardianship, ideal continued to assume the inherent good of promoting “Christian Civilization,” even while they claimed to uphold the formal separation between church and state.¹⁵ Such sentiments help to explain the close association of antebellum evangelism, in the North and South alike, with notions of social progress.¹⁶ The belief that Protestants had a special role to ensure the nation's morality endured well beyond the remembered heyday of antebellum evangelicalism, but it began to weaken during the so-called Second Disestablishment, the weakening of Protestant hegemony during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. By the close of that period, many liberal Protestants had either accepted or acquiesced to the fact that a growing state was assuming many, if not most, of the church's custodial responsibilities.¹⁷

Many conservative Protestants, of course, did not view the Second Disestablishment as a necessary or even an unavoidable development. Fundamentalists, as well as their neo-evangelical offspring, never consciously accommodated themselves to the relative decline of Protestantism as a moral influence. Graham and his fellow neo-evangelicals specifically sought to restore that influence.

The ancestors of twentieth-century fundamentalists and evangelicals, of course, had resisted liberalizing trends within Protestantism from the moment they first emerged. Following the Civil War, many conservative Protestants departed from the optimism of the antebellum years. Instead, they embraced a pessimistic premillennialist eschatology (or theology of the end times) that stressed the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ and assumed that a period of social decline would precede it. The trend held long-term implications for the relationship between evangelicalism and social reform movements. The synergy between antebellum revivalism and reform causes is well known. Charles Finney, the leading evangelist of the antebellum Second Great Awakening, had declared slavery “pre-eminently, the sin of the church” and did not serve communion to slaveholders at his New York congregation. While Finney frustrated abolitionists by viewing their cause as a secondary “appendage” of evangelism, he did not hesitate to invoke the “higher law” of Christ in the face of unjust legislation, such as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.¹⁸ By contrast, post–Civil War evangelist Dwight Moody, the revivalist to whom Graham compared most favorably, said little about the labor and monetary conflicts of the Gilded Age and reluctantly began holding segregated services in the postwar South. “Man, away from God,” Moody declared in 1876, “is not to be trusted, and there is no reform until God has been found.”¹⁹ Saving souls came first—a perspective more than a few Gilded Age barons were happy to second.

Moody portended the early twentieth-century process, sometimes called the Great Reversal, through which conservative Protestants abandoned many spheres of social activism. During the Progressive Era, the growth of the Social Gospel, which seemingly elevated social concerns to salvific status, irredeemably tainted such activism as synonymous with theological liberal-ism.²⁰ Revivalist Billy Sunday, Graham's immediate forerunner, vociferously opposed Social Gospel theology, even though he did support some Progressive reforms, such as Prohibition, women's suffrage, and child labor laws. Following World War I, the attention of Sunday and what were becoming known as “fundamentalists” turned increasingly to the specter of Protestant “modernism,” which embraced the Social Gospel and attacked biblical liter-alism.²¹

While Graham preached in the shadow of the Great Reversal, he did not view the Second Disestablishment as an irreversible development. The two impulses stood in some tension. Graham sought to recover the lost social status of evangelicalism, all the while checking the gains of mainline Protestantism. Yet he operated on the other side of a deep rupture in American Protestant history. Graham and his peers could not simply re-create the seeming evangelical consensus of yore. The evangelist idealized the social impact of eighteenth-century Wesleyan revivalism, which he claimed had contributed generations of reformers to Great Britain.²² His more immediate fundamentalist heritage, however, instilled in him a reflexive skepticism about reform causes. His instinct was to keep evangelism and what he and his peers termed “social concern” in separate and usually unequal categories.

Yet Graham was also a product of his times in a more secular sense. Another influence on his social ethic was the universalist momentum of post–World War II public culture—a perspective that viewed humans as sharing common needs, wants, and problems. In his earlier years, to be sure, Graham was nothing if not an unabashed patriot and a Christian chauvinist. But as befitted a proud citizen of an increasingly confident nation (and an even prouder exponent of the Great Commission to spread the good news of the Gospel), he thought on a global scale—not just in terms of new evangelistic frontiers but also in terms of an overarching human nature. In this sense, Graham struck a notably less parochial stance than Billy Sunday, who had dismissed “this twentieth-century theory of the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man…. You are not a child of God unless you are a Christian.” Graham, by contrast, distinguished between regenerated souls (a portion of humanity) and loved ones (all of humankind). He allowed that God's love extended even to the atheistic communist. Salvation was a human concern, not just an American one. Graham shared with postwar neo-orthodox and existentialist theologians a concern for the common human condition of original sin.²³

The universalism of Graham and many of his evangelical peers derived not from an optimistic reading of human nature but rather from a theological recognition of the common condition of individual souls: created, sinful, and requiring salvation. Thus, the explicit biblicism of evangelical universalism distinguished it from the more secular “liberal universalism” that pervaded the political culture of post–World War II reform movements. The latter, in the words of historian Bruce Schulman, entailed “belief in the fundamental unity and sameness of all mankind,” meaning that “every person possessed the same intrinsic worth, deserved the same opportunities, [and] shared the same basic aspirations.”²⁴ In Graham's 1956 address to the Southern Baptist Convention, he spoke of his congregants’ “common denominator with the rest of the world…. It's not race; it's not language; it's not skin color; it's not culture. It's the fact that we are created in the image of God, and that Christ is the savior of all men.”²⁵ Graham was moving toward a position he would describe a decade later as the “biblical unity of the human race. All men are one in the humanity created by God himself. All men are one in the common need of divine redemption, and all are offered salvation in Jesus Christ.”²⁶ While Graham's emphasis on human universals set him apart from Billy Sunday in the past and W. A. Criswell in the present, his were hardly radical sentiments. Christians of many persuasions nominally professed some version of these principles, and their social implications varied wildly. Among white Christians in the American South, for example, what one scholar has called the “inclusionary impulses of evangelical Christianity” could coexist comfortably with racial hierarchies.²⁷

Spurred by motivations both religious and secular, though, Graham began by the 1950s to draw connections between spiritual and social equality. He expressed those implications largely in individuated terms—more specifically, in the language of individual sinfulness and redemption. The individual stood as an exaggerated synecdoche of society—a part that defines a larger whole, rather than being a mere component of it. As Graham argued in the pages of the ultraconservative American Mercury magazine, “Society is made up of individuals. So long as you have a man in society who hates and lies and steals and is deceitful, you have the possibility of racial intolerance; you have the possibility of war; you have the possibility of economic injus-tice.”²⁸ By extension, larger social problems derived from core individual ones. “Our international problems and racial tensions,” he stated in 1963, “are only reflections of individual problems and tensions.”²⁹ A year later he told a group of media executives that, before altering social structures, “we must change man first. Our great problem today is not social…. Our problem is man himself. We've got to change man.”³⁰ The solution had to begin with individual souls. “Society cannot repent corporately,” Graham argued in a separate American Mercury article.³¹

For the evangelist, only the individual will—effectively, the intellectual corollary of the soul—could stimulate change in one's life and, by secondary extension, in society as a whole. In Graham's theology, as a student of the evangelist has observed, “the human will represents an autonomous ego.”³² Acceptance of Christ, of course, represented the ultimate willful decision for Graham, a choice from which all lasting social change derived. “Our hope,” the evangelist declared in a 1966 address, “is…that social reform in areas where it's needed can be done by men who have been converted and who believe the Gospel.”³³ Such work made up the realm of “social concern,” a term Graham and his evangelical peers employed in reference to those Christian activities in the public, or social, sphere separate from evangelism. The term demonstrates how white American evangelicals tended to place social activism in a mental category separate from, and secondary to, traditional missionary efforts.

The born-again moment, described by leading neo-evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry and other evangelicals as “regeneration,” thus constituted the most legitimate (perhaps the only wholly legitimate) starting point for transforming a fallen society. That transformation would occur on a soul-by-soul and then a relational basis. The role of the state—the critical agent in liberal social activism—remained less certain. The emphasis on individual salvation as a trigger for social change is an oft-cited characteristic of evangelical social engagement. Henry contrasted the authentic “transformation of society” with educational and legislative efforts aimed at “preserving what is worth preserving in the present social order.” Henry and his generation of evangelicals tended to associate the state—and, by extension, the law—solely with coercive power, however necessary that power may be. Transformation through regeneration, by contrast, “rests upon spiritual power,” as “evangelism and revival remain the original wellsprings of evangelical humanitarianism and social awakening.”³⁴ Regeneration first entailed the divine forgiveness of individual sins. Its social component likewise would commence voluntarily at the level of everyday human relations, what Graham and others called “neighbor-love”—a concept they kept distinct from state justice. At its extreme, this stress on individual regeneration could effect a type of sociopolitical passivism. It could, in classic pietistic fashion, permit evangelicals tacitly to bless the political status quo while cultivating their own evangelistic gardens.

Graham and his generation of post–World War II neo-evangelicals, however, did not believe they were proffering a private faith. This was not how they envisioned the ideal role of evangelical Christianity in American society. In practice, then, most postwar evangelicals hoped their values would permeate the realm of state leadership, irrespective of their beliefs concerning the limits of that sphere for transforming society. The evangelical influence on temporal authority would commence, appropriately, at the level of individual conversions. As historian D. G. Hart has argued, a paramount conviction of evangelical political activism has been the belief that “being born again results in holy instincts about the way societies should be ordered and governments run.”³⁵ When this principle is applied to Christian statesmen, the personal becomes political in a peculiarly evangelical way; godly character yields godly governance.

The focus of postwar evangelicals on Christian statesmanship partially grew out of their profound respect for ordained authority and the rule of law. This final element of evangelical universalism often resided uncomfortably alongside the regenerational theory of social change. Despite Graham's inability to avoid personal political partisanship, he consistently argued that believing Christians should support their elected leaders as agents of God's will, irrespective of party or platform. “The devout man,” Henry likewise wrote, “must respect law, and he is spiritually inclined to obey the positive law of the State” and not “to condition [his] support of the State upon its promotion of Christian religious principles.”³⁶ While the government's mission remained ultimately negative (i.e., preservational), in contrast to the regenerative, transformational effects of individual conversions, the state did possess a legitimate role to play in upholding and implementing justice. That role, though, was more corrective than constructive—mere justice, in contrast to regeneration and its by-product of human reconciliation.

The distinction between reconciliation and justice (or between salvation and law) is one of the many facets of neo-evangelical social ethics that gave it a strongly conservative political cast. That distinction sometimes entailed differentiating between spiritual and temporal responsibilities, between individual souls bound for eternity and individual bodies occupying a fallen world.³⁷ Such a distinction made it difficult to voice one's eschatology without tacitly condemning efforts to change society. “From a Christian point of view,” Graham declared in late 1967, “I'm very optimistic about the situation in the world. From [the] point of view of a member of the human race, I'm very pessimistic.”³⁸ Christ would ultimately triumph over human sinfulness, but that triumph would have little to do with human efforts to create the good society. Thus, many evangelicals desired to strengthen their influence over national policy even while their theological inclinations led them to acquiesce to the legitimate powers that be and to assume that a period of social decline would precede the triumphant Second Coming. When political leaders professed a Christianity of the appropriate variety, of course, the dilemma seemed less complicated. Indeed, Graham went so far as to state that qualified Christians had a responsibility to run for office.³⁹

Post–Jim Crow Evangelism

Applied to both civil rights and the broader postwar South, Graham's evangelical universalism held conflicting implications. In his rhetoric on civil rights, the evangelical tension between justice and regeneration played out as a conflict between belief in a universal moral law (e.g., the need for the state to maintain moral order) and faith in voluntarism (e.g., individual acts of neighborly love). The latter impulse might assume a libertarian quality in keeping with the anti–New Deal rhetoric of property rights and individual choice pervasive among postwar conservatives. In the context of the American South during the latter half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, however, Graham invoked the values of evangelical universalism to offer a theologically grounded, commonsense critique of racism and racialism. At the same time, he drew from the ethic to defend his region and to question the value of legislative or other procedural routes to social change. Finally, his respect for the rule of law informed his responses to racial violence in Little Rock and elsewhere.

The way Graham applied his social ethic in the South made him a racial moderate. The label “racial moderate” remains a notoriously slippery but historically viable identity subject to a confused array of evaluations—courageous, compromising, reasoned, indecisive. Graham's views resembled those of the South's “middle-of-the-road liberals,” regional leaders like Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter, editor of the Greenville, Mississippi, Delta Democrat-Times, who “advocated an orderly, locally controlled process of racial change keyed to community conditions and economic growth.”⁴⁰ Some moderates, wrote cultural critic Calvin Trillin in the 1970s, had simply “valued something more than segregation.” Others still hoped to retain white control of the political system. All of them assumed that a sudden, legally enforced shift away from Jim Crow would result in chaos. During the years between the Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial moderation usually meant gradualism. Post-Brown racial gradualists believed that Jim Crow—for reasons of morality or feasibility, or both—was living on borrowed time. In light of the dramatic social implications of racial mixing, though, the ideal full maturation date for that loan was neither today nor tomorrow, but somewhere in the indefinite future. Meanwhile, however, certain forms of desegregation might cautiously proceed—preferably on a voluntary basis or, if in response to a clear and present court order, according only to the letter of the law. In negotiating the timetable for desegregation, gradualists tended to prioritize “civility” over conflict, paternalistically assuming that their approach was in the best interest of southern whites and blacks alike. Their preferred, even avowed, mode was to work “behind the scenes.”⁴¹ As resistance to the Brown decision sharpened during 1956 and 1957, gradualist sentiments gained increasing credibility even among liberals outside the South, resulting in a momentary “vogue of moderation.” Graham's concerns about extremists on both sides of the race issue, expressed in Life and elsewhere, reflected a common dilemma among southern moder-ates.⁴² Like other moderates in the South, the evangelist asymmetrically equated militant segregationists and strident civil rights activists, while worrying that integrationist legislation or aggressive enforcement of Supreme Court decisions would adversely alter the precarious balance of southern race relations. Like those moderates, Graham spoke much more forthrightly and specifically when criticizing acts of racist violence than when offering constructive proposals for racial progress.

These positions and characteristics also resembled the views of President Dwight Eisenhower, with whom Graham stayed in regular contact throughout the president's two terms.⁴³ The advice Graham offered to Eisenhower on race relations said much about how the evangelist applied his social ethic. Eisenhower was quite aware of Graham's influence in the South. So was Representative Frank Boykin, an Alabama Democrat who wrote to the president in March 1956, while Graham was visiting the capital. Significantly, Boykin saw Graham as a mediator rather than a prophet—an agent of gradualism rather than of reform. The race question, Boykin wrote in his patently folksy manner, was important “because, in my judgment, the Communists are taking advantage of it. I believe our own Billy Graham could do more on this than any other human in this nation; I mean to quiet it down and to go easy and in a Godlike way, instead of trying to cram it down the throats of our people all in one day, which some of our enemies are trying to do. I thought maybe if you and Billy talked, you could talk about this real, real good” (emphasis mine).⁴⁴ Clearly, the segregationist congressman from southern Alabama viewed Graham as a shaper of inevitable changes, not as a force that would drive them.

Eisenhower met with Graham the day after Boykin sent his letter. Although the evangelist had just returned from a visit to India and East Asia, his fifty-minute conversation with the president centered on what role he might play in the American South. According to White House notes, Graham asserted that the strong reaction against the Brown decision “had set back the cause of integration, but he thinks it is bound to come eventually.” The moral issues at stake were obvious, Graham told Eisenhower, but were complicated by the social traditions of the South. In his upcoming appearances in the region, the evangelist agreed to echo the president's recent call for “moderation” and “decency” regarding the transition toward integra-tion.⁴⁵ In affirming and possibly even compounding the gradualist leanings of Eisenhower, Graham offered words similar to the advice the president received from moderate-to-liberal southerners, such as Ralph McGill.⁴⁶

Graham and Eisenhower shared a basic understanding of the race problem. They were gradualists wary of purported extremists and skeptical of efforts to legislate racial morality. While the Eisenhower administration officially accepted the Brown decision, the president tacitly criticized the Supreme Court and refused to enforce implementation of the ruling.⁴⁷ As the president told Graham in a subsequent letter, he did back the desegregation of southern graduate schools—a position that paralleled the evangelist's support for open admission in Southern Baptist colleges. Moreover, Eisenhower thought white ministers in the South should publicly support greater representation of blacks in local governments and school boards. Graham called these suggestions “excellent.”⁴⁸ They were in keeping with the kind of adult-centered desegregation that had occurred in the years leading up to Brown. As with the open-seating policy for Graham crusades, these alterations of Jim Crow had not necessarily required legislative or judicial action. Both Graham and Eisenhower publicly endorsed this type of localized gradualism, contrasting it by implication with the “extremism” of enforcing Brown in the Deep South.

Graham's correspondence with Eisenhower following their March 1956 meeting blended moral concerns with racial gradualism. Affirming the belief of the president that “the Church must take a place of spiritual leadership in this crucial matter,” Graham pledged to organize a meeting of southern denominational leaders to discuss Eisenhower's recommendations for enhancing race relations. The evangelist further committed to “do all in my power to urge Southern ministers to call upon the people for moderation, charity, compassion and progress toward compliance with the Supreme Court decision.” Although the proposed gathering never occurred, Graham did meet privately with a range of church leaders, black and white, “encouraging them to take a stronger stand in calling for desegregation and yet demonstrating charity and, above all, patience.” Two moderate southern governors, Luther Hodges of North Carolina and Frank Clement of Tennessee, received similar advice from Graham.⁴⁹ Later in 1956, the evangelist and Vice President Richard Nixon attended Southern Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist gatherings in western North Carolina. These discussions and meetings increased Graham's optimism but also affirmed his gradualism. “I believe the Lord is helping us,” he wrote to Eisenhower, “and if the Supreme Court will go slowly and the extremists on both sides will quiet down, we can have peaceful social readjustment over the next ten-year period” (emphasis mine).⁵⁰

The following year, Eisenhower sought advice from Graham during the most pressing racial crisis of his presidency, the attempted desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School in the fall of 1957. Eisenhower consulted Graham about the possible use of federal troops, and Nixon twice contacted the evangelist during the crisis. Graham agreed that Eisenhower had no choice but to employ the troops.⁵¹ The evangelist also communicated with Little Rock ministers and offered to hold services in the strife-torn city. As part of his Hour of Decision radio program, he distributed to stations throughout Arkansas a sermon encouraging love across the color line. Oveta Culp Hobby, a Houston newspaper publisher and former member of the Eisenhower cabinet, suggested the gesture. In other statements, Graham called for Christians in Little Rock to “obey the law” and averred that “all thinking southerners” were disturbed by the events there.⁵²

With Little Rock, Graham began to involve himself with specific racial crises in the South. Basic Christian racial decency and obedience to the law emerged as the two distinctive themes of these interventions. In 1957, around the time of the violence in Little Rock, Graham sent a brief card of support to Dorothy Counts, an African American student who had faced severe harassment upon enrolling at a previously segregated high school in his hometown of Charlotte. The curiously sloganeering note juxtaposed faith and Cold War nationalism, separating them only by sentences:

Dear Miss Counts,

Democracy demands that you hold fast and carry on. The world of tomorrow is looking for leaders and you have been chosen. Those cowardly whites against you will never prosper because they are un-American and unfit to lead. Be of good faith. God is not dead. He will see you through. This is your one great chance to prove to Russia that democracy still prevails. Billy Graham, D.D.⁵³

Graham's involvement in the social ferment of the South was not completely voluntary, however. He traveled to Charlotte the following year for a crusade. Afterward, he planned to hold a one-day rally on the statehouse lawn in nearby Columbia, South Carolina. The event would be his first desegregated service in a Deep South city since his seating policy had become public knowledge. (Earlier that year, Graham canceled plans to hold several services in western South Carolina. He cited health reasons, although racial tensions were likely a factor as well.)⁵⁴ The leading newspaper in Columbia connected the lack of segregation at the Charlotte meetings with the low black turnout, estimated at between 1 and 3 percent of the total audience. The scheduled statehouse rally turned controversial following the arrival of a racially mixed attachment of soldiers from the nearby Fort Jackson military base; they apparently had been assigned to set up seats for the service. South Carolina governor George Bell Timmerman, ever willing to play the role of blustering segregationist, seized the moment and argued that to permit the service would be to endorse the evangelist's integrationist position. Timmerman implicitly characterized Graham as a traitor to the region. “As a widely known evangelist and native southerner, his endorsement of racial mixing has done much harm, and his presence here on State House property will be misinterpreted as approval of that endorsement,” declared the governor.⁵⁵

Timmerman's brashness reflected the reality that newspapers in the Deep South had started reporting on Graham's racial views, especially those he voiced during the 1957 New York City crusade.⁵⁶ In Charlotte, the evangelist continued this theme, branding the bombing of schools and religious buildings by segregationists as “symptomatic of the type of thing that brought Hitler to power.”⁵⁷ Timmerman soon moved to block the statehouse rally. Legally, he hung his hat on the separation of church and state, an argument typical of segregationists seeking to counter ministerial critics of Jim Crow. Besides, the governor claimed, Graham had likely chosen the statehouse location for “propaganda purposes.” Timmerman, whose stand garnered national attention, neglected to add that Graham had spoken at the statehouse eight years earlier—or that, at the governor's own invitation, W. A. Criswell had delivered his 1956 harangue against integration there.⁵⁸

Rather than challenging Timmerman, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) shifted the rally to Fort Jackson, the nearby military base removed from state jurisdiction. The desegregated Sunday gathering drew an estimated crowd of 60,000, and the platform guests included former governor James Byrnes, an avowed segregationist. Graham avoided personally attacking Timmerman, but he alluded at a press conference to people who “have become so unbalanced by this whole issue of segregation and integration that it has become their only gospel.” As if to compensate for even this backhanded form of criticism—which, of course, also took aim at liberal Protestants—Graham praised South Carolina's “warm friendship between the races” in his national radio broadcast that evening. “It is most unfortunate,” he added, “that much of the world judges this part of the country by a small, minute, extremist minority and sometimes forget[s] that some of the finest Christian people in the entire nation live in this state.”⁵⁹ That extremist minority had, of course, managed to elect Timmerman as governor. In Columbia, Graham clearly cast himself as a voice of evangelical decency rather than as a prophet of racial justice.

Graham's role in the South grew even more visible later that fall. In November, he made racial tensions a theme of addresses at the Alabama State Baptist Convention in Birmingham and Stetson University in Florida.⁶⁰ More important, he held his first desegregated service in a southern city that had experienced racial violence. In his visits to Clinton, Tennessee, in November and to Little Rock one year later, Graham for the first time directly linked his evangelistic services with the region's racial troubles. These postcrisis visits ultimately numbered four in total, and they sharpened the contrast between his evangelistic priorities and the concerns of civil rights activists. Intervening in the South by way of rallies and crusades allowed Graham still to define himself exclusively as an evangelist. In other words, he could safely fold his racial message into his revival sermons and, when pressed, explicitly prioritize the conversion of souls over the transformation of racial sentiments.

The first such intervention took place in the small East Tennessee city of Clinton, where in October 1958 segregationists had bombed the local high school. The school had already experienced rioting during its integration two years earlier. Along with Little Rock and Mansfield, Texas, Clinton had come to symbolize the violent emergence of grassroots massive resistance to the Brown decision.⁶¹ Two months after the bombing, Graham responded to a challenge from nationally syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson and moderate Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, and held a gathering in a gymnasium near the bombed-out high school. The evangelist also worked with an organization created by Pearson to raise funds to rebuild the high school. Graham put Pearson in touch with possible members of the group, although he declined an invitation to chair it.⁶² The Clinton meeting was simultaneously a community rally and a church service. Before Graham's sermon, Pearson and area leaders recounted the bombing story and outlined their fundraising efforts. Pearson praised the local school board for its “unflinching determination to go ahead and rebuild the school as a symbol of law and order.”⁶³

In his Clinton message, Graham voiced his social ethic in all of its doctrinal straightforwardness and political ambiguity. A racially mixed crowd of 5,000 turned out to hear a sermon drawn from the Good Samaritan story and Christ's commandment to love thy neighbor. Christians, Graham emphasized in a recapitulation of his warning to Timmerman, “must not allow integration or segregation to become our gospel.” Either position “minus God equals chaos.” Reflecting his evangelical focus on the spirit-filled will, Graham argued that “love and understanding cannot be forced by bayonets…. We must respect the law, but keep in mind that it is powerless to change the human heart.” His stress on the conversion moment and his dismissal of purely political solutions hardly represented a rousing call to extend neighborly love beyond the sphere of daily interaction. What truly distinguished the Clinton rally from the many other services Graham held that year, though, were the circumstances behind his appearance in this traumatized southern town. His decision to affirm Clinton in its response to segregationist violence conveyed a sociopolitical message evident in a Knoxville News-Sentinel headline the following morning: “Evangelist Calls for Love, Law and Order” (emphasis mine). While Graham later recalled opposition from the local Citizens’ Council to his visit, he spoke at the time of his desire to demonstrate that most Clinton residents were Christians and good citizens.⁶⁴ The following year, the evangelist visited Little Rock, well after his initial pledge to travel there if invited by area ministers. Although a small group of pastors had requested Graham's presence the year before, every segregationist minister and most of the pro-desegregation ministers consulted in Little Rock had objected to the idea.⁶⁵ Moreover, Little Rock congressman and SBC president Brooks Hays, a racial moderate whose political future then hung in the balance, cautioned the evangelist against visiting so soon after the violence at Central High School. (After Hays lost his 1958 reelection bid, Graham addressed a banquet given in his honor.)⁶⁶ Graham's trip to Little Rock finally occurred in September 1959, when he held two rallies in the city's downtown football stadium. Continued tensions over integration likely contributed to his decision to forgo earlier plans for a multiweek crusade in August. The chair of the rally committee was influential Southern Baptist minister and racial moderate W. O. Vaught, whom Graham had introduced and praised at the Charlotte crusade for his work during the Little Rock crisis.⁶⁷

As in Clinton, Graham attempted to clarify his role as an evangelist and only that, but he could not escape the political implications of his visit. The desegregated nature of the rallies had been well publicized, and questions remained about whether Governor Orval Faubus and the Little Rock police force would provide adequate security for the services. These concerns were pressing because the Little Rock Citizens’ Council had launched its own crusade against the evangelist. According to Citizens’ Council chaplain Wesley Pruden, who was something of a celebrity among the massive resistance set, the group distributed forty thousand flyers attacking the integrationist agenda of both Graham and the ministers who had invited him. In making the case for Graham (and, by implication, the case against Faubus), the liberal Arkansas Gazette emphasized the evangelist's southern identity: “Billy Graham has preached the gospel on every continent and in the isles across the sea, but his heart, as he has said, has remained in his native South.” The editorial reflected what two sociologists called the “exaggerated southerner technique,” a strategy Graham and other moderate or liberal southern ministers (along with their secular counterparts) employed to accentuate their regional credentials.⁶⁸

Even though Graham downplayed the racial aspect of the Little Rock rallies, he did not avoid commenting on that matter altogether. “I have said many times,” he reiterated in a press conference, “that nobody can cite the Bible as a defense for segregation.” The two services drew a combined crowd of around 50,000 (including a young William Jefferson Clinton) and featured no racial incidents, although fear of violence likely depressed the overall attendance. A glowing report written for the BGEA emphasized that the rally united people “not as integrationists or segregationists, but as Christians.” In one of his sermons, Graham urged the audience to “obey constitutional authority as long as it doesn't interfere with the worship of God.” Addressing the generic sinner, Graham implied that regenerated hearts should lead to renewed social consciences as well: “When a moral issue comes up you don't really stand up for what you know is right. You're spiritually dead.”⁶⁹

More striking than Graham's occasional comments on race were the ways in which his visit served the interests of city boosters seeking to revive the image of Little Rock. That image had received a further blow only days before the rally, when segregationists dynamited the city school board headquarters. The bombings occurred just as public schools were reopening after a year of forced closure by Governor Faubus.⁷⁰ In the case of one recognizable Little Rock citizen and Graham supporter, Jimmy Karam, the rallies helped to resuscitate his personal reputation. To label Karam mercurial would be an understatement. A Little Rock clothier, friend of Faubus, and former associate of the Urban League whom bystanders had identified as a supervisor of the 1957 violence at Central High School, Karam was rough-edged and opportunistic, yet desperate to revise his well-earned notoriety as a thug. Only months before his antics at Central High School, a thoroughly nonreligious Karam had attended Graham's 1957 New York crusade, which he claimed had exerted no effect on him. By early 1959, however, Karam had come under the influence of W. O. Vaught, pastor of the most prominent Baptist church in Little Rock, who guided him into the faith. Karam became a leading sponsor of the Graham visit and continued to support the evangelist in subsequent decades. During the Little Rock rallies, the evangelist and the convert visited four of the school board bombing suspects in jail.⁷¹ Karam's story made the pages of Time magazine—as did the fact that, although he had recanted his role as a segregationist rabble rouser, he declined to state whether he personally still supported Jim Crow. His critics noted that he definitely still backed Governor Faubus.⁷²

The Little Rock rallies, alas, did not net even an ambiguous racial conversion from Faubus, who had also attended the New York crusade (likely with Karam). During the one Little Rock service the governor attended, he arrived late and momentarily had to sit on the stadium's concrete stairs. A photograph in the strongly anti-Faubus Arkansas Gazette shows him searching for a seat while a young black male, sporting sunglasses, sits comfortably in front of the pacing governor. According to one report, Graham and Karam paid a discreet visit to the gubernatorial mansion that day.⁷³

To Little Rock boosters, most of whom opposed Faubus, the sociopolitical meaning of the rallies centered on “law and order,” a term the editorial page of the Arkansas Gazette had readily invoked when arguing for obedience to court desegregation orders. The paper's more conservative counterpart, the Arkansas Democrat, invoked the same slogan in a political cartoon published during the week of the rallies. The cartoon shows three banners flying over downtown Little Rock; one advertises the Graham rallies, another announces a contemporaneous meeting of the Shriners, and the third declares the “Triumph of Law and Order.”⁷⁴ What ultimately swayed many business and civic leaders to support school desegregation was opposition to segregationist mob violence and its debilitating effects on the image of the city. Their solution was to embrace law and order.⁷⁵ No less malleable than any other civic virtue, the slogan in Little Rock stood for moderation: obedience to constitutional authority, but not support for any specific reform or protest agenda. This usage of law and order preceded the significantly more familiar—and more consistently conservative—connotations the term assumed beginning in the mid-1960s. Graham tapped into a national, as well as regional, discourse of moderation. Two years earlier, Life magazine had described Arkansas Gazette editor Harry Ashmore as part of a “fifth column of decency” and opened an editorial praising Eisenhower's decision to employ federal troops with the premature declaration, “Law and Order have returned to Little Rock.”⁷⁶ The Graham rallies offered evidence that Little Rock had finally achieved a degree of law and order, especially since they had occurred without incident. Graham appeared more than aware that his visit buttressed the interests of those moderates in the South who, as he assured an audience elsewhere, would triumph if only other southerners would cease resorting to “flag waving, inflammatory statements and above all, violence.” This politics of decency might also triumph if more people knew of its existence. “The newspapers of America and the world have carried stories of violence and trouble on the front pages about Little Rock,” Graham declared during the altar call of the final service. “I would like to challenge them to carry this story.”⁷⁷

The Theological Status of Segregationism in Postwar America

As both the Columbia and the Little Rock rallies revealed, Graham's actions and statements in support of improved race relations and desegregation garnered growing criticism from hardline segregationists. Governor Timmerman of South Carolina remained exceptional as an elected official willing to castigate Graham on record, although Frank Boykin privately tried to steer the evangelist away from supporting integration.⁷⁸ Most of the public reaction against the evangelist came from grassroots racists, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, from whom Graham said he received “incredibly obscene letters.” By 1957, Klan leaders had added Graham to their attention-grubbing list of targets, labeling the evangelist a “nigger lover” and (following a freak injury he suffered after an encounter with an aggressive farm animal) declaring, “God bless the ram that butted him down the hill.” Segregationist agitator John Kasper protested Graham's desegregated 1958 Charlotte crusade and similarly referred to the evangelist as a “negro lover.”⁷⁹

A smaller amount of opposition came from nominally more respectable white southerners, mostly from the Deep South. Following Graham's statement that he and W. A. Criswell did not always see “eye to eye” on race, the evangelist reportedly received several calls from First Baptist congregants demanding that he relinquish his membership.⁸⁰ Independent or nonmainline fundamentalist groups in the South, such as the Carolina Baptist Fellowship and supporters of Bob Jones University, represented a more common source of criticism. They chafed at Graham's increasing willingness to cooperate with nonevangelical groups but also objected to his positions on race.⁸¹ Following Graham's 1956 article in Life, prominent segregationist minister Carey Daniel announced his break with an evangelist who now embraced “black supremacy.”⁸² A New Orleans segregationist who had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church for her activism publicly challenged Graham to debate the merits of integration.⁸³ Other critics attacked Graham for “betray[ing]” his “homeland” by entering into “racial politics” at the expense of his spiritual duties. “A lot of the good people of the Deep South have been heading for Heaven for a long time,” editorialized the Selma (Ala.) Times- Journal in 1957, “and they are going to get there whether or not [Graham] likes it.” The title of another hostile editorial that year read, “Billy Lost South When He Jumped to Politics.”⁸⁴

Yet clearly Graham had not lost the whole of the white South. Even outspoken segregationists remained split in their responses to the evangelist. Criswell blasted Bob Jones, Sr., and his heir at Bob Jones University as “crackpot[s]” for their criticism of Graham.⁸⁵ While many fundamentalists, in addition to professional segregationists like John Kasper, felt few restraints in dismissing Graham or challenging him to debates, other Jim Crow partisans approached him with relative humility. The evangelist “is personally a fine young man,” wrote a Charlotte resident to Graham's father-in-law, Nelson Bell, despite being “misled on the negro question.” Another North Carolina critic wrote to Graham (in a letter copied to each southern governor) not “in a spirit of antagonism, but in the hope it will be taken as constructive criticism, not to be finding fault with the ministry, but to plead with [desegregationist ministers] before it is too late.” If only Graham knew of Martin Luther King's communist ties, wrote one professed admirer of the evangelist, he would surely denounce the civil rights leader.⁸⁶ Perhaps these correspondents did not view the evangelist as a race mixer at heart. At the very least, they were nonplussed that a southerner who shared so many of their theological leanings could differ with them on this issue. A South Carolina newspaper branded Graham “one of the strongest advocates for total integration,” while acknowledging his otherwise “wonderful work” as an evangelist.⁸⁷ Most important, though, such hedged criticisms testified to the social and spiritual clout Graham possessed, even though he remained hesitant to employ this leverage in a forceful manner. Critics of his racial views often felt compelled to pay their respects to this overwhelmingly popular minister of God. Many other segregationists never felt compelled to criticize him at all.

Nelson Bell responded to a number of segregationist critics on behalf of his son-in-law. Some of the charges coming from foes of Graham bordered on the absurd (e.g., the “black supremacy” allegation) and were easily countered. Other correspondents simply requested clarification of his opinions on racial matters. In answering these letters, Bell sometimes exceeded his task of defending Graham, to the point where he misrepresented or exaggerated the evangelist's positions and injected his own. As a racial conservative and a public defender of “voluntary segregation,” Bell possessed many ties with segregationist activists. His biases surfaced in his letters, as when Bell wrote to one Tennessean that blacks “must earn social recognition” and declared himself “dead against” Martin Luther King, Jr., “and the cause for which he stands.” In a 1958 letter, dated well after Graham's piece in Ebony, Bell declared that “Billy does not believe in integration any more than you and I do.” When insisting on Graham's opposition to “forced integration,” Bell never once acknowledged the evangelist's support for moderate anti–Jim Crow legislation and obedience to judicial rulings on civil rights.⁸⁸

While Graham could not be mistaken for a civil rights activist, he placed much ideological and theological, if not always spatial, distance between himself and his southern segregationist peers during the latter half of the 1950s. He began criticizing segregation in religious settings and attacking the use of Christianity to justify Jim Crow a decade or more before many of his southern peers publicly arrived at such positions. Criswell, for example, did not openly endorse desegregated church services until 1968.⁸⁹ Like Criswell, Graham commanded appeal among grassroots white southerners (as well as politicians) well removed from the more racially progressive spheres of denominational publishing houses and policy committees. This appeal gave the evangelist tangible influence in the region—or, at the very least, inspired deference to his desegregationist policies.

Graham's shift toward racial moderation challenges how some scholars have viewed the religious status of segregationism during the civil rights era—and suggests that segregationism faced theological defeat well before it faced political demise.⁹⁰ Graham indicates the fairly early timing of this loss. “When southern ministers of Rev. Graham's influence begin to speak out against the evils of segregation,” predicted a black North Carolina newspaper in 1955, “it[’]s a sure sign that the day of its departure is near at hand.” That forecast, of course, represented wishful thinking about both the end of Jim Crow and the role of white southern ministers in bringing about its closure. By no means did Graham create or drive the argument that segregation lacked a theological defense; generations of black theologians had already tilled that ground.⁹¹ Still, his words had attracted obvious notice. His accessible critique of segregation in Christian practice lent the theological defeat of Jim Crow a quality of common sense, even as its exact relationship to political and grassroots efforts for racial change remained ambiguous. “The church should voluntarily be doing what the courts are doing by compulsion,” Graham told a national magazine six months after the Brown decision.⁹²

To be sure, race had not trumped evangelism on Graham's priority list, and it often played third fiddle to politics. Yet race was an issue Graham could scarcely—and increasingly chose not to—avoid. His moderate style and his friendship with numerous southern leaders gave him unusual access to a range of regional actors. Little Rock civic boosters had recognized the good a Graham visit could do to a town's image. His status also made him attractive as a potential consultant, adviser, or mediator for someone such as President Dwight Eisenhower. In this area, Graham functioned as a different type of regional leader.