Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South. Steven P. Miller
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