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