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”