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

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