The past resurfaced often enough, however, to suggest the fallacy of evaluating Graham solely by the standard of his sanguine final chapters. Three years before the 2005 New York crusade, Graham sloughed off a final round of residue from the Nixon years: the release of a recorded White House conversation in which the evangelist appeared readily to affirm the president's anti-Semitic ranting. With the help of a leading evangelical public relations specialist, Graham responded to the disclosure with swift, if somewhat puzzled, contrition, apologizing to Jewish leaders for words he could not remember uttering.3 He had long stressed that his flirtation with politics had come to an end. Still, only two years earlier, on the cusp of the 2000 presidential election, Graham offered effusive support for Republican candidate George W. Bush, who credited the evangelist with sparking his journey toward born-again Christianity.4 And a decade before this second Bush assumed office, Graham had spent a night in the White House with George H. W. and Barbara Bush watching television coverage of the start of the Persian Gulf War—a fact the president soon recounted at the National Prayer Breakfast.5 During an era when religion and politics consorted brashly and unapologetically (and when Graham no longer commanded sustained media coverage), these incidents drew merely passing attention.
Clearly, the snapshot of Graham in New York City captured only the twilight of a remarkable career that dated back to the end of World War II. Since the early 1950s, Graham has never relinquished his status as one of the most recognizable and respected of Americans, someone who has mingled comfortably with the powerful, while retaining the common touch. As scholar of religion Joe Barnhart recognized in the early 1970s, the evangelist functioned during his peak years of influence as a kind of conduit through which flowed much of the zeitgeist of the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet Graham was not, as Barnhart went on to contend, merely “an innocent tool of complex dynamics which he may little understand or appreciate.”6
Rather, Graham was a public actor in his own right—a point this book seeks to demonstrate. In engaging political leaders and the pressing issues of his times, he made important decisions that, while always weighed against his higher priorities as an evangelist, reflected his own values, his own notion of the social and spiritual good. Graham's power, that is, was simultaneously readily visible and more than what met the eye.
Nowhere was Graham's public and private sway more evident than in his native region of the American South, the central (although not the exclusive) purview of this book. Graham's national and international prominence has understandably obscured the southern origins and identity of the Charlotte-born evangelist, who possesses a distinct drawl, whose grandfathers both fought for the Confederacy, and who has made Montreat, North Carolina, his primary residence since 1945. He was a southerner by birth and remained one by choice. Likewise obscured are the keen ways in which Graham paralleled and influenced the course of the post–World War II and post–civil rights era South. Bill Clinton understood this influence, yet voiced only one facet of it on the crusade platform in New York. During the decades after 1950, the South experienced two significant, related shifts away from its status as a “Solid South”: the end of legalized Jim Crow and the end of Democratic Party dominance.7 Through Graham's social ethic, which I term evangelical universalism, as well as the political ethic it helped to inspire, which I term the politics of decency, the evangelist had a hand in both trends.
A World—and Regional—Figure
This book seeks to reintroduce a familiar figure to the narrative of southern history and, in the process, examine the political and social transitions constitutive of the modern South. It considers the important role Graham played in creating that South, focusing on his behavior and rhetoric regarding the overlapping realms of religion, politics, and race, particularly during the decades after 1950. In these years, the North Carolinian maintained a visible and controversial presence in a region witnessing the civil rights movement and the beginning of political realignment. Alternately a desegregating crusader in Alabama, regional booster in Atlanta, southern apologist in the national press, and southern strategist in the Nixon administration, Graham functioned as a type of regional leader—a product of his times and a player in them, a symbol and an actor. His evangelical Christianity mediated the emergence of a post–civil rights era South simultaneously more open to desegregation and more amenable to Republican Party politics.
Graham's life can tell us much about the modern South in all its ambiguities; viewing him through the lens of southern history can, in turn, enhance our understanding of the evangelist. Like most southerners of his generation, he grew up in a part of the country that was rife with segregation laws, solidly Democratic, and overwhelmingly evangelical. His career coincided with the end of the first two characteristics, although not the third. From the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, he came to support desegregation, discreetly consulted with Martin Luther King, Jr., and advocated racial tolerance in such national publications as Life and Ebony. At the same time, Graham remained a member of a Southern Baptist congregation led by the outspoken segregationist W. A. Criswell—and, in the eyes of several conservative moguls, the evangelist was a viable candidate for the 1964 GOP presidential nomination.
Graham held his first intentionally desegregated southern crusade in 1953, before most of the landmark events of the civil rights era. As he began holding desegregated services (that is, services with racially mixed seating patterns) throughout the Upper South, he received public criticism from ardent segregationists. The evangelist largely avoided the Deep South until the mid-1960s, when he visited Alabama and held highly publicized rallies and crusades in the aftermath of racial violence in Birmingham and Selma. The pinnacle of Graham's career coincided with the first term of the Nixon administration and the fitful emergence of what commentators began calling the Sunbelt South.
Starting with President Dwight Eisenhower and continuing through Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, politicians looked to Graham for regional leadership on civil rights matters, particularly among the evangelist's presumed constituency of white southerners. The evangelist consulted with Eisenhower about the Little Rock desegregation crisis and in subsequent years met with a host of regional politicians, including Alabama governor George Wallace. Later, Graham supported the Office of Economic Opportunity (the principal agency for implementing Johnson's War on Poverty) and acceded to a Nixon administration request to record television and radio spots promoting obedience to school integration and busing laws. Yet Graham was more than just a consultant or figurehead. Although nominally a registered Democrat throughout his adult life, he paralleled—and in certain respects, spoke for—those white southerners, many of them with moderate inclinations, who supported Eisenhower, backed Johnson, and then voted Republican again, for Nixon.8 Through his relationship with Nixon, in particular, Graham functioned as a political strategist and abetted the president's controversial, if not always successful, “southern strategy.”
This is a story Graham scholars have inadequately explored and southern historians have largely ignored. As a popular (and popularizing) figure, Graham has always received more attention from journalists than from academics. The earliest scholarly study of Graham, a 1960 biography, casts him as the somewhat atavistic flagship evangelist of a new Great Awakening. During the Nixon era, a generation of scholars offered informed, often lively, polemics about an evangelist they viewed as an agent of civil religion and a spokesperson for the “silent majority.”9 Graham eventually drew more attention from academic historians, who ably treated him in relation to a number of broad trends, such as Cold War religiosity and the emergence of modern American evangelicalism.10 Several