CHAPTER ONE
“No Segregation at the Altar”
Growing up in the rural South, I had adopted the attitudes of that region without much reflection. —Billy Graham, 1997
The audience may be segregated, but there is no segregation at the altar. —Billy Graham, 1952
BILLY GRAHAMENTERED the 1950s as a nationally known evangelist who was also an identifiable southerner and a Christian fundamentalist. The following decade saw a struggle—sometimes public, often unstated—between his singular position as an evangelist and the other, seemingly more expendable, labels. While parting ways with many of his fundamentalist allies, Graham chose to retain his regional identity. This decision meant he would ultimately have to address the specifically southern problem he and his fellow moderates politely called the “race question” or the “race problem” (hesitant as they were to use the more prescriptive term “civil rights”). Graham's southern identity was evident in many things—his theological sensibilities, his political and social relationships, and his zealous Cold War apocalypticism—but expressed itself most strikingly when civil rights reemerged as a national issue in the early 1950s. As an evangelist, Graham also situated his response to race within the larger context of his ministerial priorities, which in many respects transcended matters of region. At some level, he attempted to square his inherited racial customs with his theology, his southern background with his increasingly inclusive ministry.
Graham's early response to the race issue revealed the elusive nature of his racial moderation. During the post–World War II years preceding the rise of “massive resistance” to desegregation in the South—a time when even parts of the Deep South were not yet a completely “closed society” on matters of race1 —Graham formulated views and rhetorical postures that lasted him for decades. He evolved from a tacit segregationist to a tepid critic of Jim Crow and, finally, to a practitioner of desegregation in his crusade services. The sources and motivations for his changing stance on racial segregation ranged from the theological to the intellectual and the political. They included his exposure to theological spheres outside southern fundamentalism, his concern about his public image, his desire to evangelize within the black community, and his burgeoning Cold War internationalism.
In his discussion of racial matters, Graham retained a familiar evangelical language buttressed by both his celebrity status and his recognizability as a southerner. He also cultivated public positions reflective of his regional affiliation: defensiveness about the South, denunciation of “extremists on both sides” of the civil rights debate, and prophecy of racial disharmony in the North. Graham's actions were never radical, and he cultivated close ties with southern politicians of all stripes. Still, he implicitly (and, with time, explicitly) acknowledged and accepted the fact that the Jim Crow system was on borrowed time—theologically and, quite possibly, politically. While not playing as visible a role in the South during the first half of the 1950s as he later would, Graham paved the ground for his subsequent regional leadership.
The Making of a Racial Moderate
Graham first entered the national spotlight in the fall of 1949 during his two-month-long Christ for Greater Los Angeles campaign. The Los Angeles revival holds a firm place in the Graham mythology. He came to Southern California as a representative, if quite successful, preacher following the well-traveled fundamentalist revival circuit. By the close of the Los Angeles meeting, held in an elaborate circus tent dubbed the “Canvas Cathedral,” Graham stood as the heir apparent of Billy Sunday, the last nationally prominent male evangelist, whose career had peaked in the 1910s.
Graham arrived in Los Angeles toward the start of a well-publicized postwar national religious revival that eventually saw Congress add “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Churches and synagogues boomed along with the birth rate. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Graham's chosen denomination, saw five hundred new churches built between 1946 and 1949, with the denomination growing by around 300,000 members during the same period. “Religion-in-general,” in historian Martin E. Marty's famous phrase, gained new credence during the postwar years. “Our government,” President Dwight Eisenhower flatly declared, “makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is.” Such reflexive, but not self-reflexive, “faith in faith,” as Marty also called it, did not inevitably portend a revival of the old-time gospel.2 Ye t it certainly offered an opening for an evangelist claiming that the faith of the fathers could resolve the conundrums of modern man.
The Christ for Greater Los Angeles campaign took a while to gain steam. The pivotal moment came when newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst ordered his army of editors to “Puff Graham,” words that Graham supporters have happily recounted almost from the moment their effects first registered. Hearst, who was likely drawn to the strident anticommunist message of the dynamic young evangelist, had already “puffed” Youth for Christ (YFC), the evangelistic organization for which Graham then worked. This time, the instructions stuck. Word about the lanky young evangelist quickly spread from the headlines of Los Angeles newspapers to the pages of Time, Life, and Newsweek.3 Graham became a religious media phenomenon to a degree unseen on North American soil since the eighteenth-century peregrinations of English evangelist George Whitefield. The hoopla thrust Graham into a national mainstream from whose current he has rarely strayed since.
Graham's success in Los Angeles and other areas outside his native South had more to do with his southern background than is initially apparent. In his early career, the evangelist benefited from the continuing migration of white southerners westward and northward in search of industrial jobs. The white southern diaspora, a phenomenon less explored than the related Great Migration of black southerners, left a distinct imprint on twentieth-century American Christianity. The 1949 Los Angeles revival drew strength from the many fundamentalist-inclined “country preachers” who had moved from Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma to the “Southland” of California. The list included Methodist fundamentalist “Fighting” Bob Shuler, a Texas transplant. Long Beach radio station KGER, owned by Arkansas fundamentalist entrepreneur John Brown, was the first to broadcast news of the upcoming revival meetings. Radio host and country and western musician Stuart Hamblen, the first of several celebrity converts in Los Angeles, hailed from Texas. Similar patterns appeared elsewhere. The chair of Graham's 1952 Detroit crusade was a southern preacher. So was the powerful fundamentalist Baptist minister William Bell Riley, a Kentucky native who in 1947 appointed Graham to succeed him as president of Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis.4
Unlike the preachers of the southern diaspora, Graham was a “commuting southerner,” rather than a migrant.5 Even though the evangelist built his reputation in the Midwest, especially through his partnership with Torrey Johnson—head of the Chicago-based YFC—he remained a southerner in the eyes of most of the public, as well as in his own. In 1952, Graham struck a Time writer as a flamboyant product of the country South whose concept of fashion entailed “a jaunty sky-blue gabardine,” along with “a blue and white tie and square-folded white handkerchief, thick-soled, reddish-brown shoes, a cowboy belt with a silver buckle and silver tip.” Graham also played the part in his language patterns. He closed his ABC radio broadcast with the colloquial send-off, “May the Lord bless you real good,” and referred to the daughter of President Harry Truman in personal correspondence as “Miss Margaret.”6
Newfound fame both permitted and forced Graham to address a host of national concerns beyond the purview of altar calls and gaudy garb. On one such issue, the global threat of communism, Graham never hesitated to voice his opinion. On another matter, race, he remained strikingly more circumspect. When he did address the race issue, however, he spoke not only as an evangelist but also as a southerner whose background lent him a certain amount of the authority on the subject.
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