More than any other figure, Graham came to embody the neo-evangelical posture: a greater willingness to witness to secular society and, by doing so, to offer a relevant conservative alternative to the overt or latent liberalism of mainline Protestantism. The shift toward neo-evangelicalism was a gradual process for Graham. As early as the late 1940s, though, he had sermonized against sectarian proponents of “so-called ‘ultra-Fundamentalism’ whose object is not to fight the world, the flesh and the devil, but to fight other Christians whose interpretation is not like theirs.”21 Neo-evangelicals hoped to restore their brand of Christianity to its rightful place in American—indeed, Western—culture. They evinced an overarching concern for, in the words of NAE founder Harold Ockenga, the “rescue of western civilization by a…revival of evangelical Christianity.”22 The publication Christianity Today, founded in 1956 with vital assistance from Graham, reflected this mission.
The line between militant fundamentalists and more culturally engaged neo-evangelicals, to be sure, did not fully harden until the mid- and late 1950s. Even after the 1949 Los Angeles crusade, Graham still moved comfortably within separatist fundamentalist circles. He received numerous accolades from fundamentalist leaders, including an honorary doctorate from his abortive alma mater, Bob Jones University, where he spoke on several occasions.23 From William Bell Riley, Graham had already netted a more burdensome mantle: the presidency of Northwestern Schools, which the evangelist reluctantly accepted in 1947.24 Despite maintaining his home in North Carolina, Graham nominally occupied the college presidency until 1952. The school's Minneapolis location explains why the city served as the longtime headquarters of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), incorporated in 1950.
Whereas Riley's fundamentalism was partly a product of the southern diaspora, early neo-evangelicalism was an overwhelmingly northern phenomenon. Southern Protestants, for the most part, had not experienced the doctrinal splits that tore apart northern denominations, especially Baptists and Presbyterians, after World War I.25 In this sense, Graham introduced neo-evangelical assumptions to his crusades and social relations in the South. There, departing from the doctrinal dogmatism of fundamentalism potentially also meant departing from its racial assumptions.26 As a result, Graham faced the prospect of criticism from the many southern fundamentalists who, like the eponymous patriarchs of Bob Jones University, advocated a strict, two-kingdom separation between saving souls and reforming societies, while also avowedly supporting the institution of segregation.27
Educational and theological influences aside, an evangelist who sought to witness to all of society had to worry about his public image. In the years following the Los Angeles crusade, Graham's audiences widened beyond the spheres of fundamentalism or even neo-evangelicalism. The new constituencies included a secular press ever conscious of the Elmer Gantry type—of the synergy between hucksterism and soul saving. As early as 1950, Graham faced criticism in New England for tolerating segregation down South. Censure came from within Dixie as well. A letter to the Atlanta Constitution, a liberal paper by regional standards, chided the evangelist for holding segregated meetings during his 1950 crusade in that city. “Is he implying that God Almighty has room for segregation and discrimination in His work?” the writer wondered. A columnist for the same paper continued on this theme, asking, “Will you preach, Sir, on the sins of violent sectionalism and hatred, with brother pitted against brother?…And will you, in all humility, state your position on the greatest thorn in the brow of Southern clergymen…the puzzles of race, white supremacy and segregation?”28
Graham also drew fire from African American leaders. Black attendance was extremely low at the Atlanta crusade, even though Graham recalled that black congregations were among those that had officially invited him to the city. In Atlanta, he came under fire from prominent African American ministers, as well as the South's leading black newspaper, the Daily World, for offering to hold a special service exclusively for blacks.29 Morehouse University president Benjamin Mays, a foremost theological critic of Jim Crow and an early mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr., chastised the evangelist publicly and in print.30 Similar tensions were evident in New Orleans, where a prominent African American Congregational minister took out advertisements urging blacks to shun the 1954 crusade there. (He later learned that those services would, in fact, be desegregated.) Outside the South, at least one black newspaper reported that Graham had held segregated services during his 1953 Dallas crusade. His immediate response to the reports about Dallas—sermonizing, from the relatively safer confines of Detroit, “that there is no [racial] difference in the sight of God”—revealed his caution, but also his sensitivity to criticism.31 Graham viewed African Americans as part of his broader constituency, although not the core of it.
The Cold War represented a final, if delayed, influence on Graham's development on racial matters. Graham may have been the quintessential Cold War revivalist. From the very beginning of postwar tensions with the Soviet Union, he linked his evangelism to the destiny of the United States and its leaders.32 His warnings of pending national disaster surpassed the tone of his evangelistic predecessors, including Moody, Sunday, and Charles Finney.33 When Graham advocated “Christ for This Crisis” (the motto of his 1947 revival in Charlotte), the crisis he spoke of entailed the specter of communism, in addition to moral degeneration. His sermon titles (“The End of the World,” “Will God Spare America?”) reflected an apocalyptic interpretation of the times.34 Graham offered an emphatically spiritual interpretation of the Cold War. Communism was “Satan's religion,” a “great anti-Christian movement” whose gains had been “masterminded” by that same force.35 The evangelist viewed communism as a rival faith, complete with its own trinity (to quote the 1952 book Communism and Christ, which Graham mailed to every member of Congress, along with President Harry Truman and his cabinet): “Marx the Lawgiver, Lenin the Incarnate Truth, Stalin the Guide and Comforter.”36
For Graham, though, the fight against communism needed to be won by might as well as by the spirit. His Cold War bellicosity resided well to the right of the emerging liberal anticommunist consensus and, as such, held complex implications for his stance on racial matters. In 1950, he castigated the reds who “stole China” and predicted that communists would bomb the United States within two or three years—“and not five years.”37 That same year, he personally urged President Truman toward “total mobilization to meet the Communist threat.” South Korea, the evangelist had earlier informed the president by telegram, contained “[m]ore Christians…per capita than any part of world.” The situation, he declared, necessitated a “show down with Communism now.”38 Following Truman's dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur for desiring just such a confrontation, Graham praised the general as “a great man and a great Christian.”39 After the U.S. Senate censured another anticommunist icon, Joseph McCarthy, in December 1955, Graham likened the legislative body to a fiddling Emperor Nero.40
The preoccupation of Graham with the Korean peninsula pointed to his association with an anticommunist right fixated on the reddening of Asia and, indeed, the United States itself. In early 1953, he introduced friendly congressmen to right-wing Australian activist Fred Schwarz, then in the process of creating the influential Christian Anti-Communism Crusade.41 Moreover, Graham possessed a number of social ties with the broader “China Lobby,” which urged an aggressive policy of “roll back” in Asia. His father-in-law, Nelson Bell, had left his missionary post in China on the cusp of the Maoist ascendancy. Early Graham supporters included publishing mogul Henry Luce, who was born in China to missionary parents, and Minnesota congressman Walter Judd, whose background as a medical missionary in China resembled that of Bell. Other conservative anticommunists who admired Graham from a distance included Alfred Kohlberg, the leading spokesperson for the China Lobby, and Albert Wedemeyer, who as a special representative to China had warned President Truman about the impending collapse of the Nationalist regime.42 Bell himself corresponded with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, met with the Formosan ambassador to the United States, and warned throughout the 1950s and 1960s of Americans “in high places who consistently helped the Communists”