Christopher Stroop takes a look at the image of Billy Graham the Moderate in (appropriately? ironically?) Playboy, In Billy We Trust? How "America's Pastor" Birthed Our New Theocratic Wave 02/23/2018. Stroop describes himself in this article as part of the "the ex-evangelical community." His article has a tone of a convert away from a cause that he experienced as harmful. But he has real insight into fundamentalist culture, and is careful with facts.
He reminds us of what a large role Graham played in building the conservative version of the Cold War outlook, which had a heavy religious component. Although distinguishing the conservative from the liberal version would be a challenging undertaking. The liberal Cold Warriors had their own Christian theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who actually had some important practical perspectives in his foreign policy vision known as Christian realism. Although Niebuhr own view of Soviet Communism was highly ideological, too.
Stroop also talks about how Billy Graham's public religiosity affected the contemporary versions of his son Franklin and of former alleged moderate Rick Warren. And he argues, "Radically conservative, mostly white evangelicals like Rick Warren and Franklin Graham are largely responsible for America being stuck with a thrice-married brash billionaire who brags about sexual assault as president."
I like Stroop's description of I've started to call the conservative evangelical "thoughts and prayers" position on social problems they don't want solved:
In a famous 1958 sermon, “What’s Wrong with the World?”, Billy Graham lamented that America had “rejected God’s simple program ... We’re not really living for Christ.” He insisted that “The race problem is a symptom. War is a symptom. Crime is a symptom.” A symptom of what? “Sin,” according to Graham, the “disease” inherent in “man’s nature.” In the same sermon, Graham decried the United Nations for not opening its meetings in prayer. His actions in respect to race were also in line with this way of thinking. While Graham did indeed bail Martin Luther King, Jr. out of jail, he also opposed King’s calls for civil disobedience.
Billy Graham never moved past this ideology. In 2012, for example, he wrote, “the farther we get from God, the more the world spirals out of control.” And how exactly had America moved away from God? Broadly, by embracing “the idolatry of worshiping false gods such as technology and sex,” and more specifically by limiting the ability of police chaplains in some locales to pray in Jesus’s name. Oh and, of course, abortion. Since the late 1970s, it’s always abortion.
Part of his post deals with Billy Graham and the moderate image he constructed and which became part of how he was remembered when he passed away:
White Evangelical Christians opposed desegregation tooth and nail. Where pressed, they made cheap, cosmetic compromises, like Billy Graham’s concession to allow black worshipers at his crusades. Graham never made any difficult statements on race, never appeared on stage with his “black friend” Martin Luther King after 1957, and he never marched with King. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech,” Graham responded with this passive-aggressive gem of Southern theology, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” For white Southern evangelicals, justice and compassion belong only to the dead.
When addressing problems that they don't want solved, i.e., that they don't actually view as problems, "thoughts and prayers" are all that can be done. When it comes to problems they want addressed or laws they want changed, they think being militantly and actively engaged is fine. And that it would be a sin to wait for the Second Coming to take action on those problems.
Ladd covers a lot of historical grounds in a short post. But his basic point is well-founded: that the fundamentalist variant of white evangelicalism was very heavily influenced by the very worldly influence of slavery and segregation. And that influence is still visible today:
What did Jesus say about abortion, the favorite subject of [Dallas First Baptist pastor and prominent Christian Right figure Robert] Jeffress and the rest of the evangelical movement? Nothing. What does the Bible say about abortion, a practice as old as civilization? Nothing. Not one word. The Bible’s exhortations to compassion for immigrants and the poor stretch long enough to comprise a sizeable book of their own, but no matter. White evangelicals will not let their political ambitions be constrained by something as pliable as scripture.
Why is the religious right obsessed with subjects like abortion while unmoved by the plight of immigrants, minorities, the poor, the uninsured, and those slaughtered in pointless gun violence? No white man has ever been denied an abortion. Few if any white men are affected by the deportation of migrants. White men are not kept from attending college by laws persecuting Dreamers. White evangelical Christianity has a bottomless well of compassion for the interests of straight white men, and not a drop to be spared for anyone else at their expense. The cruelty of white evangelical churches in politics, and in their treatment of their own gay or minority parishioners, is no accident. It is an institution born in slavery, tuned to serve the needs of Jim Crow, and entirely unwilling to confront either of those realities.
Ladd also observes, "Many Christian movements take the title 'evangelical,' including many African-American denominations. However, evangelicalism today has been coopted as a preferred description for Christians who were looking to shed an older, largely discredited title: Fundamentalist."
It is notable that some white Christians and most African-American Christians draw different lessons that the Christian Right does from conservative/"evangelical" theological beliefs. After all, unless there is a secret version of the Christian Bible that only Christian Rightists ever see - and I'm often tempted to think there is - their Bible, which fundamentalists claim to interpret literally. contains the story of the Exodus, the words of the prophets, the parables and sayings of Jesus that shows solidarity with the poor and extreme skepticism about the capability of the rich to lead godly lives. Their Old Testament contains many injunctions to be just and compassionate to immigrants, and their New Testament tells the story of the Good Samaritan, a foundational story for the Christian religion.
This current article by Bruce Hindmarsh in the conservative Protestant Christianity Today magazine give a useful sketch of the historical roots of what we call "evangelicalism" in the US, What Is Evangelicalism? 03/14/2018:
Seventeenth-century movements of devotion such as Pietism, Puritanism, and the Anglican “holy living” tradition fused to generate a general spiritual awakening first in central Europe and Germany, then throughout the Anglo-sphere. In the middle third of the eighteenth century a number of persons, who later would be drawn into evangelical preaching, passed through crises of personal conversion. The most famous of these in Britain were John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, but there were many others. Most were already baptized, highly observant Christians who nevertheless came to a crisis of conscience and spiritual insufficiency that seemed to demand new and more deeply personal experience of repentance and faith in Christ. They discovered in these conversions new impulses to preach, travel, organize, and campaign for widespread evangelical renewal within their own spheres, whether Anglicans, Methodists, Moravians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, or Baptists.
Hindmarsh's article gives a broad, non-critical description of what he understands to be "evangelical" in the American sense.
But to understand white American evangelicalism and fundamentalism, the social, political, and ideological factors that Chris Ladd discusses also have to be taken fully into account.
Hindmarsh also does not touch on the very large influence of Christian Zionism on Christian fundamentalists today. Believers in the "Dispensationalist" tradition that has been heavily influenced by the British theology and leader of the Christian Brethren sect John Nelson Darby hold beliefs that are particularly congenial to militaristic and warmongering views of the world as well as an underlying anti-Semitic worldview. That also is a theological dividing point that is significant for their politics.
The President of the United States looms large in the news because of the power and influence of the office. With a narcissist running a seriously dysfunctional Administration in the White House, the number of Presidential incursions into the daily news can get exhausting. Susie Madrak recounts Joe Scarborough's lament about information overload in Scarborough: So Much News, It's Hard To Know Where To BeginC&L 03/01/2018.
But taking a break from the current Presidential professional-wrestling spectacle, I ran across a journal article about an interesting moment in the public ministry of Billy Graham, who this week lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda as though he were a departed head of state.
The period in question is the early 1970s, when Graham most clearly and publicly identified politically with a President, Richard Nixon at the time. At this same period, he took a new interest in youth evangelism. This was part of what is sometimes called the Long Sixties. And one feature of the times was the prominent presence of a kind of alternative-lifestyle brand of evangelical Christianity, which the national press hyped as the "Jesus movement," a label with which participants identified.
One notable instance of that tendency was led by Francis Schaeffer, whose son and one-time heir apparent in his ministry now regularly criticizes the Christian Right and it's authoritarian Christian dominionist politics. The elder Schaeffer establised what later came to be called an "intentional community" called L'Abri in Switzerland, a kind of fundamentalist Christian commune. A biographical sketch in the conservative evangelical magazine Christianity Today by Michael Hamilton ("The dissatisfaction of Francis Schaeffer" 41:3 03/03/1997) described his intervention in American evangelical culture this way:
... this was no ordinary fundamentalist preacher. He and his wife, Edith, had lived for ten years in a student commune they had started in the Swiss Alps. When he lectured, he wore an alpine hiking outfit--knickers, knee socks, walking shoes. By 1972 he had added to his already singular appearance long hair and a white tufted goat's-chin beard. Most curious of all, he seldom quoted from the Bible. He was more apt to talk about the philosophical importance of Henry Miller (then regarded as the most pornographic writer in American letters).
During the next two decades the Schaeffers organized a multiple-thrust ministry that reshaped American evangelicalism. Perhaps no intellectual save C. S. Lewis affected the thinking of evangelicals more profoundly; perhaps no leader of the period save Billy Graham left a deeper stamp on the movement as a whole. Together the Schaeffers gave currency to the idea of intentional Christian community, prodded evangelicals out of their cultural ghetto, inspired an army of evangelicals to become serious scholars, encouraged women who chose roles as mothers and homemakers, mentored the leaders of the New Christian Right, and solidified popular evangelical opposition to abortion.
The Schaeffers left an imprint on the wildly diverse careers of Jesus People organizer Jack Sparks; musicians Larry Norman and Mark Heard; political figures Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jack Kemp, Chuck Colson, Randall Terry, C. Everett Koop, Cal Thomas, and Tim and Beverly LaHaye; and scholars Harold O. J. Brown, Os Guinness, Thomas Morris, Clark Pinnock, and Ronald Wells. Strange bedfellows, indeed, and this is part of the puzzle of Francis Schaeffer. Clues to its solution are spread across a half-century and two continents--from Westminster Seminary, the art galleries of Europe, and an English boarding school to the Mayo Clinic and the U.S. Supreme Court. And in the end, when the pieces of the puzzle are all assembled, the life of Francis Schaeffer gives us a picture of a side of evangelicalism quite at odds with the trajectory of the modern world. [my emphasis]
As the list of famous Christian Right figures who saw him as a major influence shows, despite the "hippie" and intellectually highbrow image he struck, his contribution to evangelical culture landed heavily on the side of the Christian Right and dominionism. We can't blame Schaeffer for what his self-proclaimed followers may have done. But it's worth noting that Randall Terry was not only the leader of the militantly anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. He was also an important player in getting the violent Patriot Militia movement going. HIs now liberal/progressive Christian son Frank has emphasized what a major role his father played in promoting the anti-abortion cause.
It's probably worth mentioning here that "evangelical" in the American usage is not a blanket term for Protestant, as it is in parts of Europe including Germany. The American usage refers to theologically conservative Protestants, including but not limited to fundamentalism. People not immersed in the politics of that world may find it difficult to see a distinction between fundamentalists and their non-fundamentalist fellow evangelicals. But participants in denominational politics and theological polemics are keenly aware of the differences. Billy Graham is particularly known for appealing to both "evangelicals" and "fundamentalists," which gave him a more moderate image than a closer familiarity with his faith and politics might justify. Francis Schaeffer, too, bridged that gap while planting his feet in conservative American Republican politics. As Hamilton writes, "Schaeffer created for himself a highly independent place in the public world of evangelicalism. He had wide appeal to students with countercultural leanings, but also to conservative politicians. He remained in touch with but aloof from the other leading figures of American evangelicalism."
Graham continued to cultivate a more moderate image, while Schaeffer became more and more radicalized in a rightward direction. Hamilton writes:
In trying to assess the meaning of Francis Schaeffer, it is instructive to compare him to Billy Graham. Both reached the peak of their influence at about the same time, and both had an immeasurable impact on American evangelicalism. Graham in many ways represents the moderate middle of evangelicalism--defusing controversy, wishing the best for everyone, friend of both Republicans and Democrats, slow to disturb middle-class conventions willing to cooperate with anyone who will let him preach the gospel. As historian Grant Wacker once wrote, "When Graham spoke, middle America heard itself." It was just as natural to see Graham and the President on the fairway together as to see Graham on a platform with a Bible in his hands. [my emnphasis]
Larry Eskridge looked at Graham and the Jesus People circa 1970 in "'One Way': Billy Graham, the Jesus Generation, and the Idea of an Evangelical Youth Culture" Church History (March 1998). At that time, there was a big growth in interest in evangelical organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ that focused their evangelizing efforts on young adults. Eskridge points out the demographic element of Baby Boomers producing a bump in the numbers of people in that age cohort, calling it "the 'pig-in-the-python' effect of the Baby Boom."
Billy made magical thinking mainstream. He shaped an evangelical movement that then became as political as he was in his Nixon-supporting years and unlike Billy, this movement never repented of trading Jesus for politics. Full circle: Billy Graham sought to forge a movement that was distinct from the Southern racist fundamentalism of his day, yet that is precisely what today’s evangelicalism has become again.
Magical thinking isn’t a very good basis for policy or politics. “I believe Donald Trump is a good man,” Franklin Graham said on CNN, last month. “He did everything wrong as a candidate and he won, and I don’t understand it. Other than I think God put him there.”
Graham’s converts from the 1950s to 1990s (my generation, old, white, and tired) lined up to support not only Trump but Roy Moore. One of their very own, Sarah Huckabee, stands up every day and knowingly lies for Trump, covering for his multitude of sins on everything from racism to his lies about paying off porn stars, to abusing scores of women and denying that the Russians attacked our democracy to help get him elected.
Graham and the neo-evangelicals, as they called themselves, tried to create religious revival in the United States. Fifty years on what they got instead was Trump and Roy Moore, climate change deniers, white nationalism and the NRA’s lock on the party evangelicals uniquely empower.
There's enough spiritual and moral power in this stadium tonight that could change the nation. And change the world. If we begin to march for Jesus Christ. Young people all over the wold are marching for every cause in the world. And tonight I believe the time has come to declare ourselves and stat marching in earnest for Jesus Christ. ...
Well, our hope is not in Communism. Our hope is not even in democracy. Our hope is in Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God. [my emphasis]
1972 was the year that Graham endorsed Richard Nixon for re-election as President.
It doesn't require especially careful listening to tell that in that sermon, he presents the political manifestations of young people becoming engaged as a menacing development, darkly invoking the supposed similarities with the period leading up to the Second World War in which millions of people perished," in which "blood splattered across this planet, as it's never been splattered in history."
He pronounces "fascist" as "fash-e-ist."
When he say that young people of "this generation" are being deceived by Satan, his listeners in 1972 mostly understood that he was not talking about people being deceived by the power of concentrated wealth or by propaganda for an unjust war. In fact, he quotes "the Devil" as saying, "All you need is security from the cradle to the grave and you'll be happy." The welfare state is part of Satan's trickery! And people who aspire to a world in which all being have "security from the cradle to the grave" are promoting a Satanic goal! Wait ... what?!
The evangelical rhetorical context here has to do with evangelicals' attitude toward political issues, which can be remarkably flexible. In the kind of Protestant Christianity Graham represented, proselytizing is seen as a central task of the Christian believer. The task is understood as saving peoples' souls from burning in Hell for eternity, a task of some obvious urgency. So any Good Samaritan type ideas of social solidarity are considered distinctly less important, unless they are embedded in proselytizing or missionary efforts.
So for social or political causes with which the evangelicals reject, they can argue that secular efforts will ultimately be ineffective. Only getting a large enough number of people saved by Jesus, i.e., recruited into that brand of Protestant Christianity, can resolve those problems. Think of it as the "thoughts and prayers" position. This feature of fundamentalism in particular often leads observers to assume that this attitude would result in political withdrawal, or quietism.
But the flexibility reveals itself over social-political causes which the evangelicals support. In those cases, active involvement in lobbying, protest, and various kinds of political activism is seen as very much part of the Christian's mission on earth. This is framed in religious terms by which those kinds of political engagement are an expression of the higher religious values of the believers. So while conservative evangelicals may think "thoughts and prayers" are the best that can be done when it comes to reducing gun proliferation, urgent action is required to get abortion outlawed.
Those positions may look contradictory or hypocritical. And, often enough, they are. But its also a cultural narrative - maybe "culture war" narrative is a better term for it - to identify among themselves which causes are godly and therefore legitimate and which are bad, or evil, or Satanic. Dogmatism and authoritarianism also come into play here and encourage evangelicals to feign respectful listening to people associated with the bad causes only in order to establish credibility with them to convert them from their ungodly beliefs. If saving souls from eternal damnation is a primary mission in life, developing effective sales techniques is essential.
Eskridge describes Graham's marketing approach to young potential converts this way:
,,, his larger approach to the youth problem in his national ministry, [involved providing] a tolerant, openhanded response that was at variance with much of the hard-line rhetoric that secular and religious conservatives used in denouncing the younger generation in general, and the counterculture in particular. Indeed, Graham saw in the Jesus Movement a cadre of young prodigals who - rejecting the counterculture - had metaphorically come home to their parents' America via the bridge of an old American tradition: evangelical religion. [my emphasis]
Eskridge also declares somewhat grandiloquently of this outreach to long-haired and disaffected youth, "In supporting this uniquely evangelical spin on youth culture, Graham and the BGEA's [Billy Graham Evangelical Association's] efforts to legitimate the Jesus Movement were yet another example of evangelicalism's uncanny ability to harness popular forces and movements for the furtherance of its mission."
This is part of what the late Billy Graham had a moderate image, despite the conservative nature of his theological conceptions, his politics, and social attitudes.
Megachurch pastor Rick Warren spent a few years in the early 2000s trying to cultivate a similarly moderate image. Maybe he wasn't as skilled at doing it as Billy Graham. That ploy ended with Warren pretty abruptly dropping it with his hosting of a joint appearance at his Saddleback church with Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain in August 2008. Just after the event, he trashed Obama for not having been sufficiently anti-abortion. (Michelle Vu , Rick Warren: Obama's Abortion Answer Not Clear EnoughChristian Post R08/19/2008) He didn't endorse either candidate. And Obama generously invited Warren to give a public prayer at his first Inaugural. But that was pretty much the end of Warren's posture as a moderate, based on his concern for issues like gay rights and environmental "stewardship."
In fact, Warren's position on abortion was largely indistinguishable from that of the most hardline fundamentalists. Even including the fanatical label of abortion rights as perpetrating a "holocaust," a label that validates the most violent antiabortion fanaticism while tossing in anti-Semitic dog-whistling in the mix. (Nia-Malika Henderson, Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren on abortion, sexuality and ObamaPolitico 11/29/2009)
On abortion, which has become central to the health care debate, Warren takes on Obama's idea that abortions should be rare, suggesting that stance essentially supports that life begins at conception.
"We've had 46 million Americans who aren't here. Those who could be here since Roe v. Wade, who are not voting. I think that innocence is a holocaust. I really do," Warren said. "Now, I think that we have to get beyond the name calling and find common ground to work on these issues. Now, I don't understand the idea of it should be rare and less. Well, either you believe it's life or you don't....why would you believe it should be rare?....If a baby, a fetus is not a life, then why restrict it?"
In 2012, Warren was echoing the phony Christian Right complaint about the Mean Libruls violating the religious freedom of good Christian white folks who think it's God's will that they discriminate against gays, loose women, black people and other categories of sinners. (Jaweed Kaleem, Rick Warren, Saddleback Pastor: Obama Has ‘Infringed’ Upon Religious LibertiesHuffpost 12/28/2012)
Similarly the "Jesus movement" of the early 1970 left few distinctive "countercultural" elements in evengelical culture. Though it has been observed fundamentalist and Christian Right networks do form a kind of subculture that sees itself in a "culture war' with the mainstream American culture.
Eskridge seems to think the main surviving contribution of the movement to present-day evangelicalism was a musical style:
For the long term, in countenancing the union of evangelical youth with the popular style of the Jesus People, Graham gave his blessing to a manner of coping with American youth culture that became characteristic of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century. By the 1990s, evangelical youth cultures that paralleled "the world" were an assumed part of the subculture's landscape and proliferated in as many guises as their secular counterparts. While still not accepted by some sectors of the evangelical community, the strategy took hold, backed by a continually growing "Contemporary Christian Music" industry and marketing infrastructure. The groundwork for this change was laid in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the success of the Jesus Movement. The Jesus People did disappear as a movement, but they were not killed off by a lack of interest. It is more accurate to say that they were gradually replaced as a new cohort of young people, infatuated by the evolution of new musical styles and affected by the ever-increasing segmentation of the youth market and the subcultures and group identifications that accompanied these trends, took their place. [my emphasis]
And the quality of the contemporary Christian music is itself questionable. I know better than to make a blanket criticism of a whole musical genre like that. But ... There are good Christian contemporary songs. The brilliant folksinger and songwriter Kate Campbell, for instance, has a number of songs that could count as Christian contemporary. But much of fits into what is called 7-11 music: seven words repeated eleven times. Traditional hymns feature more complex music and more sophisticated lyrics. And it generally doesn't come close in quality of emotional intensity to the African-American spirituals.
A friend of mine years ago clued me in to the fact that ordinary newspaper obituaries can be very interesting reading because of the sketches of the lives of the deceased that sometimes go much beyond their age and their family survivors.
For famous people, major news agencies have obituaries in the can before the person dies. There was a moment during the Shrub Bush Administration when CNN inadvertently posted several of their obituaries-in-waiting for people still living, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney. (CNN's Premature Obituaries 04/16/2018).
So when evangelist Billy Graham passed away this week, there were plenty of fairly detailed obituaries waiting to be published, as well as immediate reactions to his death.
Graham’s frequently televised “crusades” (as he called his public evangelistic events until 9/11, when the connotations in the Middle East became newly salient) became a regular part of American life from the 1950s on, presenting an intensely personal but ecumenical version of evangelical Protestant Christianity to a rapidly secularizing world. Suffering from a variety of ailments, Graham had been out of the public eye since his last big preaching event in 2005 (in Flushing Meadows, as it happens). Upon his death today at the age of 99, his legacy as perhaps the first global evangelist, and certainly the first televangelist, is secure. But his relationship with the politically powerful, which in some respects anticipated the Christian right (which Graham himself conspicuously did not join), provides a more complicated picture.
Graham was part of the Southern Baptist tradition, though his message appealed to a wide range of the conservative Protestant spectrum. For those not familiar with it, Southern Baptists do not practice infant baptism like the Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations. A person formally joins a Southern Baptist church by publicly acknowledging that he or she has made a conscious personal decision to "accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior." Baptism takes place after the public "profession of faith" is accepted by the local congregation. A person doesn't have to be an adult to make such a decision. For kids growing up in the denomination, the profession of faith often takes place at middle school age, similarly to confirmation in the Catholic Church.
Southern Baptists don't usually describe themselves as having a "mystical" faith, mystical being as it is popularly associated with "Eastern religions" (Hinduism and Buddhism) or with long-haired hippies from The Sixties, a period which many conservative Protestant Christians view as a kind of cultural fall from grace for America and other places. But in fact there is a strong mystical element in Southern Baptist theology coming out of the Pietist tradition. For Southern Baptists, this includes a belief that God speaks to individual directly, though without the angels or visions accepted in other Christian traditions. It also includes a strong consciousness of a punitive God with a Hell of eternal burning fire for the unsaved, i.e., those who have not had the accepted type of conversion experience. Perhaps ironically, Southern Baptist belief also has a concept of "once saved, always saved," which says that once a person make a genuine confession of faith, their place in Heaven is guaranteed, no matter what they do or believe in the future. Still, even for the saved, Baptist teachings and sermons tend to stress a fear of divine punishment which even those considering themselves permanently cleared for entrance to Paradise still feel, often keenly so.
Because of the belief in the need for a conscious conversion experience to enter into an acceptable relationship with God, and how large Hell looms in the theology, regular Sunday services in a Southern Baptist Church normally conclude with an altar call, in which a person comes forward publicly before the congregation to declare their faith. It is considered to the duty of the converted to "witness" to others so that their souls can be saved through conversion.
And this is how Graham's famous religious events were structured around a message of salvation to escape the threat of eternal damnation, concluding with an altar call. Typically, large numbers of people could be observed coming forward at the end, which those within the conservative Protestant traditions, and not just the Southern Baptist version, would code as souls being saved. So having brought untold thousands or even millions "brought to Christ" by hearing Graham's message in person or through the media, Graham enjoyed great prestige among such believers. And he was also a great showman. Which is not to say that he was a fraud or a charlatan. I know of no reason to think he was anything but serious and sincere about the faith for which he proselytized. Although most believing Christians would presumably acknowledge at least the possibility of miraculous healings, Graham was not a "faith healer." And while those in the Pentecostal were impressed by him, Graham did not practice or distinctive Pentecostal "charismatic" practices like speaking in tongues or "prophecy" rituals.
On the other hand, her uncle Franklin Graham seems to be the heir to Graham's larger ministry. And he has identified more thoroughly with the Christian Right than his father ever did. As Charlie Pierce puts it with even less reverence than I, "Given the fact that we are now left with his inexcusable wing nut son, Franklin, I’m not inclined to look too harshly on Billy Graham’s career. It can always get worse, and has." (Billy Graham Was a Giant in American Political LifeEsquire Politics Blog 02/21/2018)
Part of the Graham hagiography is that he actively cooperated with Martin Luther King, Jr. in promoting desegregation in the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s. Here is a version from a well-known conservtive Protestant figure, Richard Land (Confronting Graham's DemonsChristian Post 06/25/2009):
Very early in his ministry, Billy Graham confronted the demons of racial prejudice and segregation, refusing to allow segregated seating at his evangelistic crusades from the late 1940s onward.
In the middle decades of this century, the only integrated worship experiences many black and white Southerners ever experienced were attending Billy Graham crusades together. This courageous early stand by Billy Graham earned him the undying devotion of those seeking to rid our society of the plague of racial prejudice, as well as the unrelenting hostility of the staunch segregationists.
Steven P. Miller (not the Steven Miller who works in Trump's White House!) covers the history of Graham's relationship to the politics of desegregation in Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (2009). His makes a point that is key in understanding this aspect of Graham's career:
Within American popular evangelicalism, a mythology of sorts has emerged equating the work of Graham and King on behalf of racial justice. "Billy Graham Had a Dream," reads the title of one favorable treatment of the evangelist’s efforts to combat racism. Such thinking has blurred the significant distinction between those ministers who marched and those who did not. It also has obscured Graham’s fundamental discomfort with the civil rights movement. Part of a larger conservative effort to fashion a "limited civil rights movement" by invoking the legacy of America’s most revered civil rights leader, the misleading King-Graham equivalency has drawn sustenance from dreams about what an alliance between them might have accomplished. The interpretation first received popular dissemination in 1979 with the publication by Graham’s authorized biographer of a letter from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to the evangelist. "You and Rev. King," wrote the Democrat and former adviser to President Richard Nixon, "more than any two men — and, surely, with God’s help — brought your own South out of that long night of racial fear and hate." Graham’s own description of his relationship with King has also contributed to the mythology. [my emphasis]
During the 1950s, Graham undertook some active cooperation with King in the 1950s as a white "moderate" minister. In practice, that meant he hedged his bets on whether the Jim Crow segregation system in place in the South of the 1950s would survive or not. And he made important cultural gestures like not allowing racially segregated sections at his events. And he spoke out against acts like the Birmingham church bombing that were so obviously heinous and criminal that even the perpetrators tried to deny their own roles in them. But he was far more reserved on even speaking against the most serious state-enforced aspects of segregation like denial of voting rights to black citizens or segregated public schools.
And for African-Americans to actively protest such practices or, heaven forbid, engage in civil disobedience in such protests, well, that was something Graham felt very uncomfortable with. Because it wasn't nice, you know.
King didn't mention Billy Graham specifically in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963). But that statement paints a devastating picture of how useless (or worse) white "moderate" ministers could be when it came to protesting white racism and discrimination. Miller's book gives a realistic assessment of Graham's role in the civil rights movement:
The mid-1960s represented the high point of Graham’s regional influence [in the US South], when he facilitated the growth of a faith-informed, postsegregation public language and paved ground for the racially moderate Sunbelt ideal. While Graham and his southern booster collaborators worked to convince white southerners to accept the fated demise of legalized Jim Crow — and, through desegregated evangelistic services, modeled one way of doing so — they also steered the course of social change away from the more substantive goals of civil rights activists. The moderate forces of law and order (so distinct and decent when contrasted with a George Wallace or a Bull Connor) grew less civil in the face of demonstrations and downright vigilant when confronted with urban riots. Graham’s brand of demonstrations highlighted the better part of the white South, but also foreshadowed the Nixonian politics of the "silent majority." [my emphasis]
Graham styled himself as a counselor to Presidents. How seriously US Presidents from Truman to Trump actually took his advice is an open question. But his most significant political association was with Richard Nixon. He gave his only public endorsement of a Presidential candidate to Richard Nixon in 1972.
Nixon's infamous tape came back to plague Graham when a segment became public in 2002, as Haaretz and Reuters report in Billy Graham, Nixon and anti-Semitism: The Bombshell Tapes That Tarnished the Faith Leader's Reputation Haaretz 02/22/2018. This passage was pretty stunning:
"They're the ones putting out the pornographic stuff," Graham said to Nixon - "the Jewish stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain," he continued.
Graham also confided in Nixon that he hid his [real] feelings about Jews from them: "I go and I keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal (then exective [sic] editor) at The New York Times and people of that sort, you know. And all -- I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel. But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances."
Graham, who had a long history of supporting Israel, apologized profusely after the tapes' release and said he had no recollection of the conversation.
Even during Nixon's time in office, Graham's well-know close association with him tarnished Graham's reputation as Nixon's Administration disintegrated in the Watergate scandal.
After Nixon's fall, Graham struck a more restricted public political posture, even advocating for nuclear arms control. But even during this period of his career, Miller asks us to look beyond the dominant public image:
The tale of Graham’s self-described "pilgrimage" toward moderation has highlighted certain changes at the expense of other telling continuities. Popular portraits of Graham have exaggerated the nature of his depoliticization. Specifically, they have elided his social ties with the emerging Christian Right, underestimated his presence in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush White Houses, exaggerated his defense of Bill Clinton, and not connected the dots between the motif of Christian statesmanship and the faith narrative of George W. Bush. In short, Graham never completely abandoned the world of politics. As he shed the political residue of the Nixon era, he walked an increasingly forgiving line between his reconstructed image and the fundamental endurance not only of his basic theological assumptions but of his political inclinations as well. During this time, the narrative of the Sunbelt South began to overlap with that of an ascendant conservatism. One need not embrace a glib thesis of "southernization" in order to draw a connection between the two developments - and Graham is a case in point. ...
In key respects, Graham helped to construct the political and religious culture that made the Christian Right possible. [my emphasis]
Here are some additional articles on Graham's life and career:
Martin Marty, the well-known American religious scholar, has excerpted at his Web site an article he wrote about a Billy Graham appearance in New York in 1957, which appeared in The Christian Century 06/12/57 (quotes from Reporting on Billy Graham by Martin Marty 06/27/05).
It's a good example of the way in which Graham's ministry has always been distinguished from those of fundamentalists. Graham counts as an "evagelical". I wouldn't count him as a fundamentalist.
"Press comment ... is largely congenial to the events, ... regarding them much like very, very large Sunday morning services repeated nightly for Christians .... The rally ... is carried on in the New York that is much like Nashville, Minneapolis or Glasgow. If the crusade hopes to attract sinners that their hearts may be strangely warmed, the rally is attracting semi-saints that theirs maybe re-warmed. The song leaders, the announcers and the preacher all treated us pretty much like church people almost until the moment of the call for a decision for Christ .... Most of the congregation were not the New Yorkers of the image being prayed for .... But here is Graham's great appeal, his great success .... Now, for one night of a summer and for the summer of one-year at least, the concealed church is being revealed, the latent become patent .... There is a contagious release and exhilaration for these church people; this morning Protestants have something to talk about at work and at home. When they unite, their numbers are large enough so they can make a noise. raham is big: If he has his great weaknesses, this could be his great potential. The hunger that moves this minority of Church people may be something more than hunger for identification with size and power; it may be a judgment on us all ....
"The churches seem more than satisfied. There is in the message enough sin for the orthodox and enough palliation for the liberals, ... and there is enough Christ for both .... This leaves few critics. The rally is sufficiently popular to make dissent sound like 'sour grapes' .... The old-time infidel won't criticize; he has disappeared, finding nothing to burlesque in the new genteel happenings.
James Evans at the same site has an essay summarizing Graham's career. He gives particular attention to some ways in which Graham set himself apart from fundamentalists and the Christian Right: Billy Graham's Final CrusadeSightings 07/07/05.
Indeed, during the early days of the rise of the Moral Majority -- the early flagship venture of the Religious Right -- Graham warned of the dangers of linking faith's reputation to political parties.
But politics has always had a way of finding Graham. During the first night of this most recent crusade, Graham was introduced by former President Bill Clinton. enator Hillary Clinton was also present on the platform. After the introduction, Graham quipped that he always thought that Bill Clinton should have been an evangelist. After citing the many gifts that would allow Clinton to become a successful evangelist, Graham then said, "And Hillary could stay home and run the country."
Several conservative Christian leaders took serious offense at this remark, accusing Graham of endorsing Senator Clinton for a presidential run in 2008. That was not the only time Graham ran afoul of members from his conservative base. In an interview just prior to this most recent evangelistic campaign, Graham said he would not preach about any of the political issues important to evangelical conservatives, including abortion, homosexuality, and stem cell research. "I'm just going to preach the gospel and am not going to get off on these hot-button issues," Graham told the New York Times. "If I get on these other subjects, it divides the audience."
Evans also recalls one of Graham's least admirable moments, and what he did about it:
This desire for unity has been an important theme for Graham. Three years ago, taped conversations emerged with Graham and Nixon engaging in anti-Semitic banter in the White House. After the revelation, Graham quickly met with Jewish eaders and apologized to the Jewish community. In preparation for the present evangelistic campaign, Graham again met with Jewish leaders and pledged anew his opposition to all forms of prejudice.
