Graham's public commentaries on racial matters lacked intellectual depth and exposed the evangelist to charges of inconsistency. A glaring dearth of symmetry existed between his passionate calls for ending personal prejudice among Christians and his significantly less enthusiastic support for dismantling the actual legal structures of Jim Crow. Like a candidate running for office, Graham avoided committing himself to all but the most general of prescriptions for combating racist practices. Unlike most politicians, however, Graham claimed spiritual and moral authority as a minister of God; he implicitly asked to be held to a higher standard than other public figures. Despite his tepidness and inconsistency, though, he proffered to his audiences something other than, as critics then charged (and have charged since), a simple belief that “religion, like politics, had a duty to uphold the status quo.”13
Evangelical Universalism
In explaining his positions on racial and other sociopolitical matters, Graham drew from and updated traditions rooted in nineteenth-century American evangelicalism. He evinced an evangelical social ethic centered on the individual soul and will, and predicated on the universal commonality of divinely created humans. This ethic, here termed evangelical universalism, viewed the individual soul as the primary theological and political unit in society, prioritized relational over legislative solutions to social problems, and it tended to acquiesce to the ultimately inscrutable realm of ordained legal authority. According to this ethic (which should not be confused with the inclusive soteriology, or doctrine of salvation, also called “universalism”), the most effective forms of social change emanated from the conversion of individual souls.
These beliefs, or ones similar to them, contained a rich heritage. Graham voiced them from the assumption that evangelical Christianity held a special relationship with American society that—if protected and nurtured—would permit the nation to fulfill its most fundamental values. Many antebellum evangelicals, for example, had seen themselves as having a unique responsibility to ensure the endurance of the young nation's republican foundations. Electing “Christian statesmen” to office might help, but so would a strong evangelistic witness.14 Proponents of this “custodial,” or guardianship, ideal continued to assume the inherent good of promoting “Christian Civilization,” even while they claimed to uphold the formal separation between church and state.15 Such sentiments help to explain the close association of antebellum evangelism, in the North and South alike, with notions of social progress.16 The belief that Protestants had a special role to ensure the nation's morality endured well beyond the remembered heyday of antebellum evangelicalism, but it began to weaken during the so-called Second Disestablishment, the weakening of Protestant hegemony during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. By the close of that period, many liberal Protestants had either accepted or acquiesced to the fact that a growing state was assuming many, if not most, of the church's custodial responsibilities.17
Many conservative Protestants, of course, did not view the Second Disestablishment as a necessary or even an unavoidable development. Fundamentalists, as well as their neo-evangelical offspring, never consciously accommodated themselves to the relative decline of Protestantism as a moral influence. Graham and his fellow neo-evangelicals specifically sought to restore that influence.
The ancestors of twentieth-century fundamentalists and evangelicals, of course, had resisted liberalizing trends within Protestantism from the moment they first emerged. Following the Civil War, many conservative Protestants departed from the optimism of the antebellum years. Instead, they embraced a pessimistic premillennialist eschatology (or theology of the end times) that stressed the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ and assumed that a period of social decline would precede it. The trend held long-term implications for the relationship between evangelicalism and social reform movements. The synergy between antebellum revivalism and reform causes is well known. Charles Finney, the leading evangelist of the antebellum Second Great Awakening, had declared slavery “pre-eminently, the sin of the church” and did not serve communion to slaveholders at his New York congregation. While Finney frustrated abolitionists by viewing their cause as a secondary “appendage” of evangelism, he did not hesitate to invoke the “higher law” of Christ in the face of unjust legislation, such as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.18 By contrast, post–Civil War evangelist Dwight Moody, the revivalist to whom Graham compared most favorably, said little about the labor and monetary conflicts of the Gilded Age and reluctantly began holding segregated services in the postwar South. “Man, away from God,” Moody declared in 1876, “is not to be trusted, and there is no reform until God has been found.”19 Saving souls came first—a perspective more than a few Gilded Age barons were happy to second.
Moody portended the early twentieth-century process, sometimes called the Great Reversal, through which conservative Protestants abandoned many spheres of social activism. During the Progressive Era, the growth of the Social Gospel, which seemingly elevated social concerns to salvific status, irredeemably tainted such activism as synonymous with theological liberal-ism.20 Revivalist Billy Sunday, Graham's immediate forerunner, vociferously opposed Social Gospel theology, even though he did support some Progressive reforms, such as Prohibition, women's suffrage, and child labor laws. Following World War I, the attention of Sunday and what were becoming known as “fundamentalists” turned increasingly to the specter of Protestant “modernism,” which embraced the Social Gospel and attacked biblical liter-alism.21
While Graham preached in the shadow of the Great Reversal, he did not view the Second Disestablishment as an irreversible development. The two impulses stood in some tension. Graham sought to recover the lost social status of evangelicalism, all the while checking the gains of mainline Protestantism. Yet he operated on the other side of a deep rupture in American Protestant history. Graham and his peers could not simply re-create the seeming evangelical consensus of yore. The evangelist idealized the social impact of eighteenth-century Wesleyan revivalism, which he claimed had contributed generations of reformers to Great Britain.22 His more immediate fundamentalist heritage, however, instilled in him a reflexive skepticism about reform causes. His instinct was to keep evangelism and what he and his peers termed “social concern” in separate and usually unequal categories.
Yet Graham was also a product of his times in a more secular sense. Another influence on his social ethic was the universalist momentum of post–World War II public culture—a perspective that viewed humans as sharing common needs, wants, and problems. In his earlier years, to be sure, Graham was nothing if not an unabashed patriot and a Christian chauvinist. But as befitted a proud citizen of an increasingly confident nation (and an even prouder exponent of the Great Commission to spread the good news of the Gospel), he thought on a global scale—not just in terms of new evangelistic frontiers but also in terms of an overarching human nature. In this sense, Graham struck a notably less parochial stance than Billy Sunday, who had dismissed “this twentieth-century theory of the universal fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man…. You are not a child of God unless you are a Christian.” Graham, by contrast, distinguished between regenerated souls (a portion of humanity) and loved ones (all of humankind). He allowed that God's love extended even to the atheistic communist. Salvation was a human concern, not just an American one. Graham shared with postwar neo-orthodox and existentialist theologians a concern for the common human condition of original sin.23
The universalism of Graham and many of his evangelical peers derived not from an optimistic reading of human nature but rather from a theological recognition of the common condition of individual souls: created, sinful, and requiring salvation. Thus, the explicit biblicism of evangelical universalism distinguished it from the more secular “liberal universalism” that pervaded the political culture of post–World War II reform movements. The latter, in the words of historian Bruce Schulman, entailed “belief in the fundamental unity and sameness of all mankind,” meaning that “every person possessed the same intrinsic worth, deserved the same opportunities, [and] shared the same basic aspirations.”24 In Graham's 1956 address to the Southern Baptist Convention, he spoke of his congregants’ “common denominator with
