in the image of God, and that Christ is the savior of all men.”25 Graham was moving toward a position he would describe a decade later as the “biblical unity of the human race. All men are one in the humanity created by God himself. All men are one in the common need of divine redemption, and all are offered salvation in Jesus Christ.”26 While Graham's emphasis on human universals set him apart from Billy Sunday in the past and W. A. Criswell in the present, his were hardly radical sentiments. Christians of many persuasions nominally professed some version of these principles, and their social implications varied wildly. Among white Christians in the American South, for example, what one scholar has called the “inclusionary impulses of evangelical Christianity” could coexist comfortably with racial hierarchies.27
Spurred by motivations both religious and secular, though, Graham began by the 1950s to draw connections between spiritual and social equality. He expressed those implications largely in individuated terms—more specifically, in the language of individual sinfulness and redemption. The individual stood as an exaggerated synecdoche of society—a part that defines a larger whole, rather than being a mere component of it. As Graham argued in the pages of the ultraconservative American Mercury magazine, “Society is made up of individuals. So long as you have a man in society who hates and lies and steals and is deceitful, you have the possibility of racial intolerance; you have the possibility of war; you have the possibility of economic injus-tice.”28 By extension, larger social problems derived from core individual ones. “Our international problems and racial tensions,” he stated in 1963, “are only reflections of individual problems and tensions.”29 A year later he told a group of media executives that, before altering social structures, “we must change man first. Our great problem today is not social…. Our problem is man himself. We've got to change man.”30 The solution had to begin with individual souls. “Society cannot repent corporately,” Graham argued in a separate American Mercury article.31
For the evangelist, only the individual will—effectively, the intellectual corollary of the soul—could stimulate change in one's life and, by secondary extension, in society as a whole. In Graham's theology, as a student of the evangelist has observed, “the human will represents an autonomous ego.”32 Acceptance of Christ, of course, represented the ultimate willful decision for Graham, a choice from which all lasting social change derived. “Our hope,” the evangelist declared in a 1966 address, “is…that social reform in areas where it's needed can be done by men who have been converted and who believe the Gospel.”33 Such work made up the realm of “social concern,” a term Graham and his evangelical peers employed in reference to those Christian activities in the public, or social, sphere separate from evangelism. The term demonstrates how white American evangelicals tended to place social activism in a mental category separate from, and secondary to, traditional missionary efforts.
The born-again moment, described by leading neo-evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry and other evangelicals as “regeneration,” thus constituted the most legitimate (perhaps the only wholly legitimate) starting point for transforming a fallen society. That transformation would occur on a soul-by-soul and then a relational basis. The role of the state—the critical agent in liberal social activism—remained less certain. The emphasis on individual salvation as a trigger for social change is an oft-cited characteristic of evangelical social engagement. Henry contrasted the authentic “transformation of society” with educational and legislative efforts aimed at “preserving what is worth preserving in the present social order.” Henry and his generation of evangelicals tended to associate the state—and, by extension, the law—solely with coercive power, however necessary that power may be. Transformation through regeneration, by contrast, “rests upon spiritual power,” as “evangelism and revival remain the original wellsprings of evangelical humanitarianism and social awakening.”34 Regeneration first entailed the divine forgiveness of individual sins. Its social component likewise would commence voluntarily at the level of everyday human relations, what Graham and others called “neighbor-love”—a concept they kept distinct from state justice. At its extreme, this stress on individual regeneration could effect a type of sociopolitical passivism. It could, in classic pietistic fashion, permit evangelicals tacitly to bless the political status quo while cultivating their own evangelistic gardens.
Graham and his generation of post–World War II neo-evangelicals, however, did not believe they were proffering a private faith. This was not how they envisioned the ideal role of evangelical Christianity in American society. In practice, then, most postwar evangelicals hoped their values would permeate the realm of state leadership, irrespective of their beliefs concerning the limits of that sphere for transforming society. The evangelical influence on temporal authority would commence, appropriately, at the level of individual conversions. As historian D. G. Hart has argued, a paramount conviction of evangelical political activism has been the belief that “being born again results in holy instincts about the way societies should be ordered and governments run.”35 When this principle is applied to Christian statesmen, the personal becomes political in a peculiarly evangelical way; godly character yields godly governance.
The focus of postwar evangelicals on Christian statesmanship partially grew out of their profound respect for ordained authority and the rule of law. This final element of evangelical universalism often resided uncomfortably alongside the regenerational theory of social change. Despite Graham's inability to avoid personal political partisanship, he consistently argued that believing Christians should support their elected leaders as agents of God's will, irrespective of party or platform. “The devout man,” Henry likewise wrote, “must respect law, and he is spiritually inclined to obey the positive law of the State” and not “to condition [his] support of the State upon its promotion of Christian religious principles.”36 While the government's mission remained ultimately negative (i.e., preservational), in contrast to the regenerative, transformational effects of individual conversions, the state did possess a legitimate role to play in upholding and implementing justice. That role, though, was more corrective than constructive—mere justice, in contrast to regeneration and its by-product of human reconciliation.
The distinction between reconciliation and justice (or between salvation and law) is one of the many facets of neo-evangelical social ethics that gave it a strongly conservative political cast. That distinction sometimes entailed differentiating between spiritual and temporal responsibilities, between individual souls bound for eternity and individual bodies occupying a fallen world.37 Such a distinction made it difficult to voice one's eschatology without tacitly condemning efforts to change society. “From a Christian point of view,” Graham declared in late 1967, “I'm very optimistic about the situation in the world. From [the] point of view of a member of the human race, I'm very pessimistic.”38 Christ would ultimately triumph over human sinfulness, but that triumph would have little to do with human efforts to create the good society. Thus, many evangelicals desired to strengthen their influence over national policy even while their theological inclinations led them to acquiesce to the legitimate powers that be and to assume that a period of social decline would precede the triumphant Second Coming. When political leaders professed a Christianity of the appropriate variety, of course, the dilemma seemed less complicated. Indeed, Graham went so far as to state that qualified Christians had a responsibility to run for office.39
Post–Jim Crow Evangelism
Applied to both civil rights and the broader postwar South, Graham's evangelical universalism held conflicting implications. In his rhetoric on civil rights, the evangelical tension between justice and regeneration played out as a conflict between belief in a universal moral law (e.g., the need for the state to maintain moral order) and faith in voluntarism (e.g., individual acts of neighborly love). The latter impulse might assume a libertarian quality in keeping with the anti–New Deal rhetoric of property rights and individual choice pervasive among postwar conservatives. In the context of the American South during the latter half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, however, Graham invoked the values of evangelical universalism to offer a theologically grounded, commonsense critique of racism
