community of Montreat, North Carolina, Billy and Ruth followed them there in 1945.17
Wheaton may have planted seeds for Graham's subsequent doubts about the racial norms of his home region, yet their public sprouting was a while in coming. In his subsequent telling, the climax of his years-long struggle to reconcile a tacit acceptance of Jim Crow with a strident promotion of the gospel message came at the start of a March 1953 crusade service in Chattanooga, Tennessee. There, Graham personally removed the ropes separating the black from the white sections of the audience.18 This was the first time he had not followed the dictates of the local crusade committee regarding segregated seating. The Chattanooga incident served as a key moment in Graham's “racial conversion narrative,” to use a literary scholar's term for self-styled accounts in which “products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society…confess racial wrongdoings and are ‘converted,’ in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment.” Graham himself spoke of his own “racial conversion” on at least one occasion.19
Graham's racial development paralleled his theological and temperamental transition from Protestantism fundamentalism to neo-evangelicalism. During the 1940s, as noted above, an influential group of moderate fundamentalists associated with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and hailing mostly from Reformed backgrounds began embracing the label “evangelical,” the source of its most common current American usage. While not departing from core fundamentalist doctrines, these “neo-evangelicals” projected an evangelistic optimism not seen since the irrecoverable era before World War I when Protestants of all stripes could speak of “the evangelization of the world in this generation” (the motto of the Dwight Moody– inspired Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions). They sought to revive the influence of a conservative Protestantism that, at least according to popular perceptions, had retreated from public view in the aftermath of the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial.” In response to the so-called Second Disestablishment of the 1920s and subsequent decades, fundamentalism (the name given to the sizable minority of Protestants who adamantly rejected liberalizing trends within mainline denominations) became synonymous with theological and cultural separation from secular society. As critics of fundamentalist separatism, neo-evangelicals tended to prioritize evangelistic outreach over defenses of the pure faith.20
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
