In keeping with his modest aspiration to know nothing “save Jesus Christ and him crucified,” Billy Graham’s theology was anything but abstruse. The heart of his preaching was and would ever remain a short list of straight forward affirmations. A sovereign God has revealed his will to humans in the Bible, his inspired, accurate, and fully dependable Word. Humans are sinful and corrupt, but if they accept God’s offer of grace, made possible by the redeeming work of the crucified, risen, and living Christ, their sinful nature can be supernaturally transformed—“born again”—and after death they will live forever in heaven. Without question, the simplicity of this scheme helps account for the widespread and enduring popularity of Evangelical Christianity. It is easily understood and, despite its negative view of human nature, essentially optimistic; though it may not be easy, humans can readily do what they need to do, God will do the rest, and the rewards are infinite. To many, many people, that is indeed “good news.”
Later in his career Graham would devote entire books to such subjects as the Holy Spirit, angels, and the problem of suffering, but during these early years, in his sermons, newspaper columns, and Peace with God he simply delivered this kerygma (the Greek word for “proclamation,” often used to describe the bare-bones gospel message) with little attempt at elaboration or defense. His task, as he had understood it since the day he knelt by the rock at Forest Home, was not to ask hard questions of Scripture but to follow the advice of the old revival hymn, “Trust and Obey.” If a skeptic asked how he could be sure of the existence of God, he answered guilelessly, “I spoke to him this morning,” or told the story of a boy whose kite had disappeared in the clouds but who knew it was there because “I can feel the tug.” Such answers did little to help inquirers who were truly struggling with theism, but they were sufficient for the many in his audience who needed only a one-liner or an anecdote to make them feel they had wrestled with the world’s doubt and won handily. As Creator and Sustainer of the universe, God is able both to raise up individuals and nations, and to bring them down if they betray the purpose for which he has exalted them. He also intervenes, as it pleases him, in the minutest aspects of everyday life. Graham did not doubt that God acts directly in human affairs, or that diligent, disciplined prayer would be rewarded with discernible blessings, but he was realistic enough to admit that the correlation between request and benefaction is imperfect. During the Washington crusade, when asked if he believed God had stopped the rain to allow the rally on the steps of the Capitol to proceed, he replied, “I believe God does intervene. I also believe that God did intervene today, as he has in days gone by when we have prayed concerning the matter of the weather.” Then, with a slight smile, he added, “But in all fairness, I have to remember that we prayed once out in Portland, Oregon, and it poured down.” Overall, Graham’s view of God during the early years of his prominence emphasized justice and wrath more than grace and mercy. “[God] is not a jolly fellow like Santa Claus,” he warned. “He is a Great Bookkeeper. And he is keeping the book on you! I am a Western Union boy! I have a death message! I must tell you plainly—you are going to Hell! You listen! Don’t you trifle with God! Don’t you think you can barter! You are a sinner! You have come short of God’s requirements! Your punishment is sure!”
Graham also believed in an equally real Satan who stands in cosmic opposition to God, battling for control of the universe and the allegiance of every human soul. His own obsession with avoiding temptation was based in large measure on enormous respect for Satan’s powers and prowess. “The devil,” he wrote, “is a creature of vastly superior intelligence, a mighty and gifted spirit of infinite resourcefulness. . . . His reasoning is brilliant, his plans ingenious, his logic well-nigh irrefutable. God’s mighty adversary is no bungling creature with horns and tail—he is a prince of lofty stature, of unlimited craft and cunning, able to take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself, able to turn every situation to his own advantage. He is unrelenting and cruel.” Fortunately, since God possesses three qualities the Prince of Darkness lacks—omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence—-the Almighty will ultimately defeat the Enemy, as Scripture teaches, but his power and craft are so great that only those safely inside God’s mighty fortress, the Church, will be able to resist him and escape eternal damnation.
The cornerstone of Graham’s theology, of course, was his unshakable belief that the Bible is God’s actual Word. His literalism required him to reject evolution of the human species and to believe that Adam and Eve were actual historical beings, “created full-grown with every mental and physical faculty developed,” but it was Adam’s nature, not his origin, that played the key role in his theology and preaching. Adam, in the orthodox Evangelical view, was created sinless but equipped with free will. Because he used that freedom to disobey God and eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he fell into a state of sinful, guilt-ridden rebellion against God, a state passed along to all of his descendants. Left to their own devices, humans will live a miserable, unsatisfying life and spend eternity separated from God and the only relationship upon which true peace and happiness can be based. Even in their depravity, however, they possess sufficient reason to understand what they must do to escape from their wretched state, and sufficient free will to enable them to do it. And what they need is justification. A just God, Graham proclaimed, had no choice but to demand that all sin, from Adam onward, be punished by a sentence of death. Since “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” the only hope for fallen humanity was for someone to volunteer to die, physically and spiritually, as a substitute offering to God. In a succinct statement of his doctrine of atonement, Graham wrote, “God demands death, either for the sinner or a substitute. Christ was the substitute!” Because he did not deserve to die, since he had not sinned, his merit could be transferred into the accounts of those who would accept it. Here then was the heart of Graham’s theology and preaching: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).
Graham frequently asserted that only born-again Christians could ever know true happiness and genuine peace of mind, but he never promised that conversion would cure all ills; on the contrary, he warned that the disciplined life of a true Christian could be difficult and that taking a stand for Christ might create entirely new and quite serious problems. Still, he believed that “only the Christian knows how to live,” and his thumbnail sketch of the Christian life looked remarkably like an idealized self-portrait: “The Christian should stand out like a sparkling diamond against a rough background. He should be more wholesome than anyone else. He should be poised, cultured, courteous, gracious, but firm in the things that he does and does not do. He should laugh and be radiant, but he should refuse to allow the world to pull him down to its level.” The hallmarks of Christian life are the disciplined practice of specific spiritual exercises and personal purity, particularly with regard to sex. In a 1952 sermon, “The Life That Wins,” he told his radio audience that “your quiet time (your prayer time and the time you spend in the Word) is absolutely essential to a happy Christian life. You cannot possibly be a powerful Christian without such a daily walk with Christ.” He was able to imbue these words with convincing force because he made it clear, somewhat more frequently than absolute humility required, that he followed such a regimen himself. In sermons and articles and interviews and printed excerpts from his diaries, he often spoke of long stretches of prayer, of praying immediately upon arising, of an entire afternoon spent pouring out his heart to the Lord, of walking out under the starry sky to pray, of a delightful prayer time with a close circle of friends, and of dropping to his knees again and again as he wrestled with some decision or difficulty. Such descriptions, which clearly portrayed him as a spiritual exemplar, could easily have been viewed as immodest and self-serving. They seem also to have been accurate.
A person properly fortified by prayer and Bible study would, Graham believed, live a disciplined moral life. In keeping with Evangelical practice, he tended to identify morality with avoiding specific behaviors, primarily sins of the tongue and the flesh. He spoke against the profanity he heard among politicians, university professors, and other men in high places, but warned that many common expressions used by professing Christians are simply disguised ways of taking the name of the Lord in vain. He also condemned lying, including the shadings of truth that often occur in business, politics, and everyday social intercourse. As for sins of the flesh, Graham appeared to share the common Fundamentalist conviction that alcohol is scarcely less pernicious and damnable than heroin or cocaine and was willing to put at least a bit of his weight behind occasional last-wheeze efforts at legal prohibition. In 1950 he spoke so forcefully to the Georgia state senate about the need for an all-out revival against sin that two hours later, that body passed a bill to make the state totally dry; the state’s House of Representatives, however, managed to arrange that bill’s death by neglect. In Jackson two years later, Graham commended Mississippi for being one of the few dry states in the nation and said, “I hope it will remain so.” And in his first two feature films, alcohol served as a key symbol of the lost condition of the male protagonists. Clearly, Graham felt the bottle held a powerful demon. Still, far more dangerous than lying, swearing, or drinking was sex, the primary temptation Satan uses to lure people down that broad path to hell. Graham readily admitted to being a sexual person and spoke glowingly of the joys to be found in a God-blessed marital bed, but he followed Evangelical practice by using immorality as a code word for sexual transgressions and devoted what was clearly a disproportionate, if not in ordinate, amount of attention to sex-related topics. In an early collection of his best “My Answer” columns, for example, over a hundred selections deal with some aspect of sex—adultery, fornication, petting, pornography, smutty stories, illegitimacy, abortion, rape, impure thoughts, immodest apparel, and “living in sin,” among others. Graham’s basic position on these topics was predictably condemnatory, or at least full of caution. Speaking to teenagers about sexual temptation, he stated flatly, “You’ll never make it to the top until you lick this thing, and you’ll never lick it without Christ!” He pointed out that adultery is one of the few sins for which God demanded the death penalty in the Old Testament and consistently warned against any behavior that would increase the likelihood of falling into this grievous sin. To a man who defended his ostensibly platonic friendship with a woman other than his wife, he warned, “You are living a double existence and you are playing with fire. What can so easily start as an ‘innocent friendship’ has within it the seed of untold sorrow for all concerned and of the eternal loss of your soul.” At the same time, he refrained from a bluenosed, unforgiving priggishness that would demand some modern equivalent to a scarlet letter. He reminded sinners that as bad as it is, adultery can be forgiven as easily as lying, cheating, or stealing, and told them they must not fear that God would not welcome them back into his loving arms. He told women who suspected their husbands of infidelity that “before I did anything at all, I would make certain that my suspicions were justified.” If the test proved positive, they should confront the offender directly: “I’ve known men to grow up overnight when wives reminded them that from now on it is an ‘either/or’ deal.” Moreover, he said to one woman who had failed to take this step, “I must frankly say that your meek silence is in part to blame for your husband’s philandering. He either thinks you don’t love him, you don’t care, or that you are not smart enough to know what is going on right under your nose.” To those who wondered if they should confess their past infidelities, he counseled against either a public confession before the church or a private confession to one’s mate: “I don’t think this is always advisable or necessary. I have known of homes that were wrecked by such confessions.” Interestingly, on the question of abortion, which was not hotly debated at the time, Graham ventured that if it were necessary to save the mother’s life, abortion might be acceptable, though he felt it should not be employed simply “for selfish reasons.”
Graham’s prescriptions for a happy Christian home included a similar blend of biblical precept and commonsense. The husband, he said, should provide for the support of his family and serve as “the master of the house, the one who organizes it, holds it together, and controls it.” The wife is “his chief assistant in this work” and has every right to expect her husband to be demonstrative, courteous, polite, loving, and gentle toward her, but she is nevertheless to remain in subjection to him and adapt herself continually to “his interests, his experiences, his progress. . . . When he comes home in the evening, run out and meet him and give him a kiss. Give him love at any cost. Cultivate modesty and the delicacy of youth. Be attractive. Read as much as you can to keep up on world events and developments.” Given his own marriage to a strong and capable woman, Graham had to admit that “in one sense, the husband and wife are co-equal in the home; but when it comes to the governmental arrangement of the family, the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, teaches that man is to be the head of the home. . . . He is the king of the household, and you, his wife, are the queen.” A proper queen, he said, would prepare the king’s favorite dishes, have the meals on time, make their home as attractive and comfortable as possible, and feel “it is her duty, responsibility, and privilege to remain at home with the children.” She is not, however, a plaything or chattel without basic rights. She should satisfy her husband’s sexual desires, but the decision to bear children should be hers: “Surely a woman is entitled to choose when she will undertake the burden she alone must carry in bearing a child. No woman should be called upon to pass through [childbirth] involuntarily, nor should she be obliged to live in constant dread of doing so.” To a husband who asserted his right to impregnate his wife against her will, Graham flatly answered, “In my opinion, you are totally in the wrong. You and your wife should lovingly and prayerfully agree on this point.”
Graham believed children in a Christian home should be subordinate to both parents and did not hesitate to recommend spankings, pointing out that “the pain of corporal punishment administered in love is insignificant compared with the evil and pain resulting from the habits of disobedience.” Accordingly, he decried modern psychology’s tendency toward permissiveness. “Psychologists are saying, ‘Don’t spank your children; you’ll warp their personality.’ I stand here before you tonight in a warped personality because I got plenty of spankings. There are plenty of calluses on my backbone that were put there by a razor strap. If you haven’t had that kind of discipline in your home, you’d better start it, because God demands it. Our children tonight are roaming the streets because there is no home discipline or restraint.” Despite these strong words, Graham acknowledged that punishment is inherently negative and that children differ in their reaction to punishment: “It may not be necessary for you to resort to the rod. I am saying, do not be afraid to use it when there is no other way.” As for religious training, he cautioned against forcing children to perform unpleasant or meaningless exercises. It is better, he counseled, to let them see their parents pray, to set aside special times for family worship, and to make such experiences as pleasant as possible. Graham felt confident that couples who followed these directions would be able to establish happy homes, a vital need not only for individuals but for the nation as well, since, “almost every historian will agree that the disintegration of the Roman Empire was due largely to the broken home.” He informed an Hour of Decision audience that only one in fifty-seven marriages ended in divorce when the families were regular in their church attendance; in homes where daily Bible reading and prayer occurred, the ratio dropped to only one in five hundred. “This amazing survey,” he proclaimed, “gives us two significant facts: that divorces in America are mostly among nonreligious people, and a Christian home is the best possible insurance against a broken home.”
Nothing in Graham’s theology or recipes for Christian living was unique, or even rare, but he proclaimed his convictions with an urgency and style that caught and held attention, and he undergirded them with a character and personality that made them compelling to those disposed to listen. As he gained experience, first-person dramatizations of the exploits of biblical heroes disappeared along with his argyle socks and flashy ties. Occasionally, he displayed a purplish school-declamation kind of eloquence, as when he declared that “the secret of America is not found in her whirling wheels or streamlined industry, nor in the towering skyscrapers of our teeming cities where clever men of commerce meet, [nor] in the rich, lush prairies laden with golden grain, nor in her broad green meadows where fat cattle graze . . . [but] in the faith that abides in the hearts and homes of our fair land.” He also sometimes illustrated his sermons with Moody-like stories of the praying mother who left the front door wide open for years, winter and summer alike, so that a wayward daughter would always know she was welcome at home; of the father who turned away from the saloon when he noticed his young son walking behind him, “stepping in Daddy’s tracks”; of the fatally ill girl who lamented that her mother had taught her how to dance and smoke and drink, but not how to die. But he was never truly comfortable with either poetry or pathos, and though he acknowledged it was possible to move audiences by eloquence, deathbed tales, and heart-tugging illustrations, he felt the result was too often insubstantial. “It may look genuine,” he said, “but the people are weeping over the story told and not over the conviction of sin by the Holy Spirit.” In consequence these rhetorical techniques came to play less and less a role in his mature style, a style that reflected elements from most of his major forerunners but that borrowed most heavily from the earliest and latest forms of mass communication in America, the jeremiad and the network newscast.
In the manner of YFC speakers, as well as of many a southern preacher, Graham usually began by relating a few warm-up jokes, often mangling the punch line, to relax the audience and let them know that despite the hard things he had to say, he was really a good fellow not much different from themselves. As soon as he got through these relaxation exercises, he shifted gears and set about to create a high level of tension in his listeners. He observed that revival is more likely to occur in a time when people feel unable to cope with the problems they face, and he used a variety of techniques to make his audiences believe their lives were filled with such problems. In some sermons he proceeded carefully from point to next logical point. In others his subject and text served merely to launch him into a barely related discourse on teenage sex, drugs, loneliness, communism, or atomic war. But whatever the mode of organization, he typically began by ticking off a list of individual or social problems he had observed or heard about on the news or seen mentioned in an article by J. Edgar Hoover or personally discussed with Henry Luce and President Eisenhower or read about in Reader’s Digest or gleaned from the works of British historian Arnold Toynbee and Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and Dr. P. A. Sorokin of Harvard and the famous psychiatrist, Erik Erikson, and the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. He pointed out that like the rich young ruler in the parable, many seem to have everything but inside are lonely, restless, empty, despondent, and depressed. They seek pleasure in nightclubs and casinos, but their faces wear no smiles when they leave. And even those whose personal lives seemed rich and fulfilling must live in a world filled with terror and threat. As a direct result of sinful humanity’s rebellion against God, our streets have become jungles of terror, mugging, rape, and death. Confusion reigns on campuses as never before. Political leaders live in constant danger of the assassin’s bullet. Racial tension seems certain to unleash titanic forces of hatred and violence. Communism threatens to eradicate freedom from the face of the earth. Small nations are getting the bomb, so that global war seems inevitable. High-speed objects, apparently guided by an unknown intelligence, are coming into our atmosphere for reasons no one understands. Clearly, all signs point to the end of the present world order.
These assertions flashed like a fusillade from an automatic weapon, fired in unrelenting staccato bursts that could not be ignored but allowed no time to run for cover. Indeed, Graham’s basic mode of preaching in these early years was assault. To keep entire arenas alert and at bay, he stalked and walked and sometimes almost ran from one end of the platform to the other, his body now tense and coiled, now exploding in a violent flurry. His arms slashed and crushed and shattered, his hands chopped and stabbed and hammered, his fingers pointed and sliced and pierced. And his words kept coming, a stream of arresting, often violent and frightening, images. He never faltered, never groped for a word, never showed the slightest doubt that what he said was absolutely true. Then, when he had his listeners mentally crouching in terror, aware that all the attractively labeled escape routes—alcohol, sexual indulgence, riches, psychiatry, education, social-welfare programs, increased military might, the United Nations—led ultimately to dead ends, he held out the only compass that pointed reliably to the straight and narrow path that leads to personal happiness and lasting peace. “The Bible says,” Billy said, that the only Way worth following, the only Truth worth knowing, the only Life worth living is that offered to those who acknowledge their helplessness, throw themselves on God’s grace and mercy, and turn their lives over to Jesus Christ, who is able to answer their deepest need. “Christ died for your sins,” he proclaimed. “They hung him on a cross, and his blood was flowing, and they taunted him, ‘Come down, come down. You saved others; save yourself.’ And he said, ‘No, I love them. I’m dying for people in 1952 in Washington, D.C. I’m dying for those people in generations yet unborn. I’m going to bear their penalty and their punishment, and take it upon myself.’” That offer, Graham stressed, as he moved to close the sale, was the most spectacular any person could receive, but it would not forever be available. Even if Christ did not soon return, each individual’s life is of brief and uncertain span. Think, he reminded them, of the movie stars and sports heroes and political leaders who had recently died, some at the peak of their careers. How could anyone be sure he or she would be alive twenty-five or fifteen or ten or two years from now? What about a week? A day? How easy it would be to die in an automobile accident on the way home from the service, and then face God at the Judgment, aware of having passed up this one last opportunity to escape an eternity of separation from his blessed countenance. Life is uncertain. Tomorrow’s sun may never rise. Eternity may be but a heartbeat away.
Graham did not wring such themes for every ounce of anxiety and fear they might hold, but seldom did he let an invitation pass without giving them at least a twist or two. It was not high pressure, but it was pressure nonetheless, and he felt no qualms in using it to move them to make the decision toward which all his preaching pointed. “I’m going to ask you to get up out of your seats,” he would announce, “and come and stand in front of the platform, and say, ‘Tonight, I want Christ in my heart.’” And then, suddenly and unlike most revivalists, who continued to badger and plead and cajole throughout the invitation hymn, he stopped talking, closed his eyes, rested his chin on his right fist, cradled his right elbow in his left hand, and waited—for the Holy Spirit to move, for men and women and boys and girls to decide that this would be the day of their salvation.
For all his vitality and carefully honed technique, Graham was far from flawless as a preacher. He often insisted he was no scholar or intellectual, and his sermons were studded with garish justification of his modesty. He seemed to specialize in sweeping generalization and oversimplification, as when he declared that “almost all ministers of the gospel and students of the Bible agree that [the postwar rise of Russia] is masterminded by Satan himself” or blithely proclaimed in a sermon on “The Sins of the Tongue” that “the problems of the world could be solved overnight if the world could get victory over the tongue.” In similar fashion he asserted that the major reasons for the immorality of youth in midcentury America were the troubled marriages of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, Ingrid Bergman’s notorious affair with Roberto Rossellini, and too-frank discussions of marital problems. On other occasions he offered dubious or glaringly erroneous renderings of the thought of authorities he cited, as when he overlooked Thomas Jefferson’s well-known Deism and credited him with having “believed that [man’s] salvation, his only real freedom, is found in a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ, because he gives freedom from fear of death, from sin,” or when he lumped Nietzsche, Freud, and Schleiermacher together under the heading of “behavioristic philosophies.”
Such naive statements gave more learned and sophisticated critics ample excuse to dismiss Graham as an undereducated zealot, but they detracted hardly at all from the quality that gave his preaching its strength and power: the unmistakable authority of his proclamation. The source of his authority, of course, was the Bible and his absolute confidence in its truth. It was for him a saber whose strength and sharpness he used to slash deeply into the consciousness of his hearers. He understood intuitively that countless multitudes—not everyone, to be sure, but far more than enough to fill the largest arena in any city—want to be told what to believe by someone who believes it himself. He advised ministers to hide whatever doubts they might have and to preach what they do believe with full conviction. “People want to be told authoritatively that this is so,” he said, “not be given pro and con arguments. . . . The world longs for finality and authority. It is weary of theological floundering and uncertainty. Belief exhilarates people; doubt depresses them.” His own belief was final and unshakable, if not fully explicable, and because he had no doubts, he was able to convey in his voice, his gestures, and his absolute forthrightness a personal authority that bolstered and exemplified the authority of Scripture. He did not defend his belief; he proclaimed it in clear and perfectly intelligible language, so that no one could doubt or misunderstand what he wanted them to do.
Though Graham often spoke of social problems of national and global magnitude, he offered few suggestions for dealing with them other than accepting Christ as one’s personal savior. In part, this was because he considered himself an evangelist, not a theologian or social reformer. More crucial was his conviction, widely shared among Evangelicals, that the only way to change society is to change individual men and women, who would then act as a leavening agent to make society more Christian, which he seemed to assume would naturally cause it to resemble the decent, hardworking, middle-class, patriotic, capitalist society to which he belonged and in which he felt most comfortable. He and his fellow Evangelicals did not expect to bring about widespread and basic social change by promoting legislation or disobeying laws that seemed clearly unjust.
In 1947, Carl F. H. Henry, one of the most prominent and perhaps the most gifted of young Evangelical theologians, wrote a pivotal book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, in which he lamented his own movement’s lack of sensitivity to social problems. Modernists had an insufficient view of the gospel, he believed, but they often demonstrated a concern for society that put Fundamentalists to shame. If Evangelicals were to have the impact they ought to have, they must develop a more progressive social message. Harold John Ockenga agreed. Evangelicals, he insisted, “must concern [themselves] not just with personal salvation and doctrinal truth “but also with the problems of race, of war, of class struggle, of liquor control, of juvenile delinquency, of immorality, and of national imperialism. . . . [O]rthodox Christians, cannot abdicate their responsibility in the social scene.” Also in 1947, radio preacher Charles Fuller, with strong encouragement from Henry, Ockenga, and other leading Evangelicals, founded Fuller Theological Seminary, one of whose goals was to encourage a more socially enlightened ministry. Graham was aware of these currents of modest change and was particularly impressed by Carl Henry’s book, but his overriding passion for winning souls outweighed his social concerns, and his solutions to major social problems were typically those of Evangelical individualism and pietistic moralism—get individuals to attend church, read their Bibles, and pray, and social problems will vanish—and he showed only limited appreciation for corporate efforts to effect social change. He occasionally conceded that organized labor had helped reduce exploitation and ameliorate insufferable conditions in the workplace. He noted with pride that Wesley’s revivals had stimulated improvements in working conditions in England and often noted that Keir Hardy, the founder of the British Labor party, had been one of D. L. Moody’s converts. He was careful to point out that employers should regard their workers not just as “man power” but as human beings, should provide them with a safe and pleasant work environment and treat them with fairness, generosity, and respect, and that responsible workers should give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay and “not stoop to take unfair advantage” of their employers. To encourage such a whistle-while-you-work atmosphere, his associates visited industrial sites in every crusade city, setting up prayer groups they hoped would improve relations between employers and employees, and he urged employers and workers to save a seat for Jesus at the bargaining table. “I guarantee,” he said, “that if labor and management alike would bow their knees to almighty God and ask him for a solution, they would solve their problems overnight. If Christ reigned in these labor discussions, . . . we would enter an industrial Utopia.” Still, his reference to the Garden of Eden as a Paradise in which there were “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease,” clearly reflected his preference for a world free of unions and the conflict they produced. Neither Graham’s supporters nor his critics expected or demanded much more of him on most problems facing society during the 1950s, but he could not easily avoid more comprehensive attention to two issues threatening to rend the fabric of unity woven by the war and the following period of recovery. Those issues were communism and racism. The first, he could not resist; the second, he could not avoid.
To Graham, communism was such an unqualified evil that he regarded attacks on it as but the slightest departure from his ostensible political neutrality. At a precrusade press conference, he told newspeople that “not once will you hear from this platform an attack, by implication or otherwise, against any religious or political group. The only one I mention from the platform occasionally is Communism, which is anti-God, anti-Christ, and anti-American.” On the Hour of Decision he declared that the struggle between Communism and Christianity was “a battle to the death—either Communism must die, or Christianity must die because it is actually a battle between Christ and Anti-Christ,” and he told an Asheville reporter, “I think it gets its power from the devil.” In keeping with that conviction, the first printed sermon he distributed to Hour of Decision listeners was “Christianity Versus Communism.” In it he characterized Communists as devotees of a religion “created and directed by Satan himself. . . . The Devil is their god; Marx, their prophet; Lenin, their saint; and Malenkov, their high priest.” These “disciples of Lucifer,” he charged, “seek in devious and various ways to convert a peaceful world to their doctrine of death and destruction.”
Graham, like many Americans, expressed admiration for those claiming to find subversives in government and elsewhere in American society. When Senator Joseph McCarthy, frustrated by witnesses who refused to answer his badgering questions, called for changes in the Fifth Amendment, Graham recommended that if that was what it took, “Then let’s do it.” Even after McCarthy’s and similar committees came under heavy fire for their abusive and demagogic tactics, Graham persisted in his admiration for their efforts. In a 1953 sermon, a year before the Senate censured McCarthy, he said, “While nobody likes a watchdog, and for that reason many investigation committees are unpopular, I thank God for men who, in the face of public denouncement and ridicule, go loyally on in their work of exposing the pinks, the lavenders, and the reds who have sought refuge beneath the wings of the American eagle and from that vantage point, try in every subtle, undercover way to bring comfort, aid, and help to the greatest enemy we have ever known—Communism.” As McCarthy became more intemperate, and as his opponents began to demonstrate that he was a liar and a charlatan, Graham began to back away from him and his ilk. He admitted that while there might be some leftist, Marxist thinking in American churches, as McCarthy and others charged, he did not know of any such cases personally and was opposed to having people “put under suspicion without solid documentary facts and proof.” And in 1954, when reporters pressed him for a statement, he said, “I have never met McCarthy, corresponded with him, exchanged telegrams or telephone him. I have no comments to make on the Senator.” When they asked whether, simply as a Christian leader, he did not have some opinion on McCarthyism, he replied, “I am not answering that.” A few weeks later, he informed President Eisenhower that “most people are laughing off the McCarthy hearings” and were not giving them the kind of seriousness they had earlier received. Later that year, however, when the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, Graham observed that like Nero during the burning of Rome, the Senate was fiddling over “trifles” and “bringing disgrace to the dignity of American statesmanship” by making such a fuss. Other patriotic Americans besides Billy Graham (including Robert F. Kennedy, who worked for McCarthy for six months before becoming disillusioned) had been taken in by the junior senator from Wisconsin, and despite his apparent willingness to modify the Constitution if it would help ferret out enemies of freedom, Graham’s tolerant spirit made him uncomfortable with McCarthy’s excesses once he understood their implications. Still, his conviction that America was locked in a death struggle with Satan’s own ideology kept him from ever declaring flatly that Joseph McCarthy had also been an enemy of freedom.
Graham by no means believed that all of America’s problems were caused by Communists themselves. Equally at fault were American leaders who had underestimated the Communist threat, had listened to bad advice, and had followed a course of appeasement that encouraged Communist aggression of the very sort that led to the war in Korea. “We’ve lost prestige in the Far East, shown weakness, betrayed friends,” he lamented. “Our morally weakened allies are now calling for the admission of Red China into the United Nations and crying for the scalp of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa.” Such a faltering approach, he warned, was doomed to fail. “There can be no bargaining, there can be no parleying or compromising with evil.” America must stand firm, “no matter what it costs.” Firmness did not necessarily entail support of the United Nations. In a 1953 sermon, “America’s Decision,” he observed that “we have been caught in the web of the United Nations,” then quoted a Life editorial that had said of the UN’s intervention in Korea, “They set the policies, we shed the blood and pay the bills.” Though Graham would come to have a higher opinion of the UN in later years, he criticized it during the Korean conflict for its failure “to stand up to Russia” and ventured that a root cause of its some times spineless behavior was its lack of a clear theistic foundation: “At the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, there was no prayer made to God for guidance and blessing. We were afraid that the Godless, atheistic Communists would not like it, so we bowed in deference to Russia.” Such statements earned Graham recognition as a staunch anti-Communist. The Chicago Daily News characterized him as “Communism’s Public Enemy Number One,” and the Soviet Army newspaper, Red Star, denounced him as a quack, a charlatan, and a howling hysteric whose comments on world affairs impressed only “simpletons inexperienced in politics.” With equal vehemence, East German papers depicted him as a hypocritical demagogue fronting for a war-mongering White House and soulless Wall Street capitalists. Clearly, however much impact they assigned to his efforts, the Communists regarded Graham as something more than just another itinerant missionary.
For all the seriousness of the Communist threat, attacking it was a relatively risk-free enterprise. Evangelists since Billy Sunday had pounded on communism with impunity; not many Communists wandered into their tabernacles, and few Fundamentalists held up a hand to argue that their Communist friends had been misunderstood. All Graham had to do was avoid looking foolish. Racism posed a much trickier problem. Many Christians, as well as many observers who were not Christians, felt Graham ought to use all his influence to denounce segregation and prejudice. At the same time, others among his supporters, particularly in the South, continued to defend racist policies and practices and did not want him to meddle with what they regarded as a God-ordained system. To complicate matters even further, increased reliance by blacks on various forms of public protest ran counter to Graham’s own deep abhorrence for conflict and impropriety. The complexities of that problem would dog him for decades.
As a son of the South, Graham inherited a view of blacks as a qualitatively different and inferior people. “It was sort of an unspoken assumption that we were in a different class,” he recalled. “Whether it was master/servant, I don’t know. It was with some people, I’m sure. I don’t think I ever analyzed it when I was a boy.” Like many southerners, however, he was not exposed to a particularly virulent form of racism. His father used the word nigger, later softening it to nigra and then to negro, but he also hired Reese Brown, a black man who had been to school and served as a sergeant in World War I, to be foreman of the dairy farm. Billy admired Brown, worked alongside him, learned from him, played with his children, and shared meals at his table, experiences that made it difficult to sustain any notion of blacks as subhuman creatures. He often claimed that after his conversion he found it difficult to reconcile racial discrimination with worship of a God who is “no respecter of persons,” but these misgivings remained latent for a number of years. Bob Jones College and Florida Bible Institute were whites-only schools, and issues of racial justice did not arise. Wheaton College had been founded by abolitionists, and its student body included a sprinkling of black students, some of whom Billy befriended. His anthropology studies taught him that race is a quite imprecise term and concept often used by laypeople to explain such obviously nongenetic traits as language, religion, and social values. He also learned that most of the world’s peoples, including those responsible for some of humanity’s greatest achievements, are of mixed heritage. But these experiences and insights demanded no radical response. Most Evangelicals, even in the North, did not think it their duty to oppose segregation; it was enough to treat the blacks they knew personally with courtesy and fairness, and Billy found that quite easy to do. Dr. Bell, whom he admired tremendously, saw no contradiction between being a Christian and endorsing traditional southern racial attitudes, and he strongly urged his son-in-law to stay away from social-reform efforts that might deflect him from his primary task of winning souls.
During the early years of his independent ministry, Graham followed the example set by Billy Sunday and others by holding segregated meetings wherever that was the local custom. In Los Angeles and New England, blacks were welcomed and free to sit wherever they liked, but the few who supported his crusade in Columbia, South Carolina, were obliged to sit in a clearly designated “colored section.” When he returned to New England for his reprise tour, reporters grilled him about his acquiescence to this racist practice. He had no persuasive defense for not taking a stronger stand, but he affirmed his belief that the gospel is for all people, regardless of color, and that spiritual revival, which he professed to see on every hand, was the only dependable way to break down racial barriers. He managed to avoid a major controversy, but awareness that a skeptical public would be watching everything he did pricked his increasingly uneasy conscience. In Portland that summer, he objected to the automatic assumption that just because he was a Southern Baptist, he also favored racial inequality. “All men are created equal under God,” he said flatly. “Any denial of that is a contradiction of holy law.” Brave words and good copy, but two months later, he accepted just such a denial and contradiction by preaching to segregated audiences throughout his Atlanta crusade. Though Georgia was experiencing considerable racial tension at the time, Graham railed against the evils of alcohol, drugs, crime, divorce, and suicide, but said nothing about the evils of racism. It troubled him that few blacks attended his services and that the black ministerial association indignantly refused, and the leading black newspaper vigorously criticized, his offer to hold a special service for blacks only. Unfortunately, he was not sufficiently troubled either to speak out boldly against racism or to demand that his next several southern crusades—in Fort Worth, Shreveport, Memphis, Greensboro, and Raleigh—be integrated. It bothered him that blacks stayed away, but he resisted any action that might engender conflict or offend his white hosts. During his brief Hollywood Bowl crusade in 1951, he tried to play both sides of the issue, announcing that he personally favored improved race relations but that organized reform efforts were likely to do more harm than good, especially since it seemed to him that Communists and Communist sympathizers were at the root of most such efforts. Once again, he could imagine no route to racial harmony that did not run past the cross. “You can’t clean up a city,” he said, “until you clean up the hearts and minds of individuals, and the only successful method of accomplishing this is to lead them to an acceptance of Christian faith.”
Graham’s insistence on individual rather than social change doubtless gave comfort to advocates of racial gradualism and massive resistance alike since it placed the onus of conflict on those who wanted to change the system, but it was not a hypocritical dodge. He genuinely believed he was right, and he began ever so gingerly, to suggest it was time for individual Christians to start accepting the implications of a gospel whose central assertion is that Christ died for all people, whatever their color. On the Hour of Decision he declared that for America to remain strong, its people would have to affirm and demonstrate confidence in one another, “race with race, creed with creed, color with color.” Before his 1952 Washington crusade he announced there would be no discrimination in seating arrangements, and when liberal Washington clergymen criticized his lack of a coherent social message, he replied that at conversion “you become obedient to spiritual laws. You begin to love persons of all races, regardless of the color of their skin. It’s just love, love, love—love for all people of the world.” In Houston a few weeks later, he acceded to the local committee’s desire for segregated seating but set aside a shady portion of Rice University stadium for blacks instead of assigning them to the less desirable sunny section, as was customary. In addition, he held a special service, this time at their request, for nearly five hundred black leaders, whom he warned not to make their problems worse by turning them over to “a gang of international bandits.” Then, at the 1952 Southern Baptist Convention, he startled some of his brethren by asserting that it was the Christian duty of every Baptist college to welcome academically qualified Negro students. “The moral stature of the Baptist people,” he warned, “can rise no higher than the policies of the Baptist educators.”
Graham clearly felt an obligation to speak against segregation, but he also believed his first duty was to appeal to as many people as possible. Sometimes he found these two convictions difficult to reconcile. That summer in Jackson, Mississippi, in the heart of the black belt, he accepted segregated seating but defied Governor Hugh White’s request that he hold entirely separate services for blacks. During that crusade a white minister who had been president of a black college made him understand that his growing prominence meant he could not avoid such public stands. “Human justice is on their side,” the man said, “but more than that, religion is, too. You’re taking leadership in the field of evangelism, and this is something you’re going to have to face.” Near the close of the crusade, Graham took another step by not only proclaiming that God’s love knows no racial barriers but by identifying Jackson’s two greatest social problems as illegal liquor (Mississippi was still dry) and segregation. With respect to the latter, he said, “There is no scriptural basis for segregation. It may be there are places where such is desirable to both races, but certainly not in the church.” He acknowledged that he accepted it in his southern crusades, where local custom demanded, but said it made him uncomfortable to do so. “The ground at the foot of the cross is level,” he said, and “it touches my heart when I see whites stand shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the cross.” These statements stirred a chorus of amens and hallelujahs from the black section and applause from the editors of the Christian Century, who predicted his forthrightness would hurt him in the South. Both responses were correct, and when segregationists criticized him, he immediately backtracked. He told the local newspaper, “I feel that I have been misinterpreted on racial segregation. We follow the existing social customs in whatever part of the country in which we minister. As far as I have been able to find in my study of the Bible, it has nothing to say about segregation or non-segregation. I came to Jackson to preach only the Bible and not to enter into local issues.” Just one day earlier, preaching the Bible required that segregation be condemned and characterized the practice as on a par with bootlegger’s moonshine, only one rung lower than immorality on the ladder of major sins. When it appeared that such a message might shrink the size of his potential audience, Graham decided it was no longer “unscriptural” but simply a “local issue” that had mischievously popped up where it did not belong. Not long afterward, he covered this fast-rising waffle with still another topping. In a letter to one of the leaders of a crusade planned for Detroit, he included a copy of the news story about his bold statements (but not the story of his “clarification”) with the comment, “I am certain this will be of interest to our colored brethren. I cannot be hypocritical on this matter. I do not preach one thing in the North and change my message in the South. This is a moral issue, and we take our stand. To take one’s stand in Mississippi is not too popular, but we had very little repercussions from this statement. Our Negro friends have attended in large numbers.”
Graham’s behavior had not quite matched his alleged boldness, but the statement expressed truth as he wanted it to be, and that ideal pulled him along toward consistency. In March 1953, more than a year before the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, and more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Graham told the sponsoring committee of his Chattanooga crusade that he could not countenance the usual practice of segregated seating. When the committee balked, he went to the crusade tabernacle and personally removed the ropes marking the section reserved for blacks. In fact, few blacks dared to move into the white sections, and many people may not have realized what Graham had done—the incident passed without comment in the local papers—but he could not know what might happen, and the gesture was significant. In Dallas a few months later, he backslid a bit by accepting the sponsoring committee’s designation of separate seating areas for blacks and whites, but ushers made no attempt to hinder the small number of blacks who chose to sit in areas reserved for whites. When a black Detroit newspaper reported the segregated arrangements in Dallas, the pastor of a Baptist church in that city informed Graham that his church would not participate in the upcoming crusade and blasted him for bowing to racist practices. Crusade director Willis Haymaker responded that Dallas law mandated segregated seating and that however much they might dislike certain laws, they felt bound to obey them. Billy Graham, he asserted, was deeply committed to improving race relations, but he intended to do it by preaching the gospel, not by breaking the law. Some black churchmen in Detroit continued to doubt Graham’s commitment, but others participated actively on various committees and were quite visible on the platform and in the choir and usher corps. Reassured and buoyed by the harmony of the meetings, Graham proclaimed that “the church must practice the Christianity it professes. The state, the sports world, and even the business field are way ahead of the church in getting together racially. And church people should be the first to step forward and practice what Christ taught—that there is no difference in the sight of God.” Racial discrimination, he warned, hurt American foreign policy and frustrated the work of Christian missionaries. Still, without explaining why secular institutions were moving more quickly toward racial harmony than was the church, or why the plight of blacks seemed particularly discouraging in that section of the country most heavily populated with born-again Christians, he reaffirmed his basic conviction that “a great spiritual revival is needed to relieve the racial and political tensions of today.” The Christian Century, though skeptical of Graham’s individualistic approach to social issues, commended him for his statements in Detroit and acknowledged his growing insistence on integrated crusades.
While in Detroit, Graham explicitly rejected as unbiblical the racist contention that dark skin and the inferior social position of blacks derived from a curse Noah placed on Canaan, the son of Ham (Genesis 9:22–27), and were therefore part of a divinely sanctioned and unchangeable order. A few weeks later, in his syndicated column, he addressed the same issue from both a biblical and an anthropological perspective. To the question Does the Bible teach the superiority of any one race? he replied: “Definitely not. The Bible teaches that God hath made of one blood all the nations of the world. . . . Anthropologists have come to two very important biological observations. First, there are no pure races. Second, there are no superior or inferior races. We know from history that all people upon contact have crossed their genetically based physical traits. We know from human anatomy that in fundamental structure all people are identical. As far as biological man is concerned, what he is is related to his cultural environment, rather than to any inherited ability or aptitude.” Then, in oblique but unmistakable fashion, he lumped racists with Nazis. “There is no ‘German Race,’” he observed, “only a German nationality. There is no ‘Aryan race,’ only an Aryan language. There is no Master Race, only a political bombast!” In Peace with God, he again indicted the church for allowing secular institutions to outshine its commitment to racial justice. “The church should have been the pacesetter,” he lamented. “The church should voluntarily be doing what the federal courts are doing by pressure and compulsion.” And they should be doing it because the Holy Spirit had transformed their hearts and their perceptions. When true Christians look at other people, they see “no color, nor class, nor condition, but simply human beings with the same longings, needs and aspirations as our own.” Billy Graham was now fully on the record against segregation and for racial equality. After the Supreme Court decision on May 17, 1954, he no longer permitted any form of enforced segregation in his meetings, even in the Deep South, though he sometimes seemed less concerned with the intrinsic injustice of racial discrimination than with the effect on his ministry’s image. Before his Nashville crusade in the fall of 1954, for example, he wrote to the crusade chairman, urging him to “keep in mind that my ministry is now worldwide, and I have to be extremely careful in everything I do. Therefore, I would suggest that Negroes be allowed to sit anywhere they like in the open-air stadium and that nothing be said one way or the other about it. It might be well if once a week you had a Negro pastor lead in prayer. . . . There will likely be only a small group of Negroes come anyway, but if they were roped off or segregated into the back, it might cause trouble.” Graham obviously felt no strong need to incorporate blacks into the crusade as he had in Detroit, and they apparently got the message. Few attended the services, and those who did, though not required to, sat where black folk usually sat in that stadium. Consistent with his pacific and conciliatory nature, Billy would always prefer decorum to bold example, and he would never be comfortable with violent protest or even with nonviolent socially disruptive measures aimed at changing the standing order. Neither, however, would he ever retreat from the higher ground he had seized.