Chapter 2

JOHN WAYNE WILL SAVE YOUR ASS

BILLY GRAHAM WAS A LIFELONG REGISTERED Democrat. This may come as a surprise, given the close alliance between white evangelicals and the Republican Party that has come to define the American political landscape in recent decades, but in the middle of the twentieth century it would have been hard to find a Southern Baptist from North Carolina who didn’t identify as a Democrat. Contemporary evangelical partisanship can only be understood in terms of a broader realignment that transformed partisan politics from the 1950s to the 1980s, a realignment that evangelicals themselves helped bring about. At the heart of this realignment were attitudes toward civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and “family values.” For conservatives, a defense of white patriarchy emerged as a unifying thread across this range of issues; for conservative evangelicals, a defense of white patriarchy would move to the center of their coalescing cultural and political identity.

Graham’s problems with the Democratic Party started early on. Fresh off the success of his LA crusade, Graham decided to make the most of his newly acquired celebrity status by requesting a meeting with President Truman. This wasn’t the first time he’d tried to secure a meeting, but in the summer of 1950 he finally had enough clout. By his own admission, he promptly made a fool of himself. Graham thought part of the problem may have been his attire. Still in his flashy-dressing phase, Graham arrived at the White House wearing a “pistachio-green” suit, rust-colored socks, white buck shoes, and a hand-painted tie. But the more serious problem was Graham’s comportment. He talked up his remarkable success in LA and at subsequent crusades, inelegantly quizzed the president on his “religious background and leanings,” and then told Truman that his Golden Rule Christianity wasn’t sufficient—what he needed was a personal faith in Christ and his death on the cross. The president informed him that his time was up. Graham insisted on closing with prayer, a prayer that extended several minutes past their allotted time. Graham’s most egregious error, however, occurred as he left the Oval Office. Encountering the White House press corps, Graham blithely recounted the entirety of his conversation with the president, before reenacting his prayer by posing on one knee on the White House lawn. Truman never invited Graham back.¹

But Graham’s difficulties with Truman extended beyond this awkward encounter. Graham criticized the Truman administration’s “cowardly” refusal to heed General MacArthur’s advice in Korea and lamented that the country had settled for a “half-hearted war” when America’s full military strength was needed. With Truman’s term coming to an end, Graham began signaling to Republicans that they could woo the evangelical vote by aligning with evangelical views on morality and foreign policy. Eager to bring a new occupant to the White House, Graham took it upon himself to write a letter urging Dwight D. Eisenhower to enter the race. Eisenhower wasn’t a particularly religious figure, but Graham was convinced that the war hero possessed the “honesty, integrity, and spiritual power” necessary to lead the nation. When Eisenhower decided to throw his hat in the ring, he called on Graham to help mobilize religious support. Graham delivered. Despite the Democratic loyalties of southern evangelicals, sixty percent of evangelicals nationally voted for Eisenhower, helping him achieve a decisive victory over Adlai Stevenson in 1952.²

As president, Eisenhower maintained a close relationship with Graham and his evangelical supporters. He asked Graham to help select Bible verses for his inaugural address, and he kept an annotated red leather Bible that Graham had given him on his bedside table. He began opening cabinet meetings with prayer, and he appeared at the first National Prayer Breakfast in 1953, an annual event organized with Graham’s assistance by members of “The Fellowship,” a secretive group that wielded tremendous power by connecting religious, political, and business leaders to advance their mutual interests. In 1954, Congress added the words “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and the following year Eisenhower signed into law the addition of “In God We Trust” to the nation’s currency. For evangelicals who believed that America was a Christian nation, the 1950s offered plenty of circumstantial evidence. More importantly, as the self-professed and loudest defenders of Christian America, evangelicals enhanced their own cultural and political power.³

Eisenhower and Graham were united in the conviction that Christianity could help America wage the Cold War. Early on, Eisenhower recognized the religious nature of the conflict, and at a time when American religiosity was higher than ever, he knew the religious angle would be key to mobilizing support. By framing the Cold War as a moral crisis, Graham made himself useful to Eisenhower—and to subsequent Cold War presidents. Evangelicals weren’t the only ones with an interest in propping up Cold War politics; government officials, business leaders, educators, and the national media all played a part. But evangelicals raised the stakes. Communism was “the greatest enemy we have ever known,” and only evangelical Christianity could provide the spiritual resources to combat it.⁴

The defense of Christian America required more than spiritual resources alone. Eisenhower presided over the vast expansion of America’s military-industrial complex, and in his farewell address, he made the connection explicit: a strong military would keep Americans free to worship their God. At the same time, Eisenhower looked back on his presidency with some trepidation, warning of the dangers of this mobilization. Few conservative evangelicals seemed to share his concern. As late as 1952, the NAE had joined mainline groups in denouncing the nation’s peacetime militarization, but by the end of the decade, the conflation of “God and country,” and growing reliance on military might to protect both, meant that Christian nationalism—and evangelicalism itself—would take on a decidedly militaristic bent.⁵

By that point, evangelicals had seen their own fortunes rise. By any measure, they had succeeded in advancing the agenda Ockenga had set before them, thanks to the auspicious Cold War consensus, an expanding economy, and their own efforts to transform their scattered endeavors into a powerful national movement. Within recent memory they had been ostracized, relegated to the margins of American culture and politics. But by the 1950s, the baby boom was in full swing and the “traditional” family appeared to be flourishing. (The nuclear family structured around a male breadwinner was in fact of recent invention, arising in the 1920s and peaking in the 1950s and 1960s; before then, multigenerational families relying on multiple contributors to the family economy had been the norm.) In the 1950s, too, Americans of all sorts were reinvesting in religion. Churches were springing up in new suburban neighborhoods across the country, and Sunday schools were bursting at the seams. Cold War politics also united Americans across party lines. To their delight, evangelicals found themselves securely within the political and cultural mainstream. The formation of the Religious Right was still two decades away, but the pieces were already falling into place. By the end of the decade, evangelicals had become active participants in national politics and had secured access to the highest levels of power. And they had come to see a Republican president as an ally in their cause.⁶

Confident that God was on their side, evangelicals were at home in a world defined by Cold War certainties. The next two decades, however, would threaten to undermine evangelical hopes for the nation, and their place in it. The civil rights movement, Vietnam, and feminism would all challenge reigning dogmas, and for evangelicals who had found a sense of security and significance in an America that affirmed “traditional” gender roles, a strong national defense, and confidence in American power, the sense of loss would be acute. But conservative evangelicals were not about to relinquish their newfound power. They would not go down without a fight.

In various ways, each of these disruptions challenged the authority of white men. In the 1960s and 1970s, then, conservative evangelicals would be drawn to a nostalgic, rugged masculinity as they looked to reestablish white patriarchal authority in its many guises. Over time, the defense of patriarchy and a growing embrace of militant masculinity would come to define both substance and symbol of evangelical cultural and political values.

TO WHITE AMERICANS who were willing to listen, the civil rights movement argued that America had never been a country of liberty and justice for all. Evangelicals’ response to civil rights varied, particularly in the early stages of the movement. It is easily forgotten, but some evangelicals—especially those who would come to constitute the “evangelical Left”—were vocal supporters of civil rights. Others, primarily fundamentalists and southerners, were staunch opponents. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Lost Cause of the Confederate South had blended with Christian theology to produce a distinctly southern variation of civil religion, one that upheld Robert E. Lee as its patron saint. In this tradition, fundamentalist pastors like W. A. Criswell of First Baptist Dallas (Robert Jeffress’s future home) crusaded against integration as “a denial of all that we believe in.” To such opponents, civil rights activism was a sign of disruption and disorder; many denounced Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist agitator.⁷

Most northern evangelicals were somewhere between these two positions. Like Graham, many were cautious supporters in the early years of the civil rights movement. In the early 1950s, Graham began to integrate his crusades, going so far as to personally remove ropes separating the seating between whites and blacks. In 1954, he praised the Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate schools. In 1957, he invited King to pray at his New York City crusade. Yet Graham was wary about moving too fast, and he urged the Supreme Court to proceed with caution to quell “the extremists on both sides.” This cautious support was reflected in institutional responses as well. In 1951, the NAE endorsed “equal opportunities” for people of all races. Christianity Today, too, published articles backing civil rights, although they also published articles suggesting that Christians were under no obligation to support integration.⁸

After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, these differences within the evangelical community began to diminish. Explicit support for segregation fell out of favor even among stalwart fundamentalists, as was the case for most segregationists more generally. At the same time, moderate proponents of civil rights began to cool in their support for further action. Graham, for example, withdrew his backing as activists began to engage in civil disobedience and to demand further government intervention. Many evangelicals followed his lead, concluding that it was not the role of government to interfere in issues of racial justice; only Jesus could change human hearts. Many evangelicals, too, found it hard to accept that the sin of racism ran deep through the nation’s history. To concede this seemed unpatriotic. Having embraced the idea of America as a “Christian nation,” it was hard to accept a critique of the nation as fundamental as that advanced by the civil rights movement.⁹

Understanding this ambivalence toward civil rights within white evangelicalism is key to understanding the role that race would play within evangelical politics more generally. By backing away from their support for civil rights, evangelicals like Graham ended up giving cover to more extremist sentiments within the insurgent Religious Right. Today some historians place race at the very heart of evangelical politics, pointing to the fact that evangelical opposition to government-mandated integration predated anti-abortion activism by several years. Others, however—including the vast majority of evangelicals themselves—prefer to point instead to the significance of moral and “family values.” But in many ways, this is a false dichotomy. For evangelicals, family values politics were deeply intertwined with racial politics, and both were connected to evangelicals’ understanding of the nation and its role on the global stage.¹⁰

In the wake of Brown, for example, many southerners turned to private Christian academies to maintain segregation, and when the tax-exempt status of these “segregation academies” was revoked in 1970, evangelicals defended their right to whites-only schools by arguing for the authority of parents to make decisions about their children’s education, free from governmental “overreach.” Later, “forced busing” would offend these same sensibilities, in the North as well as the South. Although blatant defenses of segregation and racial inequality would be rare, many southern evangelicals and fundamentalists who persisted in their unreconstructed views of race would find common cause with more “tolerant” evangelicals on issues like social welfare policy and “law and order” politics that would carry clear racial undertones.¹¹

In this way, the evangelicalism that gained respectability and prominence in Cold War America cannot be separated from its southern roots. Ideals of evangelical masculinity that manifested during this period reflect this formative influence. Some proponents of Christian masculinity praised Confederate generals and defended the institution of slavery, but for many, the racial subtext was more subtle. Invariably, however, the heroic Christian man was a white man, and not infrequently a white man who defended against the threat of nonwhite men and foreigners.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN white masculine power, family values politics, and a militant defense of Christian America was on clear display in the early 1960s in southern California, the center of the evangelical political resurgence. In 1961, Pepperdine College, a hotbed of Sunbelt evangelicalism popular with conservative donors and Christian celebrities alike, hosted a “freedom forum.” With the recent election of the Catholic Democrat John F. Kennedy, the mood was more urgent than triumphalist. Kennedy’s Catholicism was cause for serious concern among fundamentalists in particular, and the contention that Kennedy was soft on communism—this despite the fact that Kennedy had increased military spending by 14 percent during his first nine months in office—was also a matter of concern. At the forum, fifteen hundred businessmen and educators discussed ideas such as outlawing the Communist Party, refusing to seat Red China in the UN, disbanding President Kennedy’s Peace Corps, and commending the extremist John Birch Society. The highlight of the event was a televised luncheon with Barry Goldwater.¹²

Goldwater seemed the perfect antidote to Kennedy, and conservative evangelicals were drawn to his hard-edged, bombastic style, and to the “cowboy conservatism” he embodied. For his 1958 Senate campaign poster he’d stood, rifle in hand, in a buckskin jacket and cowboy hat, and in public appearances he liked to conjure the aura of the heroic cowboy, standing alone against all odds, refusing to compromise. As the freedom forum’s featured speaker, Goldwater invoked his own hero, Theodore Roosevelt—“America’s ultimate cowboy president.” Like Roosevelt, Goldwater warned against “peace at any price,” and called instead for a strong defense and courageous citizenry. Goldwater wasn’t known for his religious beliefs, but that wasn’t really the point. He was bringing a message Sunbelt evangelicals wanted to hear.¹³

Four months later, the region’s evangelicals came together again, this time in Anaheim. The occasion was an event organized by the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, a “citizen’s training program” headed by Fred Schwarz. Schwarz, an Australian physician who founded the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, had recently set up shop in southern California. At the close of the five-day event, sixteen thousand young people and their parents sang the “Star-Spangled Banner,” pledged their allegiance to the flag, and listened to celebrity speakers. First up was Marion Miller, a housewife who had gained fame crusading for anticommunist education in public schools, and for infiltrating the Los Angeles Left as an FBI informant. Next up was Ronald Reagan. Still a Democrat at the time, Reagan warned of communists’ devious plans to target teenagers’ “rebellious nature,” fooling them into thinking that their “patriotism is hollow.” Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and John Wayne then followed suit. But it was pop star Pat Boone who stole the show that night, closing with an impromptu address that Reagan would recall years later: “I would rather see my four girls shot and die as little girls who have faith in God than leave them to die some years later as godless, faithless, soulless Communists,” Boone asserted. His audience was thrilled, even if his wife was not.¹⁴

Program cover for Barry Goldwater’s Pepperdine Freedom Forum luncheon, 1961. FROM THE PEPPERDINE COLLEGE FREEDOM FORUM COLLECTION, PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES.

That same year, fundamentalist pastors were among those who rebuffed President Kennedy when he challenged the Soviet Union “not to an arms race, but to a peace race.” And they came to the defense of men like General Edwin Walker, who had been admonished by the Department of Defense for his attempts to indoctrinate troops with right-wing anticommunist materials supplied by fundamentalist evangelist Billy James Hargis. Walker resigned his post so that he would no longer be subject to “the power of little men,” as he put it, but Goldwater joined Senator Strom Thurmond and other Republicans to call for Senate hearings on the “muzzling” of the military. In the fallout of these events, Kennedy gave a speech at the Hollywood Palladium in November 1961, reproaching “those on the fringes of our society” who were easily wooed by “an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat” and warning against “the discordant voices of extremism”—against those who called “for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people.” Thurmond responded by denouncing “pussyfooting diplomats.”¹⁵

General Walker may have resigned, but he did not go quietly. He was later arrested for “inciting rebellion” among segregationists as federal marshals attempted to desegregate Ole Miss, and in 1963 he took up with Hargis to lead anticommunist “crisis crusades,” persisting in his charge that the government was soft on communism and hamstringing the military. Pastor Bob Wells of Los Angeles’s Central Baptist Church hosted many of these crusades. Wells thought it crucial that Americans “not be deceived about all of this talk about peace and safety”; disarmament would imperil both American sovereignty and Christianity. For the many members of Wells’s congregation whose livelihood was wrapped up in the defense industry, disarmament was problematic for other reasons as well.¹⁶

Wells was a key figure in the southern California evangelical community. To counter the perceived failures of public schools, he established a Christian elementary school and Orange County’s first Christian high school, Heritage High. Dedicated to teaching “Christian Americanism,” the school board screened textbooks to ensure that God and Christianity were well represented in American history. (They chafed at the lack of attention one popular textbook gave to General Douglas MacArthur—a paltry 26 words.) The school’s drama department staged musicals celebrating the values of patriotism and frontier democracy in which boys acted as the nation’s “valiant protectors.” One drama, God of Our Fathers, contained inspirational words from Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and General MacArthur. From the Patriot’s football team to school floats adorned with students dressed as Union, Confederate, and WWII soldiers all raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the school was steeped in a mythical, militant past.¹⁷

When Goldwater ran for president in 1964, Wells set up a table promoting Goldwater’s campaign on the church’s front lawn. Before the California primary, members of his church traveled together to Knott’s Berry Farm to attend a Goldwater rally featuring John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and Goldwater himself. Owned by conservative businessman Walter Knott, the amusement park was the perfect venue—with a Wild West ghost town, a patriotic tour celebrating the Founding Fathers, and a Freedom Center stocked with pamphlets on free enterprise, it was a fantasy world that they hoped to make a reality.¹⁸

Goldwater’s truculent style and aggressive foreign policy went hand in hand with his cowboy mystique. Here was a man who was not afraid to shoot first. Goldwater had recommended withdrawing from the UN and appeared open to provoking nuclear war. Opponents tarred him a warmonger and an extremist, to which Goldwater famously retorted: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” Just days before the election, Reagan, who had only recently switched to the Republican Party, gave a televised address on Goldwater’s behalf. Linked by their ardent anticommunism and cowboy conservatism, Reagan defended Goldwater’s promise of peace through strength and denounced those who sought a utopian peace without victory, proponents of “appeasement” who thought the enemy might “forget his evil ways and learn to love us.” Americans had “a rendezvous with destiny.” Either they would preserve for their children “the last best hope of man on earth,” meaning the American nation, or they would step into “a thousand years of darkness.”¹⁹

Reagan’s endorsement wasn’t nearly enough; Goldwater won only Arizona and five southern states, losing to Lyndon Johnson in one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. Although fundamentalists and Sunbelt evangelicals were drawn to Goldwater’s politics, most northern evangelicals ended up voting for Johnson, even if they did so without much enthusiasm. Johnson knew that the evangelical vote was in play, and he worked hard to keep Billy Graham on his side. The two had struck up a friendship, and Graham supported Johnson’s Vietnam policy and his approach to civil rights legislation, even though he had declined to endorse the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet Graham’s support was muted. He had in fact briefly toyed with running for president himself. In the end, most evangelicals outside the Sunbelt deemed Goldwater too radical. Goldwater’s defeat, however, masked a political realignment already under way. Although Graham refrained from supporting Goldwater in 1964, he claimed to have received “over one million telegrams” urging him to do so. Four years later, the choice would be easier.²⁰

In 1968, Richard Nixon knew that conservative evangelicals could hold the key to his victory. A lapsed Quaker, Nixon wasn’t a particularly religious man, but he understood that anticommunism abroad and “moral values” and “law and order” politics at home could woo this coalescing voting bloc. And he knew that one man—Billy Graham—could help him win over this crucial component of his “great silent majority.” When Nixon had run against Kennedy in 1960, Graham had come close to endorsing him. He’d submitted an article to Life magazine praising Nixon, but after having second thoughts he requested that it not be published. When Nixon lost the election, Graham was tortured by this decision. This time around, Graham was ready to abandon the guise of neutrality.²¹

“There is no American that I admire more than Richard Nixon,” Graham proclaimed at one of his crusades that year. Although some rural Southern Baptists and Methodists were drawn to segregationist third-party candidate George Wallace, most evangelicals preferred Nixon, the more viable and respectable choice. By the late 1960s, even fundamentalist leaders like Billy James Hargis and John R. Rice thought it best to distance themselves from the overt racism of a man like Wallace, and Nixon’s “Southern strategy” helped draw former segregationists into the Republican Party. With Democratic administrations overseeing federally mandated desegregation efforts, and with Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act into law, the Republican Party’s defense of “states’ rights” appealed to southern whites. An increasingly militant civil rights movement (and the 1965 Watts riot that erupted in the backyard of southern California evangelicals) enhanced the allure of “law and order” politics across the nation, as did the growing disruptions caused by the antiwar movement and the emergence of an unruly counterculture. Nixon won by appealing to his so-called Silent Majority, capitalizing on the political realignment signaled by Goldwater that would come to shape the next half century of American politics. White evangelicals were a significant part of his majority; 69 percent cast their vote for Nixon.²²

With Graham’s assistance, Nixon had worked to identify himself with born-again Christianity. Nixon’s faith was shaped by a western strand of Quakerism that bore some similarities to fundamentalism and was not to be confused with the pacifist Quakerism of the East, but there remained a distance to be bridged. Already in the 1950s, Graham had coached Nixon on how to appeal to evangelicals, drafting a speech for Nixon to give to Christian audiences referring to the “new birth” teachings of Quakerism and recounting a childhood marked by Bible reading and prayer. In a 1962 article in Graham’s Decision magazine, written at Graham’s prompting, Nixon described making a personal commitment “to Christ and Christian service” at a revival led by Chicago evangelist Paul Rader. Once in the White House, Nixon continued to solidify this strategic alliance. He instituted Sunday morning church services in the East Room and placed Special Counsel Charles Colson in charge of handpicking politically advantageous guests. Nixon knew how to speak the language of evangelicals and how to appeal to their values through symbol and spectacle. This “ceremonial politics” was on full display at “Honor America Day” on July 4, 1970, an event organized with Graham’s help and staged on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with the aim of bolstering Nixon’s agenda. Pat Boone was master of ceremonies. Clad in red, white, and blue, Boone lamented that patriotism had become a bad word. The country wasn’t bad, he insisted: “We’ve had some problems, but we’re beginning to come together under God.” Graham concurred. It was time to wave the flag with pride.²³

Connections between the Nixon White House and conservative Christians went beyond ceremony and spectacle. When Nixon came under fire for his secret bombing of Cambodia, Colson tapped the Southern Baptist Convention to pass a resolution endorsing the president’s foreign policy. Graham, too, worked to promote the president’s foreign policy agenda—including the escalation of the war in Vietnam—with talk of patriotism and unity. Nixon’s reelection campaign prompted Graham to step up his support.²⁴

Billy Graham and Richard Nixon at Graham’s East Tennessee Crusade in Knoxville, May 29, 1970. GETTY IMAGES / BETTMANN.

Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, was a former ministry student, son of an evangelical minister, and a deeply religious candidate. Despite having served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War, however, he opposed the war in Vietnam and proposed large cuts in military spending and amnesty for draft dodgers. In his acceptance speech, McGovern issued a prophetic critique of the nation and its culture of militarism. He promised to end bombing in Indochina on Inauguration Day, and within ninety days to bring every American soldier home: “There will be no more Asian children running ablaze from bombed-out schools” and no more Americans sent to die “trying to prop up a corrupt military dictatorship abroad.” He called on Americans to live with more faith and less fear. Countering those who said “America—love it or leave it,” he instead urged Americans to work to change their nation for the better, “so we may love it the more.” A small group of Evangelicals for McGovern rallied around the Democratic candidate, but they were a tiny minority. Powerful evangelicals like Graham and Ockenga publicly endorsed Nixon, and when McGovern spoke at Wheaton College, he was greeted with resounding boos.²⁵

Evangelical support for Nixon was manifest at Campus Crusade’s Explo ’72. With an eye toward reelection, Nixon had been looking for ways to reach evangelical youth. At Graham’s urging, Nixon aide (and ordained Southern Baptist minister) Wallace Henley reached out to Bill Bright, head of Campus Crusade, to convince him to join in a media strategy to advance the conservative cause. By “media strategy,” Henley meant “doing things like syndicated news columns, developing evangelical-oriented radio and television spots, undertaking a specific effort to land some of the big names on Christian talk shows.” The possibilities were vast.²⁶

Timed to the run-up to the election, Explo ’72 attracted 80,000 evangelical young people to Dallas’s Cotton Bowl. At a time when hippies were taking to the streets to protest the war, young evangelicals were celebrating Flag Day by applauding more than 5000 parading military personnel, saluting the Stars and Stripes, and cheering the South Vietnamese flag. Such overt displays of patriotism troubled some evangelicals; Jim Wallis and other members of the People’s Christian Coalition unfurled a banner lamenting the “300 GIs killed this week in Vietnam.” African American evangelist Tom Skinner said he didn’t have a problem with Flag Day, “but to associate God with that is bad news.” But most in attendance shared the organizers’ conservative values. They favored Nixon over McGovern by more than five to one; they also supported stronger penalties for marijuana possession and felt that American attitudes toward sex were “too permissive.” The event closed with an eight-hour Christian music festival, a “Christian Woodstock” attended by between 100,000 and 200,000 students, featuring “Righteous Rocker” Larry Norman, recent convert Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and other Christian musicians. Evangelicals had long rejected rock ’n’ roll, which they associated with drug culture and youthful rebellion, but by offering a Christian version of popular music, Explo ’72 helped pave the way for what would become a thriving Christian contemporary music industry. As Henley’s strategy suggested, the expanding world of evangelical popular culture would offer an ideal conduit for the dispersal and reinforcement of conservative politics.²⁷

Nixon won reelection handily, capturing 84 percent of the evangelical vote. The alliance between the Republican Party and evangelical Christians seemed secure. But things didn’t turn out exactly as planned. It would later be revealed that Explo ’72 took place during the week of the Watergate break-in. When news of the scandal broke and the extent of Nixon’s corruption (and Colson’s role in the cover-up) was revealed, Graham came to regret his unabashed foray into partisan politics. It was a lesson that most other evangelicals refused to abide.²⁸

THE ANTIWAR LEFT, though often disparaged by evangelicals, was in fact animated in part by religious faith. Mainline clergy vociferously condemned American war crimes and called into question the morality of the war and that of American soldiers. They expressed outrage over the use of napalm, indiscriminate bombing, search-and-destroy operations, and the scale of civilian casualties, and they didn’t hesitate to expose the brutality of American soldiers and violations of international rules of warfare. They criticized military chaplains, too, for failing in their prophetic roles, for preaching a “military religion,” and for essentially serving as “an indoctrination agent in behalf of the military.”²⁹

Conservative evangelicals saw things differently. Most not only supported the war in Vietnam but also held the military itself in high (and often uncritical) esteem. Having spent two decades working to inculcate moral and religious values in the armed forces, they often had nothing but praise for American troops. For instance, Graham, who had visited troops in Korea and in Vietnam, spoke admiringly of the “tough, rugged men” he encountered, men who shed manly tears when they came forward to receive Christ. Fundamentalists were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the war—a war to prevent “godless communism with its murder and torture and persecution from taking over other lands which ask our help.” According to fundamentalist leader Carl McIntire, “the infallible Bible . . . gives men the right to participate in such conflicts” and the knowledge that God was on their side; believers felled in battle would be “received into the highest Heaven.” McIntire castigated calls “to cringe and retreat” and denounced America’s “‘no-win’ policy” as “a sin against righteousness, the heritage of our nation, the mothers and wives of boys who have sacrificed for political expediency.”³⁰

When word of American atrocities began to filter back to the home front, conservative evangelicals minimized the violence and advanced moral equivalencies. In a 1967 Christianity Today editorial supporting intensified bombing in North Vietnam, Carl Henry employed sanitized language dismissing any “civilian damage” as “regrettable,” adding that it paled in comparison to the damage inflicted by the communists. To Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, the US soldier in Vietnam remained “a living testimony” to Christianity, and to “old fashioned patriotism.” A defender of “Americanism,” the American soldier was “a champion for Christ.”³¹

When confronted with undeniable evidence of American brutality, evangelicals could always fall back on the concept of human depravity. With sin lurking in every human heart, violence was inevitable, and only Jesus was the answer. When the young army lieutenant William Calley faced trial for his role in the murder of some five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in what came to be known as the My Lai massacre, Billy Graham remarked that he had “never heard of a war where innocent people are not killed.” He told, too, of “horrible stories” he’d heard from missionaries of “sadistic murders by the Vietcong,” and he reminded Americans that Vietnamese women and children had planted booby traps that mutilated American soldiers. His moral reflection in the pages of the New York Times was remarkably banal: “We have all had our Mylais in one way or another, perhaps not with guns, but we have hurt others with a thoughtless word, an arrogant act or a selfish deed.”³²

In 1969, Graham sent a thirteen-page letter to President Nixon—a letter only declassified twenty years later—offering an array of policy scenarios, some of which clearly abandoned Christian just-war theory and the Geneva Conventions. It is unclear what effect Graham’s letter had on Nixon’s strategy, but Graham’s was certainly not a voice of restraint. Even as Graham became increasingly ambivalent about the war, he remained unwavering in his support for Nixon. Meanwhile, conservative evangelicals continued to celebrate American servicemen, and looked to returning soldiers to provide leadership on the home front as well. At a time when evangelical churches needed to take a stand, who better to lead a nation—and its churches—than men who had “carried those concerns through the jungles of Viet Nam”?³³

The Vietnam War was pivotal to the formation of an emerging evangelical identity. For many Americans who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Vietnam demolished myths of American greatness and goodness. American power came to be viewed with suspicion, if not revulsion, and a pervasive antimilitarism took hold. Evangelicals, however, drew the opposite lesson: it was the absence of American power that led to catastrophe. Evangelical support for the war seemed to grow in direct relation to escalating doubts among the rest of the public. After the Tet Offensive in the summer of 1968, a poll revealed support for continued bombing and an increase in US military intervention “among 97 percent of Southern Baptists, 91 percent of independent fundamentalists, and 70 percent of Missouri Synod Lutherans; only 2 percent of Southern Baptists and 3 percent of fundamentalists favored a negotiated withdrawal.” Aware of their outlier status, many evangelicals understood themselves to be a faithful remnant, America’s last great hope. With the fate of the nation hanging in the balance, conservative evangelicals “assumed the role of church militant.”³⁴

The war was a watershed moment for American Christians overall. As the established power of the Protestant mainline eroded in step with their critique of government policy, evangelicals enhanced their own influence by backing the policies of Johnson and Nixon. Moreover, by affirming the war and the men who fought it, evangelicals gained favor and status within the military. This partnership was acknowledged ceremonially in 1972, when West Point conferred its Sylvanus Thayer Award—an award for a citizen who exhibits the ideals of “Duty, Honor, Country”—upon Billy Graham.³⁵

Still, there remained within evangelicalism a small contingent of outspoken critics, including national figures like Senator Mark Hatfield, who, together with McGovern, had called for a complete withdrawal of US troops in Vietnam. In 1973, progressive evangelical leaders issued the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern. Like members of the emerging Religious Right, they saw politics as an expression of their faith, but on nearly every issue they parted ways with their conservative brethren. They denounced racism and called for Christians to defend the rights of the poor and oppressed. Confessing that Christians had “encouraged men to prideful domination and women to irresponsible passivity,” they called instead for “mutual submission and active discipleship.” And they challenged “the misplaced trust of the nation in economic and military might—a proud trust that promotes a national pathology of war and violence which victimizes our neighbors at home and abroad.” The evangelical Left, however, failed to convince most fellow evangelicals that their faith required a critique of patriarchy and American power, rather than the assertion of both, and they would remain a relatively marginal group within the larger movement.³⁶

The evangelical Left and the Christian Right would pursue divergent trajectories, building their own networks and alliances. A common evangelical heritage and shared theological commitments diminished in significance as Christian nationalism, militarism, and gender “traditionalism” came to define conservative evangelical identity and dictate ideological allies. Conservative evangelicals would find they had more in common with conservative Catholics, Mormons, and with other members of the Silent Majority who were not particularly religious. Elements of class conflict also helped define these emerging coalitions. As children of blue-collar workers gave their lives in Vietnam, children of the elite protested the war on college campuses across the nation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, conservative Protestants had tended to lag behind other white Americans economically, but thanks to a thriving postwar economy, growing numbers of evangelicals were moving into the middle class. Still, many were only one generation removed from humbler circumstances, and in the 1960s and 1970s, as patriotism took on a populist dimension, conservative evangelicals were drawn to the values of the white working class. For these new allies, nostalgic celebrations of rugged masculinity would come to symbolize a shared identity, and a political agenda.³⁷

THE VIETNAM WAR was a foreign policy crisis, and a domestic one. Young men dodged the draft, shirking their duty to protect American interests in the face of global communism. Antiwar protesters shunned authority, advising their generation to make love, not war. Sporting long hair and flowered shirts, the young men and women of this generation seemed nearly indistinguishable, at least according to conservative critics. The failure of American soldiers to defeat a ragtag enemy testified to serious problems of American manhood, and no group felt this crisis more keenly than American evangelicals.³⁸

For evangelicals, the problem of American manhood was at its heart a religious one, properly addressed within the Christian family. Fundamentalist megachurch pastor Jack Hyles made this case in his 1972 book How to Rear Children. The son of a distant, alcoholic father, Hyles had grown up in Texas, served in the 82nd Airborne Division in the Second World War, and later turned to ministry. In 1959, the “skinny, charismatic Bible thumper with a Southern-fried drawl and a couple of cheap suits” showed up in Hammond, Indiana, and took charge of its First Baptist Church. He quickly built the church into one of the largest Independent Fundamental Baptist churches in the nation, boasting an attendance of over 20,000 and housing “the world’s largest Sunday School.”³⁹

Hyles’s book included a section on “How to Make a Man Out of a Boy.” Boys needed to be taught to be winners: “This is how we get our General MacArthurs. This is how Billy Sundays are made.” Teaching boys how to be good losers left you with a generation of young men who didn’t want to fight for their country and were instead “willing to let the strongest nation on earth bow down in shame before a little nation like North Vietnam.” It was up to Christian parents to rear a new generation of men, and to this end they should make boys “play with boys and with boys’ toys and games,” with “guns, cars, baseballs, basketballs, and footballs.” Boys who engaged in “feminine activities,” he warned, often ended up as “homosexuals.” A boy must be taught to fight, to “be rugged enough” to defend his home and those he loved. Hyles bought his own son a pair of boxing gloves when he was five, an air rifle at thirteen, and a .22 at fifteen. When a neighbor boy insulted Hyles’s daughter, he encouraged his son to “let him have it” and walked away as his son beat the boy bloody. Such violence was sanctified: “God pity this weak-kneed generation which stands for nothing, fights for nothing, and dies for nothing.”⁴⁰

Hyles prefigured a style of militant masculinity that other evangelical pastors would perfect. Known for angry outbursts and a nasty temper, Hyles had “a penchant for ironfisted control” over his growing religious empire. He instituted a dress code—men wore jackets and ties and close-cropped hair, and women skirts below the knee—and he commanded women to “be in complete and total submission to their husbands and to male leadership.” Whereas boys must be trained to be leaders, girls should be trained to submit. They “must obey immediately, without question, and without argument.” By enforcing submission, parents would be doing a future son-in-law “a big favor.” Hyles also advocated corporal punishment of children, even infants. (Spankings should last “at least ten or fifteen minutes” and should “leave stripes,” as necessary.) Parents in his church took his advice to heart; one woman recalled receiving more than three hundred lashes from a leather belt, and Hyles advised the girl’s parents how to avoid arrest after authorities were notified. “Our natural man” might rebel at such punishment, Hyles explained, but children must learn obedience or end up in hell.⁴¹

As religious leaders like Hyles championed a militant application of patriarchal authority, other conservatives, too, embraced a nostalgic vision of aggressive, even violent masculinity. In this way, militant masculinity linked religious and secular conservatism. In time, the two would become difficult to distinguish. As red-blooded American manhood became infused with God-and-country virtues, otherwise secular models would come to exemplify an ideal Christian manhood. This conflation of religious and secular can be seen in the cultlike status John Wayne enjoyed among American conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s.

If an evangelical could be defined as anyone who liked Billy Graham, by the 1970s a conservative might well be defined as anyone who loved John Wayne. Wayne was more than just a movie star. As far back as the 1940s, Wayne’s masculinity had been intertwined with his conservative activism. In 1944, he’d helped create the anticommunist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), and in 1949 he became its president. He was a vocal supporter of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and in 1952 he made and starred in Big Jim McLain, a propaganda piece in which he played a HUAC investigator. In 1960 he supported Nixon and took jabs at Kennedy, and in 1964 he voiced a campaign ad for Goldwater deriding appeasement and celebrating the “high morals” of a “free America.” In 1968 he gave a rousing, patriotic address at the Republican National Convention. When Nixon wanted to explain his own views on “law and order,” he pointed to Wayne’s Chisum as a model, a bloody tale of frontier justice in which Wayne achieved order—and revenge—through violence.⁴²

Many of Wayne’s films were politically charged, none more so, unsurprisingly, than the two films he directed. The Alamo (1960) was inspired by Wayne’s Cold War activism in the late 1940s; Davy Crockett’s sacrifice for the cause of liberty offered a heroic model for Cold War America. But The Green Berets (1968)—the only major motion picture in support of the Vietnam War filmed during the war years—was Wayne’s most direct contribution to Cold War militarism. A commercial success, The Green Berets offered fans a make-believe substitute for the actual war, one that perpetuated the myth of American greatness. To conservatives, the fact that both films were “viciously panned and vilified, dismissed as rightest message films and artistic duds,” was another point in their favor, even more confirmation that cultural elites disdained heroic masculinity. Like the heroes Wayne played onscreen, conservatives’ sense of embattlement only heightened their resolve.⁴³

John Wayne starring as Colonel Mike Kirby in The Green Berets, 1968. TCD / PROD.DB / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO.

The mythical wars Wayne fabricated had very real repercussions. As one working-class Vietnam veteran later recalled, he went to Vietnam to “kill a Commie for Jesus Christ and John Wayne.” It was Sands of Iwo Jima that inspired Ron Kovic to volunteer for the marines during the Vietnam War, a war that would cost him the use of his legs and lead to a disenchantment with war that he chronicled in his memoir, Born on the Fourth of July. Offscreen, too, Wayne worked to recruit young men to the war effort, ridiculing as “soft” those who didn’t enlist. One critic labeled Wayne “the most important man in America,” given the role his films played in driving American engagement in Vietnam.⁴⁴

However, the war heroes Wayne played left recruits ill-prepared for the realities of war. Onscreen, good triumphed over evil, and the lines between the two were clearly drawn. War was a place where boys became men and men became heroes, where America was a force for good, and where American ends justified any means. Shipped overseas, new recruits soon learned that real war fell far short of this ideal. Reared on a false narrative of wartime heroism, many men were haunted by the sense that they somehow failed to measure up. As for making boys into men, Kovic reflected bitterly that the war robbed him of his manhood: “I gave my dead dick for John Wayne.” Wayne himself had secured a deferment in order to avoid serving in a war with a far more clear-cut division between good and evil.⁴⁵

For veterans like Kovic, the disconnect between expectation and reality led to disillusionment. Many conservatives, however, continued to cling fiercely to the role of the military in defining American manhood and preserving American greatness. Those inspired by Wayne’s bravado came to see all of life as a war, and toughness as a virtue. This had repercussions on a personal level, and on a global one. Indeed, critics characterized American foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s as afflicted with a “John Wayne syndrome.”⁴⁶

Through his films and his politics, Wayne established himself as the embodiment of rugged, all-American masculinity. Understanding the man and the myth—and it was not clear where one left off and the other began—is key to understanding his enduring legacy. To begin with, Wayne’s masculinity was unapologetically imperialist. All of Wayne’s greatest hits involved valiant white men battling (and usually subduing) nonwhite populations—the Japanese, Native Americans, or Mexicans. Like Teddy Roosevelt, Wayne’s rugged masculinity was realized through violence, and it was a distinctly white male ideal. This was not lost on his fans. In 1977, on the occasion of Wayne’s seventieth birthday, an article in the conservative journal Human Events attempted to explain Wayne’s allure, and the racialized portrait of Wayne is revealing: Wayne was a “basic American breed,” a “tall Celt” of “pioneer Scots, Irish and English stock.” In films like The Searchers, Wayne plays unapologetically racist characters; in others, the racial politics are more subtle. His own views on race were conventional among conservatives, but still appalling. In a 1971 interview in Playboy, Wayne was particularly harsh in his assessment of “the blacks”—“or colored, or whatever they want to call themselves: they certainly aren’t Caucasian”:

With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightly so. But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

As far as African American representation in his own films, Wayne asserted that he’d given “the blacks their proper position”—he had “a black slave in The Alamo,” and he had “a correct number of blacks in The Green Berets.” His views on Native Americans were no more enlightened: “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from [the Native Americans]. . . . Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival.” People needed land “and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”⁴⁷

Nor did Wayne feel a need to apologize for America’s actions overseas. He downplayed “the so-called My Lai massacre” and instead highlighted atrocities committed against “our people” by the Vietcong. With all the terrible things happening all over the world, he saw no reason “one little incident in the United States Army” should cause such uproar. And he took great pride in the inspiration servicemen drew from his portrayal of Sergeant Stryker in Sands of Iwo Jima. General MacArthur himself told Wayne that he represented “the American Serviceman better than the American Serviceman himself.”⁴⁸

Onscreen and off, Wayne epitomized an old-fashioned, retrograde masculinity, and one increasingly understood in politicized terms. A staunch proponent of “law and order,” Wayne had no time for “cowards who spit in the faces of the police,” for “judicial sob sisters,” for people who advocated for criminals without thought for the innocent victim. He was similarly dismissive of student protestors. “There doesn’t seem to be respect for authority anymore,” he opined. As the Human Events chronicler put it, “As a man he is loathed and demeaned by sanctimonious ‘liberals’ and a whole mess of bugout-on-America hypocrites,” but the Duke was “top shelf with freedom fans, who thrill to the big guy’s charge.”⁴⁹

Wayne’s crassness was part of his appeal, if not the key to it—and this would become a pattern among evangelical heroes, religious and secular. He defended his use of profanity and his dramatization of violence onscreen (“All our fairy tales have some kind of violence—the good knight riding to kill the dragon, etc.”). There was a place, too, for sex in films, but only heterosexual sex. He had no use for Midnight Cowboy, “a story about two fags,” but “as far as a man and a woman is concerned,” he was “awfully happy there is a thing called sex”—it was “an extra something God gave us” and he didn’t see why it shouldn’t be portrayed in film, in a “beautifully risqué” way. “Healthy, lusty sex” was a wonderful thing.⁵⁰

To many conservatives, including evangelicals, Wayne personified “a tone of life” that needed to be recovered if the country was to reverse course “from the masochistic tailspin of this prideless age.” He modeled a heroic American manhood that rallied the good against evil; took pride in the red, white, and blue; and wasn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty. That Wayne never fought for his country, that he left behind a string of broken marriages and allegations of abuse—none of this seemed to matter. Wayne might come up short in terms of traditional virtue, but he excelled at embodying a different set of virtues. At a time of social upheaval, Wayne modeled masculine strength, aggression, and redemptive violence.⁵¹

FEAR HAD BEEN AT THE HEART of evangelical postwar politics—a fear of godless communism and a fear that immorality would leave Americans defenseless. What changed by the 1960s was evangelicals’ sense of their own power. Between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the 1960s, evangelicals had become more and more confident that they had a providential role to play in strengthening American defenses and upholding American faithfulness. The events of the 1960s, however, and the realization that the larger culture seemed to scorn what they had to offer, undercut their newfound confidence. Among evangelicals, a rhetoric of fear would persist, though it would be aimed at internal threats as much as external ones. Instrumental to their efforts to reclaim power, this rhetoric of fear would continue to bolster the role of the heroic masculine protector. There might be a place for the softer virtues, but the perilous times necessitated ruthless power. In the words of Baptist scholar Alan Bean, “The unspoken mantra of post-war evangelicalism was simple: Jesus can save your soul; but John Wayne will save your ass.”⁵²