The Politics of Accommodation

With this book, Steven P. Miller emerges as a significant new voice in the history of evangelical Christianity. This is a first-rate book, well written, strongly researched, and full of insight into the politics of racial accommodation in the postwar South. Miller ably captures Graham's effort to support racial integration in the postwar South through his religious "Crusades." Although Graham became closely allied in the public mind with President Richard Nixon, Miller shows that Graham, a registered Democrat, formed close relations with other presidents, especially Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon Baines Johnson. While Miller does not fully explain why or how Graham wielded so much political influence, he shows that politicians from both parties called upon Graham for political advice, personal counseling, and public show.

Miller persuasively frames Graham within what he calls the social ethic of evangelical universalism and a political ethic he terms the politics of decency. For Graham, both ethics followed from his deeply rooted Christian faith that accepted all men and women as equal in the eyes of God and open to personal salvation. Miller finds the essence of universalism in the belief that the individual soul is the primary theological and political unit of society; that relational solutions surpass legislative ones in resolving social problems; and that Christians should acquiesce to legitimate government authority. These social and political ethics had important consequences in shaping Graham's public life. They led Graham to insist that his religious revivals be racially integrated. As a consequence, he held his first desegregated Southern "Crusade" in 1953, before the landmark events of the civil rights era. At the same time, the politics of decency invoked "law and order," which proved to be a double-edged sword used to denounce both violence by white segregationists and in inner-city race riots.

As Miller observes, Graham viewed himself as an evangelical, not a fundamentalist. By the 1950s, a deep divide between evangelicals and fundamentalists had widened. Although Miller understands that "evangelical" has become a pervasive modifier that is both vague and perpetually contested, it is a term that Graham identified with and that captures the revivalist impulse which so clearly defined him. Moreover, the term implies wariness toward nonreligious social institutions and a skepticism about political and religious liberalism, both of which were reflected in Graham's career.

Miller's book focuses largely on how Graham's moderate evangelicalism shaped his views on race as he changed from a tacit segregationist to a tepid critic of segregation to an active practitioner of desegregation in his religious crusades. Graham's own Southern childhood infused him with what he later described as a "patronizing and paternalistic" way of thinking about blacks. His enrollment at Wheaton College as a young preacher marked a turning point in Graham's attitudes on race. Wheaton College had deep roots in antebellum abolitionism. At Wheaton, Graham found black students among his cohorts. More importantly, however, Graham majored in anthropology at Wheaton. He encountered evolutionary anthropology that challenged the notions of "pure race" in any group and rejected arguments for black inferiority. Graham fitted such views into his own views of the Christian gospel, which he believed was open to all people, regardless of race. Graham's racial views paralleled his theological transition from Protestant fundamentalism to neo-evangelicalism. In this transition he allied himself with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE).

Graham arrived in the national spotlight in the fall of 1949 during his two-month Christ for Greater Los Angeles campaign. This campaign gained steam when newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who was attracted to Graham's strident anticommunism, used his media outlets to promote the revival. The success of this religious revival put Graham in the public eye for nearly the next half-century. While his anticommunism stance became more moderate in the 1950s, his travels abroad augmented his understanding that racial segregation in the United States was exploited by communists to denigrate American "democracy" as a...