America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation by Grant Wacker (review)

Grant Wacker has provided a welcome and much-needed interpretation of the Reverend Billy Graham’s life and work. Although the book is biographical, it is not a biography. The structure of the book is more like Russian nesting dolls. Wacker begins with Graham’s origins as a preacher (his most important role) and successively considers his role as icon, southerner, entrepreneur, architect, pilgrim, pastor, and patriarch. Each role is unmistakably Graham, but the context and focus change as the previous role swallows the next. Ideas and key topics often reemerge with added insight and texture, but they are always anchored in the previous chapters.

Wacker is admittedly a sympathetic interpreter of the evangelist, but he does not whitewash Graham’s foibles or shy away from criticism of Graham’s actions, particularly regarding segregation and race, Graham’s relationship with Richard M. Nixon, and naive comments Graham made about religious life in the Soviet Union. Under Wacker’s eye, Graham’s notorious stumbles receive a more complicated texture. For example, Wacker shows that Graham’s views on race and segregation were more progressive than they seemed. However, Wacker’s argument that Graham’s embarrassing comments about enjoying caviar in the Soviet Union “came with a twinkle in the eye” is less convincing (p. 241).

The chapter that interprets Graham as a southerner will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. Wacker’s treatment of Graham’s engagement with race and civil rights is particularly well done. Rather than discussing what one wishes Graham had done, Wacker describes what the preacher actually did in the context of the American South of the 1950s. Graham desegregated his crusades in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1953, before the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and the Montgomery bus boycott. Wacker neither overstates nor diminishes the fact that a southern white evangelical had more to lose than gain in the eyes of his core constituency by doing so. However, Wacker shows that Graham’s actions reflected his wish to promote the gospel to a wider audience, rather than promote social justice in the name of Christ. Sometimes these causes overlapped; sometimes not.

The core objective of winning individuals to Christ is carefully outlined in the book, and Wacker helps the reader appreciate Graham’s craft as an evangelist. In each successive chapter, Wacker expertly charts how Graham changed over the course of his long career. Graham remained consistent in his goal to win souls for Christ, but his vision of religious life evolved over time. Wacker notes that Graham gradually relinquished the fundamentalist trappings of his faith and embraced a more irenic neo-evangelicalism. He moved from a hawkish vision of foreign relations in the 1960s to promoting nuclear disarmament by the 1970s. Graham’s political hobnobbing with presidents may have inspired other evangelicals with the confidence to engage in the political and social arenas of American life, but, because of the fallout from his relationship with Richard Nixon, Graham generally stayed above partisan politics and the culture wars by the time of the rise of the Religious Right.

Ultimately, Wacker claims that Graham helped shaped American culture in the twentieth century. One will not doubt that Graham decisively impacted American evangelicalism, which in turn shaped modern American politics and society. However, it is not always clear that Graham shaped American culture so much as his actions reflected the culture that staged his success. Yet Wacker is surely correct that Graham became a symbol of legitimacy and a messenger of hope to the nation: presidents wanted to be seen with him; the nation expected to pray and grieve with him in times of trial; and many Americans aspired to his vision of personal success, pious individualism, and connection to God.

Wacker focuses on Graham’s work in the United States, leaving the evangelist’s considerable international impact for...