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Epilogue: Billy Graham and American Conservatism
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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epilogue Billy Graham and American Conservatism He is the kind of man Rudyard Kipling had in mind when he wrote, ‘‘You can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with Kings— nor lose the common touch.’’ —John Connally, 1965 Over the course of that weekend, Reverend Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year. . . . It was the beginning of a new walk where I would recommit my heart to Jesus Christ. —George W. Bush, 1999 By the early 1980s, Billy Graham had safely entered his third and final stage as an American public figure. The evangelist had begun his career as a fundamentalist, a phase that lasted only as long as he remained a sociopolitical outsider—a firebrand novelty or a sawdusted throwback. The 1952 election of President Dwight Eisenhower then helped to thrust Graham forward as a spokesperson and symbol for a resurgent public evangelicalism seeking to rescue the United States (and, with it, Western civilization) from atheistic communism abroad and morally acquiescent liberalism at home. Politically, this neo-evangelicalism translated into a heartfelt, if somewhat strategically unfocused conservatism. In his home region of the South, Graham emerged as racial moderate and a type of regional leader. He continued those roles into the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. The subsequent Nixon years led Billy Graham and American Conservatism 201 Graham toward a type of political partisanship that surpassed even his behavior during the Eisenhower administration. Graham’s regional leadership thus became intertwined with Nixon’s ‘‘southern strategy.’’ By the early 1970s, then, the corrupt Nixon presidency seemed to mock the ideal of Christian statesmanship upon which so much of Graham’s political ethic rested. In the years following Watergate, the evangelist cultivated a noticeably more moderate image, which has endured ever since. He reconsidered his associations with partisan politics (after partly acknowledging them) and surprised critics with his newfound support for nuclear disarmament. The reformed Graham drew sustenance from his increasingly international and inclusive ministry. He stood as an elder statesman—an icon beyond partisanship and, by the 1990s, above the culture wars, as well. The now familiar narrative of a postpolitical Graham, however, does justice neither to the full breadth of his legacy nor to his ongoing comfort with the powers that be. The tale of Graham’s self-described ‘‘pilgrimage’’ toward moderation has highlighted certain changes at the expense of other telling continuities. Popular portraits of Graham have exaggerated the nature of his depoliticization. Specifically, they have elided his social ties with the emerging Christian Right, underestimated his presence in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush White Houses, exaggerated his defense of Bill Clinton, and not connected the dots between the motif of Christian statesmanship and the faith narrative of George W. Bush. In short, Graham never completely abandoned the world of politics. As he shed the political residue of the Nixon era, he walked an increasingly forgiving line between his reconstructed image and the fundamental endurance not only of his basic theological assumptions but of his political inclinations as well. During this time, the narrative of the Sunbelt South began to overlap with that of an ascendant conservatism. One need not embrace a glib thesis of ‘‘southernization’’ in order to draw a connection between the two developments—and Graham is a case in point. His pilgrimage in the aftermath of Watergate says much about the transformation of American conservatism at the close of the twentieth century. Christianity in Politics—Not as Politics With time, Graham’s post-Watergate claim that ‘‘everybody knows I’ve become politically neutral’’ grew in credibility.1 His increasingly nonpartisan identity benefited greatly from his public distance from the Christian Right, [44.200.77.59] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 21:22 GMT) 202 epilogue the new standard by which the media and many Americans measured Christian political involvement.2 While Graham criticized Jerry Falwell and the larger Christian Right out of principle, he also knew that even a partial association with such a controversial movement could severely hamper his evangelistic outreach. It is perhaps no coincidence that in 1981, after the election of Reagan led the media to train its sights firmly on the Christian Right, Graham hired evangelical public relations whiz Larry Ross.3 The evangelist’s exact relationship to the Christian Right thus remains unclear or oversimplified . Historians have cast Graham as a conscience figure vis-à-vis the movement , while journalists have often written him out of it...