I. Introduction
World-famous evangelist Billy Graham sat down on Monday, June 29, 1953, to pen a hasty Dear John letter to Rev. Earll C. Sheridan, pastor of Curtis Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, where Graham kept his official church membership.Footnote 1 He had just wrapped up a record-breaking month-long crusade in Dallas. Half a million people attended. 75,000 filled the Cotton Bowl to capacity on the crusade’s final night alone. Biographer William Martin called it “the largest evangelistic meeting ever held in America to that point.”Footnote 2 Flush with the crusade’s success, Graham preached a guest sermon at W.A. Criswell’s First Baptist Church of Dallas on Sunday, June 28. At the conclusion of the service, Graham made a decision that shocked everyone. “The whole congregation,” Criswell later remembered, “was electrified when Billy Graham himself stood and walked down the aisle to request membership at First Baptist Church of Dallas.”Footnote 3 Graham and Criswell came together, broke down, and wept. They embraced for several minutes before they could collect themselves and continue on.Footnote 4
The next day, Graham wrote his letter. It was short, almost terse. “This past Sunday morning I felt led of the Spirit of God to walk down the aisle and be received into the membership of this church,” he told Sheridan. “It has been impossible for me to come to Augusta and to have any fellowship with you and the congregation.” And since there was no Baptist Church in his permanent home of Montreat, North Carolina (although there were others in the greater area), Graham wrote, “I feel that I should move my membership to a place that I go often.” He explained that “During the past few years my heart has become very closely knit to that of Dr. W.A. Criswell of the first Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas.” He briefly thanked Sheridan for taking him in and thanked the church for their fellowship, reminding Sheridan that “in the next few days [First Baptist Dallas] will be writing for my letter.”Footnote 5 The letter would indeed come to First Baptist Dallas, and it would stay there for more than 50 years, a Texas-sized quark in the life of America’s most famous evangelist and in the history of postwar American evangelicalism more broadly.
Billy Graham was the most prolific, successful, and well-known religious leader of his era. Over the course of his decades-spanning career, the North Carolina-born Baptist – sometimes dubbed “America’s Pastor” – won the ears of presidents, the support of business and financial titans, and the souls of millions through his famed “crusades,” protracted revival meetings he held all across the world. Through his crusades, he preached to more people perhaps than anyone else in history. Although an historiographical over-emphasis on Graham can obscure as much about postwar American religion as it reveals, over the past several decades Graham has become, in many ways, a foundation, or at least a jumping-off point, for the historiography surrounding religion and public life in postwar America. Scholars have not only produced in-depth biographical examinations of Graham’s life but also used his career to investigate the religious right, southern conservatism, the Cold War, American race relations, and the nation’s moneyed elite.Footnote 6 And his relationship to Texas has not gone unnoticed.
Billy Graham was a national and international figure whose work transcended geographic boundaries, and yet, as historian Darren Dochuk suggested in a 2017 essay, Graham’s social vision – especially his fervent Cold War faith in free-market economics and his mild and moderate approach to American race relations – is “best seen through the prisms of place.” Dochuk proposed Texas as just such a prism.Footnote 7 “Texas was,” as he put it, “his crucible.”Footnote 8 And in Anointed with Oil, his 2019 exploration of the marriage between oil money and American Christianity, Dochuk demonstrated how Graham wed himself to Texas and its oil barons. Historian Kevin Kruse, in his 2015 One Nation Under God, similarly discussed the connection of corporate wealth and conservative Christian leadership and highlighted a similar dynamic between Graham and Texas by stressing Graham’s inexorable yearning for proximity to Texas’s millionaire oilmen. Both draw upon a robust body of scholarship surrounding the ways that Texas seduced Graham, who gravitated not only to the cash of its oil barons and the power of its politicians, as chronicled by Dochuk, Kruse, Darren Grem, and other religious historians,Footnote 9 but also to the potency of its popular image: the midcentury mystique of Texas that captivated Cold War Era Americans and helped sell Graham’s ministry across the country and around the globe.Footnote 10
But Graham was not just shaped by Texas dollars, Texas leaders, and Texas images. He was as much an agent of Texas as he was its object, a conduit between the soft-edged interdenominational evangelicalism sweeping American life and the homegrown, hard-edged Texas theology that would fuel the national conquest of the American religious right over the coming decades. Graham, whose all-American Cold War Era gospel softened the image of Texas theological hardliners and segregationist stalwarts such as his own eventual pastor, W.A. Criswell, offered Texas’s white evangelical establishment a path out of its own hermetic denominational worlds toward national political and cultural power. Graham’s membership, in other words, not only alleviated national tensions between postwar evangelicals and southern fundamentalists but also armored Graham with the approbation of theological agitators and nationalized a particular “Texas theology” that had developed over decades in pulpits such as First Baptist Dallas. Church membership is no trifling thing, and a sustained exploration of Graham’s decision to join First Baptist therefore reveals a transformative moment in postwar American religion.
The history of religion in Texas is usually trapped in a no man’s land of its own historiography – too western to be southern, too southern to be western, and perhaps too chauvinistically bound by its own hyper-developed denominational institutions and traditions to be anything but self-framing.Footnote 11 But Graham punctured the hermetic world of Texas religion, and a focus on his membership at First Baptist in particular helps us understand that world unbounded by state borders. Dochuk himself, in his 2011 From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, described a distinct “Texas theology” carried by Depression Era migrants that swept the national landscape in the second half of the twentieth century, and Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, upon reviewing the national weight of the state’s religious history, concluded affirmatively that “Texas is America’s most powerful Bible-Belt state.”Footnote 12 But if Lone Star evangelists borrowed and exported a particular brand of Texas religion to the rest of the country – and they did – national figures like Graham were also deeply invested in and responsible for its future growth and direction. Billy Graham, in other words, may have been America’s pastor, but he was also Texas’s apostle, the conduit for – with apologies to John Egerton – the Texanization of postwar American Christianity and the Americanization of a fighting Lone Star faith.Footnote 13 Graham’s five-decade membership at First Baptist Church Dallas offers an analytical entry point for exploring this complicated yet symbiotic relationship.
II. Billy Graham and Postwar Texas
Graham’s national rise is well documented. Born into a religious household in North Carolina in 1918, converted at 16, and dedicating himself to the cause of national and global evangelism, Graham never looked back. His 1949 Los Angeles Crusade – launched days after the news broke of the explosion of Russia’s first nuclear bomb, supported by the financial backing of the city’s business community, and explicitly propped up by William Randolph Hearst’s media empire – not only attracted 350,000 attendees but also tapped directly into the energies and anxieties of Cold War America. It catapulted Graham into national prominence.Footnote 14 His crusades continued to attract multitudes. His six-week Atlanta crusade in 1950 drew perhaps half a million attendees. Time called Graham “the hottest Protestant soul-saver since the late Billy Sunday.”Footnote 15 He became a semi-regular guest on Meet the Press, where moderator Ned Brooks introduced him as “one of the best known and one of the most talked about figures of our generation.”Footnote 16 He was invited – after much personal lobbying – to Truman’s White House and worked closely with Texas oil baron Sid Richardson to convince Dwight Eisenhower to run for the presidency. In 1952, with the personal help of House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, he was allowed to hold the first formal religious service on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. 40,000 braved the rain to attend.Footnote 17 Billy Graham was in love with America, and America was in love with him. And they were both in love with Texas.
Texas boomed in the years after World War II. The heart of a new “Sunbelt” busy devouring federal dollars and private investment, its oil fields and refineries redefined the limits of American wealth and anchored a prolonged postwar period of economic growth. In the 25 years after the war, oil production nearly doubled, manufacturing jumped nine-fold, and the state’s population increased by more than 50 percent.Footnote 18 For many Cold War Era champions of “free enterprise,” Texas embodied the unfettered possibilities of postwar America. Conrad Hilton, global hotel icon and inveterate Cold Warrior, wrote in his widely read 1957 autobiography that the land itself seemed to inspire entrepreneurial ambition.Footnote 19 “There was a vastness here,” he wrote, “more air, more sun, more space, and I thought that here a man drew some of that vastness into his soul. He could dream big dreams, think big thoughts because there was nothing to hem him in.”Footnote 20 For Graham, Texas was, in the words of Darren Dochuk, “a limitless tomorrow-land.”Footnote 21
The postwar Texas boom thrust the state headlong into the national culture. Growth washed away the stigma of cotton and sharecroppers and lynchings and replaced it with the romance of the Alamo and cattle and cowboys.Footnote 22 To Cold War Era Americans, Texas represented, as historian Lawrence Goodwyn put it, everything “rare and appealing about America.”Footnote 23 Americans watched James Dean in Giant and John Wayne in Rio Bravo. Footnote 24 Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett riveted a generation of children who donned coonskin caps and sang “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” which spent five weeks atop the Billboard Charts, just three months before Mitch Miller’s version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” knocked Bill Haley’s iconic “Rock around the Clock” back down from the top of the charts.Footnote 25 John Steinbeck, who, at the close of the decade, loaded his dog Charley into a camper and set out “in search of America,” put it best: “Texas is a state of mind,” he wrote, “but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.”Footnote 26 And by midcentury, the Texas mystique was an idea that could be sold. It had no better salesman than Billy Graham.
In 1951, Graham attracted more than 300,000 people to a four-week Fort Worth crusade, his first in Texas.Footnote 27 Months later, on a warm fall night, 25 spotlights lit up the L.A. sky and a record-setting 25,000 people filled the seats and surrounding hills of the Hollywood Bowl for the film premiere of Mr. Texas, the first film produced by Graham. The film told the story of a rodeo-loving, pleasure-seeking rancher, Jim Tyler, played by Red Harper, who finds God through the pleadings of his sister and the evangelism of Graham himself (footage from his Fort Worth crusade intercuts the film). “All my life I’ve been riding the wrong trail,” Tyler says. “I’m turning back. I’m going God’s way. I think it’s going to be a wonderful ride.”Footnote 28 Graham called the film the first “Christian Western.”Footnote 29 Though panned by critics, its success – along with a $75,000 donation from J. Russell Maguire, a right-wing oilman and arms manufacturer – inspired Graham to found a dedicated film studio, Worldwide Pictures, which returned to Texas to produce the 1953 film Oiltown U.S.A., the story of a greedy, hard-drinking Houston oilman who finds God through the pleadings of his daughter and the evangelism of Billy Graham, whose 1952 Houston crusade (his second in Texas) intercuts the film. A third film, Fort Worth, followed the next year, yet another play on the wayward-Texan-comes-to-God-through-Graham script.Footnote 30
Mr. Texas, Oiltown, U.S.A., and Fort Worth were symptoms of Graham’s Texas obsession. “Down in Texas,” Graham told a crowd at Cambridge University in 1955, “everything is bigger and better than anywhere else in the world.Footnote 31 He mined Texas for humor – he repeatedly told jokes about the Scotsman in Texas taking off his clothes, the Washington who was born in Texas, the Texan on resurrection morning.Footnote 32 In the 1950s, he even took to wearing cowboy hats. Historian Steven Miller explained that he “admired the swaggering style of Texas.”Footnote 33 Graham thought Texas was the best vision of the future. It was free-enterprise incarnate. He joked that “In Texas the way you tell the difference between the poor and the rich is that the poor man washes his own Cadillac.”Footnote 34 Oiltown, U.S.A., an ode to God and oilmen, was marketed as a celebration of “the free-enterprise system of America” and the “men who have built a great new empire.”Footnote 35 Texas was, for Graham as well as many postwar Americans, the most American part of the United States.Footnote 36
These were not original ideas. A 1952 Christian Century article – “Deep in the Heart of Texas” – argued that “same boundless belief in the future which bore our pioneering fathers from the Atlantic to the Pacific may be found everywhere today in Texas.”Footnote 37 A few years later, New Yorker writer John Bainbridge called Texans “The Super-Americans” in a series of articles and an eponymous 1961 book.Footnote 38 “If there still is an American Dream, the State of Texas is the American Dreamland,” read a review in TIME. Footnote 39 Graham held crusades all over the world, but he knew the importance of place. To shape “the spiritual and moral condition of the human race,” he argued, evangelists needed “strategic centers,” fixed locations with the institutional networks and cultural capital necessary to sustain missionary efforts across the world. New Testament Christians, he said, had been able to spread the gospel because they had Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, and Rome. “Here at home,” he said, “there are many strategic centers. But above all the others stands New York, Hollywood, and Texas.” The “whole world knows about Texas,” he said.Footnote 40 So when Billy Graham went looking for a new home church, Texas beckoned.
III. Joining First Baptist Dallas
Graham had visited Texas before becoming a national figure. He first preached at First Baptist Dallas in 1948 and hosted its pastor, W.A. Criswell, at his North Carolina home in 1950.Footnote 41 The two began their courtship. “Your great ministry of Dallas is spoken of far and wide,” Graham wrote Criswell in 1952.Footnote 42 Graham’s crusades in Fort Worth and Houston had already burned brightly, and that year they plotted together to save Dallas in 1953. Criswell was happy to do it. “From all over everywhere people have told me of the glory and power of God upon your ministry,” he wrote Graham.Footnote 43 He reveled in the anticipation of Graham’s coming crusade. “Get ready for the greatest revival in the history of Christendom,” he wrote in January.Footnote 44 By many measures, Graham accomplished just that. By requesting membership that summer in 1953, Graham was only proposing to consummate a long-running relationship.
For Baptist denominations committed to institutional autonomy and democratic control, church membership is no trifling thing. Membership is an essential prerequisite for participation in Baptist life. Existing members examine professions of faith, review spiritual credentials, and vote upon potential members. Members submit themselves before one another. Historically, members could be charged, tried, and punished for breaches of behavior or doctrine by the broader membership. They could have their membership revoked, and their letters of good standing rescinded. In its earliest years, for instance, First Baptist Dallas subjected wayward members to committee hearings on infractions ranging from dancing and drunkenness to adultery and violence.Footnote 45 Conversely, to remain a member in good standing is a church’s sanction of an individual member and provides a passport into Baptists’ spiritual and bureaucratic worlds. It is also, of course, far more than all of that. For many, church membership is a statement, a statement of belonging or self-identification with a particular church and a particular pastor and a particular community. And for public figures such as Graham, church membership is a public statement invariably freighted with social and political baggage.Footnote 46
Graham’s decision to join First Baptist was controversial. His brief Dear John letter to Rev. Sheridan would be the first of many justifications he would have to make for joining First Baptist Dallas. Criticism poured in quickly. “I am disappointed in the fact that you placed your church membership in the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, rather than in some Baptist church near your home of Montreat, North Carolina,” wrote James Howard, Superintendent of Evangelism and Associational Missions for the State Convention of the Baptist Denomination in South Carolina. “The question in the minds of loyal, cooperating Southern Baptists is, ‘What was the motive?’” Howard complained that Graham’s decision would undermine the work of local churches. “How can a Southern Baptist evangelist encourage and influence non-resident Baptists, or members of any other denomination, to place their church membership in some local church while his church membership is around a thousand miles away from his home? Suppose every Southern Baptist who will change his residence in the next ten years should follow your example relative to the local church in his community or town. Where would Southern Baptists be with their program of missions, Christian education, and evangelism at the end of ten years?” Howard questioned his Baptist commitment. “I hope you will consider,” he wrote, “how inconsistent it is to claim to be a ‘good, cooperating Southern Baptist’ and then not go along with Southern Baptists in every phase of their program.”Footnote 47
Regular church attendance represented perhaps the core of official church membership. Members assumed many obligations by joining into a formal covenant with an individual Baptist Church, but attendance and participation in the life of one’s home church were always taken for granted. Individual church covenants often said so. First Baptist had, for instance, historically policed the attendance of its members. The church resolved in its earliest years that “it is the duty of every member of this church to attend the regular public services of the church as often as practicable.” Church members who failed to attend were therefore put before the committee on discipline: “any member (being able to do so) who shall willfully neglect this duty shall be considered in violation of his scriptural duty and covenant obligations and therefore subject to discipline.”Footnote 48 But even as formal church discipline faded, the obligations of regular attendance remained.
Southern Baptists took it for granted that members would attend their local church. Isaac Jacobus Van Ness, a Tennessee pastor and executive secretary of the SBC’s Sunday School Board, wrote a popular tract for the Baptist Young People’s Union, Training in Church Membership. While church membership entailed a number of reciprocal duties, personal attendance was the most basic. “We attend the services and take part in the work of the church,” Van Ness wrote.Footnote 49 Sadie Tiller Crawley, a missionary and educator who later served as the dean of women at Baylor, published several Baptist texts for a curriculum of the SBC’s Sunday School Board. In one, The Meaning of Church Membership, Crawley had students pledge themselves that “I will advance its interests by my faithful attendance at its services.”Footnote 50
Baptist writers anticipated Graham’s plea for a geographic exception to the rule of attendance. In a distinct 1950 text that nevertheless borrowed Crawley’s title, The Meaning of Church Membership, Wayne C. Clark, a Northern Baptist seminarian, described church membership as the assumption of responsibilities, and he reminded his fellow Northern Baptist brethren that “faithful attendance upon the worship services of your church is necessary to the carrying out of your responsibility.” It was not sufficient to hold membership in a distant church “because you are so fond of its pastor, or have so many friends there,” he wrote. Church attendance was everything. “You have a responsibility to keep up regular worship,” he argued.Footnote 51 And one’s church was supposed to be local. “You cannot effectively serve your former church when you no longer live where you can attend it.”Footnote 52 Clark’s Southern Baptist cousins agreed. Joe T. Odle, a Southern Baptist pastor and editor from Kentucky, published the first edition of the Church Member’s Handbook in 1941. With more than a million copies printed and distributed over the following decades – Odle published a revised edition in 1962 – it was almost certainly the most widely read midcentury exploration of the nature of Southern Baptist Church membership.Footnote 53 Odle worried that too many Baptists took membership for granted, and his very exercise hinted at the weakening bonds – or at least the sense of a weakening of bonds – of church membership. “They have not been brought face to face with the real meaning of church membership, nor have they had its various aspects laid on their hearts,” he wrote of Southern Baptists.Footnote 54 Too many members did not take their responsibilities seriously. “Membership places upon us an inescapable obligation,” he wrote, “an obligation to make the church and its work first in our lives.”Footnote 55
These core ideas about church membership animated much of the interest in Graham’s decision. Robert Denny of the Baptist World Alliance, for instance, wrote to Graham to report that he was being bombarded with questions about Graham’s membership. “Why did Billy Graham join the First Baptist Church in Dallas? Why did he not join one at Montreat [his North Carolina home]?”Footnote 56 Graham repeated many of the reasons he had given to Rev. Sheridan. “I am in 100 per cent agreement with the policy of the Southern Baptist Convention in encouraging people to join where they live and have a church responsibility,” he wrote. “I preach that constantly. However, my circumstances are quite different and unique.”Footnote 57 He said there was no Baptist Church in the immediate vicinity of Montreat, and although other churches had invited him to join, he said he was away from home too often. “Even if I were a member here,” he argued, “I would never get to attend, because I am never home on Sundays.”
As might be expected of such a prominent Baptist leader, Graham cited divine inspiration for his decision. “I joined First Baptist in Dallas because I felt it was the leading of God,” he explained. He said he admired Criswell and knew the church’s congregants well.Footnote 58 “I am probably in Dallas more than any other city in the United States,” he argued.Footnote 59 Graham disclaimed as well that he had discussed the decision at length with leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention.Footnote 60
Graham tried to plead his case with the Baptist public. He directed his secretary to issue a press release to the major Southern Baptist papers and to keep additional copies on hand in the offices to explain his new membership.Footnote 61 He asked Denny to publicize his letter.Footnote 62 He likewise asked David Gardner, editor of the Texas Baptist Standard, to publish his explanation. “So many distorted newspapers stories have been released and so much misunderstanding and confusion has resulted that I would deeply appreciate your carrying the true story in the Baptist Standard.” He said he had already sent copies to nearly 1,000 ministers across the country.Footnote 63
Graham transferred his church membership to First Baptist Dallas for many reasons. Some he explained publicly. Others testified to Graham’s unbounded ambition. As historian Grant Wacker put it, “Many people regarded that congregation as the ‘national’ church of the Southern Baptist Convention.”Footnote 64 First Baptist was perhaps the largest and most influential Southern Baptist Church in the world.Footnote 65 “What Rome is to the Catholic,” Criswell’s one-time co-pastor and spurned rival Joel Gregory put it some decades later, “FBC Dallas is to the Baptist.” But, Gregory explained, even that comparison failed to convey First Baptist’s allure. “The magnetism of FBC Dallas evokes something in the spiritual realm akin to sexual lust in the fleshly realm, he explained.”Footnote 66 For Graham, then, forever drawn to the biggest and the best, First Baptist was a logical choice.
More importantly, perhaps, First Baptist tapped the financial heart of Texas and the state’s great oil fortunes. If America’s Sunbelt cities worshipped at the altar of endless growth, Dallas’s fervor for development surpassed them all. John Bainbridge, the New Yorker writer, described Dallas as “a city of the businessmen, by the businessmen, and for the businessmen.”Footnote 67 Gregory called it the “capital of materialism in that corner of the western hemisphere” and said “Dallas understands two things: money and power.”Footnote 68 H.L. Hunt, perhaps the richest man in America, was in Dallas, and Criswell would bring him into the church a few years later, when he would push Graham hard to run for the presidency. But Graham would benefit from fortunes all over the state. Oilman Sid Richardson – “Mr. Sid” to Graham – a hard-living bachelor who rivaled Hunt’s personal wealth, was just down the road in Fort Worth and had already introduced Graham to the Texas political establishment, connecting him with House Speaker Sam Rayburn and soon-to-be-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson.Footnote 69 Other wealthy Texans were eager to back Graham, too: R.G. LeTourneau, the Christian businessman who built a fortune supplying the world’s earthmoving equipment; Russell Maguire, the right-wing oilman and arms manufacturer who bankrolled Graham’s production studio; and Howard E. Butt Jr., the heir to Texas’s grocery empire who was not only a conservative business magnate but a Baptist preacher.Footnote 70
As Kevin Kruse and others have emphasized, the proximity to the Texas “Big Rich” carries explanatory weight for Graham’s decision to join First Baptist. Graham’s pathological need to be near power, wealth, and success are well documented: First Baptist offered access to all three.Footnote 71 Graham could not only don a cowboy hat and tell anecdotes about Texas but also have access to unlimited funds, powerful lawmakers, and the crown jewel of the Southern Baptist Conference. But if Graham benefited from the financial, political, and cultural capital of Texas, First Baptist and the broader Texas religious establishment also benefited from Graham, who ushered in a new era of influence and unity for Texas Baptists after World War II.
IV. Symbiosis
Graham’s new pastor, W.A. Criswell, bridged pre- and postwar Texas religious history. Born in 1909, he remembered listening on the radio to William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson and Will Rogers. “But, in fact,” he said, “all my real heroes were Texas preachers, and … I got to hear the best of them.”Footnote 72 As a young man he heard Texas’s infamous fundamentalist J. Frank Norris preach at his Fort Worth Baptist Church. “Sixty three years later, I can still remember that sermon. Norris was preaching on the evils of sin. Before the message ended, I could smell the acrid smoke and feel the burning coals of hell.”Footnote 73 But George W. Truett, the long-time pastor of First Baptist, Dallas, was his true idol. “Dr. Truett was one of my childhood heroes … Of all the great Texas Baptist preachers, no one influenced my life any more.”Footnote 74 Truett pastored First Baptist for 47 years, from 1897 until his death in 1944. He was a president of the Southern Baptist Convention, led the Baptist World Alliance, and preached a famous sermon on religious liberty and the separation of church and state – he favored both – on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in 1920.Footnote 75 He was a compelling preacher, among the era’s most well-known, but not at all like Norris, the bomb-throwing provocateur who pastored an even larger congregation – arguably the largest in the United States – 30 miles away in Fort Worth. Norris used his pulpit to savage the religious establishment, accusing Baylor of liberalism, for instance, and picking fights with governors and presidents.
Truett and Norris, the two most powerful and well-known religious leaders in Texas before World War II, personified the tensions afflicting the state’s religious establishment: Truett, the institutional icon, and Norris, the bomb-throwing iconoclast. “Norris could do anything with a crowd,” Criswell recalled, “but Truett was the type of man who built.”Footnote 76 Criswell’s own family was divided: Criswell’s father admired Norris’s ferociousness; his mother, Truett’s kindness. The clash of personalities testified to a more fundamental tension inherent to the Texas religious establishment, which, although flush with wealthy backers, political capital, and seemingly inexhaustible institutional resources, struggled to shape national life.
Criswell sought to bridge that divide. He wanted to be an institutional force, and he wanted to incite. He began his pastorate at First Baptist in 1944 with fierce energy. In Criswell’s telling, “one dear old lady” said to him that “You aren’t Dr. Truett. He didn’t wave his arms and holler, or pace up and down and shake the Bible at us as you do, but we’ll get used to that.”Footnote 77 Criswell wanted to blend pugnacity with institution-building. Historian Barry Hankins said Criswell “adopted Truett’s style [of institution-building] and Norris’s theology.”Footnote 78 He built up First Baptist, turning what had been a large church under Truett into his own personal megachurch. It became the largest Southern Baptist Church in the world. But still Criswell wanted more.
Whatever the power of First Baptist’s pulpit – later described by the Washington Post as “one of the most lucrative and prestigious in American religion” – Criswell’s influence never extended much beyond the Southern Baptist Conference and the Baptist General Convention of Texas.Footnote 79 He was a powerful preacher, but also a segregationist and a theological hardliner who, for all of his successes at First Baptist, would never enjoy Graham’s mass appeal. Graham’s crusades captivated Cold War America. He was on the cover of Time and profiled in LIFE magazine. “I am not anointed for that work,” Criswell admitted. “I have tried it. It is not my calling. God has not consecrated me for that kind of a ministry.”Footnote 80 But Graham was. He was America’s great evangelist, a charismatic figure whose Cold War Era Christianity appealed to millions. “O God, that I had the drama and the agility of Billy Sunday,” Criswell said. “O God, that I had the charismatic presence of Billy Graham.”Footnote 81 “Oh!,” he said, “how I could sway the thousands!”Footnote 82 But if Criswell could not do it himself, perhaps Graham could do it for him.
Grant Wacker called Graham the “Great Legitimator.”Footnote 83 Despite his own celebrity and his own influence, Graham would do anything to be close to power. Biographer Marshall Frady, for instance, described his “beguilement … with sirens singing in the national empyrean of power.”Footnote 84 In return for such proximity, Graham offered the legitimacy that only “America’s pastor” could bring: the anointment of themselves, their businesses, and their ideas. As Frady put it, “Graham sturdily affirmed, for the nation’s affluent and proprietorial, their own sense of the fitness of things.”Footnote 85 First Baptist supplied Graham with endless financial resources, won him the allegiance of the Southern Baptists, and clothed him in Texas’s cultural mystique. In return, Criswell received the final piece of his ministry, the legitimation necessary to wage a war for fundamentalism and white supremacy without sacrificing the institutional power of First Baptist or the broader Southern Baptist Convention. In the 1920s, J. Frank Norris had become a national figure by attacking nearly everyone and everything in American life; George Truett had become a denominational icon because he did not. Criswell could now, finally, fuse Norris’s pugnacity and Truett’s institutional prominence. He would not have to choose. And he would grow powerful because of it.
Graham, would benefit not just from cash and political connections, but from the imprimatur of hardline theological purity. Powerful theological suspicions followed Graham’s interdenominational crusades. The more he won the American mainstream, the more precarious his hold over culturally and theologically conservative Christians became. The Texas Baptist establishment, born of endless factionalism and infighting, incubated those suspicions. Baptist Standard editor David Gardner himself looked warily upon Graham’s rising celebrity. In 1950, drawing upon a deep well of denominational and institutional jealousies, he published a scathing attack on Graham. “If Billy Graham has ever been vitally connected with Southern Baptists,” Gardner wrote, “we have not heard of it. His educational background and in fact his entire ministry has had the ‘inter’ or ‘non’ denominational complex.” He criticized his near “anti” denominational work for Youth for Christ and at his college and, worse, alleged that, in a recent revival in Portland, he had said that you did not have to be submerged to be baptized – even a Methodist “sprinkling” would be fine. “All of which,” Gardner wrote, “leads us to conclude that Brother Billy is not much of a Baptist. He would like to have Baptist support, but he is not supporting fundamental gospel principles for which the Baptists stand.”Footnote 86
Graham, taken aback by the ferocity of the attack, reiterated his Baptist allegiance. “I am not only anxious but proud to have been a member of the Southern Baptist Convention for over eleven years,” he wrote. He disclaimed that in his public crusades he believed in full-immersion baptism but preferred not to waste breath among non-Baptists litigating the Baptist obsession with immersion and “sprinkling.” And he defended his interdenominational work. “When the Communists get here,” he said, “they are not going to ask whether we are Baptist, Presbyterian, or Methodist. They are going to hang us together.”Footnote 87 He said he had not asked for so much press and publicity. “I do not deserve it. I did not ask for it. The only explanation is – God did it.” Instead, he asked Gardner for unity. “My honored Sir, this is America’s darkest and most desperate hour. Our backs are to the walls. We are fighting for survival. A spiritual awakening is our only hope. Christ is the answer. I beg of you from the depths of my heart and with tears in my eyes – let us not have controversy and disunity.”Footnote 88 Forsaking controversy and disunity would be a tall task for any Texas Baptist, but Graham’s ability to mobilize popular support was unparalleled.
“I will aid in warfare against the hordes of hell,” one reader wrote to Gardner, “but I will have nothing to do with placing a bulwark before the advancing Kingdom of God.”Footnote 89 He was not alone. “I can assure you that the editorial so-called does not represent informed Texas Baptists,” W.H. Southern, head of music and religious education at First Baptist Dallas, told Graham.Footnote 90 Graham, the inveterate self-promoter, did not just send his rejoinder to the Standard. He sent it to the Dallas Morning News, too, with the promise that he would be happy to bring his popular crusades to Dallas, but only if the city’s Baptists approved of it.Footnote 91 In his public letter, he praised Texas Baptists. “Every man that I have met from Texas has been humble, gracious, evangelistic, aggressive, and on fire,” he said, and, in a line he made sure to underline in his second draft, said, “You men are men after my own heart,” adding, “I love to be with you.”Footnote 92
The allure of a Dallas crusade was too much for Texas Baptists to refuse. “It is quite evident that God is using you to spearhead the revival effort across America,” wrote C. Wade Freeman, superintendent of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. “Have no fear,” he said. “The Baptists of Texas are with you and for you.”Footnote 93 Gardner meekly offered that he had been misread. “Our editorial has been misinterpreted by some of our best friends as a personal attack on Brother Billy Graham,” he wrote. “I am deeply and profoundly sorry that what I said should be so interpreted.” But Gardner reiterated his commitment to Baptist theology. “It is our conviction that Southern Baptists have the finest program of evangelism that has yet been devised,” he wrote. “It is patterned after New Testament type. We are winning more souls to Christ than any other group on earth. … Let us never abandon or ever weaken a program of soul winning that has had the approval of heaving upon it through the years.”Footnote 94
Gardner, of course, was not Graham’s only critic. Although an early partner of Graham’s, the British evangelist Thomas Rees criticized Graham’s crusades merely as public relations campaigns peddling a superficial spirituality. Militant fundamentalist Carl McIntire, who would emerge as Graham’s most forceful and consistent conservative critic, was already arrayed against him: Graham “was not a champion of the historic Christian faith,” McIntire explained in 1951. Amid the flood of invective, John R. Rice, a native Texan and acolyte of fundamentalist J. Frank Norris, devoted nearly the entirety of a 1951 edition of his paper The Sword of the Lord to the “rising tide of insistent criticism of Billy Graham.”Footnote 95 Graham well understood that mass appeal threatened his own theological credentials. How could he manage his rising celebrity without surrendering his theological flank to southern hardliners like Gardner? The answer was obvious. What could be more legitimizing for a Southern Baptist than membership in the denomination’s premiere church, pastored by the denomination’s most ferocious theologian?
Criswell certainly believed he provided Graham with new Baptist bona fides. As Billy Keith explained in Criswell’s official biography, “there was the time when Southern Baptists did not accept a young evangelist named Billy Graham,” but Criswell brought Baptist leaders around. “I got into some terrific arguments with some of our Southern Baptist leaders about Billy Graham,” Criswell explained. “They just weren’t going to have anything to do with him.” But, as Keith explained it, Criswell worked on them and convinced them that “the hand of God is on that young man.”Footnote 96
And yet, while the close relationship between Graham and Criswell redounded positively upon both, their symbiosis sometimes strained under the weight of social and political pressures. Graham’s rise to celebrity, for instance, coincided with the acceleration of the civil rights movement and southern white “massive resistance” in the 1950s, both of which exploded into the forefront of national consciousness almost immediately after Graham joined First Baptist. White southerners rallied against the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the twin shocks of Emmett Till’s lynching (and the acquittal of his murderers) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott threw the South into turmoil.
Graham tried to elide the civil rights movement. If he would not actively support segregation – he eventually swore off segregated crusades after his segregated 1953 Dallas crusade – neither would he champion integration or larger campaigns for racial justice.Footnote 97 Criswell, however, jumped into the fray. He rallied white resistance. In February 1956, with Black Montgomeryites three months into their headline-grabbing bus boycott, Criswell preached an infamous defense of segregation before a joint session of the South Carolina General Assembly. After being introduced by the old Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond, Criswell explained that he could no longer abide remaining silent on the issue of segregation. Disclaiming any personal hatred of Black Americans – “I wasn’t raised, I wasn’t brought up to feel that way about it,” he saidFootnote 98 – he inveighed against integration and decried “those good-for-nothing fellows who are trying to upset all of the things that we love as good old Southern people and as good old Southern Baptists.”Footnote 99 It was a hit. The address was carried by the press, quoted, reprinted in pamphlet form, and distributed widely. According to historian David Chappell, Criswell instantly became the country’s “the most celebrated and popular segregationist minister.”Footnote 100 It provided white southerners divine cover to resist integration. Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. issued his infamous call for “massive resistance” two days later.
Criswell’s preaching was inextricable from Graham’s membership. As one Canadian journalist put it in his lede, “The man who preaches to the largest congregation in the world, the pastor of Billy Graham’s Baptist Church in Dallas, today defended the segregation of southern churches.”Footnote 101 Graham was forced to answer for his pastor and he fired off disclaimers. Publicly, Graham meekly offered that “My Pastor and I have never seen eye to eye on the race question.”Footnote 102 But he went further. In a letter to Alvan Gamble of the Industrial Relations Counsel, he repeated his go-to line, saying “Dr. Criswell and I have never agreed on race relations.” And then he went on. “I am only one of 10,000 members in the First Baptist Church of Dallas,” he said. When he joined First Baptist three years earlier, he explained that “my heart has become very closely knit to that of Dr. W.A. Criswell of the first Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas.” Now he said “I do not belong to a church because of its minister – I belong because it is God’s house and God’s organization. It is my chosen place to worship.” But Graham did not just discount his responsibility for Criswell’s rhetoric and the broader biblical defense of southern segregation. He outright defended Criswell. “I might say,” he argued, “that Dr. Criswell is no radical Southern fanatic. He holds the view that thousands of thinking, responsible Southern people hold.” While rejecting those beliefs himself, he nevertheless legitimated Criswell as just another middle-of-the-road southerner while, simultaneously, articulating his own personal argument that the social questions surrounding race in America were ancillary to evangelicalism. “The basis of Christian fellowship as expressed in the Bible,” he explained, “is not on the matter of race, but on acceptance and belief that Christ is Lord. While Dr. Criswell and I may violently disagree on race, we both accept Christ as Lord and Savior. Therefore I enjoy wonderful spiritual fellowship with him.”Footnote 103
Interestingly, while Graham wrestled publicly with his pastor’s segregationist gospel, perhaps no location in the American South gave Graham safer harbor amid the tumult of the southern civil rights movement than Dallas. Although fully a Jim Crow city – Dallas was busy grappling with the bombings of Black homes when Billy Graham held his segregated crusade at the Cotton Bowl – prominent Dallasites did everything they could to sideline race as a topic of conversation. The city’s business elite, institutionalized after the 1936 Texas Centennial as the Dallas Citizens Council (DCC; a separate and distinct body from the post-Brown White Citizens Councils that formed across the South, including in Dallas), functionally ruled over the city. Cabals of bankers and businessmen dominated urban politics across Texas and much of the Sunbelt, but perhaps nowhere else was power wielded so unapologetically or institutionalized so formally.Footnote 104 The New York Times – under the headline “Group of Businessmen Rules Dallas Without a Mandate From the Voters” – called the DCC a “supergovernment” or an “invisible government,” although “invisible” hardly captured a dynamic profiled variously in Fortune, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. Footnote 105 Above all else, the DCC championed “the Dallas way,” a business-friendly, growth-at-all-costs politics of urban development.Footnote 106 All other priorities were subsumed. If business was Dallas’s gospel, then the Dallas Way was its creed.
More than anything, the Dallas Way depended on Dallas’s reputation. “A good business climate requires a good city image,” urban historian Martin Melosi wrote, and Dallas leaders knew “that a good image promotes profits.”Footnote 107 And who could help them more than Billy Graham? Just as Graham and Criswell’s close relationship benefited each of them individually, so too did prominent Dallasites hope to profit from America’s Pastor. When Dallas churches first attempted to bring a Graham crusade to Dallas in 1950, well-known businessman Joseph F. Parks thrilled at the prospect. “Churches of all denominations have had an important part in making Dallas a city of high ideals,” he wrote, but wondered whether the city’s spiritual life could survive the city’s explosive growth. A Baptist himself, he could “think of nothing finer that could happen to Dallas than to have a great religious revival meeting,” he wrote. “One can not begin to enumerate the good that would come.”Footnote 108 Presbyterian minister Floyd Poe likewise argued that “The coming of Billy Graham will do Dallas good in every way.”Footnote 109 Many could only read religion through the lens of growth. “God’s Business Is Big Business,” read a June 1952 editorial in the Dallas Morning News. Footnote 110 The next year, with prominent Dallas businessmen having pledged $60,000 in support, Graham finally came.Footnote 111 Poe predicted Graham’s crusade would “probably turn Dallas upside down. So be it. Perhaps we need turning upside down.”Footnote 112 Graham agreed. “This is one of the finest cities in all the nation,” he preached that summer, but “I tell you the number one sin in the city of Dallas is your utter and complete indifference to religion.”Footnote 113
Religion helped city leaders soften the city’s materialistic reputation, but they were even more invested in keeping the city’s penchant for radicalism – especially far-right political extremism and anti-Black racial politics – out of the national media.Footnote 114 “Dallas could be embarrassed by its own extremism,” as urban historian Harvey J. Graff put it.Footnote 115 When city leaders worked simultaneously to blunt civil rights demonstrations and preempt white opposition, they turned to religion. For instance, when the city exhausted all alternate legal avenues and was forced to finally begin integrating schools, the DCC oversaw the production Dallas at the Crossroads, a 1961 documentary, narrated by Walter Cronkite, that opened on a pull-out shot of a large stained glass tableaux, organ music, and the injunction to Dallasites to “set Him a good example in all we think, or say, or do.”Footnote 116 Dallas offered Graham, who tried desperately to straddle American racial injustice, a perfect platform. And, more than a decade later, with the city still struggling to overcome the stigma of the Kennedy assassination, Graham returned the favor.
In 1972, almost two full decades after he had saved thousands of souls there, Graham returned to the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, where he helped organize a week-long youth revival, Explo ‘72, with Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ. Graham and others – including Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach – preached, performed, and testified to more than 100,000 attendees.Footnote 117 The New York Times called it the “largest religious camp meeting ever to take place in the United States.”Footnote 118 Graham called it “the greatest religious happening in history.”Footnote 119 In his The Americanization of Dixie, published two years later, writer John Egerton recognized Explo ‘72 as not only the triumph of the Texas Sunbelt – Texas shook off its venomous post-Kennedy assassination reputation through the allure of oil fortunes in the 1970s; the triumphs of the Cowboys, “America’s Team”; the television smash-hit Dallas; a national obsession with country music and country style, and events such as Explo ‘72 – but the apotheosis of Billy Graham.Footnote 120 “He has long since risen above Baptism and his North Carolina roots to become the nation’s unofficial chaplain and a globetrotting messenger of the Lord,” Egerton wrote. Dallas was only his stepping stone. “The basic objective of Explo ‘72 was scaled to the dimensions of Graham’s rhetoric,” Egerton wrote. “It was to lay the groundwork for an evangelistic juggernaut that would convert the nation to Jesus Christ by 1976 and the whole world by 1980.”Footnote 121
V. Conclusion
It is impossible to quantify the precise amount of social capital separately accumulated by Graham and Criswell through their mutual association, nor the ways in which Texas broadly, and Dallas specifically, benefited from Graham, but it is undeniable that they all wrapped themselves around one other and saw their already well-established reputations rocket further into public prominence together. For five decades, Graham and Criswell – and Texas and Dallas – left their respective marks on American culture and American religion. Graham became the world’s greatest evangelist. He preached to millions live and on television. And he had the ears of presidents, with whom he prayed and advised. Criswell emerged as the most powerful Baptist in America, and, armored in part by Graham’s affiliation, muscled his way into greater institutional and political prominence. First Baptist begrudgingly welcomed its first African American members and, in return, Criswell accepted the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention.Footnote 122 Although he could not save segregation, over the coming years Criswell nevertheless laid the foundation for the religious right, helped turn Texas Republican, and masterminded the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention beginning in 1979.Footnote 123 When Ronald Reagan famously told 15,000 evangelicals at the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing in Dallas in August 1980 “that I endorse you,” it was only natural that he would be welcomed with a call to prayer by Criswell himself.Footnote 124 “Southern Baptists … do not have a pope,” an article in the Chicago Tribune read a few years after Criswell entered partial retirement in 1994, “But with apologies to all who have been elected to the denomination’s presidency, its most recognized patriarch has been Rev. W.A. Criswell.”Footnote 125 And throughout it all, Billy Graham was a member of his church.
In a 1981 conversation with the state with the Dallas Morning News’s religion editor, Helen Parmley, Graham reflected on his long relationship with Texas. “Many places I travel, people think I’m a Texan. … They say I look like a Texan and I talk like a Texan. I am often introduced as Billy Graham, the evangelist from Texas. I don’t mind that a bit. I’ve spent a lot of time in Texas, particularly during my early ministry, and I feel at home here.” Graham never bought a home in Dallas, but his daughter owned a ranch on the outskirts of the Metroplex. “I’m on my way to heaven,” the 62-year-old explained, and, taking in the Texas skyline there, added, “and when I’m in Texas, I’m halfway there.”Footnote 126 A few years earlier, Graham, the unofficial king of the Cotton Bowl, was made grand marshal for the 1975 bowl game between Baylor and Penn State. Officially pleading neutrality, he hinted at his support for Baylor by reminding readers that “I am a Baptist and I am half-Texan.”Footnote 127 The Dallas Morning News would use that phrase, “half-Texan,” in the headline for Graham’s 2018 obituary, which opened by pointing to the title of Graham’s first film, Mr. Texas: “the same title might have applied to Graham, who died Wednesday at age 99.”Footnote 128
Graham’s half-century association with the First Baptist Church of Dallas testifies to vast changes in American religious history. Any division between a “plan-folk religion” and the nation’s business elite vanished in the years after World War II. Barriers between political and cultural warfare and institution-building broke and the hermetic world of Texas religion was forever punctured.Footnote 129 Texans engaged the world, and, as Robert Wuthnow chronicled, Texas became “America’s most powerful Bible-Belt state.”Footnote 130 The marriage of Graham and First Baptist – and, necessarily, its pastor, W.A. Criswell – enmeshed the worlds of moderates with radicals, demonstrating the ways in which a popular postwar evangelism and a pugnacious conservative fundamentalism were folded into one another as careers and causes fused together. In 2008, citing his deteriorating health and inability to travel, an elderly Graham finally, formally transferred his membership out of First Baptist.Footnote 131 But a half-century’s history could not be undone, and religion in Texas and the United States would never again be the same.
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