Writing a biography challenges us in fundamental ways as scholars of religion, as historians, and as human beings. We are forced to reckon with the implicit and explicit theological commitments of religious persons, the ways they inhabited the world, the sometimes “strange country” that is the past, and the varied ways in which our subjects took for granted things by which we find ourselves and our age so troubled. While we may eschew “taking sides” in our attempts to be good scholars and under the noble goal of not wanting simplistically and reflexively to impose our contemporary moral judgments upon figures from the past, we cannot avoid discussing the moral choices historical actors made, assessing their prominence in their time, their influence on their broader surroundings, and their legacy beyond their times. All of these factors have great bearing on how we narrate the lives of historical figures and how we represent them in the present. James Baldwin's impassioned claim that it is with “great pain and terror [that] one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one's point of view”Footnote ¹ might sound a bit overly deterministic, but it is worth remembering when thinking self-consciously about how we critically assess and evaluate those about whom we write. Grant Wacker's new biography of Billy Graham, America's Pastor, invites the reader along to grasp more fully what this looks like as Wacker, a self-described “partisan of the same evangelical tradition Graham represented,”Footnote ² masterfully evokes and unfolds Graham as a shaper of public consciousness and a spokesperson for millions of “ordinary Americans.”Footnote ³ This work possesses the virtues of the careful and considered reflections of a seasoned historian's analysis of the life of a famous religious leader who is deeply admired by many Americans. It is about the closest we will get to a full appreciation of Graham the man and Graham the icon.

Wacker's book enters an already crowded field, especially among works that examine the rise of conservative Christianity in post-1960s America and the emergence of the Christian Right. To begin with a well-received book, Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sun Belt Footnote ⁴ opens with Billy Graham, with his pronounced North Carolina accent and the animated gestures of a southern Baptist preacher, holding forth and preaching a rousing message to fifty thousand Southern Californians in 1969. Graham was speaking about the second coming of Christ and he ended his message with a call for a personal commitment to Jesus as one's Lord and Savior. Thousands affirmatively responded to his call. Although Dochuk's book explains why Southern California proved so welcoming to Graham and what this region meant for evangelical religion, it also demonstrates the crucial role that Graham played in post-1960s America. As Dochuk writes of the consequences of Graham's 1969 crusade: “Graham championed the vision of a creative society, one in which racial gaps were bridged though changed attitudes, evangelical political activism was made respectable, and Christian virtues of personal initiative and community responsibility were lifted up as the answer to society's troubles.”Footnote ⁵ For Dochuk, then, Graham is a figure who played an enormously important symbolic and actual role in the transformation of American society in the post-civil rights era.

Building on this theme of influence, other works assess Graham's role in the emergence of the Christian Right. Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party Footnote ⁶ introduces Graham as a bridge figure who moved northern fundamentalists from their separatism into a new evangelical identity. Williams argues that Graham's Christian Americanism was significant for a number of reasons. First, though he preached a simple message of repentance and commitment to Christ, he provided a new twist on old revival themes. He called not simply sinners to repentance, but an entire nation. As Williams writes, for Graham “the nation needed a spiritual revival in order to become a beacon of light and a leader in the fight against communism.”Footnote ⁷ Thus Graham's early public prominence and his ministry in the 1950s infused the anti-Communist struggle with an “underpinning of evangelical theology” and made it a religious duty for the nation and the churches to fight communism.Footnote ⁸ For Williams, Graham's particular historical significance rests on his identification of Christianity with American ideals, which earned him widespread acclaim, especially among senators and governors. Graham made evangelicals respectable, pushed them out of their isolation, and urged and helped them (through his own relationships with political figures including presidents) to become full participants in the political system.

Similarly, the Graham in William Curtis Martin's With God on Our Side,Footnote ⁹ which is essentially drawn from his biography of Graham, A Prophet with Honor,Footnote ¹⁰ first appears as a Youth for Christ preacher who is trying to save America's youth from the temptations of consumerism and materialism, but he ends as a close friend of presidents and prominent persons. His principal role for Martin, however, is one who moved in the corridors of political power and who enabled evangelicals to regain a cultural hegemony that they had not known outside the South since the Civil War. This Graham, while calling America to repentance, refused to engage in the hard-edged critique put forth by the fundamentalists, abandoned and repudiated the segregationist thought of his native South, and packaged the new evangelical message of salvation through Christ in a winsome manner that appealed to a broad segment of America.

One may well ask, do we need another biography of Billy Graham? Can we learn more than what Martin instructed us about Graham in his massively researched A Prophet with Honor, which is a more standard chronological biography of Graham's private and public life? Another important work, Steven P. Miller's Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South,Footnote ¹¹ also probes Graham's role in the emergence of a conservative religious and political culture in the South since the 1950s, and then charts his prominence as a national figure. Then too there are the many books that examine Graham's evangelistic style, his role in race relations, his beliefs about human sin, and his relationships with American presidents. Among these are The Legacy of Billy Graham (ed. Michael G. Long),Footnote ¹² Long's Billy Graham and the Beloved Community,Footnote ¹³ Andrew Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants,Footnote ¹⁴ and Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, The Preacher and the Presidents.Footnote ¹⁵ What can be added?

The first answer to be given is that Grant Wacker's America's Pastor, even taken alongside these other works, is unique in its analysis of Graham's life as a biography of changes in American culture since the 1950s, particularly in its subtle and engaging evaluation of the longevity and appeal of a certain leadership style in American history, and in its charting of changes and tensions in Graham's life as a way of assessing the growth and cultural legitimacy of evangelical Protestantism in the post-civil rights years. Wacker's reputation as one of the leading historians of American religion, especially for his book Heaven Below,Footnote ¹⁶ makes him uniquely qualified to write this kind of cultural biography.

Wacker's work addresses three major queries: 1) How did Graham become the most powerful and notable preacher in America? 2) In what ways did Graham expand traditional evangelical rhetoric into the “moral vocabulary” of many Americans for whom it increasingly made sense of their private and public lives? 3) How did Graham help shape the culture that created him and that he in turn helped form? In other words, how did he speak for and to modern Americans? Wacker's thesis is summarized in the following way: “Graham displayed an uncanny ability to adopt trends in the wider culture and then use them for his evangelistic and moral reform purposes.”Footnote ¹⁷ Taken alone, this thesis gives the impression that Graham was primarily a keen observer of already existing trends and adapted his message to those developments, but a careful reading of the remainder of the book indicates that for Wacker Graham exerted an enormous influence in shaping American culture and in channeling and articulating the religious sensibilities and moral grievances of a number of Americans. In some ways, Wacker's book is a study of leadership qualities that many Americans find appealing. But fundamentally, it is about Graham's influence and his relationship to American culture. Graham's ability and willingness to legitimate, sanction, and censure certain behaviors, persons, and trends—conferring status on certain presidents, accepting particular wars, condemning racial prejudice, and lending his prestige to civic events, among other thingsFootnote ¹⁸—are for Wacker crucial measuring devices of his influence. Thus Graham appears as a representative voice for millions of Americans and simultaneously a singular American whose influence transcended national boundaries.

The book is divided into eight chapters: preacher, icon, southerner, entrepreneur, architect, pilgrim, pastor, and patriarch. I postpone a discussion of Graham as a preacher for a later section of this review, but a few words about his status as an icon are illuminating for Wacker's treatment of Graham and for the role Graham played in American culture. Graham's public visibility and influence are evident over a period of four decades or more when the rise of electronic media—radio, movies, and television—facilitated the transmission and dissemination of information and helped construct celebrity personalities. Graham fully utilized all of these media, from his popular Hour of Decision radio broadcast in the 1950s to the later television broadcasts of his crusades. Graham founded and wrote for magazines, published books, and traveled widely. His presence and seeming ubiquity go a long way in accounting for his popularity, but as Wacker notes, as a religious icon, Graham and others were distinguished from other celebrities in that they “stood somehow above and apart from mundane affairs” and they carried an “aura of veneration” for many.Footnote ¹⁹ Perhaps this should be qualified with the claim that some wanted them to appear this way. Graham certainly was not above mundane affairs, particularly in his relationships to presidents. And yet, Graham did portray and feel that his life was the result of a calling, that he was providentially chosen by God to be an evangelist and speaker of truth to the nation.Footnote ²⁰

Although the title, America's Pastor, might suggest that Graham's role as pastor was his most significant one, Wacker writes that the “pastoral office played the least important of his story.”Footnote ²¹ Yet Wacker is keenly interested in how people in Graham's audience saw him as a pastoral figure and what they wanted from him. It is this “America” and its desires for a certain kind of pastor that the biography examines. These “Heartlanders,” as Wacker refers to them, supported Graham, expected certain things from him, and shaped his ministry in very particular ways. They were the “middling folk” or mostly middle-class white persons who appeared primly dressed in Sunday clothes and who promoted sobriety and propriety.Footnote ²² What exactly did these people expect from Graham? Why did some make the effort to go to his crusades? And what did he provide for them? The answers varied. Some sought advice for practical living, ranging from issues of loneliness to struggle with addictions. For Wacker, Graham called for radical change in their lives and challenged them to commit to something deeper than a nominal Christian faith (many of those who “dedicated” their lives to Christ at his crusades were already professing Christians). He charged his listeners to choose the Christian gospel, or at the very least “any goal larger than personal self-fulfillment.”Footnote ²³ Graham thus played a central role in the lives of many Americans who sought help in the struggles of their personal lives. That basic fact must be emphasized. Wacker adds that Graham as a public pastor was all too willing to assist these people as he brought to bear his “uncanny ability to discern the desperation of personal struggles to break free” of addictions, constraints, and difficult life circumstances.Footnote ²⁴ This was America's pastor, who both comforted many and “challenged them to live up to their self-professed values of biblical equality, moral integrity, and social compassion.”Footnote ²⁵

Because Wacker's book is a cultural biography and does not seek to assess Graham's direct influence in the way that works like Steven Miller's does, it is useful to rehearse Miller's more precise claims about Graham's influence in the political arena in the South to help us reflect more deeply and comparatively on Wacker's project. For Miller, Graham was a “significant historical figure” who was a “serious actor” and a “powerful symbol” who “contributed more than any other single person to the renaissance of evangelical Christianity in post-World War II America.”Footnote ²⁶ Even regarding Graham's personal style and demeanor, Miller captures nicely who Graham was as “one of the most recognizable and respected of Americans, someone who has mingled comfortably with the powerful, while retaining the common touch.”Footnote ²⁷ Crucially for Miller, Graham was a political and public actor in his own right, not primarily one who was used or duped by political actors. The Graham presented in Miller's analysis is one who engaged political leaders and pressing issues of his times even while weighing such activism in light of his higher priorities as an evangelist. Miller thus gives Graham's own notion of the social and spiritual good serious attention as he helps us think through how Graham strategically employed his evangelistic skills and his popularity to challenge the nation to live up to his conception of the good society.

My extended comparison of Miller's book with Wacker's work rests on my belief that Miller's book is one of the most compelling analyses of this “renaissance of scholarship” on Graham, which Miller summarizes in his footnotes on recent historiography on Graham. Graham's regional influence on the South and also his broader status among evangelical Protestants are given much attention in Miller's work, but the book is about other significant concerns. Its regional focus and its emphasis on sociopolitical change make it a more limited work than Wacker’s, though as just noted, the book is more broadly cast than merely charting Graham's significance in the South. After all, Graham's most important contribution to the post-civil rights South, his social ethic of evangelical universalism, helps explain his enormously instrumental role in easing white Americans into a new set of social relations where the old order of enforced segregation and racial oppression had to be reckoned with and acknowledged as an integral part of American history. Thus Graham assisted in sustaining and rehabilitating the nation's public image, especially as a conveyor of democratic values, in a world where Communist regimes were making claims of brotherhood and solidarity that transcended national boundaries.

Miller also presents details of the secular corollary of Graham's evangelical universalism, a politics of decency, emphasizing law and order. These concepts require further explanation because I regard them as absolutely crucial as historically significant developments that explain more than any other Graham's popularity within and beyond the South. The ethic of evangelical universalism, as Miller argues, viewed the individual soul as the primary theological and political unit in society, giving preference and priority to relational solutions over legal solutions to social problems. This ethic posited that the most effective form of social change was the conversion of individual souls. This meant also that larger social problems stemmed from core individual ones, and this was a message that Graham championed consistently. This attention to the social efficacy of conversion was important because Graham wanted to recover the lost social status of evangelicalism, as Miller astutely observes, even if he had reservations about the gains of mainline Protestantism and the “social concern” that seemed to him and his peers to crowd out or occupy the same realm as evangelism. His evangelical universalism was a restatement of his belief in the “biblical unity of the human race,”Footnote ²⁸ which was a critique of southern racial hierarchies and racial practices and a claim that all humans were born sinful and in need of salvation. Graham's ethical universalism served as both a critique of American racism and a furtherance of his evangelistic mission of preaching the gospel to as many people as possible.

Graham's politics of decency consisted of a belief that legally constituted authority was divinely ordained and that respect for law and order was a moral obligation. It was often, as Miller notes, combined with an invocation of evangelical faith “toward moderate ends.”Footnote ²⁹ In the context of the 1960s South, it meant an acceptance of existing civil rights laws, a condemnation of racial violence, and a dismissal of the need for further protests or legislation. It allowed a way out of the segregationist path of the South and opened up new space for moderate conservatism. Given Graham's close relationship with so many American presidents, especially Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, and his public pronouncements on nearly all of the contentious issues of his day, Miller reminds us how necessary it is to adopt a “respectful suspicion” of Graham's own comments about the “solely conversion centered” nature of his work and of those who would regard his work as wholly nonpolitical.Footnote ³⁰ Graham was a political actor, an evangelist, and a regional (and eventually national) leader. Thus no biography is complete if it fails to address these intertwined threads of his life. Miller's work brilliantly elucidates this dimension of Graham's life with more depth and insight than Wacker's otherwise fine biography.

Graham as a symbol (I use “symbol” more broadly than “icon,” which is the subject of one chapter in the book) comes closest to what Wacker is after—more specifically, Graham as an American religious and cultural symbol. For Wacker, Graham is a kind of Horatio Alger figure, a humble man who rose from simple beginnings and became a model to be emulated. His call for and belief in repentance and new birth in Christ became a symbol for something that all Americans could embrace: the offer of a second chance. He presented them with an opportunity to remake their lives. This was one of Graham's greatest achievements in Wacker's reckoning. He also notes that Graham “more than most other religious leaders of his time .▒.▒. helped millions of everyday folks to be American, Christian, and modern all at once.”Footnote ³¹ What is “America” in Wacker's formulation? Who were these everyday folks? And why did they need Graham to make them bring together their national, religious, and personal identities? Is this America to be identified with the white middle-class Christians who went to his crusades and listened to his broadcasts? Wacker's work leaves one with the sense that these followers of Graham felt put upon, taunted, or treated as outsiders in the broader culture; that Graham's dining with presidents and rubbing shoulders with famous persons legitimated him in the eyes of this crowd; and that these “solid, decent, frugal, patriotic and hard-working” folk needed Graham's iconic status to make them feel at home as Americans and Christians.Footnote ³²

Many readers will want to know more about these “hard-working” folks’ grievances and the reasons for their feelings of status anxiety. Was it the legacy of the Scopes trial, the changes in race relations, sexual mores, and gender roles, or a combination of these and more that led to their sense of disfranchisement? Wacker's mostly sympathetic treatment of these faithful and patriotic Americans seems to elide the kind of America that made life so hard and harsh for its many minorities who would have gladly accepted this sense of cultural unease in exchange for the violence and exclusion that was so much a part of their lives.

Graham's narration of the American story anticipated many of the central themes that would become particularly prominent in the rise of the Christian Right in the 1980s: that the nation's blueprint documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (and the ideals of the founders), were Christian in spirit; that Christian values had shaped the nation's history;Footnote ³³ and that a massive religious revival was possible to restore the soul of the nation if it only had ears to hear and a heart to receive the Christian message. The nation had providential obligations. Graham repeatedly called the nation to live up to the “moral dimensions of public questions.”Footnote ³⁴ This providential conception of the nation did not make Graham unique among American evangelists, but his consistent advocacy of this providential scheme sustained a narrative of national accountability and a view of the nation that demanded a return to its “original vision, the vision that had made the land great.”Footnote ³⁵ With this backward-looking focus on the founding as divinely ordained and this valorization of the “Christian” origins of the nation, Graham's narrative, like other providentialist narratives, implicitly minimized the experiences of slavery and racial oppression and often showed little self-awareness of the theological and historical problems this “golden age” narrative creates. Wacker fails to highlight this weakness of the providentialist narrative, though he rightly notes that Graham never uncritically accepted America as a nation without moral responsibilities before a judging God.

Though Wacker provides enormous material on Graham's varied relationships with political figures, world leaders, and even businessmen, he insists that we take seriously Graham as a preacher, something discussed at length in his very first chapter. Wacker delineates Graham's core theological message, from which much else flowed in his public ministry. Given the crucial role Graham played as evangelist and preacher, I wish to linger on this point. Graham regarded the Bible as the final source of authority. He repeatedly taught that the Bible's narrative demonstrates that the first human, Adam, sinned willfully against God, and so did every person after Adam; that human sin and pride corrupted the entire created order; that God in his infinite love provided Jesus, as God and man, to atone for human sin; and that repentance was available to all who accepted Jesus as their personal Savior. Christians could be confident that Jesus would return to the earth in the future and bring an end to human history. In its minimal form, this remained Graham's central message of personal salvation through Jesus for the length of his entire ministry.Footnote ³⁶ Wacker suggests, however, that Graham did not simply preach and find converts, but that he altered the “internal culture” of evangelicals, urging them to shift their focus from the “venial sins” of smoking, drinking, dancing, and the like to the “mortal sins” of greed, lust, racism, and faithlessness.Footnote ³⁷ Was it really Graham's preaching and ministry that were responsible for this shift? Wacker also argues that Graham helped evangelicals see that “justice for everyone” was hardly a peripheral matter. Might it be more likely that the evolution of the civil rights movement, the emergence of critics of evangelical religion and its role in the South in particular, rising educational levels, and other forces were more responsible than Graham for these shifts in American evangelicalism?

Wacker concludes with the argument that Graham spoke in a register that his listeners could hear, that he “legitimated their social location by guaranteeing that their values would count.”Footnote ³⁸ Although Graham could be quite animated and harsh when preaching, especially in his early Cold War sermons against Communism, he ultimately was optimistic about America's future. His relationship with American presidents, his response to critics that he had to be respectful and deferential on occasion to have access to the powerful, and his pastoral role to Heartlanders all place Graham more firmly in the camp of the priestly figure who ministered to and comforted the sometimes wayward nation and a people whose destiny was mostly clear. Prophet is not among the roles Wacker attributes to Graham. Perhaps Martin's ironic title, A Prophet with Honor, is responsible for this choice. After all, the Gospel of Matthew (13:57) has Jesus, after being rejected by the people from his native town of Nazareth, uttering the words that a prophet is without honor among his own people and in his own town. Graham, in Martin's and Wacker's renderings, was highly honored and admired in his native South and by his own nation. In reflecting on Wacker's title, America's Pastor, my mind immediately went to Edward J. Blum's W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet,Footnote ³⁹ which strongly asserts that those who heard Du Bois and read his works felt that he was a prophet “seething with spiritual anger”Footnote ⁴⁰ against the American nation for its white supremacy and economic exploitation. This noted African American intellectual damned the American nation on behalf of blacks, the poor, and the downtrodden. A very different view of the American nation and his relationship to his audience no doubt were crucial factors in why Du Bois held such a distant stance to America as it actually existed up until his death in 1963.

Richard Wightman Fox's Reinhold Niebuhr Footnote ⁴¹ also invokes the notion of the prophet, noting that even “sober-minded observers” and friends of Niebuhr insisted on calling him a prophet.Footnote ⁴² Fox's Niebuhr had a “prophet's intensity and single-mindedness”Footnote ⁴³ and desired to follow the prophet Amos in calling upon the nation to practice righteousness.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although the term “prophet” as an analytical category is ambiguous (except perhaps for specialists in the study of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religions) and the term itself is morally loaded (a prophet for some might easily be a carping critic for others), it is nonetheless illuminating to know that figures such as Du Bois and Niebuhr are more likely to be described in this way than Graham. It probably says more about their relationships to the nation and their audiences, especially Du Bois's alienated and oppressed audience. Graham's Heartlanders demanded a more priestly and pastoral figure who assured them of the nation's fundamental goodness. At the risk of stating the obvious, I must admit that these biographical works, especially Wacker’s, raise questions about the freedom and individuality of historical subjects in relationship to the constraints of their pasts and personal upbringings and those to whom they are speaking. Do we speak only to our own audiences? What counts for influence and how exactly did Graham really affect evangelicals? Were they affected more by external social and cultural changes than by Graham's preaching? Clearly, Graham himself evolved in certain areas, but precisely how or whether he reached beyond the Heartlanders in Wacker's narrative is not clear and the extent of his being beholden to, rather than challenging, his audience is not always easy to assess, even in Wacker's nearly exhaustive study.

Fox reminds us that a thinker “produces thought, but not simply as an individual product; a set of communities, historic and contemporary, shapes the thought.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Therefore, a good biography must “grasp its subject as producer, but also as one produced by particular life circumstances and cultural resources. It must see him as one whose creativity . . . is the fruit of tradition as much as it is the expression of individual talent.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Is this the Graham we find in Wacker's narrative? At times, yes. Graham rises above his circumstances and is more than the sum of his background and history. If Wacker is right, as I think he is, that Graham, a self-described downhome southerner who once honed his speaking skills by talking to fish in a local pond and who became a world-renowned evangelist, called his core constituents of millions of mostly white, middle-class, moderately conservative Protestants to account on their claims to be good American Christian citizens of the modern world, then he has accomplished that task of the biographer with great skill and sympathy.