In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on the future struggle of African Americans after their successful Montgomery bus boycott. Among the “forces of good,” King saw the indispensable assistance of the federal government, cautioning critics and sympathizers that though government action was “not the whole answer,” it was an “important partial answer.”Footnote 1 King was addressing one of the most common criticisms of black activism for civil rights. White conservative Protestants, in the South and North, insisted that race relations would worsen because agitation would only stoke the fears and hatreds of whites and that government action on behalf of blacks was only a form of coercion. King rejected this reasoning by noting that “morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.” He argued that it was true, for example, that laws could never make employers love their black employees, but they could prevent them from refusing to hire blacks because of their skin color. King conceded that society ultimately must depend on “religion and education to alter the errors of the heart and mind,” but he emphatically argued that “it is an immoral act to compel a man to accept injustice until another man's heart is straight.”Footnote 2 He added that the law was a form of education in that it instructed citizens about what society regarded as right and appropriate. King asserted that in any case the “habits if not the hearts of people have been and are being altered every day by federal action” and that it would be wrong to undervalue the efficacy and force of law in altering human behavior and social patterns.
In this essay, I look at King's fiercest critics, white evangelical Protestants, who were not only opposed to King's method but his active courting of the federal government to alter entrenched social customs in the South. Much recent attention has been focused on evangelicals, fundamentalists, and the role of religion in the public square since the election of President George W. Bush in 2000. This concern with religion and politics has evinced a deep seated fear that religious conservatives will reverse many of the social and political changes introduced into American society in the 1960s. Evangelicals' (and fundamentalists') influence and involvement in politics have prompted great worry among critics within and outside the movement.Footnote 3 Evangelicals' presence in the public square is now taken for granted, which is quite remarkable from a historical perspective, given evangelical leaders' frequent pleading from the 1940s to the 1960s for evangelicals to actively engage the pressing issues of their day. Whereas evangelicals once had to legitimize the involvement of believers and churches in social and political problems, now it is quite rare to find evangelicals, especially pastors, who are not actively involved in issue advocacy and promoting particular candidates who support evangelical conceptions of the good society.Footnote 4
A brief reevaluation of how evangelicals first legitimated social activism will be undertaken in this essay. Particularly enlightening is to view their response to the civil rights movement as a case study of growing political involvement. Evangelicals' theology and social thought changed from a hesitant posture toward social reform with modest expectations about what was possible even from believers' participation in the social and political sphere to a more confident assertion of the ability of only “Bible believing” Christians to reverse cultural decline and inject morality and decency into the public sphere. Many evangelicals had forgotten or ignored the earlier arguments of evangelical leaders who maintained that the church should not align itself with any political party or program—as if it were God's chosen instrument—and that the unsaved often exhibit a more robust concern for justice than the saved. In basic theological terms, hubris had replaced hesitancy as evangelical saints became more eager to flex their social muscles and to assume political power.Footnote 5 Not only that, but for all their criticisms of liberals for having an overly optimistic view of human nature and too much faith in the power of the state to produce lasting social change, evangelicals seemed just as confident about the state's ability to reinstate family values, clean up moral corruption, and reform behavior if simply enough evangelical Christians were elected to public office.
Scholarly and popular studies of evangelicalism and fundamentalism abound, but there are no detailed academic works on evangelicals and the civil rights movement. Most of the research remains scattered or hidden in doctoral dissertations, in-house (at evangelical seminaries) articles and theses, and memoirs. Perhaps one reason for this scholarly oversight is that this is not a politically progressive story. Evangelicals were opposed to the civil rights movement and did very little in practical terms to advance social justice for African Americans during the 1960s. Most evangelicals resisted the growth of the federal government and legislation that furthered black rights. Yet, even though most evangelical leaders did no more than write about or simply respond verbally (negatively) to the civil rights movement, an evaluation of their approach to public life during those years is useful in understanding their underlying theological presuppositions and the kinds of criticisms that King was reacting to in some of his speeches and writings.
“Evangelicalism” as used in this essay refers to white American Protestants, mostly centered in the North, who sought to reform fundamentalism from the 1940s to 1960s. These theologically conservative theologians and evangelists held some of the same beliefs and doctrines of the fundamentalists, but they rejected the separatist approach of the fundamentalists and thereby reached and gained a broader constituency throughout the nation. Eventually, evangelicals came to represent a distinct sociological group (which moved outside the fundamentalist camp) that shared common theological goals and social aspirations. As George Marsden defines it, evangelicalism is a “self-conscious interdenominational movement, with leaders, publications, and institutions with which people from many subgroups identify.”Footnote 6 Those who sought to form this cooperative theological and social movement that they initially called “neo-evangelicalism” coalesced around central institutions such as Fuller Theological Seminary, Christianity Today, the National Association of Evangelicals, and other organizations. Because of the frequent interaction on the ground between neo-evangelicals (who adopted the name “evangelicals” by the 1960s) and fundamentalists, no definition is without problems. However, I distinguish evangelicals from fundamentalists by the following imprecise criteria: evangelicals are more open to cultural forms and institutions outside of their subculture, hence their willingness to be trained and to teach in secular colleges and universities; evangelicals have had a broader social constituency during the time discussed, not being limited to the South; and evangelicals self-consciously set out, beginning in the 1940s, to reform fundamentalism and reengage culture on a broader range of issues than fundamentalists were willing to accept.Footnote 7
The growth of evangelical Christianity was occurring precisely at a historical moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when a developing conservative political movement was reorienting itself away from its earlier primary focus on anticommunism. As Lisa McGirr narrates, the more active involvement of evangelicals in the political sphere was a direct result of major changes in family life, sexual liberation, a growing youth culture, and Supreme Court decisions that broadened the scope of personal freedoms. Economic problems in the 1970s and the growth and assertiveness of women's, gay, and minority rights movements helped to fuse a political coalition of worried religious and cultural conservatives with economic conservatives.Footnote 8 Mark Noll notes that since 1950 a general political mobilization among white evangelicals became noticeable through a number of changes, which is an indication that evangelical leaders were quite successful in legitimating social activism even before the salient cultural issues of the late 1960s emerged. Noll observes that there has been a notable politicization of subject matter in evangelical periodicals in very engaged and adversarial language; the entrance of entire conservative religious families into the political arena that were formerly apolitical; the emergence of a new set of leaders who openly embraced political partisanship; and the movement of the South, the region with the most white evangelicals, from a mainstay of the Democratic party to an active shaper of the Republican party.Footnote 9 Evangelicals have thus become major contributors to the political sphere on the local, state, and federal levels.
Evangelicals were not silent during the tumultuous 1960s. Although they explicitly condemned racism in many of their public writings, they did not support the tactics employed by civil rights leaders to end discrimination against black Americans. Evangelicals constantly criticized civil rights marches and legislation. Their conceptions of sin, social change, and personal ethics played a determinative role in their repudiation of the underlying social thought of legislation on behalf of black civil rights. An individualistic approach to social change that placed paramount importance on personal regeneration (in an immediate conversion experience) was in conflict with the emphasis on social and systemic change advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and those religious leaders who were generally sympathetic to civil rights for African Americans. Evangelicals lambasted liberal religious leaders for preaching a social gospel that neglected evangelism and personal regeneration.Footnote 10
Evangelicals were initially (in the 1940s) critical of fundamentalists for with-drawing from the social and political arena. These neo-evangelicals viewed themselves as outsiders to mainstream social, theological, and political thought. While decrying the major social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, evangelicals looked on with envy, hoping that they were in such a position to shape the political and cultural landscape of America. In many respects, however, evangelicals maintained the fundamentalists' priority on evangelism and missionary work. Most leaders believed that public stances on racial issues were a distraction from the church's primary task of preaching the Christian gospel. However, by the mid-1960s, a small number of dissonant and disparate voices in the evangelical community rejected the political and social conservatism of their evangelical leaders and urged evangelicals to make good on their insistence that the gospel necessarily had social implications. Because of social developments in American society in the 1970s and the rise of politically and socially active fundamentalists, who presented blanket condemnations of the social changes of the 1960s, evangelicals no longer found it necessary to urge their constituents to enter the social and political arena. Evangelicals had become more united on electoral politics than on evangelism or theology.Footnote 11
Racism was a very important force in evangelicals' general lack of concern for the plight of African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, but, as John McGreevy writes in his fine work on northern Catholics and race, we wish to understand racism not simply to catalog it.Footnote 12 By taking into account evangelical leaders' rhetorical strategies for social involvement and their underlying theological worldview, I seek to advance a deeper understanding of the evolution of evangelical thought on race in particular and social and political reform more generally. (Though important and relevant to my topic, a sociological and historical analysis of how evangelicals became politically involved is beyond the scope of this essay.) Critics have argued that individualism, the notion that the basic causes of all social problems reside exclusively within individuals, hindered evangelicals from developing a social ethic and a critique of structural racism in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 13 More recently, Michael Emerson and Christian Smith in their Divided By Faith argue that white evangelical Protestants attribute racial problems to prejudiced individuals, defective personal relationships and the fabrication of the self-interested (blacks, the media, the government, or liberals). Evangelicals' approach to race relations allows them to deny that racial inequality is a systematic problem in America.Footnote 14 More fundamentally, in my view, Emerson and Smith argue that because of the close “historical and present-day connection between faith and the American way of life,” racial inequality profoundly challenges white evangelical Protestants' “world understanding” and their “faith in God and America.”Footnote 15
Although there is much to be said about evangelical individualism, I am not convinced that it is a sufficient explanation of their approach to race. Evangelicals have selectively applied an individualist ethic primarily to social practices with which they have disagreed. A close analysis of evangelical thought in its historical evolution indicates that evangelicals invoked a “spiritual solution” or personal conversion (in general) to social problems when solutions to these were being promoted by interest groups whose values differed from their own and when it appeared that government support of such positions would challenge evangelical conceptions of the proper social order. Hence their endless refrain that legislation could not change a person's heart precisely when others were supporting legislation to deal with legal discrimination against African Americans. Yet, though modern fundamentalists and some evangelicals actively call for the election of only “Bible believing Christians” to promote their values, for a short while evangelicals were brought face to face with the failure of Christians to confront their own racism, which caused a few evangelical leaders to question whether the saved necessarily possessed a finer sense of justice than the unsaved.Footnote 16 Modern day evangelicals would do well to heed some of the lessons from their own history.
Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism
In 1958, Arnold Hearn, a professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary, noticed a rather surprising development. He penned an article in The Christian Century in which he claimed that a “fundamentalist renascence” was taking place. Several scholars in this movement had studied at such places as Basel and Zurich, Switzerland, and some even held doctorates from Boston and Harvard University. Hearn commended these individuals for a “strand of irenicism” in their approach to theological discourse (in contrast to the cantankerous older fundamentalists). He urged liberal theological seminaries to pay more attention to these thinkers. Hearn predicted that fundamentalism might very well be moving toward a place of much greater influence in American Protestantism.Footnote 17
We now know that Hearn was witnessing the development of the neo-evangel-ical movement, which was seeking to move beyond the divisiveness and hostility of the fundamentalist movement. Many of these neo-evangelicals came from fundamentalist families and received their early training in Bible schools and institutes, but they wanted their religious subculture to have a broader influence in shaping American society. Hearn's reflections indicate how unexpected it was to mainstream liberal Protestants to find evidence of the persistence of fundamentalism, apparently having believed that the movement had either died or become nugatory in its influence (hence a fundamentalist renaissance was possible). Neo-evangelicals had met with partial success in their emphasis on civility because Hearn, though not one who shared their theological presuppositions, urged liberal Protestants to engage in dialogue with them in view of their willingness to offer their theological arguments in irenic debate.
Joel Carpenter shows that even in the 1920s, after they suffered humiliation and seemingly disappeared from public notice, fundamentalists began building the institutions that would become instrumental in bringing about a religious revival in American society. By the 1940s, a flurry of activity indicated that something was happening within the fundamentalist camp. The InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) came to the United States in 1940, having originated in England. IVCF held its first missionary convention in the United States in 1943. Other organizations and schools, seen as indispensable means of regaining intellectual respectability and encouraging revival, were also formed in these years. These included the following: National Association of Evangelicals (1942), Youth for Christ (1943), Fuller Theological Seminary (1947), and the Evangelical Theological Society (1949).Footnote 18 Though missionary work and evangelism were the priorities for fundamentalists and the neo-evangelicals, the latter had begun to express an interest in social issues. Many of these mostly second-generation fundamentalists (who called themselves neo-evangelicals) had grown weary of the intramural debates and bickering of fundamentalists. They were not satisfied with a religion that had turned inward. It is this endeavor to reform fundamentalism to engage social and political issues that became known as neo-evangelicalism. Neo-evangelicals were determined to apply a socially engaged faith to the problem of race in American society.
Billy Graham: Evangelism as the Solution to Racial Problems
No person is more responsible for the visible prominence of postwar evangelicalism than William (Billy) Franklin Graham. Graham proved adept at promoting and raising funds for the building of seminaries, schools, and Bible colleges—and founded a number of magazine publications. He was a central figure in altering the religious landscape of America in the 1950s and 1960s. Graham's approach to social reform gives us an inside view of the possibilities and problems of evangelical attempts to apply their deeply held religious values to the public arena. Graham had personal relations with five American presidents. He was particularly drawn to the personality and leadership style of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon (a relationship that would come to haunt him later). Graham later spoke of it as an honor to advise many of these presidents on race relations.Footnote 19
After his 1949 crusade in Los Angeles, California, Graham seemed poised and uniquely positioned to bring to bear the neo-evangelical influence on American culture. Crusades heightened his public stature and gained new converts to evangelicalism. In an address delivered in 1953, Graham stressed themes that would persist in his thought for much of his public life. He criticized liberal theology for telling people that they did not need personal regeneration, but instead promised them that they were to be “properly clothed, properly fed, [and] properly educated” and only then could they become new persons. Graham denounced communism as anti-God and a counterfeit of Christianity. His discussion of communism and liberal theology together indicated that he and many evangelicals saw these as similar threats to their traditional understanding of religion and the social order. Graham had a tendency to drop hints about his private conversations with the great leaders of his day, lending an aura of authority and social respectability to his message. He argued that the gospel transforms the hearts of individual persons and was therefore the panacea for America's social ills and the private woes of restless souls. Graham informed his listeners that the church's most important task was to preach the gospel to every creature. This gospel was the only hope for America.Footnote 20
Graham's consistent position on race was that race relations would improve as the result of the conversion of sinful individuals (that is, those who had not accepted Jesus as personal Savior) and the spiritual revival of Christians who harbored racial prejudice. In his private and public relations, he tried to implement his philosophy of race relations. In March 1953, more than a year before Brown v. Board of Education, he removed ropes separating blacks and whites at a crusade tabernacle in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Although few blacks or whites dared move into the other's sections, this was a bold symbolic move for Graham. In this same year, Graham began to insist on integrating his crusade audience. Prior to Brown, however, he still occasionally bowed to local pressure and allowed segregated seating.Footnote 21
Primarily because of his respect for law and order, Graham urged southern Christians to obey the Supreme Court decision of 1954. His denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, counseled its members to abide by the law. In 1956, President Eisenhower began seeking Graham's assistance on civil rights issues. Alabama Congressman Frank Boykin (one of the many congressmen whom Graham had befriended) wrote Eisenhower on March 19, 1956 to suggest Graham as the best person to consult for advice on how to handle the South's racial problems. Boykin wrote:
There is another question—this race question—that is truly very serious, because in my judgment, the Communists are taking advantage of it. I believe our own Billy Graham could do more on this [than] any other human in this nation; I mean to quiet it down and to go easy and in a Godlike way, instead of trying to cram it down the throats of our people all in one day, which some of our enemies are trying to do. I thought maybe if you and Billy talked, you could talk about this real, real good.Footnote 22
Graham adopted a policy of moderation as the best approach to racial and social change. Graham told the president that if the Supreme Court would “go slowly” and that if the “extremists” (that is, segregationists and integrationists) on both sides of the issue would quiet down, a “peaceful social readjustment” would take place within the next ten years. Graham and Eisenhower were convinced that communists were using the racial crisis to create social unrest.Footnote 23
Graham's growing influence caught the attention of leading liberal Protestant thinkers. In 1956, John C. Bennett, a theologian at Union Theological Seminary (New York City), wrote that there is “no other Christian leader in America who can do as much as Billy Graham to open the eyes of believing Christians to the implications of their faith in this area” of racial justice. Bennett was responding to an article in Life magazine in which Graham reiterated his argument that personal conversion was the key to overcoming America's racial and social problems. He commended Graham for demolishing biblical “rationalizations of segregation on their own ground,” yet he wanted Graham and others to call for a total reeducation of evangelicals on race. Bennett noted that for most evangelicals and white southern Christians, the notion of regeneration was devoid of any specific content regarding race. He pressed Graham to elaborate on what he meant when he suggested that a “genuine conversion” would lead to a change in racial attitudes. Bennett argued that “it is not true that a genuine conversion necessarily leads to a re-examination of social structures of racial discrimination and segregation.” He contended that the culture of the South, where the churches were most influential and personal piety nourished by the Bible was most widespread, was the most prone to racial problems and the most ardent in its support of segregation. Bennett wrote that “we cannot expect that Christians who are converted will come to a new attitude about segregation,” unless criticism of one's social structure and cultural pattern was introduced into the very substance of repentance. Bringing about social justice would have to involve more than overcoming personal prejudice. However, Bennett still found hints that Graham had made a “truly prophetic statement about the racial problem” that needed to be heard.Footnote 24
Though Bennett was somewhat sympathetic to Graham's stance on race, Reinhold Niebuhr, an influential theologian and Bennett's colleague at Union, was more critical of Graham's theological views and their social ramifications. Niebuhr acknowledged that Graham was “rigorous on the race issue,” but he could scarcely conceal his distaste for Graham's theological framework, which he labeled “pietistic individualism.” He wrote:
An individualistic approach to faith and commitment, inevitable as it may be, is in danger of both obscuring the highly complex tasks of justice in community and of making too sharp a distinction between the “saved” and the “unsaved.” The latter may not have signed a decision card but may have accepted racial equality with greater grace than the saved.Footnote 25
Niebuhr was concerned that Graham's evangelism might become irrelevant to the great moral issues of his day. He noted that it was a tragedy that the church was far behind other institutions in ridding itself of segregation, which was a direct contradiction, in his view, of Graham's belief that the saved would experience a transformation in their attitude about race. Though Graham did not condone racial prejudice, Niebuhr contended, neither did he “incorporate the demand for love transcending racial boundaries into his evangelistic appeal.” Niebuhr continued:
He does not suggest that the soul, confronted with the judgment and forgiveness of Christ, should regard racial prejudice as an element in the “life of sin” from which the conversion experience redeems. And he does not suggest that among the “fruits meet for repentance” there must be a whole-souled effort to give the Negro neighbor his full due as a man and brother.Footnote 26
Niebuhr and Bennett converged in their critique of Graham. Niebuhr queried Graham about why the part of the country that had experienced the most revivals that Graham supported had the greatest problems in race relations. (We may accept Niebuhr's basic point while chiding him for failing to notice, at least in this instance, Northerners' own complicity in racial oppression.) He suggested that Graham break with the revivalistic tradition and incorporate into his revival message the cause of justice as it related to the commandment of love on race relations. The suggestion that Graham break with the revival tradition was hardly the kind of advice that evangelicals were willing to accept. Niebuhr's remark about the sharp distinction that Graham drew between the saved and the unsaved was an indication of how they differed in theology. For Graham and evangelicals, there was a qualitative difference between the saved and the unsaved, even if the former did not always exhibit Christian conduct. Graham placed so much emphasis on saving souls because he and evangelicals were convinced that these two groups were in profoundly different spiritual conditions. Yet, Niebuhr's recommendations did prompt evangelicals like Graham to reflect on social ethics, even though they differed in their theology.Footnote 27
In response to Niebuhr's stinging remarks, Graham said, “I have read nearly everything Mr. Niebuhr has written, and I feel inadequate before his brilliant mind and learning.” Whether this was sincere praise from a thirty-nine year old in deference to a respected older religious leader (Niebuhr was fifty-five) is unclear, but their disagreements were very real. Niebuhr received much criticism for his rebuke of Graham. Many letters flooded the office of The Christian Century, which probably led the magazine's editor to publish Edward Carnell's article, a direct response to Niebuhr's critique of Graham's theology and social ethics.Footnote 28 Carnell was president of Fuller Theological Seminary and had written his doctoral dissertation at Harvard Divinity School in 1948 on Niebur's theology (a few years later he would revise it and publish it in book form).Footnote 29 He showed his solidarity with Graham and evangelicals by defending Graham.
Ironically, Carnell immediately launched into a criticism of Graham's understanding of Christian sanctification. He argued that it was “biblically inaccurate” and “perilously close to the Roman Catholic doctrine of infused righteousness” (a serious charge given the strong anti-Catholic sentiments of evangelical Protestants). Carnell insisted that justification (the sinner being made right with God by a sovereign act of God) did not in fact bring about a moral inward change. So a regenerate Christian may very well be deeply ensnared by racism, which meant that the Christian was not necessarily more altruistic than the non-Christian just because the former was justified or saved. Carnell acknowledged that Niebuhr's assessment of Graham was essentially correct because “it is a stubborn fact—and orthodoxy should come to terms with it—that humanists often develop a finer sense of justice and bear a heavier load of charity than those who profess faith in Christ.” Carnell's profound critique of evangelical social thought, however deep and fitting as an internal criticism, strikes one under the contemporary circumstances of white resistance to desegregation as an excuse for Christian racism, not so much as an independently thought-out theological position. Even so, Carnell insisted that though Christian orthodoxy (by which Carnell meant principally evangelicalism) must come to grips with racial pride, it must not put too much stress on racial justice, lest it divert the sinner's attention from the need to repent of a totally self-centered life. Carnell could not resist taunting Niebuhr: “It happens that racial injustice has an element of tragedy in it. This tragedy lurks in New York City as well as in the South, for there is still a comfortable distance between Harlem and the faculty apartments of Union Theological Seminary.” He also made some revealing comments that indicated his willingness to put material interests on an equal footing with spiritual issues by comparing “vested property interests” with the basic right of blacks to purchase a home where they could afford to live. Carnell lamented:
If we pass real-estate laws we do an injustice to the Negro. But if we let the Negro buy a house in fashionable suburbs we do an injustice to vested property interests. With rare exceptions, real-estate values are certain to plunge. Hence the tragedy.… Deep down in his heart Billy Graham is just as anxious about racial pride as Reinhold Niebuhr. But my suspicion is that he, like myself, is not quite sure how to go about the matter.Footnote 30
With all of these controversial words swirling around him, Graham decided to fix his attention on what he saw as his life's calling, preaching and evangelism. He conducted a major crusade in New York City in July 1957. Graham invited King to give the opening prayer. King and Graham had met each other for the first time during the Montgomery bus boycott. Graham had publicly praised King in April 1957 and introduced him at his New York crusade as the leader of a “great social revolution taking place in the United States today.” King had especially attracted public attention because of his fifty public appearances outside of Montgomery during the spring and summer of 1957. He took advantage of this opportunity to say a few words in his prayer about a brotherhood that transcended race or color.Footnote 31
Some had high hopes that King and Graham would forge an interracial alliance. In February 1957, Robert Forsberg, a Connecticut minister, suggested in a letter to King that Graham “may be able to be an ally” in the racial struggle. Forsberg added, “I even dare to dream, beyond this present day of crisis in Montgomery, of a time when you might appear with Billy Graham in a number of cities, North and South.”Footnote 32 This dream did not become reality. Upon the completion of Graham's New York crusade, his staff received loads of negative and hostile letters in response to his invitation of King. Apparently Graham's bold move was a bit too fast for his constituency. Because of the pressures that Graham faced and the differences that he and King held on social reform, they agreed to confine their cooperation to private relationships.Footnote 33
Late in 1957 King wrote a letter to Graham, thanking him for the invitation to the New York crusade. He assured him that “the discussion that we shared together will remain one of the high points of my life” and that it was a “great Christian experience to share the platform” at Madison Square Garden. King encouraged Graham that God had done “marvelous works” through him and wrote that he was grateful for the courageous stand that Graham had taken on race relations. He informed Graham that he, “above any preacher in America,” could open the eyes of many persons on the problem of race. King continued, “Your message in this area has additional weight because you are a native southerner.”Footnote 34 He expressed hope that Graham would use his evangelistic skills to improve race relations.
King tried to exert influence on Graham's approach to race in a letter written in 1958. For a crusade that was to be held in San Antonio in July, Graham's sponsoring committee invited Price Daniel, governor of Texas, who was closely involved in the 1956 rewriting of the original draft of the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the Brown decision. Daniel was a well-known segregationist and had run on a states' rights platform. C. William Black, Jr., pastor of First Baptist Church in San Antonio, wired King and implored him to contact Graham and “inform him that such support of a segregationist will do great harm to the Negro throughout the South.” King did wire his “Dear Brother Graham,” pleading with him to realize that his appearance with Daniel could be construed as an endorsement of segregation. He urged Graham either to prevent Daniel from participating in the crusade, or if that could not be avoided, to “make crystal clear your position on this burning moral issue.”Footnote 35
Graham's boyhood friend, advisor, and traveling companion, Grady Wilson, drafted a response to King's letter. Apparently Graham was answering fewer personal letters as his ministry grew, but this was not just a regular letter, but instead a direct wire transmittal from a reputed friend. Wilson's response to King reveals the tense feelings of those in the Graham camp about his association with King. He disingenuously claimed that Graham had “never engaged in politics on one side or another.” Wilson attempted to shield Graham's staff from any personal responsibility by asserting that Daniel was invited by the ministers of San Antonio and that Graham had no authority to dictate whom local ministers could invite. He told King that “we were surprised to receive your telegram and learn of your feeling toward the Governor of the Sovereign State of Texas.” Wilson insisted that King, like Graham, should “love him [Daniel] in Christ,” even if they had different views. Rather condescendingly, he reminded King that “we received scores of letters and telegrams” against King's participation at the Madison Square Garden crusade and yet Graham still invited King as a “fellow minister of Christ.”Footnote 36 That Wilson would not make any moral or political distinction between King, a Christian minister noted for his leadership of the Montgomery boycott, and Daniel, a segregationist and staunch states' rights governor, is an indication of the deeply colored and racially tainted lenses through which evangelicals saw the world.
In 1960, Graham was given the opportunity to express in The Christian Century's famous “How My Life Has Changed” sectionFootnote 37 what he had learned after more than a decade of public life. His conception of evangelism and his role in social issues had hardly changed from the early 1950s. Graham maintained that the “evangelist is not primarily a social reformer, a temperance lecturer or a moralizer. He is simply a keryx, a proclaimer of the good news.” He conceded that evangelistic crusades (which had occupied the bulk of his professional life) had only a limited impact on a community. Graham admitted that “mass evangelism” had severe limitations, but he was impatient with those who criticized his campaigns when crimes, for example, did not decrease in some of the cities where he conducted his crusades. He replied that these crusades were not “magic” and that they could not affect those who isolated themselves from them. Even so, Graham argued, the gospel has social implications, but individuals must be changed before society can be altered. “Social sins, after all,” he wrote, “are merely a large-scale projection of individual sins and need to be repented of by the offending segment of society.”Footnote 38 Here was the dominant evangelical conception of social change throughout the 1960s. This individualistic “social” ethic of construing social problems in individual or personal terms allowed evangelicals to maintain their reverence for an imagined godly American nation that was threatened by individuals who were intent on undermining its goodness. This individualism also permitted evangelicals selectively to oppose legislation that differed from their conception of the social good by denying its efficacy and invoking individual regeneration as the key to social reform.
Throughout the 1960s, Graham continued to insist that personal conversion was the solution to racism. While King was behind bars in Birmingham, Alabama, he urged King, a “good personal friend,” “to put the breaks on a little bit.” Graham said that he seriously doubted that most blacks supported demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches. He made it known that he longed for a “period of quietness in which moderation prevails.” Given the “great progress” that was being made in the South, Graham saw no reason for this form of activism. He did not participate in the March on Washington because he regarded protest marches as counterproductive and he remarked that King's dream for America would never be realized until the return of Jesus Christ.Footnote 39 Graham implied that King's view of human progress was too optimistic and this-worldly and this was another instance of his tendency publicly to doubt legislation or social reform's efficacy when it challenged his vision of a godly American republic.
King surely had Graham and evangelicals in mind when he returned to a theme enunciated in his first book. In a talk given in Nashville, Tennessee in 1962, King discussed the “Ethical Demands for Integration.” He reiterated his caution that civil rights activists must “never succumb to the temptation of believing that legislation and judicial decrees play only minor roles in solving” the problem of integration. On this occasion, King seemed a bit more open to imagining what else besides legislation was required to bring about true integration in which “genuine intergroup and interpersonal living” were realized. He drew on the liberal Protestant pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick's distinction between enforceable and unenforceable demands. King made it clear that he was emphatically for all legislative attempts to bring about a desegregation that would end separate public facilities and all artificial barriers between blacks and whites. However, he argued that “the ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable” demands of integration.
Desegregation was only a partial enforceable solution to the problem of racial division. Only an “invisible, inner law” would conquer the dark and demonic forces of fear, prejudice, pride, and irrationality that stood as barriers to a truly integrated society. For King, a conviction that love was humanity's most potent weapon of personal and social transformation, that “all men are brothers,” and that evil would be removed from human hearts could only be had by those who were grasped and possessed by this invisible law.Footnote 40 It is not clear how King thought this process would come about, though Graham was probably right that King was a bit more optimistic about progress than evangelicals. Furthermore, King was never as specific as evangelicals, who believed in theory that a person among the saved could be grasped by the Holy Spirit (as an external personal force) and transformed (presumably racial prejudice would be uprooted from the heart). King's notion of an inner invisible law did not make a distinction between the saved and the unsaved, thus indicating that King rejected evangelical notions of the radical discontinuity between the saved and the unsaved in both this-worldly ethical terms (personal transformation, whether from without or within) and other-worldly notions of being made fit or saved for the afterlife. Yet, these discussions about the efficacy of law and the underlying motive forces of racial prejudice did force King to reflect more deeply on how blacks and whites would have to “come together spiritually” once all the legal barriers of segregation had been dismantled.
Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Graham urged King to call on black leaders to “declare a moratorium on demonstrations until people have an opportunity to digest the new Civil Rights act.” As the nation's major cities became inflamed with fire in 1965 and 1966, he saw behind this tragedy the hands of communists plotting to overthrow the American government.Footnote 41 Graham reminded his followers that legislation would not solve America's racial crisis. America was in dire need of a spiritual solution to its entrenched racism, Graham insisted, though he never really addressed Bennett's and Niebuhr's critique of the failure of his form of revivalism to make any appreciable dent in the problem of racism in the South. By 1966, an editorial in The Christian Century was wistfully calling for King and Graham to have a long conference to discuss ways to solve the problem of racism in American society.Footnote 42 Such a conference never occurred and it is to be doubted that King and Graham would have agreed on a common solution to the problem of race in America, especially as King began a more systematic critique of the economic dimensions of racism in the urban North.Footnote 43
It is clear that Graham made specific efforts to combat racism. He publicly condemned it as a moral evil on several occasions. At different times, Graham took very unpopular positions. He was certainly ahead of many of his evangelical contemporaries, especially in the South, when he promoted integrating his crusades and evangelistic services. As we have seen, fundamentalists such as Bob Jones and Graham's evangelical constituents in the North and South roundly condemned him for inviting King to give the opening prayer at Madison Square Garden. Even Graham's father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell, urged him to stay away from social issues. Bell favored “voluntary” segregation and no doubt privately attempted to persuade Graham of the rightness of his cause. (Bell also had to defend Graham against fundamentalist charges that he was an integrationist.) As a native southerner, Graham understood how deep feelings ran on race and sometimes this realization led him to despair and postpone the solution to racial problems in the distant future, often stating that no solution would be found before the return of Jesus Christ.
Graham's dour view of social transformation was consistent with the theology of a large number of fundamentalists (whose social views Graham and neo-evangelicals had supposedly moved beyond) who urged Christians to devote themselves to missionary work and not to get distracted by undue attention to political and social issues. His revivalist heritage and his deeply held belief about the unique mission and goodness of America prevented any type of social-structural critique of American society. Though Graham often lambasted the lack of private morals in government and the putative widespread influence of communism in America, he still believed that America was God's chosen nation. Communism and agitation for civil rights were seen as threatening America's image as a glorious beacon of hope. In the face of widespread evidence that the many Christians who espoused Graham's revivalist Christianity were some of the most adamant opponents of integration and guilty of the most virulent forms of racism, Graham surprisingly never offered any public doubts about the efficacy of personal conversion experiences in ridding American society of racially discriminatory practices and attitudes. In effect, Graham offered a proposal for private race relations, not a social critique of racism in American society.
Christianity Today as Evangelicalism's Leading Voice
The appearance of Christianity Today in 1956 coincided chronologically with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which in hindsight has been regarded by some historians as the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. From its inception, Christianity Today struggled with how it should address the social and political issues of its times. J. Howard Pew, head of the Sun Oil Company, was a conservative Presbyterian layman who donated large sums to get Christianity Today up and running. Pew had been courted in the early 1950s by Harold John Ockenga, pastor of the famous Boston Park Street Church, on behalf of Fuller Seminary. Pew was already sponsoring a number of projects in the evangelical community. He wanted to combat the spread of modernism in the northern Presbyterian church and he was convinced that liberal theology was responsible for the spread of liberal politics. Pew had received honors from the staunchly conservative periodical, Christian Economics, for his work in promoting free enterprise capitalism as the answer to the communist threat. Financial support for Christianity Today came with many strings attached. Pew wanted to see “advance proofs” for the first issue of the magazine. Carl Henry, a noted evangelical theologian who was chosen as its editor-in-chief, refused to comply with this request. Though neither Henry nor Pew had much sympathy for civil rights, Henry objected to Pew's extremely negative tone and his desire to promote a narrowly partisan view of political and theological issues. Henry was not about to relinquish his editorial control to a layman who had little appreciation for sophisticated theological discussions. Yet, he constantly struggled to maintain editorial control over against those who feared that the magazine would produce too many analytical articles that would be read by intellectuals only (a persistent problem for evangelicals whose more popular preachers and teachers have reached a much larger audience than its theologians and leaders). Henry's refusal to submit to Pew's frequent requests would eventually lead to his dismissal in 1968.Footnote 44
The first issue of Christianity Today rolled off the press in October 1956. Over 200,000 Protestant pastors received the first year of the magazine free of charge because of Pew's generosity. The journal quickly surpassed in subscriptions its older liberal rival, The Christian Century. Henry stated that he and others were looking for a “new evangelical magazine that would give the liberally oriented The Christian Century a run for its biases.” Christianity Today grew from 29,300 paid subscribers in 1958 to 36,500 in 1961 and to 148,900 by 1967. As with any magazine venture, immediately questions arose about what specific issues demanded addressing. How would the magazine define itself? Two months prior to publication of its first issue, Henry had urged that Christianity Today address America's racial problem, a rather simple request in light of the serious problems brewing in the South as a result of Brown. Each editor was to prepare an article from his unique perspective. Henry was scheduled to write, “An Evangelical Theologian Looks at the Race Problem.” Bell, Graham's father-in-law and now a retired missionary doctor who served as executive editor of Christianity Today, was asked to write a column entitled, “A Southern Physician Looks at the Race Problem.” These specific articles never materialized. Henry later suggested that pressure from Pew and others had some impact on the decision not to publish these articles.Footnote 45 Perhaps just as important were Henry's talks with Bell on the topic of race. Bell was the founder of the Southern Presbyterian Journal, a journal whose supporters had signed a formal statement affirming that “voluntary segregation in churches, schools, and other social relations is for the highest interests of the races and is not unchristian.”
Christianity Today was commenced under the auspices of men who were not sympathetic to the civil rights movement as it had developed up to that point. From 1956 to 1960, Christianity Today's editorials and articles on race took a “moderate” position. The editors called upon Christians to confront their racial biases and cease discriminating against individual blacks. Voluntary segregation was seen as a middle path between the “extremists” of the segregationist right and the integrationist left. This position placed them in opposition to civil rights legislation and the proposals of militant segregationists. However, the magazine's harsher criticisms were directed more pointedly toward integrationists than toward segregationists. The possibility of interracial marriages was deeply feared and always lurked in the background as the principal reason for the editors' desire to halt rapid social relations between blacks and whites.Footnote 46
Two representative articles written in 1956 and 1957 follow and provide a clear view of the magazine's stance on social change and race. In 1956, Addison Leitch set out to describe the primary task of the Christian church. Leitch argued that the central goal of the church is to bring men and women into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. Despite the passing of nearly a decade when Carl Henry (in his, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism [1947]) first lambasted fundamentalists for their failure to engage social issues because of their hostility to the social gospel, Leitch's essay demonstrated that evangelicals were still living in the shadow of this controversy. He asserted, “There is no solution by way of the social gospel, but only in the individual's call to Christ. But there is no such thing as an asocial Christian.… Only men saved by grace can work to save society, but men saved by grace cannot escape the necessity of working redemptively on society.”Footnote 47 Expressions such as “social concern,” “social issues,” or the “social implications” of the gospel had become standard tropes that evangelicals like Leitch repeatedly invoked to assure themselves and their critics that they were indeed concerned about the tough issues of the day. However, nothing in Leitch's article directly addressed the contemporary social and racial problems of the nation. Writing in vague generalities about long dead issues, or topics upon which evangelicals were sure to agree, became the appropriate way to “confront” live controversies. Thus Leitch could discuss alcohol, business interests (in ambiguous terms), and even slavery, but not a word was said about America's contemporary racial crisis.
E. Earl Ellis's article in 1957 was more specific about the problem of racism in America. Ellis acknowledged that it was the “most important problem agitating the Christian conscience today.” He believed that the greatest sin of Christian segregationists was their indifference to chronic injustices within a dual social system. However, Ellis was quick to add that he did not think that segregation necessitated bad race relations, any more than integration guaranteed good race relations. He argued that black progress in the South had in some ways surpassed that in the North, a typical argument advanced by those opposed to “forced integration.” Ellis had harsh words for those integrationists who reportedly caused race relations to worsen in the South. For him, these “self-righteous harbingers of a new world” were nothing more than morally arrogant preachers who were quick to consign to hell all those who did not agree with their views. He wrote, “It is no secret that the integration sentiment of most white Christians increases in direct proportion to their distance from the Negro as a group factor in society.” Thus Ellis contended that it was wrong and hypocritical of northern integrationists who lived in white suburbs and sent their children to white schools to insist that white southerners should not be granted freedom of association and have the right to preserve their distinct “European and cultural heritage.”Footnote 48
Ellis, unlike Leitch, was willing to be specific about racial issues, but he either blamed white northerners for arrogance and failure to address racial issues, or he accused advocates for integration of having a faulty view of human nature and society. After over eighty years of white oppression of blacks and astonishing levels of violence against African Americans in the South, Ellis apparently still believed that segregation had “the potential to develop into a partnership of mutual respect.” Yet, he contended that those who supported integration espoused a form of “Christian communism” and evangelicals already knew that integration “as a moral imperative has its roots in a secular view of the Kingdom of God in which the kingdom is identified with the church and ultimately with the society of this world, and is to be brought in by social reform.”Footnote 49 Although Chistianity Today cannot be held responsible for every view propounded in its pages, articles like those of Ellis and Leitch represented the evangelical mainstream position on race. Ellis's critique of integreation was nothing more than a genteel version of hardcore southern white support of segregation. Yet, evangelicals had learned that civility and respectability, however extreme one's political and social views, were essential for a group seeking to alter the culture and participate in the political realm. In general, for much of the 1960s neo-evangelical social thought was a nicer public face of militant fundamentalism.
Carl Henry, who served as editor-in-chief for Christianity Today from 1956 to 1968, provides us with a test case of the entire span of the evangelical response to the civil rights movement. Through his little book, The Uneasy Conscience of Fundamentalism (1947), Henry became one of the leading evangelicals responsible for goading some dissatisfied fundamentalists to re-enter the social arena. His views are important also because he was one of the few evangelicals to provide a sophisticated theological and theoretical foundation for evangelical social ethics. In substance, however, Henry's arguments for social reform were similar to Graham's, though they were made with more technical distinctions and with greater familiarity with the work of other theologians and social critics. He contended that Christianity is not about producing social reformers, but saving sinners. He maintained that “biblical social ethics” does not endorse specific movements and organizations, but rather states the “great social concerns of revealed religion in terms of divinely disclosed ethical principles that must determine and motivate social responsibility and action.”Footnote 50 So like Graham, Henry agreed that individual spiritual regeneration “is not only a chief but an indispensable means of social reform.”Footnote 51
For the most part, Henry's position on race and social reform must be inferred because of his tendency to write in abstractions. We know that he did not participate in civil rights marches and he watched with suspicion the growth of the federal government, which troubled his libertarian sensibilities. In his Aspects of Social Ethics (1964) and most of his writings in Christianity Today, Henry argued that of the four major methods for social change—revolution, reformation, revaluation, and regeneration—regeneration is the classic Christian method for altering a society. For Henry, Christianity is first and foremost about the supernatural redemption of sinners. The Christian leader is therefore not to be primarily concerned with social reform or changing society because Christianity does not aim at social reform as an end in itself. Put another way, the church as a corporate body or social institution should not become involved in political and social issues. The church should, however, expound God's revealed will for the political order no less than it does for other spheres of life. Yet, the church must not seek to achieve a Christian society through political action. In this schema, personal conversion was logically and necessarily a prior step toward changing society, whether incrementally or drastically. Henry expressed this by saying that “Christian social action condones no social solutions in which personal acceptance of Jesus as Savior is an optional consideration.” In practice, this meant that unless people accept the Christian gospel, the church or Christians should not support them in any organized or systematic fashion. In Henry's view, devoting such attention to race, poverty, or social reform of any kind would be to focus on events and social issues that are extraneous to the church's mission, the saving of individual souls.Footnote 52
Henry's identification of a very limited government as the one consistent with a biblical or Christian view had several implications. First, despite his critique of fundamentalism for lacking a social program, he followed the same worn path of condemning liberal Protestants and advocates of a social gospel for failing to emphasize individual redemption in their calls for social reform. Second, although Henry could write in 1965 of a few evangelicals marching to Selma with King and other civil rights leaders, he had little sympathy for social agitation on behalf of black rights. He argued that racial discrimination could be overcome only by personal Christian behavior and a heart free of bias. Christians are to demonstrate agape (disinterested godly love) to their neighbors, but nowhere in the Bible are they instructed to display “humanistic charity.” On an aggregate level, Henry took this to mean that the state's purpose is to preserve justice, not to implement love or benevolence because that is the church's role as it preaches the gospel. Henry wrote, “While it [evangelical Christianity] rightly chides the liberal for regarding the world as a unity [rather than divided into the regenerate and the unregenerate], it also has a message for all men as members of one society.”Footnote 53 Here Henry returned to Niebuhr's worry that evangelicals like Graham were making too sharp a distinction between the saved and the unsaved, though Henry gave no satisfactory demonstration of how individual conversion was indispensable to social and political reform when he and evangelicals like Carnell clearly accepted (as did Niebuhr) that the unregenerate could promote racial equality or social justice with greater grace than the regenerate. Yet, Henry was undeterred in his hostility to social reform being left in the hands of the unsaved. He urged the saved to make a specific call for others to become Christians, which was the precondition of their engaging in social reform. But Henry left unanswered what then was so distinctive about evangelicals' social message or their approach toward social reform that would give one hope that they could do a better job than liberal Protestants or humanists, given his concession of the latter's possible finer sense of justice.
In 1966, Henry was challenged by Lewis Smedes, professor of theology at Calvin College, to defend his views. Calvin College, especially through the pages of its Reformed Journal, was becoming a source of dissent in evangelical social and political thought. Although Smedes credited Henry with having done more than any other evangelical to awaken the conscience of fundamentalists to develop a social ethic, he felt that Henry's arguments for social reform lacked any degree of specificity. He summarized Henry's position as follows: Good persons (that is, regenerated Christians) rather than good laws are the key to social ethics, an inference from Henry's public criticism of the efficacy of laws in promoting lasting social change. In response to Henry's charge that a change in environment cannot change the character of persons, Smedes asked, “Why should Dr. Henry encourage the second generation of regenerate men to alter [their] environment when by the terms of his own ethics changing the environment is of dubious worth?” A bad environment can surely prevent a good person from doing the good that he ought to or can do. How could a Christian effectively love a black person, Smedes asked, if society kept him from sitting next to his brother or sister in church, on a bus, or at a hot dog stand? What is the “regenerate person”—informed about “revealed principles”—to do about large hardcore areas of social deprivation? For Smedes, Henry's strategy of regeneration did not touch on specific and concrete questions of social ethics. He chided Henry for failing to mention specifics and for speaking in abstractions when practical issues must eventually be engaged. Smedes was convinced that Henry promoted a “social ethic that leaves the social needs of man primarily in the hands of benevolent individuals.” For him, the “net impression of Dr. Henry's essay is that evangelicals do not yet have a social ethic. They have a personal ethic for regenerate individuals. They do not have an ethic that prescribes a way of action and form for human society.”Footnote 54 Smedes's critique amounted to a charge of individualism in evangelical thought. This became the standard criticism of the perceived deficiencies in evangelical thought.Footnote 55
Smedes's critique had little impact on Henry's thought. Henry's position was consistently held throughout the civil rights years. He was never supportive of demonstrations and sit-ins. Henry never wavered in his criticism of the growth of the federal government and what he sneeringly called the “welfare state.” His long-standing hostility to civil rights legislation was a corollary to his preference for a limited government. Henry argued that government must not be an instrument of compassion, because compassion involved preferential love and partiality and government had no business showing love or favor to individuals or groups. Government's principal responsibility is to preserve equal rights before the law. Henry wrote, “The evangelical champions and strives for just legislation and for obedience to law and respect for judicial process rather than for directly coerced legislation.”Footnote 56 Henry noted that he wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson to commend him on his civil rights speech to Congress because he was not opposed to moral stances on social issues, but he insisted that the church should not endorse any specific legislative proposal. Later, he tried to defend the position of Christianity Today and to minimize his opposition to civil rights by claiming that he was not “uninhibitedly free” as editor to pronounce his views on certain issues.Footnote 57 However, my analysis of Henry's other writings, outside of Christianity Today, indicates that his editorials for Christianity Today were consistent with his arguments in other venues.
Not surprisingly, Christianity Today's coverage of Martin Luther King was primarily negative and disparaging. In his fine study of Christianity Today, Mark Toulouse observes, “Incredible as it may seem, Martin Luther King is not even mentioned in the journal until 17 January 1964 when editors wrote two sentences noting the fact that he had been chosen Time's ‘Man of the Year’.”Footnote 58 Though Toulouse's judgment of the paucity of its coverage of such an important figure is consistent with my own analysis, I have found mention of King on two occasions prior to the date given by Toulouse. On August 30, 1963, a statement made by King is quoted in relation to the March on Washington. A short dispassionate paragraph cites King's comments about his attempt to persuade President John F. Kennedy to create a federal civil rights police force to protect demonstrators. A much earlier and disparaging analysis of King's work was featured in a book review article in 1959. E. Earl Ellis, mentioned earlier, reviewed King's Stride Toward Freedom (1958). Ellis saw King as a new type of black leader in the South and believed that King had the potential to become a constructive figure because of his commitment to Christian love. Ellis's fears of integration and racial intermarriage deeply colored his reading of King's book. He urged King to ask “Negro integrationists” to refrain from forcing entrance into white schools “in communities where Negro facilities are equal and whites desire to be segregated” (in accord with early evangelical support for voluntary segregation). Ellis saw integration as a “racial philosophy” that envisioned not simply freedom from discrimination or domination but freedom from difference. By associating integration with socialism, he feared that this alleged desire for sameness would ultimately prevent white southerners from preserving their distinct cultural and ethnic heritage. Ellis envisioned integration as a pernicious philosophy that would lead to interracial marriage and communism.Footnote 59
In November 1964, Christianity Today devoted one sentence to announcing King's acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1966, in a short news blurb, King was used as an example by the journal to demonstrate that lawlessness was a sign of the times. The additional articles that included King's name simply related a few remarks about his activities in the broader civil rights struggle. Carl Henry made an oblique reference to King in 1965 when he wrote, “Ecclesiastical demonstrators who never persuade observers to become disciples of Jesus Christ ought to ask how effectively Christian is such amorphous ‘witness by demonstration’.”Footnote 60 Such sparse coverage is a testimony to the inside perception of evangelicalism's leading voice toward the civil rights movement.Footnote 61Christianity Today was probably the most hostile, though the most widely read, of mainstream evangelical thought in its interpretation of the civil rights movement. Its proposals for individuals as agents of social change amounted to virtually no practical support for black attempts to secure justice in America. The repeated claim that “personal salvation had social implications” was little more than a feeble call for evangelical Christians to be better neighbors. No social or theological program was developed to address the causes of poverty or racism, other than a tendency to place the blame on “unregenerate” individuals and urge evangelicals to work for the former's salvation. Rather generously, Toulouse concludes of Christianity Today, “Though these evangelical voices accepted equality for blacks, they usually meant equality that could not impact blacks where they lived.”Footnote 62
Young Evangelicals as Dissenting Voices
Evangelicalism was never completely unified, but mainstream leaders and their approach to social reform prevailed throughout the 1960s. However, there was a minority of “younger evangelicals” (as they came to be called in the literature) who were no longer satisfied with the social and political conservatism of their predecessors and leaders. In a recent study of evangelicals and the United States military, Anne Loveland identified three groups that dissented from the mainstream evangelical position on the Vietnam war (which was overwhelmingly one of ardent support): 1) Contributors to the Reformed Journal, a periodical that commenced publication in 1951 and whose contributors and writers were mostly faculty members at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 2) The academic trio of Richard V. Pierard, Robert D. Linder, and Robert G. Clouse, all faculty members in the history department at the University of Indiana. 3) The “radical evangelicals,” with Post American (renamed Sojourners after 1975) and Jim Wallis as the leading voices. Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon was among those who participated in this group of dissenting evangelicals.Footnote 63 These three groups comprise roughly the same crowd that tended to take more activist or progressive roles in the civil rights movement, though my study of a relatively obscure evangelical journal, Eternity, leads me to think that there were more dissenting groups than just these three. (Admittedly, all of these together never comprised a large number, though they tended to be prolific writers and frequent speakers.)Footnote 64
These young evangelicals published a spate of books and a number of short-lived periodicals around 1965 to 1967, calling for greater political and social involvement. In 1965, Fred Alexander, though identified by some as an Ohio fundamentalist, began publishing Freedom Now (renamed The Other Side in 1969), which included articles on race in every issue and consistently deviated from mainstream evangelical attitudes towards race and their support of the Vietnam War. Jim Wallis was the radical counterpart of an older evangelical Bill Bright, who was so eager to save souls and evangelize the world that after four years at Fuller Theological Seminary (1947–1951) he had had enough studying. Bright learned his last Hebrew word at Fuller and thereafter devoted himself full time to his newly-founded campus ministry, which he named Campus Crusade for Christ. Younger evangelicals, however, no longer regarded this particular model of Christianity as exemplary. Wallis dropped out of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, an evangelical seminary safely ensconced in the quiet neighborhood of Deerfield, Illinois, a few miles outside of Chicago. He injected himself into the heart of urban Chicago to carry on his ministry of social justice. In 1971, Wallis founded the journal, Post American, and the People's Christian Coalition, which he moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C. in 1975 and renamed the Sojourners Fellowship. He became a thorn in mainstream evangelicals' side, issuing a number of broadsides and constantly hounding them for their conservative stance on race relations, support of Vietnam, failure to address poverty, and their traditional approach to gender and women's issues. Wallis accused evangelicals of conforming to middle class culture and practicing a rampant form of individualism that had little regard for those outside their religious circle.Footnote 65
From 1963 onward, the Reformed Journal gave sympathetic treatment to King and civil rights concerns. This was also true, to a lesser extent, of Eternity magazine, which often featured articles by evangelicals (and some fundamentalists) adamantly opposed to civil rights legislation alongside those who supported it. Almost all of those members of evangelical groups, who dissented from the evangelical mainstream position, questioned the adequacy of an approach to social ethics, if it did not challenge the existing institutions of society. They varied among themselves and in the specific actions that they undertook. These evangelical dissenters were not convinced that personal conversion would necessarily alter or affect one's views on race relations. They argued that evangelicals were making race relations worse when they called for adherence to the status quo. They also charged that the church's decision to refrain from involvement in social issues was itself a move that had definite effects on the social order. Evangelical dissenters generally emphasized community over against individualism and consumerism, though they were by no means unified in their positive proposals. For the most part, they were seen by mainstream evangelicals as well-intentioned but naïve persons who had capitulated to a Marxist or communistic philosophy of social change.Footnote 66 These evangelical dissenters probably gained a wider hearing from liberal Protestants than from their evangelical constituents. Wallis and Sider, for example, have been grudgingly referred to by many evangelical leaders as members of the “evangelical left” and it is not likely that they had a significant influence on mainstream evangelical social thought. There is evidence, however, that evangelical dissenters had some impact on evangelical college, university, and seminary students (a significant minority of whom identify themselves as politically moderate or liberal) and perhaps on some evangelical professors.Footnote 67
When Pierard and other young evangelicals criticized mainstream evangelicals for their political conservatism, the extent of evangelical connections to very conservative constituents and benefactors became more widely known.Footnote 68 Reference has already been made to the businessman J. Howard Pew. Pew donated significant amounts of money to conservative religious causes. Harold John Ockenga, who had studied Marxism as a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh, had come to the attention of Pew and a number of other business leaders who admired his strong stand against communism. Ockenga became president of Fuller and played an important role in the growth of the seminary. He and other cooperative evangelicals had to tailor their messages in a particular manner if they were to receive the funding that they needed to build educational institutions that were to surpass fundamentalist Bible institutes in academic credentials. Fuller Seminary, with Pew's support, initiated a series of lectures (beginning in 1954) on the “Christian Heritage” of America, which emphasized protecting free enterprise against communism. The first speaker was Howard Kerstner, editor of Christian Economics, which was also supported by Pew.Footnote 69
Pew's worries about communism were in many respects similar to those of J. Edgar Hoover, whose words (as Marsden notes) “graced the pages” of Christianity Today.Footnote 70 Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was openly hostile to the civil rights movement and a passionate racist.Footnote 71 He appeared as an almost ubiquitous figure in the evangelical world. In 1954, Hoover wrote a long letter to Eternity's editor-in-chief, Donald Grey Barnhouse, protesting his claim that the FBI was being infiltrated by Roman Catholics.Footnote 72 This is a remarkable instance of Hoover's connection to evangelicals that he would write to this in-house journal to defend the FBI. The official journal of the NAE, United Evangelical Action, carried popular statements and prayers written by Hoover, an honor that was reserved for only the great icons of the evangelical faith. Hoover's public actions and itinerary were detailed in several issues of the journal, and one particular article displayed a picture of Hoover receiving a plaque for his work on behalf of Sunday School education.Footnote 73 He wrote several articles for CT, emphasizing the need for private morality and Christian nurture as an antidote to juvenile delinquency. Echoing Graham's and evangelicals' solution to social problems, Hoover saw the Christian family as the greatest bulwark against the communist threat.Footnote 74 Graham publicly remarked that it was Hoover who warned that the civil rights movement was being infiltrated by communists.Footnote 75 The fight against communism, though receding in some ways during the early 1970s, provided much practice in constructing and defending institutional and ideological frameworks for the newer domestic battles against abortion, pornography, and “secular humanism.”
Conclusion
Evangelicals were more constrained by the views of their constituents than the separatist fundamentalists, who were much less concerned about social status and building a coalition (prior to the late 1970s). In public, evangelicals self-consciously made guarded comments about civil rights legislation, even if they personally sympathized with attempts to secure justice for black Americans (this is not to suggest that evangelicals were anguishing about the plight of blacks in America). Perhaps it was the price they had to pay to get funding to build institutions that would help them to regain academic and social respectability. Evangelicals were also being enticed by the active courting of their votes by Richard Nixon (who gained Ockenga's public support) and Jimmy Carter's call for their more active involvement. Proximity to and entrance into the halls of power proved intoxicating and the complex and compromising world of politics was quite new for many evangelicals. How to use power and remain Christian and charitable toward one's opponents was a major challenge for evangelicals, their prominent positions having become seen by many observers as the Christian stance on public policy, often to the dismay of other Christians.
With the rise of politically active fundamentalists and the acquisition of more cultural authority for evangelicals, many of the former restraints against incivility and intemperate public discourse were relaxed, though evangelicals were careful to frame their public debates in the language of individual rights on many occasions. Evangelicals no longer had to enjoin their constituents to become socially involved. Rather, those to the political and religious left now have as their greatest wish that evangelicals (and fundamentalists) would not be so politically active. They often look with envy and disgust at the success evangelicals (and fundamentalists) have had in capturing public debate in such an explicitly religious discourse. Henry and the neo-evangelicals had succeeded in ways that they could not have anticipated. Evangelicalism, as somewhat feebly predicted by Hearn, has altered the political and religious landscape of America.
