It was Friday, 19 June 1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson had just heard that the Senate had passed the Civil Rights Act with a vote of seventy-three to twenty-seven, following a grueling eighty-three-day filibuster. The President phoned Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, to relay the good news. They chatted about the long and winding road to passage and the many barriers overcome for the historic Act that intended to outlaw discrimination by race, color, religion, or national origin. What seemed impossible had finally been accomplished. Wilkins passed on a revealing comment he had heard from the US Senator from Georgia, Richard Russell, who “put his finger on two things. First he said it was Lyndon Johnson. And second, he said it was the clergy. He hasn't been wrong – much,” concluded Wilkins.Footnote ¹

At every stage in the lead-up to the landmark bill, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders and lay activists rallied churches and the public. The liberal, predominately white, National Council of Churches (NCC) proved tireless in its civil rights efforts in 1963 and 1964. The chief magazine of mid-century Protestant liberalism, Christian Century, was the first to publish in full Martin Luther King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Many divines in the liberal mainstream heeded King's call for an activist faith and joined him at the national mall in August 1963 on the march for jobs and freedom.

The following spring the nation's capital was again awash with ministers, priests, seminary students, and nuns. They joined up with African American preachers from the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the National Baptist Convention. A collection of seminarians maintained a round-the-clock vigil at the Lincoln Memorial to show their support for civil rights legislation. A group of about 160 men and women set off from the Lutheran Church of the Reformation on Capitol Hill and made their way to the Supreme Court Building for a prayer vigil and commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Brown v. Topeka decision. The NCC backed this and other symbolic gestures and pleaded with Senators to support the Civil Rights Bill and stand up for the rights of all Americans.Footnote ² Such actions were broadcast on national television news and reported in headlines in major papers. On the key role of the black ministers the historian Clarence Taylor observes, “In many instances black clergy became the spokespeople for campaigns articulating the grievances of black people, and they became the strategists who shaped the objectives and methods of the movement that sought to redress those grievances.”Footnote ³

Indeed, much is known about the involvement of black and white Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.Footnote ⁴ Less is known about actions and reactions of conservative or moderate white believers in the South and beyond the region's borders. Their response to the Civil Rights Bill and the heated debates that led up to it reveal much about evangelicals' antistatism while also shedding light on their individualistic beliefs concerning sin and salvation. Billy Graham, who would earn the moniker “Pastor in Chief,” summed up the cautious sentiments of many fellow believers. Speaking at a New York City prayer breakfast in April 1964, the influential revivalist reflected on the problems facing America: moral decline, the specters of communism and nuclear holocaust, and racial tensions. Racism was a sin and unequal treatment was not acceptable in Christian America, he said. But the solution would not come through demonstrations or a Civil Rights Bill. “It has to come from the hearts of the people,” he assured his thousand listeners. “That's the answer to the race problem.”Footnote ⁵

Graham, of course, represented one view among many. Conservative Protestants ranged from militant, separatist fundamentalists – at war with modernism, communism, encroaching secularism, and theological liberalism – and more middle-of-the-road evangelicals, many of whom would be largely indistinguishable in their political behavior and religious outlook from mainline Protestants. Modern American evangelicalism itself emerged in the 1940s, its adherents breaking with their more strident, hard-line fundamentalist brethren. The two movements may have shared a born-again faith, but their tactics and temperaments differed greatly. The historian George Marsden put it simply when he observed, “A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something.”Footnote ⁶ Evangelicals did not share that rage and they also found fault in fundamentalism's narrowness. “Modern Fundamentalism does not … challenge the injustices of totalitarianism,” claimed the evangelical leader and later editor of Christianity Today Carl F. H. Henry in 1947. Neither did it take a stand against “the evils of racial hatred, the wrongs of current labor–management relations, the inadequate bases of international dealings.”Footnote ⁷ Henry and other so-called neo-evangelicals had a moderating impact on the movement. So writes the historian David Swartz: “They articulated a more comprehensive evangelical agenda for the twentieth century that proposed increased political, scholarly, and social activity. Henry himself emerged as the preeminent prophet and theologian of the emerging neo-evangelical movement.”Footnote ⁸ By these lights fundamentalism was out of touch, cut off.

In the 1950s, in particular, evangelicals engaged world events and called for a renewed America in new ways. The historian Jonathan P. Herzog observes that “religious arguments marshaled against Communism during the 1950s provided a platform from which both modern religious and political conservatism grew.”Footnote ⁹ Billy Graham first built his evangelical career on white-hot denunciations of Godless communism and calls for a return to America's founding principles. Graham, in these years, dominated headlines and appeared regularly in color features in Life magazine. At mid-century, evangelicalism had become an even more global, highly visible movement. The world famous revivalist certainly agreed with Carl Henry and Harold Ockenga, principle founder of the National Association of Evangelicals, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Believers had shrugged off their moral and political responsibilities for far too long when it came to race, injustice, and engagement with the world of ideas.Footnote ¹⁰

At the same time as evangelicals considered racism or social inequality, they wanted to distance themselves from Social Gospel Protestants, who, they felt, in their rush to the left, had neglected personal conversion and private morality.Footnote ¹¹ The sociologists Christian Smith and Michael Emerson find that evangelicals practiced “engaged orthodoxy.” “In keeping with their nineteenth-century Protestant heritage,” write Smith and Emerson, “they were fully committed to maintaining and promoting confidently traditional, orthodox Protestant theology and belief, while at the same time becoming confidently and proactively engaged in the intellectual, cultural, social, and political life of the nation.”Footnote ¹² To that end, in 1956 Billy Graham helped found the chief magazine of the movement, Christianity Today, which after its early years in Washington, DC was later based in the evangelical stronghold of Carol Stream, Illinois. In this publication, evangelical pastors, theologians, and laypeople charted out positions on politics, ecumenism, world affairs, and, increasingly in the early 1960s, race relations.Footnote ¹³

By 1964 evangelicalism encompassed a large swath of the American public. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), founded in 1942 as a counter to the NCC, represented millions of members in the 1960s, uniting some of the largest denominations in the country. In the year the Civil Rights Act became law, evangelicals totaled roughly 26 million.Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, the movement would grow extraordinarily in the last decades of the century. In 2008 evangelicalism boasted 75 million adherents in the US, or 26 percent of the population.Footnote ¹⁵ By contrast, liberal mainline Protestant groups suffered enormous losses from the 1960s to the present.Footnote ¹⁶ The evidence does not show that opposition to the Civil Rights Act or antistatism helped the evangelical movement to grow. Still, in that same time frame evangelicals would become vital players in regional and national elections. In the coming years born-again Christians gained Senate seats and the presidency, would form enormously well-funded think tanks and political action groups, and would use direct-mail campaigns in the 1970s to inspire millions of conservative Christians to vote and devote themselves to national campaigns.Footnote ¹⁷ In their responses to the civil rights movement, evangelicals and fundamentalists engaged in politics in new ways, too, offering moderate to segregationist alternatives to mainline Protestant liberalism. Such alternatives, from the center to the far right, severely critiqued the modern welfare state.Footnote ¹⁸

But had stalwarts engaged in politics even before? The dominant story has been that conservative Christians, stung by the cultural defeat of the 1925 Scopes Trial – and William Jennings Bryan's botched exegesis – and mesmerized by fiery apocalypticism, remained apolitical until the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s. The harsh rebukes of H. L. Mencken and other cultured despisers relegated them to the dustbin of history. “The position of Fundamentalism,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in 1931, “seemed almost hopeless. The tide of all rational thought in a rational age seemed to be running against them.”Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, fifty years later a Milwaukee reporter ventured that “conservative Christians always regard politics as ‘a dirty business’ unworthy of men of the cloth,” until fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell and the Reagan landslide victory proved otherwise.Footnote ²⁰ So said Falwell himself in his March 1965 sermonic response to civil rights activism, “Ministers and Marches.” “Our only purpose on earth is to know Christ and make Him known,” he counseled members of his Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.Footnote ²¹ Preachers were not called to win votes for politicians, but to win souls for God. Yet even while publicly shunning politics, Falwell campaigned to uphold school segregation. He and other fundamentalists and evangelicals thought that preaching against communism, statism, and theological liberalism or social action did amount to a holy calling. Indeed, historians like Axel Schäfer, Daniel Williams, Daren Dochuk, Matthew Sutton, and Andrew Preston have recently described that long-standing political engagement of evangelicals with great precision and skill. Each has shown quite clearly that believers participated in political activities long before Falwell's supposed epiphany or the Milwaukee journalist's surprised summary of the sudden rise of the Christian right. Evangelicals, goaded as they were by liberal Protestantism, the millennial expectations of the age, or a greater awareness of the threats to Christian America, voted and campaigned in growing numbers. The very public conservative response to national politics in the 1950s and 1960s amounted to a repudiation of a revived Social Gospel, civil rights agitation, and ecumenism.Footnote ²² This article, then, takes the work of these and other scholars as a starting point.Footnote ²³

The faithful participated enthusiastically in debates and campaigns. In the decades before Reagan left the back lots of Hollywood for balloon-filled convention halls, evangelicals in the Sunbelt weighed in on a host of public matters. Their opposition to the big-government innovations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, admiration for J. Edgar Hoover (who contributed regular articles on the joys of Christian patriotism and the perils of lawlessness in Christianity Today), support for General Douglas MacArthur, and avowed anticommunism plunged them into political realities.Footnote ²⁴ In the 1960s, Nazarenes, Baptists, and Pentecostals fought to ensure that their children received a godly, nonsecular education, free from liberal indoctrination and sex education. The stormy 1960s and the “narcissistic” 1970s made their political activities all the more urgent. They weighed in on what they perceived as threats to the separation of church and state. In 1960, denominations representing around 11 million members issued official statements against the election of a Catholic President. A Pentecostal educator asked rhetorically, “Haven't the American people enough ‘security risks' as it is without placing another in the President's office?”Footnote ²⁵ As the decade progressed, others rallied behind-land usage propositions; some meant to keep government from encroaching on sacred space, others to keep their suburbs lily-white. Vocal fundamentalists, especially in the South, became strident opponents of civil rights measures.Footnote ²⁶ A few, sensing conspiracies at home, joined up with the John Birch Society and rallied to get the US out of the UN.Footnote ²⁷ They also wondered about the role that big government would play in securing civil rights for African Americans. Like other Americans on the right and center right, they cast a suspicious eye at federal laws intended to enforce equality at the same time as they questioned the lawfulness and leftist slant of civil rights activism. Fittingly, as Axel Schäfer has pointed out, evangelicals were somewhat ambivalent when it came to potential aid to churches from Great Society programs. Believers also offered sharp rebukes when legal decisions – like the banning of school prayer and Bible reading – offended them so deeply.Footnote ²⁸

The religious opposition to the Civil Rights Bill, especially in the South, was all the more important considering how serious the stakes were in 1964. The historic legislation faced enormous resistance, whether it was Kennedy or Johnson backing the law. In the summer of 1963, while Kennedy still occupied the Oval Office, the Gallup Poll registered popular opinions about the proposed legislation. When asked about racial equality in public arenas, 49 percent of those polled favored the Act, while 42 percent opposed it. Polling conducted several months after passage of the Act revealed that six in ten Americans supported the new law. At the same time, 57 percent of Americans polled said that the speed of implementation was too fast. A January 1964 poll also pointed to a deep regional split, showing that 71 percent of whites outside the South supported the new measure, while a mere 20 percent of white southerners approved of it.Footnote ²⁹

In the previous two decades, evangelicals charted a self-consciously middle ground on civil rights. The movement, heavily represented in the former Confederacy by the Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostal denominations, separatist fundamentalist groups, and southern Presbyterians, championed what it called “biblical principles,” spoken of as timeless truths.Footnote ³⁰ The strong evangelical focus on personal conversion, embrace of free-market ideals, and a reaction against an activist federal government heavily informed outlooks on race. One historian has called their stand “moderate individualism.”Footnote ³¹ In 1966 Baptist minister and University of North Carolina professor of religious studies Samuel Hill offered up a searing critique of fellow Baptists. Their indifference to the ongoing civil rights struggle, he observed, “is found to be consistent with the general Evangelical stance, which simply does not view responsibility toward God or man in the light of a social ethic.” White Christian duty toward blacks was to convert and befriend, wrote Hill, “not to consider altering the social traditions and arrangements which govern his (and everyone else's) life to so significant a degree.”Footnote ³²

Equipped with their moderation shibboleth, very few evangelicals would go as far as one writer in the pages of the evangelical Eternity magazine in 1962, who compared segregationists to Nazis. Like America's current crop of racists, he said, Nazis also held that “each race on this earth represents an idea in the mind of God.” He went on to demolish fundamentalist segregationist arguments as unbiblical in the extreme.Footnote ³³ At the same time few evangelicals who penned letters to magazines, preached on the topic, and issued public statements would have occupied the other end of the spectrum. One such example, albeit rare, also appeared in Eternity magazine two years after the above. A white Baptist preacher from the Mississippi Delta town of Greenville, which had the largest proportional black population in the state, wrote in response to a piece on color-blind Christianity. The original article described the successful integration of a Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania. Christians, the enraged Greenville pastor argued, “would act the fool and be instruments in the hands of the devil to bring spotted babies into the world.” Apparently, he scoffed, “you think spotted babies bring honor and glory to our lord Jesus?”Footnote ³⁴ A minority of evangelicals would have applied this racist, antimiscegenationist logic. More often than not, though, in the years leading up to 1964, evangelicals condemned racism in mild tones, while also watchfully avoiding overt political language or any possible alignment with the Rauschenbuschian or Niebuhrian Protestant left.

Occasionally matters of personal holiness and behavior trumped more weighty issues like integration or equality. An alumnus of an upstate New York evangelical college, looking back on his undergrad experience in the early 1960s, recalled that while students across the country were participating in the civil rights movement and arguing about the war in Vietnam, “we fought our administration over whether the yearbook could picture male swimmers without T-shirts, struggled for the right to watch TV in the lounge on Sunday, and wondered if the Christian should attend the theater (legitimate or cinema) or read twentieth-century literature.”Footnote ³⁵ It is not entirely surprising, then, that white evangelicals quite often seemed unaware of or unconcerned by racism. In 1955 the National Association of Evangelicals did not address the Brown v. Topeka decision at its national convention. Still, in the late 1950s and early 1960s key evangelical publications did begin to cover racial inequality with greater interest and frequency.Footnote ³⁶ Reluctance to embrace the modern civil rights movement, as liberal Protestants did, likely owed to a lingering suspicion of the Social Gospel and ecumenical Christianity.

Few helped to open up white believers to a more nuanced position on race than did Billy Graham. Graham held his massive integrated revival meetings in the Jim Crow South at a time when unreconstructed Christian confederates clutched dearly to segregation. There should be no color line before the altar, the evangelist insisted. The September 1957 issue of Ebony magazine included Graham's piece “No Color Line in Heaven.”Footnote ³⁷ On his tours to Asia and Africa, Graham preached the same message. Christianity was not a white man's religion, he proclaimed. At home, during his 1957 New York Crusade, he shared the podium with Martin Luther King Jr. In 1964, amid heated debates over the Civil Rights Bill, and its filibuster, Graham conducted an integrated Easter Sunday rally in a football stadium in Birmingham. Approximately 35,000 black and white congregants attended the revival, which received massive media coverage.Footnote ³⁸

Regardless, liberal critics found Graham's, and by extension evangelicalism's, message of personal conversion wanting. They also recoiled at the North Carolina evangelist's premillennial pessimism. Asked what he thought of Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington, Graham remarked, “Only when Christ comes again will little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.”Footnote ³⁹ Reinhold Niebuhr clearly thought Graham and others in his camp missed the vital social point of Christianity. In 1957, the same year that Senator Lyndon Johnson pushed a weak civil rights law through Congress, Niebuhr composed an op-ed for Life magazine, declaring that Graham might well exemplify a comforting kind of individualistic, nineteenth-century, frontier evangelism. Yet, warned Niebuhr, then the vice president of Union Seminary, bastion of the liberal Protestant establishment, Graham's “solutions are rather too simple in any age, but particularly in a nuclear one with its great moral perplexities.” Graham might have “sound personal views on racial segregation and other social issues of our time,” said Niebuhr, but “he almost ignores all of them in his actual preaching.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Even the middle ground that Graham staked out riled his fundamentalist detractors. And there were many. Surely the celebrity preacher was a compromiser, they roared. An observer in Christianity Today noted that “the great irony of [Graham's] career is that his most vehement opponents are fellow Bible believers.”Footnote ⁴¹ It may have looked like the narcissism of minor difference to outsiders, but the issues that divided fundamentalists and evangelicals, even with regard to race and civil rights legislation, were very real and pressing for those involved.

In 1964 a host of fundamentalist preachers and editors had the Civil Rights Bill in their sights. Among the most influential of these were Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntire, and Bob Jones Jr.Footnote ⁴² The last of these refused to bring his Bob Jones University (BJU) in line with the new law's guidelines because he viewed them as an authoritarian move to draw all schools under the tight control of federal power. BJU also awarded honorary doctorates to staunch defenders of segregation, like Governor George Wallace (1964) and Hargis (1961).Footnote ⁴³

Hargis established his anticommunist Christian Crusade, Tulsa, Oklahoma ministry in the early 1950s. At the peak of his career the Texas-born preacher was furiously blasting away at communists and liberals on five hundred radio and 250 television stations from coast to coast and in the pages of his Christian Crusade magazine.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1960 he mocked the “social crises” of racism and segregation. It was “one of the most artificial of all such crises, instigated by Communists within America to add racial hatred to class hatred, and thus betray America into communist hands through the betrayal of the American Negro.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In addition to warning against this red menace Hargis called out an intrusive federal government that was determined to eliminate the basic freedoms necessary for a thriving Christian, capitalist system.

From his New Jersey headquarters, Carl McIntire raised a similar complaint. His Christian Beacon newspaper claimed a maximum circulation of 145,000, while his Twentieth Century Radio Hour was carried by 610 stations. The state had no business meddling with private enterprise, warned McIntire.Footnote ⁴⁶ An ardent supporter of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the John Birch Society, he penned an open letter to Martin Luther King in his newspaper, castigating him for his communist sympathies and lawless activities, and telling the future Nobel Laureate that he unwisely sought solutions in Washington instead of the changed human heart. “In order to bring about the kind of integrated society and schools that you advocate,” he cautioned, “the principle of individualism upon which our concept of capitalism and a free society is built must be abandoned. Your approach is the road to tyranny, not freedom.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Never short of confidence, McIntire had published a similar note to LBJ two months earlier. “There are church leaders who have been backing your legislation,” he lectured the President, “but the theological basis on which they ask the people to accept the legislation is not found in holy Scripture.” McIntire pleaded that the Bible did not teach the brotherhood of man. In typical fashion he went on, declaring, “We are very sensitive to increasing federal direction and control over the lives of all our people.” He concluded by telling the President that getting prayer and Bible reading back into public schools was far more critical than the ill-conceived legislation under debate.Footnote ⁴⁸

Johnson, needless to say, did not reply. In his quest for support for the Civil Rights Bill, the President made little attempt to reach such hard-liners. He likely classed them with John Birchers, “a bunch of screwballs in California,” as he described them to a newspaper executive in the summer of 1964.Footnote ⁴⁹ Still, more moderate southern evangelicals, hoped the President, might be persuaded with a dose of the Johnson treatment. Expert at cajoling, courting favors, or flattering, LBJ looked to garner white conservative religious support. He reached out to Billy Graham, trusting the evangelist would sway others on the proposed law. The President also made an ambitious, high-pressure pitch to churchmen, with the impressive Whitehouse Rose Garden as a backdrop. On 25 March 1964, as the Civil Rights Bill made halting progress through Congress, Johnson hosted a group of 150 leading southern Baptist ministers. The President used the occasion to scold them about their Christian duties. Johnson sermonized,

The President rightly knew that Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was one of the largest, most influential white denominations in the country, and especially the South. But the Rose Garden pitch did not go over as well as planned. Some bristled at Johnson's intervention. A deacon of the First Baptist Church of Sumter, South Carolina wrote to the president of the SBC in vigorous protest of the President's attempt to influence the views of church leadership. “President Johnson's unprecedented action,” he challenged, “is in our opinion a deplorable breach of the constitutional statute of the separation of church and state.” It was also a clear sign of Johnson's “power hungry” attempt to dominate every aspect of citizens' lives.Footnote ⁵¹

In 1964 the Southern Baptist Convention claimed approximately 10.2 million members and nearly 33,000 churches.Footnote ⁵² In May of that year a southern Baptist commission recommended that the denomination support legislation that would secure legal rights for blacks.Footnote ⁵³ The SBC, along with the southern Presbyterians, would come out, at least officially, in favor of the law.Footnote ⁵⁴ In July, after Johnson signed the Act, Wayne Dehoney, the president of the denomination, called the Civil Rights Act a test to citizenship and faith. From his pulpit at First Baptist Church in Jackson, Tennessee he conceded, “as Christian citizens, we are charged by the word of God to give voluntary, peaceful obedience to every letter of this law.” The editor of the Texas Baptist newspaper, with a massive circulation of 375,000, largely agreed. Every citizen must obey the law of the land, E. S. James declared. But James, providing a loophole large enough for a Greyhound bus to drive through, added, “unless it contravenes his obligations to God.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Looking beyond official statements and the tepid support of moderates reveals a different picture. The SBC's rank and file remained staunchly conservative in 1964. Added to that some editors of state Baptist newspapers were defiant segregationists. This mattered a great deal in a denomination that maintained a high level of church-by-church autonomy. And as historian Andrew Manis observes, “the more local the responses, the more likely southern Baptists were to reject the civil rights movement.” A similar division occurred among the southern Presbyterians, with Mississippi harboring a bulwark of determined opposition.Footnote ⁵⁶

The official statements of the southern Baptists stopped far short of celebrating the bill or endorsing civil rights tactics. When northern Baptists approved a resolution in May 1964 that urged members to participate in civil rights campaigns and demonstrations, the SBC considered a similar resolution, but left it to local churches to decide on the issue.Footnote ⁵⁷ Those in favor of some measure of support for the Civil Rights Act looked for guidance to the Apostle Paul, who wrote in his Roman epistle, “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Others thumbed through their Bibles for a dissenting opinion.

The SBC made up a substantial segment of the biblical literalist evangelical and fundamentalist communities. And evangelicals in general followed a path similar to that which the southern Baptists had taken. Evangelicals grappled, however sporadically, with race and injustice. Key movement publications registered rumblings of concern. In 1962 Christianity Today had a circulation of 140,000 and in the next decade it would become the most widely read magazine for American clergy. It was the voice of white evangelical opinion. Yet while civil rights dominated national headlines and journalists scrutinized King's and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's every move, Christianity Today infrequently reported on the African American freedom struggle and very rarely mentioned King.Footnote ⁵⁹ Contributors in the 1960s tended to call for individual political action rather than corporate or church-sponsored engagement. Christians were to support the civil authorities, its writers declared. Yet believers should not demand that others take a specific stand on state intervention or race relations.Footnote ⁶⁰

An 8 May 1964 editorial in Christianity Today spelled out a characteristic evangelical position on the legislation. “While the church should not engage in politics,” wrote editor Carl Henry, “it is nevertheless an inescapable obligation for Christians to take part in public affairs.” If some of the faithful chose to support the cause of black equality, then so be it. But what about a civil rights bill? asked Henry. Without officially endorsing it, and cryptically alluding to problems of enforcement, he concluded by remarking that fellow believers had far too often lagged behind on matters of racial justice. If conscience led men and women to support legislation, then they should do so.Footnote ⁶¹

Earlier at a winter convention the National Association of Evangelicals adopted a vague statement of approval for laws that intended to insure basic equality. Arkansas native Clyde Taylor, who served as secretary of public affairs for the organization from 1944 to 1963, helped explain their cautious position to millions of constituents across the country. In a “pros-and-cons” letter, Taylor dissected the proposed bill months before its passage. Unfortunately, he worried, many religious leaders were equating desegregation with integration. Said Taylor, “Integration is basically a privilege that must be earned. It is equally as wrong and unconstitutional to force integration as it is to force segregation.”Footnote ⁶² Then he went on to call for Congress to guarantee that the bill would not coerce integration or attempt to correct racial imbalances. This well matched what Carl Henry championed in the pages of Christianity Today and elsewhere. Christians should respect the law and push for just legislation while opposing a coercive, overbearing government.Footnote ⁶³

Regardless of Taylor's careful position and his exposition of the subtleties of desegregation versus integration, the NAE's stand prompted considerable, largely hostile, reactions from evangelicals, especially those in Dixie. White evangelical anxieties about an intrusive, tyrannical federal government ran deeper than NAE leaders ever imagined. For instance, in February 1964 a representative from a missions organization in Dallas, Texas, a city which just a few months before had been the scene of a national tragedy, wrote to Taylor's Washington, DC office in protest. This disgruntled Texan thought the bill would clear “the way completely for a socialistic–communistic type government.” He threateningly quoted Dante to drive home his point about the need for action against the unjust law: “The hottest fires in Hell are reserved for those who in times of grave moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Others wrote to Taylor to let him know their severe displeasure with the NAE's statement on the bill. “My wife said right away,” wrote a man from Bakersfield, California, “don't you send them any more money.” Writing from Senator Barry Goldwater's home state of Arizona, another assured Taylor that “the government cannot replace God. If this nation trusts in the government, doom is it's [sic] fate.”Footnote ⁶⁵

In a barrage of damage-control missives Taylor replied that the organization did not officially endorse the bill. He also reminded constituents that when representatives from the National Council of Churches asked for NAE participation in civil rights vigils and marches the evangelical organization refused to take part. His protestations mattered little. The more conservative members of the NAE, many in the South, could not be calmed. One particularly riled correspondent appended a typed note to a form letter that Taylor mailed to pastors. “I regret that you got mixed up in the civil rights bill,” lamented the Louisiana minister. In his opinion, “the negroes have gotten too much sympathy and federal handouts now … why don't you sponsor a resolution to get them to go to work and get off the charity rolls[?]”Footnote ⁶⁶

The NAE's timid acceptance of the Civil Rights Bill could hardly be called enthusiastic. Indeed, such groups emphasized the law and public order in ways that Martin Luther King Jr. so effectively criticized in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”Footnote ⁶⁷ “I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law,” King bluntly observed from his cell, “but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: ‘Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.’” Graham did not support King's epistle.Footnote ⁶⁸

Many in the evangelical fold, Graham among them, believed that King asked for Christians to let the state solve the nation's problems. A fierce brand of antistatism ran through the evangelical and fundamentalist movements. The historian Matthew Sutton has shown that even in the 1930s and 1940s conservative Christians bristled at what they considered a growing federal presence. Observes Sutton, “Under Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal the federal government, [Harold] Ockenga asserted, had become a direct threat to true Christianity.” “White evangelicals' long-standing antistatism,” Sutton also notes, “reinforced their reluctance to act on racial issues or to support the nascent civil rights movement. They remained highly suspicious of any attempt by the federal government to encourage integration as socialist and suspect.”Footnote ⁶⁹ For Billy Graham the power to save or redeem an individual rested in the hands of God, not in the hands of the federal government. On a related theme the historian Steven Miller has charted what he calls the “religiously informed antiliberalism” of evangelicals. Miller rightly states that for key leaders like Carl Henry a critique of liberal Protestantism could also serve as a critique of the liberal state. Since liberal churches had become so identified with the Social Gospel since the early twentieth century, it is little wonder that conservatives reacted with such suspicion to the social-uplift schemes of the religious and political center and left.Footnote ⁷⁰ And yet many evangelical leaders and laity would have called for a strong federal presence when it came to the defense industry, protecting traditional families, regulating public morality, or keeping prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Meaning that, for the most part, believers were content to have the federal government's backing when it came to their conservative agenda.

Fundamentalists, far more agitated by what they viewed as an overly activist and socialist government, stiffened at the thought of Kennedy's and Johnson's plans to enact and enforce federal civil rights laws. Civil rights legislation would do away with the free market and would make Americans slaves to the state. Jerry Falwell actively campaigned against civil rights and warned his congregants and radio listeners of this new red peril. The Virginia pastor was also instrumental in fusing conservative Protestantism and free-market capitalism. Others were doing the same during the civil rights era and at least part of their opposition to the bill had to do with its potential threat to businesses.Footnote ⁷¹

Business leaders long courted evangelical support and vice versa. When Billy Graham wrote to oil titan J. Howard Pew asking for sponsorship of the conservative, anticommunist Christian Today, Pew responded with a generous $150,000 donation.Footnote ⁷² Many American conservatives, evangelicals among them, lauded the work of the invisible hand, while slapping the visible, meddling hands of the government. “Take your hands off!” Barry Goldwater seemed to say in his 1960 manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative. Evangelicals largely agreed with his principal points. “Our tendency to concentrate power in the hands of a few men deeply concerns me,” the senator fretted. “We can be conquered by bombs or by subversion; but we can also be conquered by neglect – by ignoring the Constitution and disregarding the principles of limited government.”Footnote ⁷³ The popular evangelical preacher Tim LaHaye, who would later go on to co-author multimillion-selling apocalyptic thrillers, pledged his support for Goldwater in 1964 and others followed suit. At a Dallas summer 1964 convention for his Christian Crusade organization, Hargis made clear his “one million percent” support for Goldwater. The Arizona Republican's stand against the Civil Rights Bill drew Hargis to his cause. “The persecuted minority in America is not the Negro,” said Hargis to a reporter, “but the white folks of the South.”Footnote ⁷⁴

That kind of overheated rhetoric would not play well among more moderate evangelicals. Indeed, Goldwater's no vote on the Civil Rights Act, his unabashed states rights rhetoric, and the specter of Birchism that his campaign conjured left many evangelicals cold. His candidacy appealed far more to fundamentalists and especially those in the South. Still the pro-business, hidden-hand capitalism that Goldwater espoused was agreeable.Footnote ⁷⁵ Believers also appreciated his tough stand on crime and social disorder.

Social problems plagued the nation, Billy Graham told an audience of students at the University of Michigan on 13 February 1964. The evangelist applauded President Johnson's early efforts to address the crippling poverty that still gripped the nation. A little more than a month before Graham's Michigan speech the President had launched the War on Poverty during his State of the Union Address. Graham, like millions of other conservative white Christians, had his doubts about state-sponsored welfare and social-justice schemes. He looked out over the sea of college students in Ann Arbor and spoke of the “race problem.” Graham spoke of the civil rights bill that the House had passed and the Senate was now considering. Even if it did become the law of the land, he warned his young audience, the race problem would still not be solved.Footnote ⁷⁶ Race prejudice was the result of a sinful human heart. No law could change the heart. Sin, as always, was personal. And really only those individuals who knew Jesus could truly overcome race hatred.

Beyond Graham, what did rank-and-file white evangelicals think about integration in the wake of the bill? One way to answer that is by looking at the opinions of readers of the Christian Herald, based in New York City. It was one of the most popular magazines in the country, amassing an enormous readership of 431,000 by the early 1960s. The magazine had developed into a kind of Reader's Digest of conservative Protestantism. Its contributors and correspondents praised the virtues of individualism and decried the welfare state just as they counseled each other on personal and family matters. It tried to steer a middle ground for moderate evangelicals, supporters of Billy Graham, and readers of self-help pop psychologist Norman Vincent Peale.Footnote ⁷⁷

In 1964 the Herald's editor hoped to gauge what readers thought of race and integration. Late in the year the magazine sent out survey forms to its nearly half a million subscribers. Would you object to a neighbor who was of a different race than you? they asked. The poll also wanted to know if readers from the fifty states would accept a person of another race as a member of their church if that person met the criteria for membership. The cross-denominational poll showed that, in the abstract, most readers were likely to accept persons of color into their churches and neighborhoods. But the numbers were skewed heavily by region. On the question of race and church membership 68 percent of Alabama respondents said they would not accept a person of a different race into their church, even if that individual met membership requirements. The same percentage of South Carolina readers answered that way as well. By contrast, only 8 percent of Californians and 5 percent of New Yorkers answered “no” on the church membership question.Footnote ⁷⁸

The editor of the Herald was discouraged by the segregationist views still present in Protestant churches across the country. To some extent, so too was Graham, who had become a kind of folk hero of moderation for the magazine's readers. A native southerner, Graham tried desperately to reach beyond regional barriers in his message of personal salvation.Footnote ⁷⁹

Graham's message did influence America's power elite. Some determined opponents of the bill cited Graham for support. US Senator Willis Robertson, a conservative Democrat from Virginia and an admirer of Graham, had opposed the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision as a horrible overstep of federal power. Now, ten years later, the devout Baptist and father of future GOP presidential candidate Pat Robertson was fighting aggressively against the Civil Rights Bill on the floor of the Senate. Filibustering in the chamber on 9 April 1964, Robertson mused about the South's unique Christian heritage and what he considered proper Christian race relations, illustrated with a story of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson and his faithful slave.Footnote ⁸⁰

The senator then turned his attention to another example of southern Christian living, Billy Graham. Robertson quoted Graham:

Having made his point about the tragedy of enforced integration by citing America's most famous evangelist, Robertson went on to hint at the nefarious souls behind the planned legislation: “Satanic forces are at work to delude even the most wary among us.” Though he claimed not to impugn the motives of the bill's supporters, he remarked, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and some have been badly deluded.”Footnote ⁸²

In the coming years, violent protests, cultural upheaval, and the rise of the counterculture confirmed believers' worst fears about national moral and spiritual decline and the government's utter inability to work for the good of the nation.Footnote ⁸³ Late in the summer of 1965, as riots broke out in Los Angeles and 15,000 national guardsmen and law-enforcement officials tried to quell unrest in which thirty-three died, Graham pleaded for calm. He asked Martin Luther King to “call on civil rights leaders to declare a moratorium on demonstrations until the people of the North and West have an opportunity to digest the new civil rights acts.” The evangelist also said that Congress should drop all other legislation for the time being in order to pass new laws dealing with riots and violence.Footnote ⁸⁴ Lingering not far behind statements about civil rights was the feeling, shared by numerous evangelicals, that the marches and protests were disorderly or had had some hand in lawlessness. Eight years after King's assassination Graham recalled, “yes, [MLK] had his demonstrations out in the streets, while I had mine as lawful religious services in stadiums.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Despite such remarks, in just ten years' time, quite a few evangelical ministers and laypeople would make an about-face on the civil rights issue. Some would even admit that they had been wrong and that the supposed “biblical view” on which they had stood was not the “biblical view” at all.Footnote ⁸⁶ Locked into a literal reading of Scripture, the faithful would have still agreed with a writer in the conservative Moody Monthly who in 1966 insisted that Christians must look to the Scripture with pressing contemporary questions in mind: “what is the Bible's teaching on sex and morality? What does it say about the home? And what does it say about race?”Footnote ⁸⁷ Eventually Graham, prodded by socially conscious evangelicals like the English John Stott, and pushed by changing political winds, would open up his views to a slightly more progressive position on race and social justice. Still, the individualistic view of salvation and the distrust of the federal government would remain. So would the evangelical mantra of moderation and a fear of govenment tyranny.

Those fears, linked as they were to the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, became full-blown in the 1970s and actually helped generate the new Christian right. Seven years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act the District Court of Washington, DC supported the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) position in the Green v. Connally case. That ruling made clear that any organization that discriminated on the basis of race could not maintain tax-exempt status.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the 1970s the Carter-appointed head of the IRS argued that private Christian academies and universities, primarily in the South, should have to prove that they were not segregated, or lose tax-exempt status. Even before that, though, the fundamentalist Bob Jones University came under scrutiny. In 1974 BJU was still excluding unmarried black students because of the fear of miscegenation. The policy applied to other non-whites as well. “We will accept Orientals,” said a university spokesman in June 1974, “but they must not date out of their race.” The Justice Department, under the Civil Rights Act, branded the school discriminatory. Yet since BJU received no federal funds, withdrawing tax-exempt status was the only federal recourse.Footnote ⁸⁹

White evangelical and fundamentalist critics cried foul and rallied around BJU and schools that faced a similar fate. Before antiabortion activism or antifeminism drew millions to the cause, government threats to Christian schools drove political protest. The leaders of the rising Christian right pointed to the enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and federal actions against BJU as chief factors prodding greater political activism and support for Ronald Reagan.Footnote ⁹⁰ So said Paul Weyrich, conservative activist, cofounder of the Heritage Foundation, and coiner of the term “moral majority.” Looking back on the origins of the Christian right Weyrich recalled that

That also rang true for the former vice president of the Moral Majority, who later recalled that the “Religious New Right did not start because of a concern about abortion.” He added, “I sat in the non-smoke-filled back room with the Moral Majority, and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a reason why we ought to do something.”Footnote ⁹² Similarly, Richard Viguerie, who pioneered direct mailing for the Christian right, remembered that the IRS enforcement “kicked the sleeping dog” and “galvanized the religious right.” Switching metaphors again, the high-profile figure concluded, “It was the spark that ignited the religious right's involvement in real politics.”Footnote ⁹³ University of Pennsylvania political scientist Rogers M. Smith thinks that such pronouncements are largely accurate. After feds targeted schools, writes Smith, “It seemed clear to many conservative evangelicals that their organizations were indeed at risk of losing forms of beneficial governmental treatment they had long enjoyed, whatever their other dissatisfactions with modern American life.” When the case went on to the Supreme Court the Center for Law and Religious Freedom filed an amicus brief on behalf of BJU and so did the National Association of Evangelicals.Footnote ⁹⁴ Conservative Christians, on the defensive, felt pressed by federal power. They asked themselves, would they have control over the education of their children? Were the sanctions against BJU just the beginning of more intrusive federal policies?Footnote ⁹⁵

Weyrich's gambit worked. Evangelicals voted solidly Republican from the 1980s forward. Sixty eight percent of them cast their ballots for George W. Bush in the year 2000; in 2004, 78 percent did so.Footnote ⁹⁶ By then the once beleaguered movement had entered the halls of power. With that came other changes. In the 1990s organizations like Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family, and Pentecostal denominations such as the Assemblies of God, sponsored events that would attempt to bridge the racial divide and pushed for racial reconciliation.Footnote ⁹⁷ Fundamentalists, by contrast, did not launch similar initiatives. Yet fundamentalist and evangelical suspicions of an overbearing government lingered. As of 2009 far fewer conservative white Christians supported national health care than those in other denominations. It is not surprising that surveys showed that the Tea Party – the most significant protest against big government and the Affordable Care Act – drew disproportionate strength from evangelical ranks. In a 2010 poll, when Tea Partiers were asked if they agreed that the government was almost always wasteful, 87 percent of them said yes.Footnote ⁹⁸ At the same time evangelicals have tended to call for greater federal action on issues like the defense of traditional marriage, military spending, or limits to abortion laws.Footnote ⁹⁹

In the more than fifty years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act evangelicals have grappled in new ways with important questions concerning race, the individual and larger society, as well as local versus national political issues. Yet in many ways certain features have remained the same. Racism, like adultery or blasphemy, was still considered the product of a sinful heart. Indeed, notions of personal responsibility and individual salvation, along with a suspicion of an impersonal, controlling state, have continued to shape evangelical and fundamentalist beliefs and behavior.