America’s Pastor review: when Billy Graham talked the talk

America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation

Author: Grant Wacker

ISBN-13: 978-0674052185

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Guideline Price: £20

In the prologue to America's Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation Grant Wacker says that his purpose was not to write a conventional biography but to "explore Graham's place in the great gulf streams of American history in the long second half of the twentieth century". In doing so he hopes to answer a number of fundamental questions about "Graham's story".

What can Billy Graham’s life and career tell us about the pervasive rise of evangelical religion? What does it say about the relationship between religion and American culture? How did “Graham’s story” help shape Americans’ stories? In short: “Why does Graham matter?”

In reflecting on these questions Wacker acknowledges that it is unlikely Graham ever exercised much influence on public policy. But he says that Graham did exercise considerable influence in another, “subtle and deep way”. He played a large role in shaping public consciousness, in shaping “how Americans perceived the world around them, how they interpreted those perceptions and how they acted upon them”.

As such Wacker sees in Graham, as in Martin Luther King jnr and Pope John Paul II, “one of the most creatively influential Christians” of the 20th century.

America's Pastor begins with a short sketch of Graham's life. Wacker goes on to examine components of his career: Graham as preacher, icon, southerner, pilgrim and so forth. There is much in these chapters that any reader of the history of the modern American evangelical movement will find interesting.

In the chapter “Preacher”, for example, we learn a good deal about Graham’s basic articles of faith, his views on providence, grace, new birth and the end of life. We also learn about his style of preaching and why his listeners found his message – which more often than not Graham tied to contemporary issues – so compelling.

In the chapters “Icon”, “Entrepreneur” and “Architect” we discover that Graham’s extraordinary success was no accident, that his “rise, singularity, and longevity as a religious icon is a constructed story”.

At the cornerstone of this edifice stands the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, a nonprofit religious corporation Graham founded in 1950 to oversee his finances and help manage his rapidly growing evangelical empire.

By this point Graham had already launched his widely popular Hour of Decision radio programme, which would soon be replicated on television. Even more significant was Graham's foray into print media, through such venues as a syndicated daily Q&A column called "My Answer", or the later launch of the glossy Decision magazine. Most important was Graham's 1956 establishment of the semi-academic Christianity Today, which according to Wacker remains the most widely read serious Christian periodical in the world.

Graham also benefited from the attention he received from the press tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, both of whom directed their considerable empires to give Graham and his rallies ample coverage.

Decision card

The evangelist was not without his critics, of course. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, observing Graham in action at Madison Square Garden in 1957, noted that “mass evangelism’s success depends on oversimplifying every issue . . . it promises a new life, not through painful religious experience, but merely by signing a decision card . . . A miracle of regeneration is promised at a painless price by an obviously sincere evangelist. It is a bargain.”

The decision card formed an integral part of Graham’s “crusades” – the highly organised mass rallies held across the US and the world, in which Graham called on his listeners to commit themselves to Christ. Those who came forward would be directed by “section captains” to waiting rooms at the back of the halls or stadiums, to fill out a decision card with their name and address, which would then be forwarded to local affiliated churches.

Wacker spends considerable time examining the potential number of converts. He also attempts to determine the overall number who heard Graham preach over the many decades of his career. Graham’s ability to attract enormous audiences is nothing short of remarkable – including an estimated 1.1 million in Seoul in June 1973.

Here we learn that most of the “inquirers” who ultimately made a decision for Christ were already committed to a religious outlook, which perhaps renders Graham’s success as an evangelist less spectacular. Still, his ability to attract hundreds of thousands to rallies in such diverse locations as Los Angeles and Moscow is extraordinary.

Indeed, Graham’s popularity raises a number of questions about the reasons for his success, which Wacker attempts to answer through personal interviews, an examination of the many letters Graham received, and his own studied observations of Graham’s life and work.

While acknowledging that the evangelist was helped along the way by the favourable media environment and the favourable press he received early in his career, the author attributes most of Graham’s success to the man himself. This seems understandable, given his entrepreneurial savvy and the nature of the merchandise he was selling (referred to as “the best product on earth”). But it still does not explain how Graham could attract such a large following in the first place – long before he became a household name in the US.

Spontaneous movement

In this sense Wacker’s book would benefit from a more detailed look at the United States’ religious and cultural milieu at the start of Graham’s career. Was Graham simply the most successful example of a seemingly spontaneous evangelical movement that emerged (or re-emerged) in the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s or was he one of the initiators of that movement?

Wacker’s examination of Graham’s place in US politics and culture forms one of the most interesting, and at times surprising, aspects of his book. His early, cautious endorsement of the civil-rights movement in the mid 1950s will come as surprise to many readers, as will his decision to participate in a peace conference in Moscow in 1982. This despite his often-professed anti-communism and the lukewarm reception the idea received from Ronald Reagan’s administration. Wacker also explores Graham’s relationships with a host of American presidents, from Truman to Obama.

Perhaps his most important observation concerning Graham’s influence on American life and politics comes in examining the “vast social and cultural transformation” that took place in the US in the middle third of the 20th century – what historians have called the southernising of the United States.

It is here that his influence on mainstream US culture becomes most apparent, for Graham, who was universally recognised as a southerner, helped legitimise this process. He was “just enough of a southerner to be appealing” and so was able to bridge “the delicate balance between the South as a definable region and the South as an attractive, exportable commodity”. The result is a US that has become much more open to and influenced by conservative southern values, both political and social.

The examination of Graham’s role in this process of “southernisation”, along with his discussion of his complicated relationship with the civil-rights movement and other important issues of the day, helps bolster Wacker’s claim that his purpose is to determine Graham’s influence in “the shaping of a nation”.

Taken as a whole, however, America's Pastor is not so much about Graham's influence on the overall formation of the United States of the late 20th century as it is about Graham's influence on the formation of modern American evangelicalism, and the latter's relationship with mainstream Protestantism and Christian fundamentalism.

Not that such an exploration has no merit. On the contrary, there is much in the book that even a reader with only a passing interest in modern religion will find interesting. But Wacker also spends considerable time – too much time, in this writer’s view – exploring doctrinal issues to make the claim that he has written a book focused on Billy Graham’s part in the shaping of a nation.

David B Woolner is Hyde Park resident historian of the Roosevelt Institute in New York