{"id":37088,"date":"2018-03-06T20:23:04","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T01:23:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=37088"},"modified":"2018-03-06T20:23:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T01:23:04","slug":"cold-war-culture-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2018\/03\/06\/cold-war-culture-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cold War before the culture war"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

One of my favorite pieces on the legacy of Billy Graham also has one of the best titles \u2014 \u201cBilly Graham and the Hell Bomb<\/a>s.\u201d You now have the name for your next rockabilly and\/or Mojo Nixon tribute band. You\u2019re welcome.<\/p>\n

Billy Graham and the Hell Bombs, maybe (she\u2019s Billy).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is from Philip Jenkins over at the Anxious Bench. Graham\u2019s death has Jenkins revisiting some old research of his into 1950s-era anti-Communist politics in Pennsylvania. \u201cAs part of that,\u201d he writes, \u201cI explored Graham\u2019s historic 1952 crusade in Pittsburgh, which was then a primary battlefield of anti-Red campaigning.\u201d<\/p>\n

What follows is a terrific little history lesson \u2014 one that focuses in on some granular specifics that I think help us to understand broader themes. Despite the Pittsburgh setting, this story hits closer to home for me here on the other side of the commonwealth \u2014 with unflattering cameos from my former home town (Ardmore) and my alma mater (EBTS).<\/p>\n

[Graham\u2019s] Pittsburgh crusade of 1952 coincided with the public panic over so-called \u201chell-bombs\u201d \u2013 hydrogen bombs \u2013 and of nuclear warfare more generally. (The first full hydrogen bomb test would occur in November 1952, but the concept had been widely discussed for some years, and there had been several partial tests). Graham consistently presented world-events in this eschatological framework. He declared that \u201cAll of the trouble with Russia began in the Garden of Eden.\u201d Only a religious revival could prevent what was ultimately a spiritual rather than a political menace: \u201cUnless this country has a revival of both morals and religion, it can\u2019t survive the onslaught of Communism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham represented the apocalyptic strain in the evangelical approach to Communism, the diabolical inspiration of which was proved by the destruction of Christian missions in China and elsewhere. The imminence of the end times might well be signaled by historic events like the recent return of the Jews to the land of Israel \u2013 and of course, the development of larger and larger nuclear weapons. If you did not recognize that these were the end times, you weren\u2019t reading the headlines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Graham\u2019s anti-Communism also made his evangelistic outreach implicitly political<\/em>. The Cold War was not a partisan political issue, but Graham\u2019s apocalyptic approach aligned him with the conservative side of the spectrum.<\/p>\n

Though overt political references were not part of Graham\u2019s sermons, news coverage of the event was steeped in apocalyptic and anti-Communist rhetoric, and the organizing committee included such firm enemies of the Communist challenge as Governor John Fine and Sam Shoemaker, and a roll-call of the region\u2019s most conservative evangelicals. The astonishing response was influenced by fears of nuclear apocalypse, which resonated so closely with religious concerns and predictions. As Graham remarked at that time, \u201cThe advent of the atomic bomb and push-button warfare has silenced those who once scoffed at talk of doom\u2019s day.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Graham was a \u201cRapture\u201d Christian. He believed in the fatalistic, otherworldly premillennial dispensationalist system that became popular in the early 20th Century when the more hopeful strain of postmillennial Christianity began to lose a bit of its Glory, glory, hallelujah. He believed that \u201cdoom\u2019s day\u201d was prophesied, predestined, and inevitable, yet he wasn\u2019t giddy about the prospect of it the way so many later PMD \u201cBible prophecy\u201d enthusiasts seemed to be. I\u2019m still trying to suss out how this influenced his politics. (The influence of eschatology on politics is confusing because it isn\u2019t usually coherent. See, for example: Tim LaHaye.)<\/p>\n

My main point here, though, is that as Jenkins notes, Graham\u2019s anti-Communism was an essential aspect of his message, his persona, and his popular appeal from the start of his ministry on up through the 1980s. This is why it won\u2019t do to portray Graham as less partisan in his politics than his successors in the religious right. He was a Cold Warrior rather than a culture warrior, but Cold War politics shaped his message and his identity just as much as culture-war politics shapes theirs. That politics provided him with a politically conservative base of financial support and thus bound him in turn as a supporter of political conservatives.<\/p>\n

Jenkins commends Stephen Carter\u2019s essay on \u201cBilly Graham\u2019s Record on Race<\/a>,\u201d but I think a big piece of what Carter misses there can be explained by the anti-Communist core identity that Jenkins\u2019 own essay describes. Graham\u2019s initial, admirable support for moderate steps toward integration faltered later when civil rights\u2019 leaders began to be painted as Commies. His somewhat overstated friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. dissipated when King began explicitly questioning and challenging capitalism. And I\u2019m sure that J. Howard Pew and the other wealthy conservative supporters Jenkins mentions had something to say about all of that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not suggesting a straightforward quid-pro-quo there, with Graham recognizing the right thing to do with regard to support for the Civil Rights Movement and then choosing not to do it so as not to anger his powerful and wealthy allies. I think, rather, that partly because he was tied to and shaped by those allies, he was unable to recognize the right thing to do.<\/p>\n

In any case, the culture-war partisanship of contemporary white evangelicalism is not a radical break from the Cold War conservatism of Billy Graham. It\u2019s a direct result of it. To understand how that happened, I\u2019ll want to return again to the 1981 manifesto that Richard John Neuhaus wanted us to forget<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Billy Graham’s anti-Communism was an essential aspect of his message, his persona, and his popular appeal from the start of his ministry on up through the 1980s. He was a Cold Warrior rather than a culture warrior. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[183,77,158,28],"class_list":["post-37088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-warfare","category-evangelicals","tag-billy-graham","tag-justice","tag-racism","tag-religious-right"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Cold War before the culture war<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Billy Graham's anti-Communism was an essential aspect of his message, his persona, and his popular appeal from the start of his ministry on up through the 1980s. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Cold War before the culture war","description":"Billy Graham's anti-Communism was an essential aspect of his message, his persona, and his popular appeal from the start of his ministry on up through the 1980s. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}