Ross Douthat reviews Stephen P. Miller’s Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South for the New York Times:
This is one of the stories that can be told about Billy Graham and the civil rights era—a narrative that portrays the preacher’s role in his native South’s reluctant abandonment of segregation as essentially heroic. Graham’s rise to prominence as an evangelist coincided with the turbulent years between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964, and throughout that decade he wrote and sermonized in favor of racial harmony, staged desegregated rallies in balkanized cities, and counseled obedience to court rulings and legislation that many of his fellow Southerners were determined to resist. As a voice for both Christian conservatism and racial progress, he served as a bridge between the Old South and the New, and as a model for a region struggling to shed its worst baggage without losing its identity.
That’s one story. But there’s another story as well, one that paints Graham as a coward and an apologist for racial backlash. He supported desegregation but took few risks on its behalf; he cultivated a studied moderation in a time that cried out for moral clarity; he was more interested in flattering the white South’s self-regard than in calling his region to true repentance. As a steadfast supporter of Richard Nixon’s career, from the 1950s down through Watergate, he simultaneously enabled and embodied Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” which shut civil rights liberalism out of power and turned the region Republican for a generation.
Neither story is the whole truth, but both are true. And it’s a credit to Steven P. Miller that his “Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South,” a study of the evangelist’s relationship to the cause of civil rights on the one hand and the cause of conservatism on the other, does justice to the tensions and complexities involved—for Graham, for the South and for the country. In Miller’s account, one of 20th-century America’s most important religious leaders emerges as a representative political actor as well, whose example is worth pondering less because he was courageous than because he often wasn’t.
Read the full review here.