[explogate 01: introduction]

BILLY GRAHAM, RICHARD NIXON, WATERGATE & EXPLO ‘72

Mike Hertenstein
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read
In 1972, the “aura of sanctity” met “radical religious protest” at a very busy crossroads: the intersecting paths of politics and religion, of Richard Nixon and Billy Graham, of Watergate and the “Woodstock of the Jesus Movement.”

Light a spiritual fire that can sweep the world for Christ! It was happening right before their eyes: individual flames, joined in a solidarity of fire. They defied the darkness, together, in the closing ceremony of Explo ’72 — June 16, 1972. To be in the midst of that, to be a part of that, was exactly the sort of peak-experience these nearly one-hundred thousand young people filling the Cotton Bowl had come across the country to find. They’d caravanned, hitchhiked, trained, planed, church-bused to Dallas, ideally, to encounter God. What that meant — or how it played out — was beyond words. A stadium full of candles seemed an effective way to express the Ineffable.

In other ways, Explo was a glorified Christian youth camp. Many of the attendees were a long away from home and parents, among peers they’d met en-route or bumped into downtown, camping in church basements across the metro area. The moment seemed critical. The world was on the brink of… something. And youth seemed to be right at the center of whatever it was. It felt bigger than a single week in a single summer. It felt like a turning point in history, especially to those who could later trace back nearly a half-century to that last-night in the Cotton Bowl before they scattered their separate ways.

From this near half-century distance, the safest conclusion about Explo ‘72 is that it took place during a long moment of radical cultural transformation, described by chroniclers as a “great shift” or even a “nervous breakdown.”¹ Where the Sixties turned into the Seventies remains in hot dispute but that was part of the shift, as debate over the Sixties became the new American center. Those in a rising reaction tended to see the era’s historical shifts not as products of historical forces, but as the product of the forces of evil. Philip Jenkins, in Decade of Nightmares, sees the 1970s as an era when the complexities of contemporary problems were pushed aside “by simpler and more sinister visions of the enemies facing Americans and their nation” — often “in terms of conspiracy and clandestine manipulation.”² Religious explanations found traction, as did public figures who used them.

The most popular and influential religious leader of the era was Billy Graham — an icon of moral aspiration, beloved as a sign of hope. Yet the evangelist launched his career denouncing Communism as “Satan’s Religion,” and would be caught on Richard Nixon’s taping system warning against evil Jews. That notorious conversation tapped into a tradition of Christian antisemitism that has stained church history for millennia. For Graham, such views seemed at odds with his public image; defenders have struggled to reconcile these ever since. For Nixon, Jews were but one of a galaxy of enemies he feared were constantly plotting against him, a paranoid vision that would spread like those flickering lights in the stadium to fill mainstream political discourse.

It was on that same Oval Office recording in which the preacher and President engage in their infamous antisemitic exchange that they also talked about Explo ’72. It was on the same night that Explo climaxed with the candle ceremony that Nixon’s political espionage team was arrested trying to bug Democratic National Headquarters. Noting the coincidence of these events is not so much to add to the conspiracy-mongering as raise questions as to whether all these things were truly unconnected. Indeed, a certain shared trajectory might be traced across that summer from the Oval Office to the Cotton Bowl to the Watergate hotel to Nixon’s landslide re-election that fall.

“Watergate,” of course, is bigger than the break-in, and came to symbolize Nixonian criminality in particular and political corruption in general. “Explogate” risks adding to the moral inflation that has come of applying that suffix to scandals ever since. On the other hand, “Explogate,” has unique relevance in this case, and helps hold together the several stories told here.

Taken together, the stories reveal how Explo, as symbol and part of larger shifts of the era, was compromised by paranoid politicking from the start: shadows are cast across the era’s youth revival — which, for those not blinded by the glow, was never so monolithic as all the One Way talk suggested.

Appropriately, this account choruses with recurring visits to that ritual of American civil religion, the National Prayer Breakfast. That annual rite of Religion-in-General, to adapt the axiom of another skeptic, represents a kind of religiosity taken by some as generally authentic, by others as generally inauthentic, and by the capitol’s faithful as generally useful. For Richard Nixon, the Prayer Breakfast was a necessary evil that came with his office.

It may have been one of the least of evils that came with that office…

NEXT: [explogate 02: the aura of sanctity]

PREACHER AND PRESIDENT ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

[explogate 03: big national youth deal]

“THE WOODSTOCK OF THE JESUS MOVEMENT”

[explogate 04: radical religious protest]

VARIETIES OF MORAL AWAKENING

[explogate 05: all the president’s men]

THE EXTENDED CUT

[explogate 06: it only takes a spark]

NEVER BE AFRAID TO STAND ALONE

[explogate 07: endnotes]

© 2018 Mike Hertenstein. All rights reserved.

Mike Hertenstein

Written by

Scholar in the garret, monk in the cell, heckler in the back. Late-life seminary student. Writer, reader, listener, watcher.

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