[explogate 06: it only takes a spark]

NEVER BE AFRAID TO STAND ALONE

Mike Hertenstein
Sep 7, 2018 · 8 min read

[conflict and conscience]

Election ’72 was over, but there was still so much more to the story. Echoes from the previous year continued to sound in the New Year. The spotlight turned — was turned — to the dramatic homecomings of Prisoners of War. Critics would charge that the POWs were being used to spin a military disaster into a kind of victory. The obvious counterspin to the counterspin was that such claims were unpatriotic, unfeeling. Peace and unity would be Richard Nixon’s theme at the 1973 National Prayer Breakfast.⁷⁹ Press coverage of the event, however, went to another speech: “Nixon Hears War Called a ‘Sin.’”⁸⁰

At the Breakfast, the keynote speaker rose from the platform table with the President and Billy Graham and, in front of them,⁸¹ the American military brass, Congressional hawks, the D.C. press corps, and even “three Russian atheists”⁸² (whose ideology saw religion as opiate of the masses) delivered what was taken as a blistering rebuke of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.

Senator Mark Hatfield was never afraid to stand alone.

Senator Mark Hatfield was an Oregon Republican, an Evangelical, and progressive for his party and perhaps more so. He’d been the co-sponsor with George McGovern of the Vietnam withdrawal legislation. (Both were famously bipartisan but McGovern so much so he’d almost made Hatfield his VP.⁸³) Hatfield had been thrilled to discover the Post-American, from the first issue — inspired to discover fellow Evangelicals trying to apply their faith to the culture with such moral courage.⁸⁴

The Republican Senator reached out to the band of countercultural Christian activists. He became a regular contributing editor to the Post-American, applying a theological and historical acumen to religion and politics usually absent from that conversation — including a view of public piety and power cognizant of the dangers civil religion represented to both church and state.⁸⁵ As Hatfield called out nationalism and militarism he called for a sense of corporate responsibility for American sins and obligation as a wealthy nation for have-nots at home and abroad. In 1975, when South Vietnam finally fell, America was long past wanting to think about “culpability for decades of a morally-indefensible policy whose final failure is now being revealed.”⁸⁶

Nobody wanted to hear about it in early 1973 either. Yet in his Prayer Breakfast speech, the Senator never directly referred to Nixon or Vietnam as he called for national repentance for “the sin that scarred our national soul.”⁸⁷ Hatfield’s primary target was the “misplaced allegiance, if not outright idolatry” of American civil religion. He contrasted what he called a “national folk religion devoid of moral content” to the “Biblical God of justice and righteousness” who will judge America for “calling upon His name, but failing to obey his commands.” Hatfield invoked German Christians who’d refused to submit to nationalist Nazi religion, calling for a “confessing church” to live the true Gospel, even when that set it “at odds with values of our society, abuses of political power, and cultural conformity of our church.”⁸⁸ UPI reporter Wesley Pippert called the speech “one of the most dramatic confrontations since the Prophet Nathan” rebuked King David to his face for his sins.⁸⁹

Billy Graham seemed to be the one who took the speech the most personally. He mailed a reproof to Hatfield, whom he told should have thanked the President, as he would tell Nixon, “instead of getting up, talking about the sins, and… really, it was terrible…inexcusable.” Graham declared that if Mark Hatfield was ever at the Breakfast again, “I don’t intend to go.”⁹⁰ (This was also the phone call where he and Nixon talked about Jews and Graham warned Nixon for a second time about the Synagogue of Satan.⁹¹)

In his 1971 book Conflict and Conscience, Hatfield noted Lincoln’s words quoted by Nixon at another Prayer Breakfast about having God on one’s side vs. being on God’s side — and the pain of finding himself opposed on what he felt were clear moral issues by so many who claimed to share his Evangelical faith.⁹² Soon enough, Nixon would resign in disgrace. Billy Graham, shell-shocked, would withdraw to the wilderness, leaving Evangelicals to rising new forces that drew many into endless war against “The Sixties.”

[conversions]

Not many knew it at the time, but Mark Hatfield’s speech at the 1973 Prayer Breakfast had been written by his young friend and ally, Jim Wallis.⁹³ Later that same year, Wallis would help organize a gathering in Chicago that produced the “Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern,” and lead to the founding of Evangelicals for Social Action (ESA).⁹⁴ Wallis moved with a remnant of his Chicago community to Washington, D.C. to find a niche among Evangelical progressives, including the GOP Senator.

By the late 70s, Wallis and his renamed Sojourners magazine contributed significant leadership in what was becoming a rising anti-nuclear movement.⁹⁵ Hatfield had been anti-nuke since, as a young naval officer, he’d walked in the ruins of Hiroshima.⁹⁶ Now he asked Wallis to write an amendment for a new treaty that otherwise promised to reaffirm the nuclear status quo.⁹⁷ This “moratorium” set the stage for what became a national Nuclear Freeze movement, a major issue in the early 80s.⁹⁸

Billy Graham’s “change of heart.”

In this cause, Hatfield and Wallis found an unexpected ally: Billy Graham, who in 1979 emerged from his political wilderness to speak out against the arms race. The evangelist had testified to a “conversion” experience in his recent personal encounter with genocide at Auschwitz.⁹⁹ Few in Graham’s generation made that link between Nazi and nuclear holocaust, for so doing threatened the old distinction between “winning” and “losing” a war, and also between Us and Them — i.e. the Good People and the Evil Others.¹⁰⁰ Perhaps if he’d made that link sooner, Billy Graham may have better understood the Sixties revolt, a rebellion that was largely built on the rejection of bankrupt Cold War“ethics”.

Jim Wallis was astonished by Graham’s new public stance. The two had first met at yet another National Prayer Breakfast a few years before. Wallis had been surprised to be invited to a “leaders” gathering and more surprised to be seated next to Billy Graham. The older Evangelical leader Wallis recalled, had made an effort to connect with the younger one, saying that they “should start talking together,” as there would be people who would try to divide them.¹⁰¹

After Wallis interviewed him for Sojourners,¹⁰² the evangelist was embraced by the anti-nuclear movement. Cheered by some, Graham would come to disappoint others who felt his stance wavered into ambiguity. He had admitted so much to Wallis, “I am not sure I have thought through all the implications of Christ’s lordship for this issue.” The evangelist’s old constituency, in the meantime, chose to stay with the simple certainties of Cold War dualism, as expressed by a new President who recruited the Evangelical political revival into a crusade against the Evil Empire.

Over time, Billy Graham seemed to process parts of his own biography, particularly his political involvement, with similar ambiguity. In later life, he said he regretted he’d “crossed the line.” Confronted with documentation of his role in the Nixon White House, as with his antisemitic statements, the aging evangelist seemed mostly bewildered.¹⁰³ “There have been times in the past when I have, I suppose, confused the kingdom of God with the American way of life,” he said.¹⁰⁴

Jim Wallis remained grateful to Billy Graham. When the evangelist died in 2018, Wallis wrote that Graham had “been an important figure in my life and vocation.” Wallis treasured Graham’s assurance that his own Gospel mission was “complementary” to Wallis’ call to apply the Gospel in contemporary culture and ways.¹⁰⁵ Earlier, Wallis praised the evangelist for his “willingness to learn, change, admit mistakes and go forward…a life-long learner, passionate about preaching the gospel but always ready to understand more about what that gospel means in the world.”¹⁰⁶ There may have been an allusion there to the possibility of a Gospel abstracted from the world, which a younger Wallis might have been less subtle pointing out, and a younger Graham less able to see.

Once you’ve experienced it, you want to pass it on.

[ironic points of light]

It’s hard not to love Billy Graham simply for being Billy Graham. Yet scholars complain that the evangelist’s status as an icon of American decency has been an obstacle to taking him seriously as a figure of American history.¹⁰⁷ That problem may reflect Graham’s own strange disconnect between his often other-worldly “spiritual” religion and his very this-worldly realpolitik. It may even reflect his characteristic approach to divine authority: appeals to pristine absolutes, abstracted from more ambiguous context and messier history.

This history is messy. Graham’s embrace of the “Jesus Generation” was compromised by his urgency to enlist “the youth vote” for Richard M. Nixon, blurring the evangelist’s call for a religious “decision” into partisan politics, a trajectory carried to further extremes by the evangelist’s constituency and son: “One Way” as a way of saying “We’re Number One!” or even worse.

Indeed, the ongoing striptease of Evangelical political involvement down to sheer power-politics stirs old questions whether twentieth-century public revivalism has represented less a faith in the biblical God than a grasp for the favor of the nation-state as a substitute deity at the end of the Christian era.

The classic denunciation of Billy Graham’s politicized faith and his relation to the Nixon White House remains theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1969 essay “The King’s Chapel and the King’s Court. Niebuhr contrasted a compliant civil religion with prophetic dissent, singling out “the Nixon-Graham doctrine” for promoting a generic religious authority marked by an obliviousness to the difference between kissing up to power and standing up for justice.

It remains as tricky as ever to identify the Real Thing. Whether religion is more than a language-game to baptize power and privilege and demonize the opposition must remain a topic for debate. Likewise civil religion, whose defenders include both a toxic Christian nationalism and moderates who warn that even the best civic spirituality is always at risk of sliding into a idolatry.¹⁰⁸ As for Niebuhr, the critical ingredient was the witness of the prophets, dissenters who disturb the seductive power of the Official Story. Dissent in itself is no guarantee that it represents “God’s Side” or any other moral equivalent. It does offer a hedge against the tyranny of “One Way,” and space for others excluded from the Official Story, the sort of others, in fact, for whom Christ himself seemed so keen to make space.

In this view, the solidarity suggested does not conjure the image of a stadium-sized firewall against the night so much as the scattered, lonely flickerings spied by the poet Auden:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

They say that once you’ve experienced it, you want to pass it on.

NEXT [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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