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How Billy Graham Married Evangelism and Anthropology

"America's Pastor" left behind a complex legacy built on Christian
worldviews and a deep sense of racial injustice. But, he wished for
more.

BRIAN HOWELL / 7 MAR 2018

On March 2, millions watched the funeral of the Rev. Billy Graham, one
of the most prominent religious figures of the 20th century. His life
was influential to many, and anthropology was an influence on him. As
an anthropology major at Wheaton College, young Graham encountered
ideas that permanently shaped his approach to his ministry,
particularly around issues of race and racial segregation.

Graham began his post-secondary education at the fundamentalist
Christian school Bob Jones College, then an unaccredited institution
in Cleveland, Tennessee, before moving to the then-unaccredited
Florida Bible Institute (now Trinity College of Florida) near Tampa.
After earning a two-year degree from there in 1940, he was encouraged
to attend Wheaton College, a Christian liberal arts school near
Chicago. Considering the possibility that he might go into foreign
mission work, and in pursuit of a well-rounded liberal arts education,
Graham moved to Illinois to attend Wheaton and major in anthropology.

The Wheaton College anthropology department was established in 1937 by Alexander Grigolia, a charismatic Russian émigré with a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. The curriculum
Grigolia developed reflected the views of Franz Boas, often considered
the founder of U.S. anthropology, who was an ardent opponent of the
scientific racism (the belief that scientific evidence proved the
existence of different racial groups and their inferiority or
superiority) prevalent in the early 20th century.

Grigolia’s curriculum seems to have had an impact. From the notes and markings Graham made in some of his anthropology textbooks, we can see
that he was an engaged, if inconsistent, student. Several chapters in
an introductory text contain prolific underlining. “Shilluk kill
hippopotami with a harpoon” caught his attention, as did “Salmon
catching Indians of British Columbia put up solid plank houses.” But
notably, in a different colored pencil, the following sentence was
underlined: “Absolutely pure races no longer exist; and this by itself
makes it extremely hard to distinguish existing groups on a racial
basis.”

After Graham graduated with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in
1943, he spent a few years in church-based ministry, and even served
as the president of a Christian college, before launching his career
as an evangelist in 1949. Speaking at a Los Angeles evangelistic
rally, Graham caught the eye of media magnate William Randolph Hearst,
who sent a telegram to his many publications that simply read: “Puff Graham.” With that injunction, Hearst’s company began promoting the evangelist. With the media empire behind him, Graham’s natural gifts
took him to superstar status within a year.

Although many criticized Graham for how he navigated the racial
politics of his day, and he himself voiced regrets later in his life,
his exposure to anthropology proved to be pivotal in his stand against segregation and racial hierarchy around the world. He countered
prevailing views on race with anthropologically informed arguments to
expose the fallacy of different, hierarchically arranged human races.

Early on, as Graham’s ministry grew and he began speaking throughout
the country, he quickly had to address the realities of discrimination
and racial injustice. For this son of the South, raised in segregated
North Carolina, confronting white supremacy in Southern contexts was
not easy. Between 1950 and 1954, Graham was not consistent in his
response. In 1953, he famously took down the ropes dividing the black
and white sections of a rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee, offending his
hosts while speaking out against racial segregation. Yet, a few months
later, local church organizers in his home state of North Carolina
staged a segregated event, and he allowed it. After the North Carolina
rally, the Asheville Citizen-Times printed a local supporter’s letter
that asked, “Why have the so-called church workers and Christians in
our city barred the colored people from the Billy Graham revival? …
Why make an example of the Negro because of the color of his skin? Is
not his soul as important as yours and mine?” The following week
Graham addressed the question “Does the Bible teach the superiority of
any one race?” in his nationally syndicated newspaper column “My
Answer”:

Definitely not. The Bible teaches that God hath made of one blood all
the nations of the world. … Anthropologists have come to two very
important biological observations. First, there are no pure races.
Second, there are no superior or inferior races. We know from history
that all people upon contact have crossed their genetically based
physical traits. We know from human anatomy that in fundamental
structure all people are identical. As far as biological man is
concerned, what he is related to is his cultural environment, rather
than to any inherited ability or aptitude.
At Graham’s revivals, African-Americans and European-Americans were integrated in the audience and included together in his ministry
teams.

After 1954, when the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education
ruling deemed segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Graham
never again held a segregated rally, citing constitutional law and his convictions on racial equality. However, he still received criticism
from those who felt his highly individualistic Christianity, which
made having a “personal relationship with God” the universal
cornerstone of Christian life, kept Graham from addressing
discrimination as a social, institutional, and systemic reality. His contemporary Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent American theologian and
commentator, was sharply critical of Graham for promoting a form of Christianity that was “oversimplifying every issue of life.” Niebuhr suggested that, like many white, conservative Protestant Christians,
Graham held personally laudable views about race but ignored the
larger social, political, and cultural dimensions of social evils like
racism and segregation.

While Graham never wavered from his commitment to the importance of
individual conversion, it does seem that later in his life he began to
see how he might have engaged racism more effectively had he developed
a deeper anthropological perspective. In 1986, Graham was interviewed
by Parade magazine and asked to reflect on his life. When queried if
he had any regrets, Graham replied, “I wish I had gotten more
education. If I could have, I would have gotten a Ph.D. in
anthropology, to understand the race situation in this country
better.”

We might imagine that a growing awareness of the cultural dimensions
of racism, nurtured by Graham’s early education in anthropology, led
him to wish for this greater anthropological understanding later in
life. Although he reached out to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to pray
at his New York crusade in 1957, Graham later expressed regret that he
did not march with King and other civil rights leaders in Selma,
Alabama, in 1965. But he did issue a strong statement against racism
when he served as honorary co-chair (along with Coretta Scott King) of
a 1999 international Baptist conference on racism held at Ebenezer
Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The 80-year-old Graham wrote,

Racism may be the most serious and devastating social problem facing
our world today. It divides humans and nations from each other, and is
the root cause of many of the wars and conflicts that rage across our
globe. Racism is a deadly poison, which never brings good, resulting
always in a bitter harvest of hatred, strife, and injustice.
It seems toward the end of his life, Graham could see that beyond the scientific evidence anthropology marshaled to support racial equality, anthropology could also expand his sense of the cultural and social
contexts of race and racism. He learned to see more clearly the
broader contexts in which all kinds of human evil—and human virtue—are
able to flourish.

Source: https://t.co/Ecnfwwq14E
--
Steve Hayes
http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://khanya.wordpress.com

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