by Chris Staron | Jun 25, 2024 | Episodes
Is it illegal to pray in schools?
In 1955, the Board of Regents for New York issued an optional prayer to be used in public schools. It became known as the “Regent’s Prayer”. Here it is: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers, and our Country.” That short prayer was contested not only by non-religious people but also by Protestants who thought that it was too vague. What God is it talking about? Where is the mention of Jesus or the Holy Spirit, salvation, sin, grace, etc.?
The ACLU’s fight against school prayer
With help from the ACLU, parents sued and the case made it all the way to the US Supreme Court. It was known as Engle v. Vitale. It overturned prescribed prayer in schools. In this episode, Chris goes through the arguments the court and Justice Hugo Black made during this landmark decision. A year later, the Court heard Abington School District v. Schempp, which ended prescribed Bible reading in public schools.
Is it illegal to pray in schools? Children can still pray in schools. The difference is that the school cannot require compulsory prayer.
This season we’re covering how American evangelicals bonded themselves with the Republican Party. There are a lot of reasons that evangelicals started to vote as a block in the late 70s and early 1980s. They range from women’s liberation, changes in attitude toward taxation, and battles over gay and lesbian rights, to education. This is part of our coverage of the education section. This episode has been rewritten and recorded, updating an episode from season 3.
Sources:
Discussion Questions:
- Did you ever pray in school? What did you pray?
- Did you ever read the Bible in school?
- Is there an “ideal” prayer that should be read in schools? If so, what is it? What objections might parents have?
- Is it important for school children to learn about religions in school?
- Do you agree or disagree with Justice Hugo Black?
Transcript (Note: This is from the original version of this episode. I’m posting it here for SEO reasons, but did not have time to update it)
This episode is part of a long series about how communism in Russia impacted the American Christian Church. This episode can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of season three.
Thomas Cramner was burned alive.
I’ll spare you the details. This is a family show after all. But he was. After having watched two of his friends meet the same fate, he was executed for treason.
Cramner is an important figure you’ve probably never heard of. He died in 1556. This hasn’t made the news in a while. But his influence is felt even today.
His was a particularly tough time for the Christian Church. Martin Luther had only recently nailed up his thesis. The Protestant Reformation was in full swing. That period was marked with Bible study…
BIBLE: Jesus said, “come to me all who are weary and I will give you rest.”
Direct access to God without saints mediating…
PRAYER: Thank you, Father, for this meal we are about to receive…
And the end of indulgences, which were essentially ways to buy into heaven for yourself or on behalf of other people.
MONEY: Get my grandmother out of purgatory, my uncle a special blessing, and what do you have in eternal salvation?
What’s more, people were murdered for their beliefs. Like Thomas Cramner. Cramner was a reformer, meaning he was not on the side of the Catholic Church. When King Henry the 8th of England wanted to divorce his wife, Cramner helped assemble the case that he could. Essentially, this action created the Church of England. A church that was sponsored and controlled by a government.
Which, you know, may not sound so bad. The Church gets financial support, maybe a little access to power… but… if the state wants to, say, encourage you to back an evil king… one who keeps executing his wives… it gets sticky really really quickly.
Like I said, this was a turbulent time in the Christian Church, especially in England where the kings and queens see-sawed between Catholic and Protestant. Protestants rise to power, Catholics get dead. Catholics rise in power, Protestants… well, you know. Depending on the beliefs of who was in charge, your religion was either favored or murdered. Based on the whims of whoever was in charge.
Cramner lived in this see-saw world. Not only did he get the king the divorce he wanted, which eventually earned him the title of Archbishop of Canterbury, Cramner also wrote… the Book of Common Prayer.
Depending on your denomination, you may never have heard of the Book of Common Prayer. It’s just what it sounds like. Printed prayers that would be used by the Church of England. It was written in those crazy tumultuous times, so he tried to walk a tightrope. Protestant, but not super Protestant. Liturgical, but not totally Catholic.
Reformers didn’t like it. Really didn’t like it. This Book of Common Prayer is sometimes cited as one of the reasons the Puritans despised the Church of England. The Puritans said the book didn’t go far enough to distance itself from Rome. It’s not the only reason they went to the New World, what would become the United States, but it’s part of it. They also didn’t like how cozy the church was with the state.
3:40 After King Henry died, Edward VI became king. No problem for Cranmer. Edward was on the side of Protestantism. So things hummed along for a while until…
Edward VI died. (exhale)
And Mary Tudor became queen. Mary Tudor was Catholic. The pendulum swung the other way. She brought back Latin mass, rituals, all sorts of stuff. And people who disagreed with her… didn’t fare so well. Including Cranmer.
Forced into isolation in prison, they made him watch his friends as they were burned alive. Under duress he famously signed documents that put him under papal authority. Recanting his writings in support of the Reformation. Yet, he renounced his renunciations before his dead, angry at his own hand for having signed the documents. When his time came to be burned, he made sure that his hands were the first to meet the flames because they had betrayed him.
Cramner’s story brings up a lot of questions for those of us who are Christians: how do we feel about the bonding of Church and State? Because the Church of England was… well it was the Church… of… England. It was a branch of the government, not unlike the Russian Orthodox Church in the time of Tsar Nicholas a few hundred years later. Because the Church was part of the government, it could be used to do the bidding of the government. And when the government switched leaders, when that see saw tipped…everything got upended.
Cramner’s story begs us to ask: What length will we go to to get our theological way, and what will we do to those who disagree with us? Things look great when our people are in charge… but what happens when leadership takes things in another direction? When you go from setting the rules to not even having a prayer.
You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
Let’s jump forward a few… hundred years. To my high school.
In 1998 or 99 I was in the school musical. I was in a lot of them. Thirteen shows in four years. I spent a lot of time in theater. This was in North East Ohio. Before every show we got in the habit of gathering around in the dressing room. We took each others hands. And we prayed. Going around the circle, dressed as baseball players, Russian peasants, mediums, knights in armor, whatever. Taking turns praying for each other and for the show.
Everyone was invited. But because there was no place else to go, we didn’t really have a backstage, people who didn’t want to pray… were there too. In the room with us, usually on the other side of some lockers but they were there with us.
I remember praying out loud before one of these shows. I was a teenager, I was full of energy but not always full of wisdom. I prayed for the people on the other side of the lockers. Not in a loving way, but more in a planting a flag kind of way. Claiming some ground. A way I’m not so proud of.
That moment sticks with me. Our director pulled me aside a few days later and said that, while she supported our right to pray, that we should be more considerate. Not to do it in a way that hurts other people or makes them feel disrespected. She was right. There was a line of decency and I crossed it.
Prayer, especially public prayer is funny like that. It can be both communion with God and weapon. A way to say, “we’re on this side of the lockers, holding hands, in unity. To the exclusion of the people on the other side of the lockers. They’re not like us. They’re not in our club. Let me rub a little salt in that wound.”
Prayer in public spaces is far from easy. Especially when it comes to schools.
By the mid-1900s, God was everywhere in public life. The National Prayer Breakfast, on the money, preached on television and radio, in advertisements all over the country.
School children held their hands over their hearts every morning to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which had recently added the words “under God”. Making it, in the minds of some, a religious expression. Others called it a political expression that happened to mention God. The Gideons handed out Bibles in many schools. God was on the money. Presidents were inaugurated with prayer. Witnesses called to testify in a court of law swore on a Bible that they would tell the whole truth, so help them God.
A wave of public religious expression swept the nation. Sometimes it seemed like everyone wanted to get on board. Including the Board of Regents, the organization that oversees education, in one particular state. They decided that, because the United States had such a rich religious history, that heritage should be reflected by a prayer each morning in the schools.
Which state do you think it was? A state that wanted prayer in schools? This was 1951. Probably somewhere in the South? The Bible belt? Midwest? Kentucky? Georgia?
Nope. This was New York State.
That’s right. New York State. What many today would consider a pretty liberal part of the union. In 1951 their Board of Regents, with a unanimous decision decided to kick off school prayer. It would be a part of the morning flag ceremonies. You know, raising the stars and stripes, and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Adding to this daily ceremony, they created a few lines that became known as the Regent’s Prayer:
PRAYER: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”
Here’s the deal. It wasn’t mandatory that the schools do this thing. It was a suggestion. Along with the suggestion that schools read speeches by President Eisenhower and documents like the Declaration of Independence. It was up to the local districts to figure out if and how they would implement it. And many did.
In June 1955 the New York City superintendents suggested that classroom teachers should, quote…
PERSON: “…identify God as the ultimate source of natural and moral law.”
That went for math classes, science classes, even in shop. Where teachers were encouraged to focus the kids on the handiwork of a Supreme Being that was reflected in the raw materials they were working with. And then to make ash trays out of it.
Okay, so you guessed which state encouraged schools to pray. Now can you guess who opposed those same prayers?
Well, it wasn’t Catholic bishops or priests. They were generally cool with it. It was Protestant and Jewish leaders who spoke up. That’s right. Against prayer in schools. The ACLU got involved, arguing that the statements of the Board of Regents… well, I’ll let you hear it in your own words, because I think it’s important. They said the superintendent’s statement…
ACLU: “substitutes for the belief in God a vague theism for which, it implies, we all subscribe. The fact is, we do not.”
The complaint of the ACLU and many Protestants was, in part, that the prayer was vague. It was non-specific, which is decidedly not in our heritage and is not really how most of us worship. Lets hear the Regents Prayer one more time:
“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”
Which God is it talking about? Doesn’t say. To some, that may seem like a solid compromise. But the reality is that most of us worship a very specific deity. It’s a criticism that some have lodged against things like God being on the money and in the Pledge of Allegiance: which God are you talking about?
That didn’t deter some 300 New York school districts from continuing their prayers, which sounds like a lot but it was only around 10% of the total d istricts in the state. Still, 300 ain’t nothing. Votes to adopt or avoid school prayer soon divided people along religious lines, often separating Catholics who were for it and Jews who were not. As you may remember, anti-Jewish sentiment ran wild in this era. Some people saw this as another reason to justify their persecution of Jews.
The battle over school prayer led to a lawsuit against a district in Long Island which had adopted the Regent’s Prayer. Three of the five people against the district were Jewish. There was worry that maybe this would create antisemitic hatred in the region. So, when it came time to pick a lawyer to state their case, the parents chose a Catholic one. Just in case.
The legal battle became known as Engle v. Vitale.
The question of the case seems pretty clear: is prayer in schools legal or illegal? This was no easy decision. Because the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution says:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”
Cut and dry, right? The Congress can’t set up a national religion. Remember, one of the main concerns that early settlers had on the continent was the power that the state had over the Church of England. When the king didn’t like the rules prohibiting divorce he simply created his own church. Budda-bing, budda boom. The government controlled worship, even having one of it’s guys write the Book of Common Prayer.
Let’s hear the next line in the Constitution…
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Ooof. So if you stop people from praying, is that the government prohibiting the free exercise of religion? Or is a school endorsed prayer really free exercise? Because kids are instructed by their teachers to do it and there is social pressure to partake. Kids were allowed to be excused from the prayer. They didn’t have to say it. But if everyone else is doing something… it can be intimidating.
Think about that. Your morning started. They’d raise the American flag. If you were cool with the Pledge, you stayed for that…
PLEDGE: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America…
And then you have to leave for fifteen seconds. Maybe thirty by the time they get the kids settled.
(sound of leaving) (sound of muffled prayer)
Then come back in with everyone watching you. Really standing out. Like those kids in my high school who had to stand on the other side of the lockers because the prayer circle was taking up most of the locker room.
I can tell you as a school bus driver during the Coronavirus that social pressure is real. If a student walks into a group of people wearing a mask…
STUDENT: Hey dude, sweet mask!
…they are probably going to put their mask on. But if that same student goes into a group that is not wearing masks
STUDENT: Dude, I don’t care if it kills my grandma and everyone at the nursing home. I’m an American!
then… you know. They’re probably not going to wear one.
Is setting aside time to say a specific prayer in a school Constitutional? Are students being treated equally if some of them have to stand outside for a few minutes every day?
So a group of parents took this case to court.
In August 1959, the county judge decided in favor of the school board. Saying that the Regent’s prayer did not violate the establishment clause and it certainly didn’t violate the free exercise of religion. The judge said that public prayer was a part of the national heritage. After all, New York state’s judicial system at the time urged it’s member to display the new national motto: “In God We Trust”. How could acknowledging God in our national motto really be all that different from acknowledging him in prayer?
The parents struck out on their first attempt.
UMPIRE: Strike one!
So they tried again in the appellate court.
JUDGE: I find in favor of the school district.
UMPIRE: Strike two!
That didn’t work, and they took the case to the Court of Appeals. The state’s highest court. Which in 1961 upheld the rulings of the lower courts. The chief Justice argued in his own words:
CHIEF JUSTICE: “Not only is this prayer not a violation of the First Amendment, but holding that it is such a violation would be in defiance of all of American history.”
Strike three. The majority decision pointed to how God was so prevalent in American life. The Declaration of Independence mentions Him. It does. Here it is:
DECLARATION: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
God was on the money (which for paper currency had been there all of four years), daily prayers in Congress which were also new thanks to Abraham Vereide, the National Day of Prayer, and God being in the Pledge of Allegiance, all which were added in or around the last decade. Plus prayers given at the Continental Congress when the country was founded. They argued that religious expression was in our heritage. Even though most of their examples were pretty recent.
The case had peaked. That was it. It reached the top of the state. The only place they could go was…
ALL GUESTS: The Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court. The highest court… in the country.
When we return, how the Supreme Court referenced the Book of Common Prayer to strike down the Regent’s Prayer. Stay with us.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
When we left off, New York State suggested that schools offer a prayer. A pretty bland and generic prayer. About 10% of districts picked it up and ran with it, only to have parents bring a lawsuit. Which failed in three different trials until finally reaching the Supreme Court of the United States.
You can actually listen to and read the public part of the trial. It’s fascinating. I’ll put links to it on the website.
The case essentially hinged on this question: was this prayer an act of patriotism or and act of worship? If it was patriotism, then it had a lot in common with the Pledge of Allegiance.
“I pledge allegiance to the flag and the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Fundamentally, what is the Pledge of Allegiance? Is it patriotic or is it a statement of faith? As we know, its history is rooted in patriotism. A nationalistic desire. The part about God was only added in during the 1950s. It is, essentially, a patriotic statement with a mention of God,
What about the Regent’s prayer? Listen again. What is it about?
“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”
The formula is flipped. Instead of a patriotic statement with a mention of God, the prayer is a statement of faith with a mention of the country.
In part, that is why the Supreme Court struck down the decisions of the lower courts. Because the prayer is clearly a government sponsored endorsement of religion, and not the expression of patriotism that the New York Board of Regents said it was.
Justice Hugo Black asked for the privilege of writing the majority opinion. Black is an interesting character. Himself theologically liberal, he’s said to have told his son, speaking of the Christian faith:
JUSTICE BLACK: “I cannot believe. But I can’t not believe either.”
He was an agnostic. But his opinion really made me think. It’s quite eloquent and reads like a spiritual pilgrimage, laying out the historic basis for his argument. Here is a piece of it. He’s referring here to the Book of Common Prayer.
JUSTICE BLACK: “It is a matter of history that this very practice of establishing governmentally composed prayers for religious services was one of the reasons which caused many of our early colonists to leave England and seek religious freedom in America. The Book of Common Prayer, which was created under governmental direction and which was approved by Acts of Parliament in 1548 and 1549, set out in minute detail the accepted form and content of prayer and other religious ceremonies to be used in the established, tax supported Church of England. The controversies over the Book and what should be its content repeatedly threatened to disrupt the peace of that country as the accepted forms of prayer in the established church changed with the views of the particular ruler that happened to be in control at the time… Other groups, lacking the necessary political power to influence the Government on the matter, decided to leave England and its established church and seek freedom in America from England’s governmentally ordained and supported religion.”
Essentially, he argued that one of the reasons English settlers came to this country was because they were escaping publicly mandated religion. He goes on to note that, in a great bit of irony, some of those same colonists set up the same kind of system they resented once they got here.
The pilgrims, in other words, became what they themselves disliked about England. Establishing state-funded churches that were involved in their daily lives and dictated worship.
Justice Black was also concerned about what it would mean for the country if this kind of thing were encouraged. Remember that see-saw from the beginning of the show? When one king or queen died, the next was free to change the religion. Throwing the entire country into chaos with every new administration. Justice Black argued that the founding fathers included the establishment clause specifically to keep that from happening in the US.
JUSTICE BLACK: The First Amendment was added to the Constitution to stand as a guarantee that neither the power nor the prestige of the Federal Government would be used to control, support or influence the kinds of prayer the American people can say – that the people’s religions must not be subjected to the pressures of government for change each time a new political administration is elected to office.
We don’t often consider that in discussions of church and state. The de-stabilizing effect it would have on the country if we changed religion or denominational preference with each successive administration.
Maybe that seems like a weird thing to be frightened of. But the decision was handed down during the Kennedy administration. John F. Kennedy was the nation’s first Catholic president. His opponents worried that he would take orders from the pope. That his religion would fundamentally change the United States. Again, that would not be unheard of in the history of the world. That’s what happened in England in the 1500s. It’s the reason Thomas Cramner was burned at the stake.
If Kennedy’s opponents had seen their nightmare become a reality, things would have been bleak indeed. Of course, none of that stuff happened. But looking back through the lens of history, we know the difference it makes when the Church is tied to the State. If you don’t have enough evidence, research the Spanish Inquisition.
I’ve been so taken by Justice Black’s opinion that I’ve recorded it myself and will post it for patrons of the show to hear in full. I think it’s very telling.
As you can imagine, the case caused a stir in the media. Headlines read “God Banned from the State”. People were in an uproar, including Billy Graham. Newswires sent out almost exclusively negative comments from members of congress, ignoring those who sided with the decision.
Sensationalism got the best of them. As it does all of us from time to time. People worried that religion was being outlawed in the country. The thing is… it wasn’t. The court had actually done a lot to make that distinction. The Regent’s prayer was illegal because it had been written and implemented by a government body. They did not outlaw prayer, or prayer in schools. Just prayers written and expressed by the government. There’s a big difference.
Even today, you can still pray in schools. Clearly, I did it when I was in high school. The crux is in who is prescribing the prayer.
We have been arguing about school prayer ever since. It still comes up, some sixty years later. Conservative Christian leaders often look at the state of schools and wish that we had prayer in schools. More specifically, scheduled prayer in schools as part of the daily routine. You can still do it on your own in schools, it’s just not part of our early morning habits.
79% of Americans questioned in a Gallop poll at the time said they supported “religious exercises” in schools.
Justice Hugo Black received over a thousand letters in opposition. Some of them are downright nasty. But he responded in the same way President Truman had responded years earlier when he was asked to institute a National Day of Prayer. They both quoted Matthew six which tells Christians to pray in their rooms with their doors closed rather than in public where their acts of piety can be seen. Jesus prayed in public. The disciples prayed in public. It’s not as much about the place as it is the reason, the heart behind the prayer.
Here is Matthew 6:1: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.” (Matt 6:1 NASB)
Let’s bring this home. Why do we pray? You and I. Why do we do it?
Jesus sometimes prayed in order to teach His followers how to do it. Some would argue that that is what the schools were doing: teaching children how to pray as Jesus taught his disciples. With some notable differences. As far as we know, the disciples didn’t begin their day reciting the same prayer. It brings up important questions: do prayers have any spiritual real weight if they are rote? Said without passion or feeling? That’s what the Puritans argued. The Puritans also wrestled with the Book of Common prayer because it wasn’t to their theological liking. The Regents prayer didn’t mention Jesus or which God it referred to.
Also, what happens if a new religious fad enters in? In the United States as it stands now, it probably won’t change the fundamental bedrock of the country. If Mitt Romney had become president, we wouldn’t all have had to convert to Mormonism, just like Americans weren’t forced into Catholicism under Kennedy.
Usually, when we talk about school prayer there is this sense that our country is fundamentally changing. That God is being pulled from the public eye. Yet, this happened fifty years ago. Most of the people listening now did not grow up with the Regent’s prayer. Preachers talk about Engel v Vitale like it was yesterday. We haven’t recited rote prayers in schools for half a century. And somehow our union still stands.
Is religious expression in schools a good thing, a bad thing, or something in between? We need to celebrate the fact that our country is not subject to the theological whims of our leaders. Prayer is a good thing. A great thing. But remember my story about praying in the locker room before a show? Prayer can also be a weapon. It can bring us closer to God, and we can use it to push others further away. The funny thing about weapons… we love them when we’re holding them. But when they are aimed at us, when we stand next to the fire ourselves… the story changes pretty quickly. Just ask Thomas Cramner.
This episode was inspired by the book “In God We Trust” by Kevin Kruse. While he declined my invitation to appear on the show, I still strongly recommend the book. “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald was also a great benefit. The full text of Justice Black’s opinion is a really interesting read. I’ll put links to it in your show notes and on the website. Also, Truce is a listener-supported show. If you become a monthly patron you’ll gain access to my reading of the opinion. You can learn more at trucepodcast.com/donate. I’m working hard to do this job full-time. I’m a long ways away from that right now, but your gift of any size will really help.
You can find Truce on social media at @trucepodcast. You can also learn more about me and my book “Cradle Robber” and my films “Bringing up Bobby” and “Between the Walls” all at the website at trucepodcast.com.
Special thanks to everyone who gave me their voices for this episode.Eric Nevins of the Halfway There Podcast, Jenna Erlandson from the Bridge of the Faithful Podcast, and Shea and Michelle Watkins of The Pantry Podcast. Additional audio came from CSPAN.
God willing I’ll be back in two weeks with more. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
Gospel Coalition
Gospel Coalition and Justice Black’s decision
One Nation Under God 171
One Nation Under God 171
One Nation Under God 171
One Nation Under God 172
One Nation Under God 173
One Nation Under God 175
One Nation Under God 175
One Nation Under God 120
One Nation Under God 147
One Nation Under God 184
by Chris Staron | Jun 11, 2024 | Episodes
Can I Love Extremists?
So many people define their faith by what they believe about Donald Trump. How can godly Christians return to the gospel to get us back on track?
In this round table discussion episode, Chris is joined by Pastor Ray McDaniel of First Baptist Church in Jackson, WY, and Nick Staron to prepare us for the season.
Topics Discussed:
- What is Christianity?
- The importance of forgiveness and going to those who are angry with us
- Why is it important to cover things like the Watergate scandals of the 1970s in a Christian podcast?
- The need for humility in our lives
- The gospel in 10 words or less
Do you have a gospel message in 10 words or less? Find Truce on social media and let us know!
by Chris Staron | May 28, 2024 | Episodes
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How the Republicans learned to court the South
When did Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, start courting the American South? It’s a big question! For decades, Republicans were known as the party that helped black people (except, you know, for ending Reconstruction to help gain the White House). Then, with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, the tide turned. Goldwater’s team promoted him as a racist when he toured the South. And… he won some ground in the traditionally Democratic region.
So when it came time for Richard Nixon to run in 1968, his team decided to court the South. Not out in public like Goldwater had. Instead, they decided to operate a campaign of “benign neglect” where they would not enforce existing laws meant to protect African Americans.
Our special guest this week is Angie Maxwell, author of The Long Southern Strategy.
Discussion Questions:
- What caused the rift in the Democratic Party that made Strom Thurmond leave (hint: it has to do with Truman)?
- What was the Democratic Party like before Truman?
- What influence did Strom Thurmond have on Nixon?
- Who was Barry Goldwater? How did he change the Republican Party by courting white Southerners?
- How might the idea of the South being “benighted” impact them as a people?
- Why do so many evangelicals see themselves as “benighted”?
Sources:
- “The Long Southern Strategy” by Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields.
- “Reaganland” by Rick Perlstein
- YouTube clip of Nixon not wanting “Law and Order” to mean “racist”
- Nixon talking about “law and order” in a speech
- Nixon’s campaign ad about protests and tear gas
- Article about Nelson Rockefeller
- Nixon’s civil rights ad
- Helpful Time Magazine article
- “These Truths” book by Jill Lepore
- Bio on Strom Thurmond
- Article about Reconstruction
- “The Evangelicals” book by Frances Fitzgerald
- Truman’s speech to the NAACP
Transcript
CHRIS: This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Republican Party. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of season 6. Not only do we need to understand how Christians were pulled in, but we also need to understand how the Republican Party changed in the 1900s. This episode won’t talk much about Christianity, but it’s key to understanding the Republican Party of the 1970s, one of the areas we’re spending a lot of time on this season. I think you’re really going to like it. Okay… here’s the show.
Dexter Chipps was a Catholic man in a time when Protestants didn’t much care for Catholics. He was a strong supporter of the mayor of Forth Worth, Texas, and the owner of a lumberyard. On July 17, 1926, Chipps got on the phone and called a pastor who was speaking out against the mayor. He’d said that he was “not fit to be the mayor of a hog pen”. The call, as you can imagine, did not go well. So Chipps stomped off to confront the pastor. The two men exchanged words. Their argument grew loud. Chipps challenged the pastor to a fight.
But he picked the wrong man to mess with. The pastor drew a pistol from the desk drawer and fired four shots. Three bullets pierced Chipps and killed him. The pastor called his wife and the police saying, “I just killed me a man.”
The pastor in question is somewhat of a controversial figure, one you’ve probably never heard of before. His name was J. Frank Norris. He embodied what one writer described as your stereotypical vision of a Texas fundamentalist. Brash. In 1909 he was hired by the First Baptist Church in Fort Worth, known as the “church of the Cattle Kings”
He was also nearly convicted of arson when his church burned down. And he got away with shooting Dexter Chipps on grounds of self-defense. 33 prominent Texas Baptists signed a statement describing Norris as “divisive, self-centered, autocratic, hypercritical and non-cooperative.” Then, a year later, the Baptist General Convention of Texas kicked him out.
Norris was a founding member of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. Fundamentalism, if you remember, began as a movement to fight modernist theology: that belief system that said you could remove the miraculous from Christianity. Maybe Jesus never rose from the dead or walked on water. Norris preached against modernism often, which is notable because, in the 1920s, there really weren’t any modernists in the South. For that reason, there weren’t really fundamentalists in the South in the 1920s. When the Scopes “monkey” trial was held in Tennessee in the south, it came as a surprise when the region was painted as fundamentalist by the press, because it wasn’t. Fundamentalism in the early years was a northern phenomenon.
Norris is credited by some historians as bringing the movement below the Mason-Dixon line He pastored two churches, one in Texas and another in Detroit. Combined, his congregations reached 25,000 people. Young men trained in his seminary and then went on to spread fundamentalism wherever they were placed.
The American South is an interesting and dynamic place. One that is often misunderstood. Today we associate it with fundamentalist religion and the Republican Party. But that wasn’t always the case. But a lot changed over the decades from the 1920s to the 70s. This season I’m telling the story of how some, especially white, evangelical Christians tied themselves to the Republican Party. To do that, we have to understand not just Christianity, but also changes in the GOP. Because the party of today or even of Ronald Reagan was not the party of the early 1900s.
But soon they took notice of the south as a voting block. White Southerners had long voted for the Democrats. But that would all change as they were courted not by a pastor tried for murder, but a presidential candidate who claimed that he was not a crook.
You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
To explore the topic today, I spoke with a fascinating guest.
ANGIE: My name is Angie Maxwell. I am the Diane D Blair endowed chair in Southern studies and a professor of political science at the University of Arkansas.
CHRIS: Author of “The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics” and just an all-around interesting person. I loved talking to her about the South because, not only does she study it, but maybe you noticed, she is Southern. Okay, so, there is this concept of the South as benighted, looked down upon by the rest of the country. The term “the benighted south” goes back to psychologist Alfred Adler.
ANGIE: And he originally studied organ inferiority, like how does the body compensate for a shoulder or leg or something like that…
CHRIS: But then he moved into social psychology early in the 1900s…
ANGIE: And what was so interesting about the theory he developed is that he said the first thing that was necessary for an individual to develop an inferiority complex was a moment of consciousness or recognition that someone deems you inferior.
CHRIS: For the American South, that was not just losing the Civil War, but also living through Reconstruction. That period after the war when the North occupied the South with the military. The purpose: to enforce new amendments meant to protect the rights of African Americans. A humiliation to white Southerners to not just lose a war, but be reminded of it constantly as soldiers marched through their towns.
Adler determined that someone with an inferiority complex would show it in one of three ways.
ANGIE: Either that person would withdraw from the society that deems them inferior or they would deem someone else inferior, kind of the corollary superiority complex. Or they would change the rules by which people were judged. And we see that happen in the South, particularly when there are intense periods of public criticism. So the Scopes trial is the perfect example, you know, it’s covered in international newspapers on the front page of the London Times for eleven days. And American journalists when they realize the international media was following so closely and making fun at this American experience and trial that was going on then the American journalists started saying ‘This isn’t American, this is Southern’. That critique from within the United States became very directed toward the South.
CHRIS: Even though the Scopes trial, which I covered in detail last season, was the result of a northern phenomenon. You can see this clearly if you watch the old film “Inherit the Wind” where the people of the town are depicted as mean-spirited hicks, when in fact they were warm and welcoming.
ANGIE: Probably the worst thing that white southerners thought would happen if they lost the war was that people would be bankrupt. Right? How would they have labor and how would they process an agricultural economy? They never thought their slaves would be their Senators.
CHRIS: During Reconstruction, hundreds of black men were elected to local offices. 600 to state legislatures, and 16 served in congress. Including Hiram Revels, the first black senator who was from Mississippi. As a Republican, then the party of Lincoln.
ANGIE: Right? That was not something that was imagined. And it was not something that happened outside of the region, either. So that experience of being under scrutiny… totally deserved, but that experience of the world turned upside down to such an extreme degree created a tender skin to criticism. There is something in that heritage that just gets passed down.
CHRIS: You likely know what comes next. Jim Crow Laws, black codes, legislation, and social norms designed specifically to keep black people from advancing. A compromise with the Republicans that ends the military occupation of the South in exchange for the presidency.
ANGIE: Because of the experience of Reconstruction they lock that power down structurally in every possible way they can imagine.
CHRIS: Once they regain control, white southerners… by and large… vote for Democrats. For decades.
ANGIE: And so when the New Deal comes along…
CHRIS: …the big set of government programs passed under FDR that covers everything from government-backed home loans to jobs to the FDIC to building trails in national parks… People were desperate. The South, like everywhere, benefits from the programs passed by a Democratic government. But… that starts to trigger dissent in the party.
ANGIE: I feel like it’s in the aftermath of the Great Depression and New Deal that there starts to be a lot of tension between the national Democratic Party and the direction it is moving, building off of that New Deal coalition, and the state Democratic parties in the South.
CHRIS: Because, try as they may, they couldn’t keep black people from benefitting from all of the programs. They made it hard for them to get those home loans… but… the New Deal still managed to lift up black people.
ANGIE: There were early efforts at FERA which was an early welfare program, and there were southern states that turned that money away rather than give it to African Americans in their state.
CHRIS: That tension escalated when FDR died and Harry Truman came into power in 1945.
ANGIE: Truman makes a speech to the NAACP. He’s the first president to make a president to make a speech to the NAACP, and he doubles down on the direction the National Democratic Party is going.
TRUMAN: It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. And when I say all Americans – I mean all Americans.
CHRIS: It’s a moving speech. I’ll post links in the show notes.
ANGIE: And then of course desegregating the military by executive order…
CHRIS: This again, is a democrat talking. What had been the party of Jim Crow.
ANGIE: And so the 1948 Truman re-election becomes the watershed moment.
CHRIS: Northern Democrats like him…
ANGIE: But Southern Democrats think ‘we’re just going to get rid of this guy. We’ll get someone good in there as our nominee’. When Truman succeeds in getting the nomination in the 1948 convention southern democrats get worried, they really see this kind of slipping away, their national party slipping away. And they walk out, not all of them but most of them. And they run their own candidate in Strom Thurmond.
CHRIS: Strom Thumond. One of those names you probably heard in high school history class. He’d been a lawyer, state senator of South Carolina, and participated in D-Day in Normandy. Then governor of South Carolina. Super into states’ rights and segregation. We’ll hear more about him later, so try to remember Strom Thurmond. This splinter group of the democratic party makes him their nominee.
ANGIE: If Truman loses because of these Southern Democrats then the democratic party is going to realize they can’t win without the South and come crawling back. Or if no one can get the majority of the electoral college then they’ll be in a position to do some negotiating.
CHRIS: They’re holding their own party hostage. We’ll see this a bunch this season as the extreme wing of a party, a movement, a conference threatens to split if the moderates don’t give in to their wishes. This is where moderates have to choose between allowing their movement to become extremist, or risk losing to the other side. Which will it be? Which is the lesser of two evils. Some folks in the South were so against Truman that he didn’t even appear on the ballot in Alabama. This group calls themselves the Dixicrats. But the Dixiecrats failed.
ANGIE: It’s close as we all know, the famous picture saying “Dewey Won” but Truman is successful, and that puts the Southern white segregationist/ pro-Jim Crow Democrats into a purgatory of sorts.
CHRIS: Because, yeah, they’ve got a Democrat in the White House, but it’s Truman. A guy who is pro-desegregation. Truman, by the way, is someone we should all know more about. Did you know that he was close to passing national healthcare? Something he called “simple Christianity”. Anyhow…
Then you get to this interesting moment in American politics, kind of like what I talked about last season in the election competition between William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt. Where the parties were just… harder to tell apart. Starting in 1948 the University of Michigan ran a study. They collected data every four years and devised two questions for voters about the pair of major political parties in the US.
MICHIGAN: (question on a survey, so say it straight-forward) “Would you say that either one of the parties is more conservative or more liberal than the other?”
CHRIS: Believe it or not, between 1948 and 1960 many voters could not answer this question. So the U of M researchers asked a bonus question:
MICHIGAN: “What do they have in mind when they say that the Republicans (Democrats) are more conservative (liberal) than the Democrats (Republicans)?”
CHRIS: A full 37% of those surveyed did not know how to answer the questions. They had no idea which was conservative and which was liberal or how to tell the difference. Wilder still is that only 17% gave the answer that the people running the survey considered the best, correct answer. Eisenhower may have been a reflection of that since both parties wanted him.
Now, if you’re a white Southerner who is really into segregation… this is untenable. But changes were also going on in the Republican Party.
ANGIE: Some union-busting Republicans are upset and they start to feel the wealthy Rockefeller Republicans, the East Coast and West Coast more liberal Republicans are just manipulating the party and controlling everything. And that conservative faction starts meeting and talking about where they can find bedfellows. How do we grow our wing of the party?
CHRIS: And maybe we can bring some white Southerners to the party. It’s not a clear line. Eisenhower, the Republican, sends troops to Arkansas to enforce the integration of schools in Little Rock in 1957. Making it harder to bring racists into the party of Eisenhower.
ANGIE: It’s Strom Thurmond who works out a deal.
CHRIS: Remember him? He was the South Carolina Democrat who wasn’t thrilled with Harry Truman’s civil rights ideas…
ANGIE: That kind of works out a deal after the Civil Rights Act Right is signed and he can keep his seniority.
CHRIS: That was in 1964. Remember, he was a racist. He’d said earlier, “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches, and our places of recreation.”The guy jumps from Democrat to Republican and has plans to help the conservative faction of the Republican Party. This conservative group wants Barry Goldwater to be the nominee for president. You may not remember that name, but he comes up a lot when discussing the radical shift of the Republican Party. If you were to draw a roadmap that showed when the GOP took that turn, Goldwater would be where the highway took a sharp turn.
ANGIE: And in 64 at the convention the conservative wing has gotten behind Goldwater because he’s one of the few Republicans that had voted against the Civil Rights Act. They think he’s dynamic. He made some pretty aggressive speeches about Eisenhower being soft on unions. You know, it’s a long shot for him to get the nomination. But Nelson Rockefeller who the other wing of the party had put up was newly remarried to a former staffer with whom he had an affair and she was having a baby and it brought some of those kinds of social taboos up at that time and decreased his popularity. And so Goldwater squeaks it out. The conservative faction of the Republican Party has its moment. They send a team of people that stump in the South hard for Goldwater and they use some pretty explicit language about Goldwater will not enforce any of these civil rights changes. They’re worried about the Voting Rights Act looming on the horizon because that’s one that could change the power structure in the region.
CHRIS: The Voting Rights Act made polls taxes, literacy tests, intimidation at voting places, that kind of stuff, illegal and would be passed by President Johnson in 1965. Racists obviously didn’t want this to pass because it meant that they could no longer play their usual tricks and their people would be voted out of office.
ANGIE: So Mississippi goes in the 80 percentile for Goldwater.
CHRIS: White Southerners eat up the rhetoric of Barry Goldwater. A Republican, a man from the party of Lincoln, takes a formerly Democratic state by appealing to white racists. This is the power of Barry Goldwater and why he’s worth remembering. He demonstrates that Republicans can make headway in the South.
ANGIE: So it’s nuts, right? The messaging was very effective. What Goldwater believed personally is not something I can express. But how he was portrayed on that tour in the south called “Operation Dixie” that his team did was explicitly anti-civil rights and pro-segregation.
CHRIS: Does that mean he wins because he speaks to racists?
ANGIE: No, he wins five deep south states and his home state of Arizona and loses everywhere else in the country.
CHRIS: So he loses, but… he demonstrates that there is room in the south for the conservative wing of the Republicans. All it takes it the right messaging.
ANGIE: You know the Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party kind of thinks they’ll go back to being the party in power
CHRIS: We let the far right have their fun and they lost the vast majority of the states. Time to get real. Let’s get Nixon up to bat next.
ANGIE: And in a sense, Nixon in 68 is a compromise candidate. Nixon had been the candidate in 60. He’d almost won and he had a pretty pro-civil rights campaign. Compare his 60 campaign and 68 campaign they are wildly different.
CHRIS: You can hear that in one of his televised campaign ads in 1960.
ANGIE: And he courted the black vote outside of the South, particularly in some of the urban areas in big cities. He had somewhat of a friendship with MLK. He had gone on record after Brown v Board when he was VP under Eisenhower saying the Warren court had made the right decision.
CHRIS: Backing school integration. Amazing stuff. Not the guy you’d think would turn and give in to the racist wing of the party in order to court the South.
ANGIE: The Goldwater wing, this conservative faction, they don’t have a leg to stand on after his terrible showing. And Nixon is still very bitter about the close loss in 60. The strategist thing is like, we can’t put another Goldwater out there because the party’s not going to stand for it, but if we can take a well-known person, a well-known name and we can skate the middle here, build on some of the gains Goldwater made in these deep South states, but code the language in a way that doesn’t offend so many Republicans in the region we might have a winning combination now.
CHRIS: We need to look moderate, but send a message to the south that we are on their side. We just can’t do it outright. We have to be sly. In doing so, maybe we can tip the scales and win a presidency.
ANGIE: There was a young super-conservative in Ronald Reagan trying to make headway in that 68 primary and it was Strom Thurmond who convinced these newly converted southern Democrats turned Republicans and the convention. He said, “I know you think Reagan is the true conservative, but Reagan has assured us he will not enforce civil rights changes. We’ve got to stick with him”. He wielded that power. It’s not that there were huge numbers of delegates, but when a party is split any group that has any influence has a lot of power.
CHRIS: With the help of Strom Thurmond, they tip the scales for the Republicans. Nelson Rockefeller loses the nomination yet again. Twice to Nixon, once to Goldwater, and the conservative wing of the Republican Party gets their man nominated for president. Richard Nixon.
ANGIE: Nixon recognized that George Wallace was going to enter the race as the third party candidate and that he was the segregationist governor of Alabama.
CHRIS: You may know George Wallace from the song “Sweet Home Alabama”. When he was inaugurated as the governor, he said…
WALLACE: And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
CHRIS: Just in case you had any questions about where he stood. This guy’s running as a third-party candidate. He’d going to take the hardcore racists.
ANGIE: You can’t out anti-civil rights George Wallace in 1968, so your option is only to go toward the middle.
CHRIS: That is what Nixon did. He was the middle guy. He was Eisenhower’s VP. Remember the 50s? Remember how nice they were? After all of the tumult of the Kennedy assassination and student protests, Nixon had nostalgia on his side. But his team still wanted to court the South, whatever they could peel loose from Wallace.
ANGIE: George Wallace is going to win the hard-line segregationists but Nixon picks up enough support to win the South. It didn’t work with Goldwater, but with some fine-tuning this long attachment of white Democrats to the Democratic Party has somewhat been broken.
CHRIS: Leaving an opportunity for Republicans. Bringing us to a moment that borders on legend.
CHRIS: The details of the meeting are sketchy, as, you know, folks are not likely to take good notes on backroom deals. But Nixon’s trying to gain the nomination in his party, and there was the option of courting the South. To do that, he had to kiss the ring of Strom Thurmond. The two met in a hotel room in Atlanta on June 1, 1968. One historian said it was the most important event in the election of that year. Another compared it to the election of Rutherford B Hayes that got him the presidential win but ended Reconstruction in the South and protection for black people there. Essentially, it amounted to a commitment to “benign neglect”. Yes, Brown v Board of Education was a done deal, ending separate but equal in public schools. But that didn’t mean that the federal government had to enforce it. Whatever the exact details, Nixon and Thurmond entered the hotel ballroom where the state chairs were gathered. A few weeks later, Strom Thurmond formally supported Nixon.
ANGIE: We do see a very changed Nixon in that campaign. And we do see Strom Thurmond who naturally would have endorsed a Wallace decide not to.
CHRIS: Right? Makes sense that Thurmond would want to nominate Wallace, the Sweet Home Alabama racist governor. But Thurmond backs Nixon. Now, Nixon couldn’t just come out and bash black people like Wallace had because he’d alienate the party’s base who weren’t racist. Instead, it comes down to benign neglect and… dog whistles.
The dog whistle term gets used a lot these days. There are those who deny that Nixon used them, like Dinesh D’Souza. But it seems clear that there was a major change in Nixon’s behavior, and it’s hard to deny since there was a playbook released as a best-selling book called “The Emerging Republican Majority” by Nixon staffer Kevin Phillips that pretty well lays out the plan.
At first, Nixon zigged and zagged. He appointed two white supreme court justices who had resisted civil rights but then backed affirmative action. Confusing. But the language was there.
ANGIE: What they mean by political dog whistle, and they’re really hard to do now because of technology, is saying something in a way that a certain community hears it and knows what you mean even if other folks take a totally different meaning from it.
CHRIS: The name comes from whistles that put out frequencies so high that only dogs can hear them.
ANGIE: And that isn’t necessarily bad in its context, right? Maybe you’re just trying to communicate something to a community.
CHRIS: Like when a candidate says “I was tried in the wilderness” or “though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death” it signals to people who know their Bibles that this candidate understands Scripture. Or is religious? To those who don’t get the reference, it’s just a folksy saying. To the true believers, it says “this person gets me.”
ANGIE: An example would be “law and order”
CHRIS: This audio is from a 1968 campaign ad for Nixon. Remember how Angie said there was a big difference between the Nixon campaigns of 1960 and 68? Here it is. Instead of a calm Nixon chatting into the lens, this one has him doing a narration over photographs of burning buildings, protestors with signs promoting socialism, and officers with what looks like tear gas launchers.
CHRIS: Nixon spoke about law and order in speeches and when accepting the Republican nomination. Yet, when some people heard “law and order” they took it to mean control over black people. Dog whistle.
ANGIE: I mean, there are tons of people in the country who hear “law and order” and think “law and order”.
CHRIS: Great TV show. (laughing)
ANGIE: That’s exactly right. Who doesn’t want there to be orders and law to be followed? But that phrase in the South was messaged to say an end to the civil rights protests, the boycotts, and organized crackdowns. That spoke to a lot of white Southerners that the civil rights beat of covering all of these protests in the South, just make the South look terrible… there’s people all the way from that to those who worry that it’s going to erupt in violence. What I’m always pushing myself to think about is the actual lived experience of people and when you think about white communities in the South during segregation for so many decades they… it was like a co-existence that was so separated. It wasn’t in your face all the time. It was real easy to pretend this is just how life is and this is just peaceful. Really easy to not see some things for your average white Southerner living this existence in a separated white world. Even non-violent protests, which were in the South, pops that bubble where people believed African Americans supported segregation too. This is good for them or paternalistic. This is just how life was supposed to be. The protests, even non-violent, showed them that African Americans did not want this. This has hurt and oppressed. The media calling it all out… it’s hard to keep that conditioned life lie going that this is all benevolent. Law and order meant we’re not going to have these walkouts and protests and that spoke to a lot of moderate white Southerners who just wanted a system that was polite. Polite racism.
CHRIS: Yet to white southerners, law and order signaled an end to the protests and a re-establishment of the old way. Again, they didn’t need to reach the extreme racists. George Wallace did that. They couldn’t compete with him. Law and order, though, could appeal to moderate white Southerners in a way that outright racism couldn’t. Hence the dog whistle.
ANGIE: In this case, they were very concerned about communicating it so directly as the surrogates to Goldwater that it is offputting to those moderates who didn’t want to be thought of that way, didn’t want to be called out for being racist. Didn’t want to support violence, but things to stay where they were. The hardliners didn’t vote for them either. They didn’t want complete and total social change.
CHRIS: And the South goes with Nixon.
I realize it may feel like I didn’t prove my point well enough. But African Americans certainly felt the change in mood from Nixon. In 1960, 40% of African American voters went with Nixon. In 68 only 13% of non-white voters went with him.
Despite what Nixon said on TV and what D’Souza claims today, African Americans clearly picked up on the dog whistles. They were aware in the moment what was going on. Then there’s this idea of neglect. What you believe isn’t signaled just by what you do, but also by what you don’t do.
ANGIE: There’s a continued effort by a lot of southern governors to block integration into universities and into different spaces and you do not see an Eisenhower level of response. Where he sends in troops. People saying this was the administration you were a part of… and then you see the same thing happening at other southern universities and southern towns and there’s just no action and at that point, those laws are in place. Eisenhower took action when you didn’t have a Civil Rights Act. Then you do get a Civil Rights Act and you don’t see action when those laws are violated.
CHRIS: You’ll see something like the Kent State shooting where they send in the military then but not to protect African-Americans.
ANGIE: The expectations were different after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Those were such enormous efforts and we just don’t see an executive response anywhere near what had happened 10 years prior.
CHRIS: And you see the rise of segregation academies where white people send their kids to private schools rather than have them integrated. Government dollars start flowing in that direction. Like in the state of Virginia which offered grants to draw teachers to private schools.
CHRIS: So it’s the benign neglect, it’s what Nixon didn’t do compared to what people expected. What racist thing did he say? It’s not that. It’s that the country gets a Civil Rights Act passed and the executive does nothing to enforce it.
CHRIS: This is going to be important in a few months when we talk about school integration and bussing. Because one of the key issues that catalyze white evangelicals to the Republican Party in the Carter era is fear of losing their tax-exempt status due to the enforcement of integration laws. It’s a wild story, one that, honestly, we’re telling the wrong way. Pray for me. It’s going to be a tough episode to make… Anyhow, pay attention as we go because the theme of dog whistles will come up again, as will dueling themes of quiet racism and peace and quiet. Note that this disjointed arc from Truman to Nixon demonstrates how the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, changed its attitudes toward African Americans in order to court the Southern white vote.
Nixon wins two terms and eventually resigns after the Watergate scandal, as discussed in the last episode. It’s tempting to end the story there. But what I appreciate about Angie Maxwell’s work is that she studies what she calls “the long southern strategy”. Despite some oversimplifications of this story, the South does not stay with the Republican Party after Nixon’s resignation. The following election it’s Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter. And Carter, the Democrat, wins the South.
ANGIE: What Jimmy Carter portrayed is that he was one of them.
CHRIS: A white Southerner. Really, there isn’t anything easy about this moment. Here was Nixon, the law and order candidate and both he and his VP Spiro Agnew were obvious criminals and both of them got away with it. Ford, running for president, is the guy who pardoned Nixon. Carter wins the South and the presidency, but only by a narrow margin. Helped by burgeoning evangelical involvement, Carter being an evangelical, and by the fact that the darling of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, avoided supporting Gerald Ford.
It’s tangled. But the south goes for the Democrats under Carter. Then it goes for Reagan and it seems like the Republicans have their attention once more.
Until Bill Clinton comes along and wins it back for the Democrats. The “Southern strategy” didn’t always work for the Republicans. It isn’t a straight line like it’s sometimes portrayed. Again, the South is a dynamic place like anywhere else.
ANGIE: It’s such a simple explanation, right? The Civil Rights Act passed and suddenly all these white Southerners become republicans. Right? It’s so much more complicated than that and there is a lot of in-fighting in the Republican Party. Lots of Republicans are very upset about this trying to appeal to white Southerners. It was a very mixed and tumultuous time.
CHRIS: And it will take a long time to fit all of the pieces together this season. Because so much was happening. We haven’t even touched on women’s liberation, the ERA, the anti-ERA movement, other supply-side economics, changes in theology, the New Right. We’ll get to all of that. It’s fascinating. Race is just one part of what changes the Republican Party, and just one component of what nudges some evangelicals to support them. It would be a mistake to pin it all on just one part of this complicated story. Settle in, gang, we’ve got plenty more to cover.
For now, let’s circle back to J. Frank Norris at the beginning of the episode. The brash, love him or leave him preacher who shot a man and also introduced fundamentalism to the South. Fundamentalism wasn’t really there until he brought the kind of fear and anxiety that was his trademark into Texas. By the end of the century, fundamentalist Christianity would overtake denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention. Norris and men like him laid the groundwork for that decades earlier. Racism and a bunch of other issues would converge to swing party politics and drive evangelicals to make strange bedfellows in order to become a voting block.
One of the ways they did this was by convincing us that not only is the South benighted, but so are Christians. Same playbook, a different target. Norris brought that fear to the South. A host of others tried to hitch it to the gospel.
Listen to preachers on the radio or on TV. Tune into the news. Do you hear that Christians are being overlooked, left behind, and that our way of life is disappearing? Whether or not you agree with that statement, do you like what gets marketed with it? It’s the language that convinced the South that they had to use force to keep their way of life.
In the Christian world, it’s not fear of the North occupying our territory that riles people up. It’s a concern that “those people” or the government are coming for your children. That they are using textbooks to turn your kids against God. That the media and society look down on us. Say we’re backward. We’re constantly being told that we’re a benighted people and that the elites are coming for us. Do we want to live life as a benighted people?
Is it a statement of fact, or a trojan horse meant to manipulate? Is it possible that political forces need us to believe that so we’ll vote for them? And what could we do if we rejected that idea?
Special thanks to the amazing Angie Maxwell. Her books are “The Long Southern Strategy” and “The Benighted South”. Patrons of the show can hear a lot more good stuff from her by giving a little each month to help the show at patron.com/trucepodcast. We had a much longer conversation than what I could fit into the episodes. She was so generous with her time.
Thanks also to everyone who gave me their voices for this episode including my friends Jackie Hart and Chris Sloan.
Truce is listener-supported. To learn how to help via check, Paypal, Venmo, whatever, visit trucepodcast.com. There you can find previous episodes as well as show notes, sources used, an email list, pictures… so many good things. Please also take some time to tell your friends and family about the show. This is a small, independent operation. There is no marketing staff. Give a little bit so I can get one step closer to doing this show full time which would mean more and better episodes for you and a healthier work/life balance for me.
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by Chris Staron | May 14, 2024 | Episodes
The Grim Reality of the Watergate Scandal: Billy Graham’s Loyalty Tested – guest David Bruce
Have you heard these myths about Billy Graham’s continued support of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal? Myth 1: Graham blindly supported Nixon without question. Myth 2: Graham’s support of Nixon was solely based on their personal friendship. Myth 3: Graham’s support of Nixon undermined his credibility as a religious leader. In this episode, our guest speakers, David Bruce and Frances Fitzgerald, will shed light on the truth behind Graham’s actions and provide valuable insights on navigating the delicate relationship between religion and politics.
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Gain insights into the complex relationship between American evangelicals and politics, revealing the challenges and opportunities for engagement.
- Examine the concerns surrounding the influence of religious groups in politics, cultivating a greater understanding of the potential implications and the need for discernment.
- Discover the powerful role played by Billy Graham in shaping national policies and how his approach to faith and politics still resonates today.
- Uncover the parallels between the Watergate scandal and current political corruption, shedding light on the importance of ethical leadership and its impact on religious communities.
My special guests are David Bruce and Frances Fitzgerald
David Bruce is the Executive Vice President of the Billy Graham Library and the new Billy Graham Archive and Research Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. With over 40 years of experience working closely with Dr. Billy Graham, David brings a wealth of knowledge and insight to the podcast. His expertise and firsthand experience make him a trusted source when exploring the complex relationship between religion and politics, specifically in relation to Billy Graham’s continued support of Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. David’s unique perspective offers a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by American evangelical leaders and their engagement with political figures. Get ready for an engaging and thought-provoking conversation with David Bruce on this episode of Truce.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 – Introduction
00:00:27 – Reverend Harold Ockengay’s Controversy
00:01:19 – Pope Pius XI and Mussolini
00:02:59 – Catholicism and the 1960 US Presidential Election
00:08:11 – Billy Graham and Politics
00:15:41 – Billy Graham’s Support for Nixon
00:16:42 – Nixon’s Civil Religion
00:17:57 – White House Church Services
00:19:35 – Graham’s Influence and Criticisms
00:21:42 – The Watergate Scandal
00:30:40 – The Importance of Prophetic Distance
00:31:41 – Franklin Graham’s Support for Trump
00:32:27 – Strange Bedfellows and the Separation of Church and State
00:33:22 – Humility and Proximity to Power
00:33:44 – Acknowledgments and Resources
Sources
- “The Surprising Work of God” by Garth M. Rosell
- An article from The Atlantic about the Pope and Mussolini
- “The Popes Against the Protestants” by Kevin Madigan
- NPR interview with Kevin Madigan
- “A Prophet With Honor” book by William Martin
- “The Invisible Bridge” by Rick Perlstein
- “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald
- “The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen” book of essays accessed on Google Books
- New York Times article about how the Watergate break-in was financed
- Pat Buchanan hearings during the Watergate investigation
- Frost/Nixon transcript
Discussion Questions:
- Was Billy Graham being a good friend by supporting Nixon after Watergate?
- Should religious leaders maintain a certain distance between themselves and people of power?
- Why do we like to see our governmental leaders as religious people?
- Was Nixon’s church service in the Whitehouse wrong to be a gathering place of the rich and famous?
- How bad was the Watergate break-in? How does it change your mind about Nixon to know about the other criminal activity?
Transcript (generated by AI)
00:00:00
This episode is part of a long series exploring how some American evangelicals tied themselves to the Truce Podcast. This episode can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of season six. In 147, the Reverend Harold Ockengay went on a tour of Italy. He was part of a delegation of religious leaders viewing the destruction after World War II. Upon returning home, he argued that the devastation was the result of Europe turning its back on God.
00:00:27
And for a second there, it seemed like Akangei might bring some of that destruction home. First, there were the accusations. Supposedly, while in Europe, he attended the opera, purchased cigarettes, and then resold them. That was the whole controversy. This may seem quaint, but Akangei’s background was in the holiness movement, where Christians were to be holy, pure, undefiled by the things of this world.
00:00:52
All the rumors hinted that the famous minister from Boston was living a double life in the process. Akangei had to admit that while his character was upright in Italy, he did indeed sometimes go to the movies with his wife. The cigarettes he was seen with had been given to him for free, and so he passed them on to someone else. That there was the entire American hullabaloo. Yet in Italy, Protestants were upset with Akingay for another reason.
00:01:19
Akange, along with other members of the clergy, had met with Pope Pius XI. Pius XI was an interesting guy. His predecessor, Number eleven, openly criticized Hitler and the secularization of Germany. Not a good thing for Hitler, who was trying to expand his influence. So when eleven died and Number twelve was brought in, Hitler and Mussolini wanted to cozy up to him.
00:01:42
And they had plenty in common. Hatred of communism, a distrust of democracy. Mussolini had been fiercely anti cleric, but once he got to the Italian parliament, he gave a speech calling for intertwining Italy with the Catholic Church to make it a Christian nation. No separation of church and state. And why?
00:02:01
The better to gain power if an influential group is behind you. In the early 19 hundreds, Protestantism spread to Italy, in part because Protestants were focusing their efforts on reaching the poor. Italians who immigrated to the US might return to the old country equipped with a new faith. After World War I, Italians grew uneasy with the power held by Americans and the British, and also that Protestantism was spreading to Europe even as Catholicism waned in the fall of the Austrian Empire. Their solution?
00:02:33
Use the power of the Italian government to persecute Protestants and stifle the wave of evangelism. That is why Italian Protestants were upset about Akingay and other religious leaders visiting with the Pope. Because that very pope was persecuting Protestants. This whole mess trickled down to something you may never expect. The US presidential election of 1960, when a Roman Catholic, John F.
00:02:59
Kennedy, was a serious contender for the highest office in the land. Books and articles like this one cropped up. When we raise the question, should a Catholic be the President of the United States? We should not be accused of bigotry. It is a legitimate question, and to deny us the right to raise it smacks of the intolerance of which the questioner is accused.
00:03:19
This is from an article published on August 15, 1960, in the Church of God’s Evangel magazine. It’s a question that haunted some Christians in that time, Americans in general. Can the United States have a Catholic president? To our modern ears, as the author suggests, that seems like a bigoted question. In 1960, though, there were other considerations.
00:03:41
When we consider these limitations, religion is not the basic issue. Rather, it is the political action of the Roman Church. Religion is the means used to demand the loyalty to put the political action into operation. What if, say, John Kennedy is president of the United States and then gets the call from Rome that he has to use his power to benefit the Church or silence Protestantism, as Pius XI and Mussolini had in Italy? Now, today, that sounds crazy, but it was very much in the air in 1960.
00:04:12
This was not the first or the only publication to question Kennedy’s suitability as candidate for public office. In June of 1960, Akankay himself gave a speech at his Boston church asking just that. Could a Catholic president separate his official duties from his beliefs? Or would that constitute a failure of separation of church and state? In the separation of church and state argument?
00:04:37
Who is being protected in the deal, the church or the state? Or both? It depends on who you ask. A decade later, when the United States found itself embroiled in scandals involving bribes, wiretapping, illegal searches, and a break in at the Watergate Hotel, the most famous evangelist in the country found himself backing a corrupt president. Billy Graham had done plenty to encourage the head of state to identify as Christian.
00:05:05
Now, would his efforts to mix church and state backfire on the US with the church? You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause in the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron, and this is truth.
00:05:30
Okay, so we need to spend a little more time with Billy Graham. I did a whole episode in season three, but we need one more. Look, Lord, do with me as you will. That was Graham’s prayer early in his career, before he became pastor to presidents and before the big crusades. And, of course, out of that then would come the final parts of his education, his call to preach in a local church as a pastor, and then eventually to feel the pull of the Holy Spirit, to become an itinerant preacher of the Gospel.
00:06:03
By the way, this is David Bruce. I’m the executive vice president of the Billy Graham Library and the new Billy. Graham Archive and Research center in Charlote, North Carolina. He’s been with the organization for something like 40 years. Mr.
00:06:17
Bruce toured and worked closely with Dr. Graham and was a lot of fun to talk to. So this young preacher, Billy GraHam, goes on to do these huge rallies during the 1940s. That notoriety, that ability to preach in so many places, put Mr. Graham in to the national psyche.
00:06:37
And soon he met Mr. Truman. He’s consulting for presidents of the United States. It would often begin with his knowledge of them as friends before they ever either ran for public office or certainly ascended to the presidency. It was that way with Dwight Eisenhower, who was a general when they met.
00:06:56
He met Ronald and Nancy Reagan in the 1950s, he met Mr. Reagan’s actor. This notoriety, as we’ll see, was a blessing and a curse, pushing Billy to walk a tightrope between politics and faith. So these things happened not by design, but often by the. We would call it the backstroke of.
00:07:15
His life by simply doing ministry, attracting large audiences. Over the course of time, people are going to want to get involved. That’s what David Bruce says. And, you know, this is coming from someone who works at an organization bearing Graham’s name. To balance that out, let’s read what one biographer said of Billy Graham.
00:07:33
Billy Graham enjoyed proximity to power. He liked being able to have a hand, or at least a finger, in shaping national and international policy, in helping a friend gain and remain in the White House, in abetting the defeat of those whose religious and political views he believed to be mistaken. This is the story of a guy walking a tightrope. One of the founding members of the National association of Evangelicals, which, if you’ll remember from last episode, was designed to lobby for neo evangelicals to gain access to radio waves, military chaplaincies, and similar things. Graham was not a political, and he didn’t quite chase power, either.
00:08:11
Instead, he used his notoriety to do things like lobby for evangelicals. He would end up, over the course and arc of his own life and his own life history, meeting 14 different presidents, 14 successive administrations, from Mr. Truman. To Mr. Trump, quite a career, though not all of those guys were upstanding.
00:08:33
He met Mr. Nixon very interestingly in the Senate dining room very early on in Mr. Nixon’s Senate history, Richard Nixon. Served as Senator from California. Funny enough, Graham actually met Nixon’s parents.
00:08:48
First, but they really began as friends. They spent a lot of time together. The Grahams and the Nixons sometimes played golf. From 1953 to 1961, Nixon served as vice president under Eisenhower. Ike wasn’t a fan of Nixon, nor the prospect of Nixon being president.
00:09:04
In their eight years in the executive branch, Eisenhower never invited his VP to visit the residents. Biographer William Martin wrote about the Nixon Graham friendship in his excellent book A Prophet with Honor. Here is an actor reading from it. Billy always found fewer faults in his friends than others, managed to see if they liked him. He liked them and was inclined to think the best of them and to regard patent shortcomings as little more than a failure to let the sterling character he was sure they possessed manifest itself with sufficient force.
00:09:35
He wanted to believe the best of his friends, and Nixon was his buddy. That optimism would blind him to the man’s true character. Graham showed his support for Nixon’s 1956 bid for president, and Nixon attended Graham’s 1957 rally in Yankee Stadium. Billy nudged Nixon to demonstrate faith so that the voters could see and hear him, though he was often hesitant to do so. Graham said, there are many, many reasons.
00:10:01
Why I would strongly urge you to attend church regularly and faithfully from now on. I am convinced that you are going to have the backing of the overwhelming majority of the religiously minded people in America. It would be most unfortunate if some of your political enemies could point to any inconsistency. Nixon generally declined to demonstrate his faith in public. Meanwhile, Graham did more than just give religious advice, going so far as to suggest a VP nomination or to urge him to meet with Dr.
00:10:28
Martin Luther King, Jr. Nixon declined to meet MLK, possibly because of his Southern strategy, which we’ll cover next time, but also out of a bit of bravado. He didn’t think that black people would leave the party of Lincoln. After all, in 1956, 60% of the black vote went for the Republican Eisenhower. Why wouldn’t they choose him, too?
00:10:50
Nixon’s first run for the big chair was against the Catholic JFK. Protestants of many stripes worried about Rome’s potential control over Kennedy. In fact, the pamphlet read to you at the beginning of the episode was written by the director of the National association of Evangelicals, an organization that Graham helped to found. They also released a letter to evangelical pastors drumming up concern about the dangers of Roman Catholicism and, of course, communist infiltration. Public opinion is changing in favor of.
00:11:20
The Church of Rome. It is time for us to stand. Up and be counted as Protestants. Similar concerns were expressed in Christianity Today, which Graham also helped to establish and in full disclosure, serves ads to this podcast. The Billy Graham Evangelistic association put out a flyer in the first edition of Decision magazine reminding evangelicals, we Christians must work and pray as never before in this election, or the future course of America could be dangerously altered and the free preaching of the Gospel could be endangered.
00:11:51
Even theologically, liberal leaders, like those of the Federal Council of Churches showed fear. According to William Martin, Graham himself waffled down his opinions. He urged Eisenhower in a letter to support Nixon, because if Kennedy in public, Graham all but endorsed Nixon, often saying things along the lines that he was the man for the job but never quite making an official declaration. Of course, Nixon lost his bid for the presidency in one of the closest elections in US history. And opposition to Catholics dissipated with Vatican II, the Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965 that determined that the Roman Catholic Church would now be more tolerant of other faiths, including Protestantism.
00:12:53
Billy Graham had the ear of presidents, sometimes to give advice and sometimes to offer spiritual guidance to those on both sides of the aisle, even JFK. This elevated position meant not only holding rallies with tens of thousands in attendance, but also bending the ear of those in charge. But walking that line is just not easy. Soon, his public stances, his career in political circles, would have him backing a criminal, a man partially responsible for steering the party of Lincoln away from African Americans whose team was involved in spying, corruption, bribery, money laundering, and breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Convention. I’ll continue the story after these messages.
00:13:42
Welcome back. This episode, we’re talking about Billy Graham, who spent much of his life close to power. Yeah, he kind of had to walk a fine line, which, as you said earlier, kind of nipped him in the backside a few times. Well, it did, because we’re all human. And so every one of these presidents is a sinner, like I am and you are.
00:14:00
Some were, of course, saved by grace, and others were still trying to find a spiritual meaning to their lives. But the common denominator in those 14 administrations was Billy Graham. That’s an important thing to keep in mind as we get into some hard stuff. Those in power are people, too. It doesn’t excuse their crimes, if there are any, but they need spiritual guidance as much as anybody else.
00:14:24
Like, for example, President Johnson. Johnson wrote him a letter after he left office and that letter is here in our archives. He says rather poignantly, Billy, you will never know how you lifted my burden by your visits. Well, that’s poignant. We don’t really know what all that means down inside, those men had conversations we’ll never know about.
00:14:46
But to hear the president say, you’ve lifted my burden, you’re helping me, that’s a remarkable thing. President Johnson attended a crusade, this one in Houston in 1965. Though Johnson apparently was a little distracted, Graham blasted Vietnam protesters, much to the president’s delight. He supported Johnson’s Great SocieTy measures, which provided aid for Americans, programs that would be disassembled by Nixon and Reagan. Graham was nothing if not all over the place when it came to party platforms.
00:15:15
As close as he was to the JOhnsons, he still believed that Nixon was the man of the hour. Around Christmas 1967, Nixon invited the evangelist to vacation with him in Florida as he considered whether or not to run again. Despite having pneumonia, Graham flew down. They studied the Bible, watched football, and walked on the beach, hashing out Nixon’s next move. At the end of the visit, Nixon said, you still haven’t told me what I ought to do.
00:15:41
And Graham responded, well, if you don’t. You’Ll worry for the rest of your life whether you should have, won’t you? According to Martin, more than anyone else, it was Graham who convinced Nixon to campaign a second time. Again, Billy dodged and weaved when the press asked him who he was going to support. Still, it’s hard to deny what side he was on.
00:16:01
At a Portland cRusade, he said, there. Is no AmerICan I admire more than RIChard Nixon. He offered the prayer at the Republican National Convention after Nixon was nominated, then attended the meeting to choose the vice president. Graham’s choice was not picked. Instead, Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew got the job.
00:16:19
Though he’d served only one year as governor, he’d caught Nixon’s eye after ruthlessly putting down urban riots. Neither man had patience for protests. Graham also stated in an interview that he cast his absentee ballot for Nixon. Again, not an official endorsement, but, you know, an endorsement. RiChard Nixon’s presidency ushered in a new era of civil religion.
00:16:42
With the usual prayer breakfasts and such, the president expressed his desire to see the Ten Commandments read in schools, things to signal to the public that the government is seeking the face of God. The flip side of civil religion, of course, is that events like these open opportunity for leaders to play church while currying political favor. For example, Richard Nixon was the first President of the United States to institute a weekly church service in the White House. It began his first Sunday in office with Billy Graham preaching. It became much less about piety and more about creating another it place to see and be seen.
00:17:20
Charles Coulson, special counsel to the president, was instructed via memo of the president’s request, that you develop a list of rich people with strong religious interest to be invited to the White House church services. Future attendees included presidents and board chairs of companies like At T GE, General Motors, PepsiCo, Republic Steel, and more. Of course, those people need to know about Jesus as well. But it’s in defiance of James, too, which commands us not to offer the seat of honor only to the wealthy. NonVIPs, like wives of POWs were limited to 25% of attendees.
00:17:57
Preachers were instructed to keep things light, not act like a prophet. They were sometimes invited for political quid pro quo, like with Fred Rhodes, who sought the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention. A visit to the White House would make him seem like an important man, while also giving Nixon a bump with the 12 million members of the SBC. All of this to support a man with shaky credentials. When it came to faith, Nixon, according to an advisor, didn’t even believe in Christ’s resurrection.
00:18:28
Still, it gave Graham access. Remember, he liked being close to political power, and this access did not go unnoticed. Members of the liberal clergy criticized him for not urging Nixon to end the Vietnam War fast enough. Graham went a long stretch without speaking about Vietnam until Reverend Ernest Campbell of New York’s Riverside Church publicized an open letter to Graham calling on him to use his influence. We believe that the only way you or any of us can minister to the troops and inhabitants of Vietnam is to prophesy to the Pentagon and the White House.
00:19:02
In the tradition of Micaiah, son of ImLA, and you, our brother, have been and will be the prophet summoned to those halls. Graham often responded that he was not a prophet like Nathan of the Old Testament, but he did use his influence. Some modern writers critiqued the evangelist, saying he didn’t do enough for African Americans, though he did push for integration at some of his crusades and arranged a meeting between Nixon and a group of black ministers. Apparently, they let Nixon have it for three and a half hours. So went their relationship, helping each other.
00:19:35
Apparently, though, Graham was not aware of Nixon’s true character, the side of the president that, with the benefit of hindsight, we all know well. Remember, like most Americans, nearly all Americans, so much of that was hidden. And while things began to unravel for them and there was a reflection in this country of the duplicity in that office. Mr. Graham, of course, was heartsick.
00:20:01
On June 17, 1972, a security officer named Frank Wills was working the graveyard shift at the Watergate complex. He noticed something fishy. He found tape over the door locks. Wills called the police, who turned up a group of five men. They had lock picks, door Jimmies, $2,300 in cash, 40 rolls of unexposed film, tear gas, guns, and a short wave radio.
00:20:25
The break in was significant already, but what drew national attention is that these men had links to the re Election Committee of President Richard Nixon. In the following months, a litany of charges that’s almost too long to believe came to light. We generally think of the break in as the main event, but it was far from the only immoral act. There were lesser infractions, like just icky shenanigans, stuff like buying up thousands of copies of the Washington Post to fake votes in a poll for the paper. Then there were more serious charges.
00:20:58
Destruction of evidence that tried to frame JFK for the assassination of a South Vietnamese president. Or when a defense intellectual named Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, they broke into a psychiatrist’s office to dig up dirt on him. This was the work of the notorious plumbers, Nixon’s hatchet men. Vice President agNew, himself a hatchet man, became the White House’s attack dog against liberals, lambasting the Watergate Committee for McCarthy tricks and for acting on, quote, unquote, the misguided zeal of a few individuals. Well, it turns out that as governor and Baltimore county executive, he’d accepted literal bags of cash in exchange for government contracts, a habit he continued while vice president.
00:21:42
These men ran on law and order. Yet Agnew was given only one reduced charge of income tax evasion. He spent no time in jail and got a $10,000 fine, even though that was less than the IRS said he owed in taxes. On the graft he’d taken from a single Maryland building contractor, the vice president was knee deep in bribes and walked away with a slap on the wrist. That angst you feel about that?
00:22:09
Imagine how it felt at the time. Trust in government crumbled. You could get more serious charges by breaking a window during a protest. When called to testify, Pat Buchanan, then a speechwriter for Nixon, revealed tactics used by the campaign. One mission was to ensure that Nixon ran against the weakest Democrat, who they judged to be George McGovern.
00:22:30
He admitted to arranging fake demonstrations against Democratic candidates, planting letters to the editor in newspapers, having fake protesters duck into photographs with opponents to make it look like there was a demonstration going on when it was just one guy with a sign. Nothing illegal about that, perhaps, but it certainly erodes one’s confidence in the electoral process. Then there was the way they financed the burglary. Some of it was laundered through a Mexican bank, and $199,000 was paid to G. Gordon Liddy for supplies.
00:23:01
Money was hidden in wads of $100 bills stuffed into lockers and airports, hotel rooms and telephone booths. John Dean, White House Counsel, testified about his attempts to shut down the FBI’s investigation of Watergate and arrange payoffs for defendants to perjure themselves. Nixon was found to have hidden profits from a land sale. He claimed California as his voting residence, but paid no state taxes there. Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, went on the warpath after all the negative coverage and blamed the Eastern press establishment, not unlike recent attacks on the mainstream media.
00:23:36
Chuck Colson went so far as to threaten to revoke the broadcast licenses of the major networks if they didn’t comply with what he considered balanced coverage, I. E. Coverage that didn’t make the criminals look so bad. And the list continues. The president’s personal attorney, Herbert Kumbach, pled guilty to setting up fake political committees in 1970 to launder Senate campaign contributions.
00:23:59
Then there was Nixon’s obstruction of justice, one of the articles of impeachment leveled against him. As you know, he had an audio recording system in the Oval Office. And the president stalled and stalled when handing over the tapes, offering edited transcripts instead of the originals, eventually leaving out entire sections or covering them with a buz. Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor, was in charge of the investigation, and Nixon ordered his attorney general and deputy attorney general to fire Cox. But both men resigned instead.
00:24:30
The next attorney general followed the order, and then less than a half hour later, the White House sent the FBI to close off the offices of the special prosecutor, an incident known now as the Saturday Night Massacre, when the president ordered the end of an investigation of himself. The list goes on and on. My point here is to impress upon you how bad this was and how drawn out was. The process from the break in to Nixon’s resignation was almost two years and two months. Imagine the kind of mental burden that was on the country.
00:25:01
I also want to dwell on the depth of the corruption because there are people out there who want to downplay this event. Nixon himself believed that the chief executive could do stuff like this simply because he was the chief executive. There’s a fascinating moment from an interview with David Bruce after this whole affair was over. Where Nixon says something remarkable. He plays up the difficulty of the era.
00:25:22
Airline hijackings, intelligence agencies not working together, bombings, student protests, all of these stresses against national security. And what follows here is a recreation. The interviewer tries to clarify what, in. A sense, you’re saying is that there are certain situations, and the Huston plan, or that part of it was one of them, where the president can decide what’s in the best interest of the nation or something, and do something illegal. Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal by definition.
00:25:53
Exactly. If the president. If, for example, the president approves something, approves an action because of the national security, or in this case, because of the threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating a law. I know that’s kind of a jumble of words, but in Nixon’s opinion, if the chief executive deemed it a matter of national security, a president should have orders carried out without fear of breaking the law. The president, in other words, in Nixon’s opinion, is above the law.
00:26:32
The Nixon administration entered us into a constitutional crisis where the executive branch tried to deny the other branches the right to check its power. It was more than just a break in. It was an attempt to assert control. Some notable figures stood with Nixon. One was Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, and we’ll get to him later this season.
00:26:53
The other was the REverend Billy Graham. He didn’t participate in WAtergate, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he was aware of any of it before the public was. But he was still supportive of Nixon until it was all but impossible. As things began to break, Mr. Graham tried to reach out to his friend.
00:27:12
He was basically cut off from Mr. Nixon in the final months of his presidency. He couldn’t get a call through. They didn’t call him. He would later believe that they were trying to shield him in some way.
00:27:23
So the president did not return calls. Graham’s remembrance of this changed over time. White House logs actually show that the two men talked four times in the last months of Nixon’s presidency. He never condoned what Watergate was. He always dealt with it as it was.
00:27:39
It was a sin. It was a transgression in this country’s history. It was a rip and a tear in our fabric. But Mr. Graham never lost his friendship.
00:27:47
One of the peculiar bits of this story is how Graham reacted in public to the transcripts of the Oval Office tapes which were published in newspapers. Many accusations of wrongdoing were made clear by then, and according to Martin, what he found there devastated him. He wept, he threw up, and he almost lost his innocence about Richard Nixon. Graham’s response was visceral at first and then OD in the process. Rather than talk about Nixon’s crimes, he focused on his use of salty language and taking God’s name in vain.
00:28:17
It seems OD to us that Graham was shocked by Nixon’s use of foul language. But many other commentators picked up on the same thing. Graham wasn’t the only one, and the fallout from Graham’s continued support is somewhat up for debate. I asked Frances Fitzgerald about this. She’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of several books, including The Evangelicals.
00:28:38
That relationship with Nixon was one that was fraught with some difficulties and certainly seems to have maybe hurt his public image. Yes, it did. Certainly in the end, because he kept with Nixon right through Watergate. He really thought he had to save Nixon, and he believed that Nixon never done any of these things again. He was trying to keep a middle ground, and Nixon was sort of promising him that.
00:29:10
But then along comes Watergate, and it destroys Nixon, but it also really destroys Graham as a moral force for a while, and he goes off on crusades abroad. He spends a lot of time abroad after Nixon. In 1980, while other evangelical leaders were vocal supporters of Ronald Reagan, Graham held back, probably because he’d been burned before, and we’ll get there soon. He continued to participate in major crusades as well as officiate at national events like the memorial Service for 911. Graham was on the list of Gallup’s most admired men 41 times from 1955 to 1998.
00:29:54
If he lost any credibility from his friendship with Nixon, it’s hard to quantify. It seems that Graham did have some thoughts about his entanglements with power later in life. He told Christianity Today in 2011, I. Would have steered clear of politics. I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places.
00:30:13
People in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to. But looking back, I know I sometimes cross the line, and I wouldn’t do that now. He regretted when he crossed the line, and I think we can cut him some slack from time to time. I mean, if you were asked to give spiritual guidance to a person in high standing, wouldn’t you? I mean, presidents, queens, kings, dukes, and members of Congress, all need Jesus as much as the next person.
00:30:40
Of course, if that crosses into doing politics or endorsing morally questionable candidates, that tends to get one in trouble. As a guest on this show said in season one, godly people should maintain prophetic distance when ministering to those in power, like Daniel refusing to eat the King’s food. We have to keep separate when we’re talking to those in high status or risk being unable to see the truth and call them out on it. It seems, for the most part, Billy Graham figured that out. At the same time, Graham’s son Franklin has not.
00:31:14
As ongoing investigations reveal more about President Donald Trump and his administration, Franklin looks a lot like his father during Watergate. When Fox News tweeted about the verdict against Donald Trump in his sexual assault case last spring, Graham responded by writing, it is a disappointment that our illegal system has become so politicized. Pray for our nation, he called out. The old chestnut from the Nixon years. When the court system prosecutes your crimes, speak out against the judicial branch.
00:31:41
Now here’s a different one. From April 9, 2021, Donald Trump became president not to make money, but to do his best to preserve the great things about this nation for future generations. He put America first. I’ve never seen anyone work harder. Thank you, President Trump, for your service to this nation, or this one from March 20, 2023 we need to pray for our country and where it is headed.
00:32:03
The left in Washington and across the country just can’t get their fill of attacking Donald Trump. They are so paranoid of him. The onslaught against him is continual. There is no question the media and the left manipulated the last election, and they are scared to death of Donald Trump’s possible return. This brings me back to the beginning of this episode where I discussed the role the Catholic Church played in persecuting Protestants in Italy in the 1940s.
00:32:27
What did American evangelicals say was the problem there? The failure to separate the church and the state. The Roman Catholic Church tied itself to a dictator in order to accomplish its goals. While nobody claims that Graham wants to wipe out another Christian movement, as the pope did in the 1940s, politicians and preachers make strange bedfellows, a theme we’ll see a lot this season. Yet we also kind of want preachers to speak out on injustice, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
00:32:55
Did. We ask them to walk a tightrope, to be involved in politics without also getting soiled by their proximity. What do we really think about the separation of church and state, and when does it apply? When we’re confronted with hard truths about those in power, like Harold Ockengay was when he visited the Pope? Are we going to fixate on details like whether or not he did or didn’t attend the opera, or are we going to be honest about the bigger issue?
00:33:22
If a politician we back is caught red handed, will we humble ourselves or get distracted by their dirty language? Are we seeking righteousness or are we really looking for proximity to power?
00:33:44
Special thanks to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and David Bruce. You can hear more of our interview by going to patreon.com Slash Trucepodcast and giving a little each month to help me make this project. For a list of my sources, check your show notes or the website at www.trucepodcast.com There you can sign up for the email list, listen to old episodes, and find out how to help via Venmo PayPal check or whatever. I relied heavily on the Evangelicals by Francis Fitzgerald, who was also kind enough to join me for an interview. I also recommend a prophet with honor, the Billy Graham Story by William Martin.
00:34:17
It’s well-written and a great resource. Thanks also to all the people who gave me their voices for this episode. My friends Chris Staron, Jackie Hart, and Marcus Watson of the Spiritual Life and Truce Podcast is a production of Truce Media, LLC. I’m Chris Staron and this is Truce.
by Chris Staron | Apr 30, 2024 | Episodes
From Decline to Unity: Evangelicals Embrace the Youth Culture Revolution – Joel Carpenter
Does this sound familiar? As an evangelical leader, have you been told that the key to reaching today’s youth culture is to simply preach louder and hold more events? But despite your efforts, do you find that young people are still disengaged and uninterested in your message? The pain of investing time, energy, and resources into ineffective strategies can be disheartening. But what if there was a better way? By understanding the historical ties between evangelicals and the Republican Party, exploring the impact of the Scopes trial, and learning about the challenges and opportunities of connecting with youth culture, you can gain valuable insights and discover new strategies for effective outreach.
My special guest is Joel Carpenter
Renowned historian Joel Carpenter joins Chris Staron in this episode to provide expert insights into the relationship between the evangelical movement and youth culture. With his extensive knowledge and research, Joel offers a deep understanding of the historical context and challenges faced by evangelical leaders in engaging with young people. As the author of the influential book “Revive Us Again,” Joel’s expertise in the subject matter is unparalleled. His analysis sheds light on the dynamics within the evangelical movement, highlighting the need for a renewed focus on outreach to effectively connect with the youth of today. Listeners can expect a thought-provoking discussion as Chris and Joel explore the complexities of the evangelical movement’s interaction with youth culture, paving the way for a unified movement and a renewed commitment to reaching out to the younger generation.
The weird duality of separating oneself while also feeling wounded by the culture at large. – Joel Carpenter
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Understand the historical ties between evangelicals and the Republican Party, and how these connections have shaped the political landscape.
- Explore the impact of the Scopes trial on the fundamentalist movement and gain insights into the ongoing tensions between science and faith.
- Learn about the challenges and opportunities of connecting with the youth culture as an evangelical leader, and discover new strategies for effective outreach.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the formation and influence of the National Association of Evangelicals, and its role in shaping the evangelical movement.
- Examine the reasons behind the evangelical shift towards the Republican Party, and uncover the implications of this alliance on both religion and politics.
Historical ties between evangelicals and the Republican Party
Historically, evangelicals have had a complex relationship with the Republican Party in the U.S. Initially, key figures in the evangelical movement, such as Harold Ockenga, did not feel the necessity to align solely with a single political party. However, as the counterculture and student protests of the 1960s and 70s unfolded, the anxieties and fears regarding youth culture pushed evangelicals towards a refocused Republican Party.
The resources mentioned in this episode are:
- Start at the beginning of season six: After listening to this episode, the host encourages listeners to go back and start at the beginning of season six to fully understand the context and background of the topic being discussed.
- Check out the book Revive Us Again by Joel Carpenter: The host mentions Joel Carpenter, author of the book Revive Us Again, which provides insights into the history of evangelicalism. Interested listeners are encouraged to check out this book for a deeper understanding of the subject matter.
- Become a patron on Patreon: The host mentions that there is a special bonus episode about Herbert J. Taylor, the president of a Chicago aluminum company, available for patrons on Patreon. Interested listeners are invited to become patrons to gain access to this exclusive content.
- Visit trucepodcast.com: The host encourages listeners to visit the official website of the Truce Podcast, trucepodcast.com, where they can find additional information, resources, and episodes related to the topics discussed in this episode.
- Listen to the episode about Harold Ockengay: The host mentions that there is an interview with Harold Ockengay available, but due to audio quality issues, an actor recreated the conversation.
Sources
- “Revive Us Again” by Joel Carpenter
- “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald
- Interesting article about the American “Religious Depression”
- “The Surprising Work of God” by Garth Rosell
- “After the Ivory Tower Falls” by Will Bunch
- “Reaganland” by Rick Perlstein
- Bill Graham’s Sermon “The Flames of Revolution”
- The National Association of Evangelicals “The New Treason”
Discussion Questions:
- The episode starts by recapping the Scopes Trial. What are your thoughts about that event?
- Do we as Christians define ourselves by our wounds? Is that good or bad?
- Do you define yourself by your wound?
- Does it make sense for evangelists to target the youth? What was the effect in the 1940s and 50s?
- How did the GI Bill impact college education?
- Does it bother you that kids going to colleges that were partially funded by the GI Bill then went on to lead the counterculture movements of the 1960s?
Transcript (generated by AI)
00:00:00
This episode is part of a long series exploring how some evangelicals tied themselves to the Truce Podcast in the United States. It can stand on its own, but when you’re done, go back and start at the beginning of season six. This is Harold Akingay and the National Association of Evangelicals. Last season, I covered the history of fundamentalism up through 1925, and in this season, I’m going to spend most of my time in the 1960s. There are a lot of years left out, like 35.
00:00:31
So in this one episode, we’re going to try to catch up. Let’s begin where I left off in season five. Here we go. In 1925, do you believe Joshua made. The sun stand still?
00:00:45
Two lawyers squared off in a large, hot courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee, to try a case in which a young teacher was accused of breaking the law by teaching evolution in a public school. It was the first complete American trial ever broadcast on radio. I believe what the Bible says advertised as a battle of the Giants, science versus religion, ending in an embarrassing moment when a lawyer from the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan, was called to the stand. And they did not come here to try this case. They came here to try revealed religion didn’t do so well.
00:01:20
At the time, the case seemed like a draw. Nobody won. Nobody lost. But in the following decades, the 1930s story grew, and the legend of the Scopes trial turned into a defeat for fundamentalism in the public imagination. Fundamentalists lost in the denominations.
00:01:41
Remember, they didn’t die out. They went underground. That will be important later on. When fundamentalists come out of the woodwork in the 1970s and surprise the culture, fundamentalism was anything but unified. Some denominations divided and others didn’t.
00:02:01
Most fundamentalists stayed put, opting for unity. In the 1930s, historian Joel Carpenter, who we’ll hear from in just a moment, wrote this even when fundamentalists have expressed their alienation toward American cultural trends and advocated separation from worldly involvement, their words have been more those of wounded lovers than true outsiders. That’s something to look out for this season, the weird duality of separating oneself while also feeling wounded by the culture at large. Like a middle schooler who sits alone, joins no clubs, plays no sports, and wonders why they’re barely in the yearbook at the end of the year. Why is the culture we don’t engage with moving away from us?
00:02:40
They will have spent decades in their own Christian bubble when they suddenly start getting involved in politics in the 1970s. And speaking of the Christian bubble, it was about to get a lot bigger. As the scope of the American government grew, it went to war in a foreign nation. Then students protested, and Christian leaders, the same ones who tried to evangelize to young people, questioned the activism of the 1960s. They struggled to unify but failed, and then learned to fear the very kids they tried to reach.
00:03:14
You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian church. We press pause in the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron, and this is truth.
00:03:33
On December 1741, the US Naval base at Pearl harbor was bombed along with a bunch of other places, and the US was at war. For evangelical Christians who stayed home, there was a renewed sense of purpose. The previous World War had left in its wake an age of flappers, illicit booze, new forms of music, and waning interest in Christianity. Instead of pushing people into churches, the Great Depression drove them away, what some have called the American religious depression. The term is disputed because some denominations grew in that period.
00:04:07
Mainline or theologically liberal churches faced incredible losses, but conservative and fundamentalist churches actually grew. Yet church attendance overall in the 1930s was on the decline. As morals loosened, evangelical clergy wanted to turn the tide. Here is Joel Carpenter, author of the book Revive Us Again. The term juvenile delinquency was probably invented in the early 40s, books coming out about the national youth problem.
00:04:37
So focus on youth. And of course, the war did that, too. All the young people serving, young people moving to factory towns to get jobs. And so the nightlife scene all of a sudden is filled with teenagers. As Pastor Tori Johnson put it, America cannot survive another 25 years like the last 25.
00:04:58
If we have another lost generation after this war, like at the close of the last war, America will be sunk. The quote is from the first ever annual convention of Youth for Christ in 1945. YFC in the 1940s may have been the most effective organization at reaching young people, though it certainly was not the only one more followed in the 1950s. Like fellowship of Christian Athletes, some leaders of those organizations are going to be important as this season goes on. From YFC’s Billy Graham, who gets mixed up with Nixon, to campus Crusade’s Bill Bright rallying for votes in the 1980 election, this will come up again.
00:05:35
At this stage, all these organizations, and there were a bunch of them, focused on two goals, evangelism of young people and discipleship. Several were financed by the same guy, Herbert J. Taylor, the president of a Chicago aluminum company. Patrons of the show can hear a special bonus episode about him@patreon.com. Truce Podcast so there was a real concern for the youth of America in the 1940s, and a group of young preachers rose up to meet the challenge.
00:06:03
They preached to big churches, and small stood in open fields. And soon these young preachers came to trust each other. Youth for Christ was one of the organizations that brought them together, led by Tori Johnson. He was a very winsome, zippy with it. Pastor of a Midwest Bible church on Cicero Avenue, west side of Chicago.
00:06:24
Chicago is such a powerhouse, and Johnson is such a great organizer that he’s the one who kind of builds a national network of these pop up, locally supported youth rallies around the country, and he forms Youth for Christ International. I think what changed is sort of a generational change in fundamentalism. Here’s a second generation. These are the people who don’t necessarily remember the scopes trial. They don’t remember as Christian leaders the humiliation of losing battles for orthodoxy and the denominations.
00:07:04
They in many respects are reverting to D. L. Moody’s style of evangelicalism. DL Moody Being maybe the most famous American evangelist in the 18 hundreds, his model was important to what would become Christian fundamentalism, essentially grow the kingdom using any method possible. Print media, organize events, start schools, found conferences, be everywhere, win the world for.
00:07:28
Christ, find Winsome ways to do that, speak the language of the people of our day. So as a major innovative surge that’s going on using pop culture, Jack Wurtson played saxophone in a dance band before he got saved. Sorry, I know this is a lot of names. He’s doing things that kind of shock and alarm people, like putting gospel songs to swing dance band tunes and rhythms, wearing loud socks. And some of his gospel musicians are actually more stand up comedians.
00:08:06
So it’s really a fresh wave of revivalism that seems much more with it than the older fundamentalist preachers. If you look at charts of church attendance in the 19 hundreds, you see a spike in the 1950s. This was due in part to citywide evangelism campaigns like those of Billy Graham. Church attendance went from 43% before the war to 55% in 1950 and 69% in 1960. But the precursor to those massive events was the youth rallies of the 1940s.
00:08:39
Even among fundamentalist groups, there was a desire to distance themselves from some of their fundamentalist past, a call to unity. But while also maintaining the authority of the Bible, they wanted an organization to present their cause before people of power. The NAE was sparked by the fact that the Federal Council of Churches put out a code in which the regular broadcasting should be confined to those people who were recommended by the Council of Churches. In 1979, Harold Ockengay sat down for this interview. I can’t play it for you because the audio quality is somewhat diminished and difficult to understand.
00:09:16
So I had an actor recreate it. In the 1940s, radio was king. New units sold even during the Depression. And evangelists were some of the first people to adopt the new technology. As time went on, though, there came a need to regulate the airwaves.
00:09:31
The Federal Communications Commission governed licensing of radio, and there were very strong efforts by the mainline denominations, the Federal Council of Churches, to say, you don’t want crazy sectarian dudes dominating the radio. Work with us FCC to get the networks to go for non paid representative radio broadcasts, and we Federal Council people will provide those for you. The Federal Council of Churches was a mainline group of largely theologically liberal churches. When you hear the word mainline, don’t confuse it with mainstream like I used to. Instead think liberal in their theology, a less literal interpretation of the Bible.
00:10:17
Perhaps they considered that Jesus wasn’t God, but simply a nice teacher, that kind of thing. Radio airwaves belonged to the public, and so the public good had to be served. Some stations opted to use preachers to fill that obligation. The Federal Council of Know that represented liberal and mainline churches became the go between. Who decided who got to be on the radio for free and who didn’t?
00:10:40
That’s a lot of power for a single organization, especially one with an agenda. And of course, fundamentalists, other Pentecostals, other kinds of evangelicals were all over the radio, and they saw this as a big threat, an attempt to put them off the air. So they said, no, we have to have our lobbying efforts, too. In the 1940s, a syndicated radio show meant reaching a huge percentage of the population. If modernists controlled the airwaves, then the God talked about would be the liberal vision, not the literal biblical one.
00:11:16
What theological conservatives needed was an organization that could represent their side to the Federal Communications Commission. Evangelicals also lacked representation as military chaplains. That, too, would need to be addressed. Enter Harold Ochenge. And his name may sound familiar.
00:11:35
He’s kind of coming back into the conversation. Akenge serves as a handy contrast to some of the people we’re going to cover later this season. Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Laughley, Patton Robertson, those people. Akenge was a guy with strong religious conviction and a desire to have influence in politics, but one who didn’t feel the need to honor a single political party. Okay, so who was Harold Akingay?
00:12:01
Harold and his cohorts came onto the scene in the midst of the youth revivals of the 1940s. He was kind of rough as a young man and was maybe a little too anxious to get married. He proposed to a woman the very first time they met after one of his mentors recommended her. Surprise, surprise, that didn’t work out. Akane preached over 400 times before even leaving seminary.
00:12:26
He first went to Princeton, and then, when they turned modernist, went to the New Westminster Theological Seminary. Even in those early days, you can see his opposition to modernism. One of his professors was a big name in the modernist fundamentalist debate. But the cultural appetite for the old fundamentalist battles was waning. Well, people were tired of the fundamentalist withdraw, both political and economic and social scene.
00:12:51
This again is an actor recreating a recording of Harold Ockengay and also the. Ecclesiology the fundamentalists had of a pure church and dividing every denomination if they didn’t have a, quote, pure church, and so on, and felt that we ought to take more of an active part in the fray. So I remember in 1947, I coined the word neo evangelical. I felt we needed a new evangelicalism to enter again into all areas of life, the academic, the social, the political, the economic, the ecclesiastical realms, and take a strong stance for the movement. Instead of being like the fundamentalists and withdrawing and allowing the endowments and the controls and the bureaucracy and everything going to the liberals.
00:13:38
His nickname was Mr. Evangelical. We did embrace, I think quite fully the fundamentalist theology. The movement embraced fundamentalist theology, where neo evangelicals like Akanke differed from other fundies, was on separation. They thought you should work within the denominations.
00:13:57
Infiltrate was the word they used, and make change within the existing structures rather than splitting. We thought that the organization should be, the NAE should be the means of bringing that about. The aim of the National association of Evangelicals at its founding was unity among Christ followers. The organization was still going to duke it out with modernism. How they would do that was still yet to be decided.
00:14:21
One big question was whether or not the NAE should allow Pentecostals to join. Akenge, thanks to his personal holiness, background, was open to the idea, and the NAE eventually welcomed them. One historian wrote, given the fact that. Modern Pentecostalism and its charismatic offspring represents the largest and fastest growing movement in the history of the Christian Church, with a worldwide membership of nearly 600 million after only a century of existence, makes one wonder where evangelicalism would be without it. This is a vital move.
00:14:53
Pentecostals were not yet part of the inside crowd of evangelicalism. Mid 19 hundreds. They were outsiders. By allowing Pentecostals into a national movement. They were essentially given a place at the table in Christian culture.
00:15:07
Decades later, as we’ll see, Pentecostals played a big role in tying evangelicals to the Truce Podcast. One, Pat Robertson, even ran for president. Others used their television ministries to rally for Ronald Reagan. In the 1970s and 80s. They were huge in the they were on the outside looking in.
00:15:28
Inviting them to the NAE meant legitimacy, and the NAE needed their muscle again. The goals of the new group were to gain access to free radio waves and also represent evangelicals to the government, seek representation as military chaplains, and Unify Christ followers. And of course, this being the 1940s, Akengay’s opening speech at the first national meeting also punctuated the need to oppose communism. He was such a powerful speaker that he was nominated for the position of President of the NAE. Yet Akengay’s vision for the NAE, which he shared with Billy Graham, was never fully accomplished.
00:16:06
The golden age of the evangelistic movement simmered down by the end of the 1950s. Part of that goes back to the old battles between fundamentalists and modernists, but also because the new evangelicals tended to start their own organizations rather than work within existing structures, as Akanke envisioned. Still, these guys transformed the country in the 1940s and 50s, welcoming Pentecostals and focusing on reaching young people. But they couldn’t have foreseen the tide of countercultural changes that was headed their way. Revival started in the youth, but so would upheaval.
00:16:42
I’ll continue the story after these messages.
00:16:50
In 1932, at least 20,000 American veterans marched on Washington, DC. They set up camps and occupied government buildings. After the Great War, they’d been promised a bonus, cash set up by the Congress to be paid out in 1945, literally decades after the final battle. Then the Great Depression hit, and veterans needed the money twelve years early. So they set up camps and demanded early payment.
00:17:16
The ensuing battle to shoe them away was a national embarrassment. So when World War II happened, the US government did not want a repeat. They passed the Servicemen’s Adjustment act of 1944, also called the GI Bill, which eventually paid for 2.2 million members of the armed forces earn a college degree. By World War II, only 5% of Americans had a bachelor’s degree. Compare that to 37% today.
00:17:47
A huge jump. Partially thanks to assistance to veterans, a veritable gold rush emerged to accommodate all the new students, largely men, and this being the 1940s, most of them white. Then came the war in Vietnam. Student protests of the war gotten national attention as they increased, leading into 1965 when the US began bombing in earnest, not to mention people of college age, had the most to lose with at its peak, 40,000 young men drafted every month, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
00:18:21
Came out against the war, highlighting that African American men were disproportionately dying in Vietnam while also being harassed here at home. In 1968, many Americans turned against the war due to the Tet Offensive, which was a series of coordinated attacks that the Communist north took on the South. Targeting areas where American presence was concentrated. It demonstrated that the north was not as weak as the Johnson administration had said they were. This conflict, as you know, created tension.
00:18:53
Student protests grew severe. This placed evangelical leaders in a tight spot. By 1967, around 15,000 young Americans were dead and over 109,000 wounded. If the Vietnam War was a mission of God, as some had claimed, how could you justify bombing the stuffing out of a poor, small country to protect an economic model? Because, you know, it was a battle between communism and capitalism.
00:19:19
As I said earlier in the 1940s, Revival started with young people. 20 years later, it looked like they would rip the country apart. Billy Graham, who had risen to prominence as an evangelist to the youth on his 1966 and 1967 radio program, Hour of Decision, featured sermons like a nation rocked by crime or flames of revolution. He sermonized on how peace efforts through organizations like the United nations were a sign of the end times and that the only peace we can have on this earth is through Jesus Christ. To be fair, Graham had always used current events to create a sense of immediacy in his sermons.
00:19:57
Here are just a few clips from his 1969 sermon, can America Survive? I’ll play a few selections because, as per usual, it’s hard to put Graham in a box. America is involved in two Revolutionary wars, one in Vietnam and the other here at home. The Vietnam War gets bloodier and bloodier as AmericA finds itself the only nation in the world which has ever purposely fought a no win war. Hold on now.
00:20:25
Billy Graham described Vietnam as a war we couldn’t win in 1969. That may surprise you. It surprised me. The other war is just as complicated and perhaps even more serious. The President’s Commission on Riots and Disorders has bluntly warned that we may be in for anarchy, insurrection and revolution within a few months unless immediate emergency action is taken to solve the problems of the ghettos.
00:20:53
There was real concern about what these protests over race feminism in Vietnam would lead to. Were they legitimate or were they started by Communists? In a series of surprise moves, he warns about demagogues using this moment to gain power, hiding behind our suburban wealth and comfort consumerism on TV, saying that people will want to vote for the presidential candidate who panders to them. Thus this fall they are going to be tempted to vote for the man that promises them the most, whether he can deliver it or not. And a small minority are going to burn, loot, steal, and even kill to get what they think is theirs by right.
00:21:32
Scary stuff. My heart races just listening to him, even though this was 50 years ago. And rather than knocking liberals, he credits. Them, many liberal writers and intellectuals, a warning that America may be headed toward a left wing or a right wing dictatorship. His warning in this sermon is classic Graham look to Jesus to solve your deepest problems.
00:21:56
But clearly he wasn’t keen on protests. Neither were others. A 1966 resolution by the National association of Evangelicals, Remember them? Spoke out against the rage coming from young people. It’s really short.
00:22:10
Here is the whole resolution believing that. The authority of the state is sanctioned by God. The NAE deplores the burning of draft cards, subversive movements and seditious utterances and prevalent disloyalty to the United States of America. By the way, those two sentences are titled the Truce Podcast. Heavy word, treason.
00:22:31
This is kind of an interesting example because you’ll see this as we go through the season, people calling on the authority that God gives the state when it suits them to do so, but not maybe when the state does something that offends us, like, I don’t know, charging us taxes or tells us how to run our schools. And the NAE wasn’t alone. The Southern Baptist Convention echoed their concerns in 1971 of the major shifts in this era was a loss of trust for the American government as new truths came to light. Atrocities committed in Vietnam, spying on Americans, shiftiness in our leaders. The other big change is distrust of young people, as there were real concerns about the outcome of these protests.
00:23:12
Where would these battles over gay and lesbian communities, women’s rights, and African Americans lead us? Changing attitudes towards economics and taxes in the 1940s and youth ushered in an era of revival and prosperity in the white middle class of the United States. Then in the 1960s and 70s, some of the same religious leaders who helped in the viewed young people with growing concern. I wanted to start the season with Harold Akingay because he’s a fun mix of things, a theological fundamentalist and someone who sought unity even to the point of opening the door to mainstream acceptance of Pentecostal believers. I also want to highlight a reality.
00:23:54
The NAE didn’t unify evangelicals. Ultimately, it would be our common social and political fights that would do that. But you gotta love the impulse of the early NAE. It’s also important to touch on these student led protests, because what follows won’t make sense in a vacuum. As conservatives witnessed their country being challenged by students whose college educations had been paid for with taxpayer money, their attitudes towards taxation and education would change, too.
00:24:23
Youth, in their mind, could no longer be trusted. To recap after the Scopes trial, I believe what the Bible says, American fundamentalists went underground. Young people coming back from World War II were evangelized heavily. Church attendance in the 1950s and 60s skyrocketed. Young people were the key.
00:24:46
Repent for the day of the Lord approaches. Then those young people and their kids took part in the GI Bill. After the World War, Korean War, and Vietnam, they sought out higher education. And soon those colleges became hotbeds of protest, which national celebrity preachers like Billy Graham didn’t quite know how to respond to. Repent for the day of the Communist approaches.
00:25:08
Through the NAE, evangelicals tried to unite, even with Pentecostals. Repent and be baptized in the Holy Spirit. But they failed. The NAE didn’t do the trick. It wasn’t until the 1970s that evangelicals found common cause.
00:25:24
This time around politics and battles over morals, that stuff was kicked off when evangelicals panicked about the behavior of the youth. Was the country backsliding? Even though it had only been, what? Forward sliding? It had only been increasing in its religion for a short time.
00:25:43
Take note of that. The glory days that a lot of Christians look back on were not a sure thing. In the early 1940s, evangelicals were legitimately concerned that Christianity in America was about to disappear 80 years ago. Instead of simply lecturing young people, they shared the gospel, even if it meant wearing colorful socks. This era reminds me of today when so many evangelicals.
00:26:11
My people are terrified of the youth. And I get it. I drive a school bus. They’re intimidating. But what if we took all of our fear and anxiety and turned it to outreach, as the preachers of the 1940s and 50s did?
00:26:26
This middle period that we’re so quickly jumping over here between seasons five and six is fascinating. You can hear about the negative side, the fear of communism and socialism, our efforts to take resources in the Third World, and evolving ideas about the role of religion in America by listening to season three. But this period was also defined by that can do spirit of evangelism and hope. What would it take to let go of our wounds of the Scopes trial, past inabilities to unite, and the fear of the youth culture in order to do the right thing. That loving drive of the 1950s became anxiety in the 1960s and 70s, opening new wounds that pushed evangelicals into a radically refocused Truce Podcast.
00:27:14
But let’s end on hope. Could we prayerfully see that our hope doesn’t come from opposition, but from sharing the simple message of salvation and in the process, just maybe find unity among fellow believers?
00:27:46
Special thanks to everyone who gave me their voice for this episode, including my friend Chris Staron and Marcus Watson of the Spiritual Life and Leadership podcast. As usual, you can find a full list of my sources on the website@Truce Podcast.com or in your show notes. In particular, I benefited from the books the Surprising Work of God by Garth Roselle, the Evangelicals by Francis Fitzgerald, and an interview with Harold Ockengay that resides at the Wheaton Archives. Thanks to Emily Vanis of the Buswell Library Archives for her help. I’m also indebted to Joel Carpenter, author of the book Revive Us Again.
00:28:18
It does a great job of filling in the gaps between last season and this one. Truce is listener-supported. It takes so many hours to do this show. I’m doing it while also driving a school bus, which is my full-time job. If you’d like to hear more truce, consider giving a little each month by Check, PayPal, Venmo or Patreon.
00:28:37
Details are in your show notes or trucepodcast.com donate for this series, I’m breezing through the 1940s and 50s, which means I’m skipping over important topics like McCarthyism, fear of Soviets that we took as permission to ruin the Third World, tying Christianity to capitalism, and Eisenhower’s social religion. I covered that stuff in season three of this very podcast. My Christian films Bringing up Bobby and Between the Walls are streaming for free on Hoopla, YouTube, and Tubi. Check them out. They are a fun and cool way to talk to your friends about Jesus.
00:29:08
Send me your comments or follow the show on social media. God Willing, new episodes of Truce will drop every two weeks. Like and subscribe so you to every new episode as it’s released. Truce is a production of Truce Media, LLC. I’m Chris Staron and this is Truce.
by Chris Staron | Apr 16, 2024 | Episodes
What do we mean by the word “biblical”?
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Thomas McIntyre stood before the US Congress to deliver a moving speech. The man was being hounded by a fringe movement known as the New Right. The movement came from the work of men like Paul Weyrich, Howard Phillips, and Richard Viguerie. Their goal was to disrupt the Republican Party. They wanted to do away with much of the federal government and program to help the poor while simultaneously cutting taxes and increasing the military. They hoped to accomplish this by controlling direct mail. Direct mail! It sounds silly, but by inundating voters and congressional offices with bulk mail they could control the story.
The New Right
Men like McIntyre and Senator Mark Hatfield didn’t know what to do with this influx of petty politics. Someone had even gone so far as to question Hatfield’s Christian salvation just because of how we was going to vote on the Panama Canal treaty. What does giving the Panama Canal back to Panama have to do with salvation? Almost nothing.
Today, we’re going to explore this wacky phenomenon where we call something “Christian” or “biblical” if it fits out politics not if it is addressed in the Bible. How are we being manipulated by propaganda like this? And what can we do about it?
Discussion Questions:
- Was the United States responsible in its claiming the Panama Canal as a territory?
- Are there things in your life that you mix with Christianity?
- How have your politics gotten confused with your faith?
- Does the Bible have anything to say on the Panama Canal treaty?
- What do we mean by the word “biblical”?
Sources:
Episode Transcript
MCINTYRE: “That said, Mr. President, let me now turn to my second purpose here today.”
CHRIS: This is an actor reading from a speech given on February 28, 1978. The original speaker was a Democratic Senator from New Hampshire named Thomas McIntyre. By the way, welcome to the Truce Podcast. I know that this probably sounds stuffy, a crazy way to start a season. Where is the action? The drama? The condemnation of an enemy? No, no, no, my friend. This… this is a great speech.
MCINTYRE: “Mr. President, I believe the techniques used to exploit the issue of the canal treaties are the most compelling evidence to date that an ominous change is taking place in the very character and direction of American politics”
CHRIS: He’s in front of the Senate talking about the Panama Canal. One of the most important manmade waterways in the world. It’s about 40 miles long, traveling southeast across Panama. In debate after debate, the Senate wrestled with President Carter’s plan to give the land to the Panamanian people.
The US had been involved with the canal since 1902 with the passage of the Spooner Act. Originally, a French company tried to build there and 20,000 people died, mostly from yellow fever and malaria. By the way, notice that the US takes over for French imperialism gone awry. The same will be true when we cover the Vietnam War.
The French gave up, so the Americans wanted a shot, guys like Teddy Roosevelt. There was just one problem: they couldn’t get a treaty with Columbia who, at the time, controlled the land. So they did what would become a defacto plan in South America – the US backed a revolution. And guess what? The new government of Panama was far more receptive. Even more lives were lost to disease, dynamite accidents, and mudslides. But it was ours. A treaty provision allowed the US to act as it wished within a 10-mile zone of the canal, essentially, giving the US a foreign colony.
That is what was up for debate in 1978. Should the United States return the land to the people? Or, as candidate for the Republican nomination Ronald Reagan said, “we built it, we paid for it, it’s ours”7. This speech by Senator McIntyre is about a lot more than what to do with the canal. It’s about the state of politics in the US.
MCINTYRE: But whatever the cause, Mr. President, I see abundant evidence that these “dangerously passionate certainties” are being cynically fomented, manipulated, and targeted in ways that threaten amity, unity, and the purposeful course of government in order to advance a radical ideology that is alien to mainstream political thought.”
CHRIS: In other words, the US, and the debates over the treaty, were becoming more polarized. The radicals involved were unwilling to work together, even within their own parties.
MCINTYRE: “As a result, the traditional role of the parties is slowly being usurped by a thousand and one passionately committed special interest, splinter faction, and single-issue constituencies.”
CHRIS: What’s more, the splinter groups were mobilized, using cutting-edge technology to go around traditional forms of communication.
MCINTYRE: My colleagues know what I am talking about. They know, as I know, that on any given issue someone somewhere can depress a computer key and within hours or a few days at the most we are inundated by mimeographed postcards and custom-tailored letters and telegrams that vary scarcely a comma in the message they deliver.
CHRIS: That’s true. If a member of Congress took a misstep or followed the party line instead of the opinions of these factions, their offices, those of the media, and other members of Congress were flooded with pre-printed letters demanding that they change their minds. These were not hand-written notes, thoughtfully penned and sent by individuals. No. These letters were sent to constituents through mass mailings. Then those people would sign their names and send them out without so much as an added comment. Bulk mail as a weapon. And it was taking over Congress. Some of it, in the name of Jesus.
Welcome to season six. This season we’re taking a deep dive into one big question. How did evangelical Christians in the United States get associated with the Republican Party? It’s a big story, full of surprises, interesting characters, dynamite, war, money, sexual revolution, righteous indignation, and corruption from all sides. Together we’ll track how the GOP changed from the 1950s through the 1990s, shifting from the party of Eisenhower to that of Ronald Reagan. How factions of Protestantism who rarely worked together found unity in common enemies, then invited Mormons, Catholics, and Jews to join them.
This podcast is non-partisan. Last season I covered the Democratic Party and the rise of fundamentalism, especially in regard to their complicity in Jim Crow laws. Now we’re pivoting to follow Republicans. I’m not here to pick winners and losers. Instead of summarizing a world of movements and characters in one hour, then hiding behind application points, we’re going to take our time. Our goal is to understand how we got to today, where so many evangelical Christians live in a state of constant anger and fear. And we’re going to talk about whether or not that’s what we want, and what we can do about it. I’m your tour guide. I’ve produced this show for six years. I’m an evangelical Christian who directed two gospel films, wrote evangelistic novels, has taught Sunday school. I drive a school bus. Now I’m on the hunt for the story of my people. How did we get here and can we get back to doing the work of the gospel?
Let’s find out. Together.
You’re listening to the show that uses journalistic tools to look inside the Christian Church. We press pause on the culture wars in order to explore how we got here and how we can do better. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
[COMMERICAL BREAK]
CHRIS: McIntyre’s speech was just heating up. His seat in the Senate was under fire. His challenger, an airline pilot named Gordon Humphrey, announced his candidacy two days earlier, and would soon win. Not just on his own merits. Humphrey was backed by a new kind of political machine.
MCINTYRE: “By proceeding from the flawed premise that all of us are alike, it is easy for ideologues to conclude that we must see every issue as they see it unless there is something sinister in our motivation. And they proceed from that premise, Mr. President, with an arrogance born of the conviction that they and they alone have a corner on patriotism, morality, and God’s own truths, that their values and standards and viewpoints are so unassailable they justify any means, however coarse and brutish, of imposing them on others.”
CHRIS: The parties were radicalizing. Not working together. They hunkered down and marketed each other not as those who disagree, but as devils out to destroy the country.
MCINTYRE: “Now I want to be fair about this, Mr. President. In the particular instance of the canal treaties, I am talking about the kind of politics practiced by what has come to be known as the New Right. But I want to note that the record of extremists on the ideological left bears a remarkable, and regrettable, similarity.”
CHRIS: In this speech, he’s going to hone in on the New Right. In another year, he’d co-author a book on the subject, “The Fear Brokers”. Who was the New Right? This cabal started as a small group, so tiny they could fit in a single living room. Their ideas were radical, based on a mishmash of teachings mixed with dramatic tax cuts. They wanted to dismantle the American government, institutions like public schools and aid for the poor. Boost the military. Undo the liberalism of the 1960s. And, yes, those on the left picked up on some of their tactics. McIntyre was here to put into the public record the nastiness of the New Right.
MCINTYRE: “Last summer the national director of the Conservative Caucus, Howard Phillips…”
CHRIS: …one of the founders of the New Right…
MCINTYRE: “…said conservatives should make “a political sitting duck” of Tom McIntyre over the canal treaties and that the Conservative Caucus could, “make it a political impossibility for McIntyre to vote for that treaty.”
CHRIS: This was before McIntyre even knew which way he was going to vote. Howard Phillips and the New Right decided they would force his hand. Their people censured McIntyre, and alleged he was helping the communists if he voted to hand the canal to the people of Panama.
MCINTYRE: “Hear, if you will, the revealing words of Howard Phillips on other occasions: ‘We organize discontent. We must prove our ability to get revenge on people who go against us.・・・ We’ll be after them, if they vote the wrong way. We’re not going to stop after the vote’s past.’
CHRIS: And hear the words of another spokesman for the New Right, Paul Weyrich (pronounced Way-Rick), director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress:
‘We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.’
Mr. President, these people are different from traditional conservatives. I know the traditional conservatives of my own State. I have competed with them in the political arena. Í have worked with them in behalf of our State. They are people of honor, civility, and decency.
The New Right cannot comprehend how people of opposing viewpoints can find common ground and work together. For them, there is no common ground. And this, in my judgment, is the best indication of what they truly are – radicals whose aim is not to compete with honor and decency, not to compromise when necessary to advance the common good, but to annihilate those they see as enemies.”
CHRIS: This movement, the New Right, would revive a failing political party by radicalizing it. They did so with the backing of big business, the help of direct mailings targeted at people most receptive, then using the money they raised to back their kind of candidates. They smeared anyone who got in their way. McIntyre wasn’t the only representative harassed by the New Right. The same was true for others like Mark Hatfield, Republican from Oregon who spoke later.
HATFIELD: “I have a few letters with me today which are replete with phrases like ‘A vote for support of the treaty is an act of treason.’ ‘You are a traitor for having indicated your support of the treaty. You are not an American.””
CHRIS: Others use anti-semitic language that I won’t repeat here. He goes on to say…
HATFIELD: “The second thing these individuals do is baptize their position with religious nomenclature. I have letters here. ‘I thought you were a born-again Christian. Now I know you are not because you support the treaty.’ They do not bother to ask my view of Jesus Christ in an effort to reach some determination of my salvation: Instead, they chose to make a judgment on my religious salvation on basis of my position regarding the Panama Canal Treaty.”
CHRIS: Imagine that. Having your faith questioned not based on your relationship with Jesus, the gospels, salvation, your morality, whether you faith bears fruit, or if you dedicated your life to Christ… but on your opinions about the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal!
This gets at the heart of of what we’ll be talking about this season. We’re going to cover a lot of ground. Go deep into the belly of this beast. There may be times where you wonder why we’re even covering the International Women’s Year, supply-side economics, textbooks, public education or televangelists. It’s because it all ties back into what we’ve heard in this speech. Each of these pieces will take us one step closer to understanding this movement that lumps Jesus with national defense, low taxes, corporate gains, the Republican Party, and the New Right.
Before we do, I want to ask you a big big question. I want you to have it ready in your mind when we get to these big issues: what do we mean when we call something “Christian” or “biblical”? Those terms get thrown around a lot. All of the time. To the point of Congressman Hatfield having to wrestle with it on the Senate floor. But what do we mean by it?
Does something have to be explicitly discussed in the Bible to be “biblical”? Let’s use that test. Is voting for the Panama Canal to be returned to the people of Panama explicitly mentioned in the Bible?
I’ve read it multiple times. Panama is never mentioned. So, the issue fails the explicit test.
Perhaps when someone says that something is biblical they mean they’re applying existing biblical principles. Does the Bible have anything to say about handing a canal over to another nation? No. How about transferring land from one country to another? Not really. Imperialism? Not a lot. Hmm…
So what basis did the radicals of the 1970s have when questioning the actions of senators involved in the Panama Canal treaty? It doesn’t seem to have been the Bible. Perhaps they allowed themselves to get caught up in the propaganda of the New Right to the point where they couldn’t tell where the Bible ended and their politics began.
We are going to see a lot of that this season. If you’re paying attention, it’s going to happen to you. The goal here isn’t to make us feel better. It’s to understand what happened. Maybe not the best way to build an audience for a podcast, but it’s what we need to do. As per usual, I’m not going to give you easy answers. I want you to think for yourself. As we continue and evangelicals, my people, make claims that something is or isn’t biblical, ask yourself what they mean. Because we humans are fallible, we tend to bundle everything that we like together in one bunch.
Here is a lighter example. I had a former roommate make a case that Crossfit is biblical. Not exercising, or maintaining your body as God’s temple, Crossfit in particular is biblical. Does the Bible say that Crossfit is God’s exercise plan? No. Does that mean Crossfit is evil? No. It literally has nothing to say about Crossfit. Nothing. What I think happened is that, since my roommate liked it, and he was a Christian, he subconsciously made a connection. Since he, a believer, liked Crossfit, and I think his workout leader was involved in his church, it must be biblical.
That sounds funny. But we do this all of the time. All the time. That’s what that writer did when they questioned Hatfield’s decision on the Panama Canal. They took their opinion, as a Christian, and assumed that anyone who disagreed with them was not a Christian, based not on the Bible, but on their politics. Some of what we cover this season is explicitly laid out in the Bible. A lot of it isn’t. So when we get to big issues, stop and ask yourself: were the actions of the evangelicals of the 70s and 80s appropriate? What should they have done? We too are in confusing times. How can we learn from the mistakes and triumphs of this era?
How was fear used to manipulate people? Were the threats real or imagined? We’re going to have both. Is it possible that we, conservative, liberal, or centrist, American or otherwise, Christian or not, are being manipulated by our fears for the financial and political gain of a few? Will we understand that a Christian is a person who follows Christ, or will we narrow it down to the fate of a 40 mile waterway in Central America?
That’s this season on the Truce Podcast. Truce is a long-form journalism show where, frequently, I pick one big story and dive deep to uncover the the truth about some aspect of Christianity. The goal: point us back to the simple work of the gospel. Love our neighbors and love God. Many of us have never examine the things that cling to our beliefs, the barnacles on the boat, as it were. Together, we’re going to explore how the support of one political party in the United States had affected us. Always asking, is this who Jesus calls us to be? If so, great. If not, how can we make the necessary changes before these barnacles damage our testimony to the world?
I hope you’ll join us.
Thanks so much for listening. From here on out, God-willing, I’ll be releasing new episodes every two weeks with some breaks for holidays. If you’re new to the show, welcome. Please like and subscribe so you get every new episode as it’s released. Also, you’ll notice that I ask for financial help at the end of most episodes. Money requests make some of us uneasy. This is not out of greed. It’s my hope to do this show full time, which would mean more episodes for you and a healthier work-life balance for me. Right now I’m doing this show while holding down a full-time job driving a school bus. There is no obligation to give. Nobody’s getting rich on Truce. I just need to keep the lights on in my apartment like anyone else.
For those who do want to help, visit trucepodcast.com/donate to learn about ways to give on Patreon, Venmo, by check, or Paypal. On the site you can also find sources for most episodes if you want to go deeper on your own. I first heard about this speech from Reaganland by Rick Perlstein, and I have links to the entire text of the speeches if you want to read them for yourself on Google Books.
Thanks to my friend Chris Sloan for loaning me his voice for this episode.
Truce is a production of Truce Media LLC. God willing, we’ll talk again soon. I’m Chris Staron. This is Truce.
