The death of Billy Graham occurred at a moment when white American evangelicals – a group that he, more than any other figure of the twentieth century, helped to galvanize and lead into the corridors of power – were stronger Republican partisans than ever, with 82 percent of white evangelical voters casting their ballots for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Perhaps partly for that reason, obituaries for Graham invariably note his involvement in Republican politics. Who can forget his private conversations with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office or his prayers at presidential inaugurations?
Yet when compared to the politics of contemporary evangelicals – including his son, Franklin Graham – Billy Graham's Republican partisanship looks a little odd. He developed close alliances with Republican centrists, such as Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower, but distanced himself from the party's conservatives. He refused to support Barry Goldwater in 1964, and in the 1980s he criticized Ronald Reagan's nuclear arms buildup. When Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other conservative evangelicals mobilized the Christian Right in the late twentieth century, Graham not only refused to participate but even issued a mild rebuke. At the same time, many of the issues that concerned Falwell had been the targets of Graham's sermons for years; on issues of public morality, Graham's views were hardly distinguishable from the Religious Right.
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