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By CHARLES WHEELER

A committee of 20 historians, journalists and public intellectuals in 2001 ranked Billy Graham as the fourth-most influential Southerner of the 20th century. Only Martin Luther King Jr., William Faulkner and Elvis Presley outpolled the Charlotte-born evangelist and confidant of presidents.

 Not bad for the son of a dairy farmer who spent a brief time at ultraconservative Bob Jones University before earning a degree from an unaccredited Bible college in Florida.

Graham’s influence in his native region extended far beyond the religious sphere, historian Steven P. Miller contends in “Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South.” Graham used his prestige and connections to play a big role in realigning the politics of the South in the post-civil rights era from solidly Democratic to Republican, he writes. What’s more, Graham did it knowingly.

In Miller’s analysis, a Billy Graham whom we haven’t seen in public before emerges. “Graham evinced an almost magnetic attraction to political power. He placed a high value on access to elected officials and was willing to wield his growing ministerial credentials to that end. … Graham possessed a desire … to reestablish the cultural credentials of conservative Protestantism. He also aspired without shame to enhance the profile of his own evangelism.”

A native of Virginia, Miller earned a master’s and doctorate in history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 2006, concentrating on the American South. He is presently researching and writing “The Age of the Evangelicals: America’s Born Again Years, 1970-2008.”

Miller’s look at Graham’s politics and politicking appears solidly researched. Its revelations about Graham are documented. In addition to assessing Graham as more than a religious figure, it offers insights into how power and religion converge in the newly aligned Sunbelt South.

Miller’s study is not a popular history. It requires an attentive reading. The book is organized by topic rather than told chronologically. While that makes sense from the author’s point of view, the lack of a narrative stream can make it difficult for the reader who doesn’t have a Ph.D. in history — me, for one.

And for all of its painstaking research, it leaves some obvious questions unanswered.

For instance, what role, if any, did Graham’s wife play in this collusion of politics and religion, which, in effect became a business, paving the way for other such enterprises across the South and in Southern California? She barely gets a mention. She had no influence, no part in Graham’s decisions? That doesn’t sound like the preachers’ wives I’ve run into.

Graham first pitched his political services to the high and mighty in a letter to President Harry Truman: “I believe I talk to more people face to face than any living man. I know something of the mood, thinking, and trends in American thought. … If at any time I can be of service to you or our country, please do not hesitate to call. Also, I follow political trends carefully and would be delighted at any time to advise you on my findings among the people.”

Truman met with Graham once but rebuffed subsequent overtures. After the first meeting with the popular evangelist, Graham and his associates blabbed to the press, detailing their conversation with the president, an indiscretion in Truman’s view. But Graham found a willing listener with President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican. The access continued with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. It reached its pinnacle with Republican President Richard Nixon. Graham, a registered Democrat, became a member of Nixon’s inner circle of advisers and defended him to the end, through Watergate and all.

A young Graham, after his stint in Bible school, eventually wound up at Wheaton College in Illinois. Miller describes it as a “leading institution of higher education within conservative, nonmainline Protestant circles.” There Graham met his future wife, Ruth Bell, daughter of an influential lay leader in the conservative wing of the Presbyterian Church, known as the Southern Presbyterians. His father-in-law provided Graham the national contacts an ambitious evangelist needed. After his in-laws moved to Montreat, the Southern Presbyterian enclave in western North Carolina, Graham and his new wife followed in 1945. He has lived there since.

Embracing civil rights

Graham has acknowledged his acceptance of the Jim Crow mores he was born into. Miller documents the gradual process to his “racial conversion.” It paralleled Graham’s theological development, a move away from fundamentalism — the staunch rejection of liberalizing trends in mainline Protestantism — to an evangelicalism, a willingness to reach out to society while holding on to a conservative Christianity.

Graham’s brand of Christianity emphasized individual salvation as the means for social change. Miller sums up the view this way: “Godly character yields godly governance.” For Graham, “evangelistic priorities trumped matters of social concern.” His focus was saving souls, the old-time religion of Southern whites. It was, at heart, a private religion, focused on the individual, unconcerned with this sinful world because life here was merely preparation for the world to come.

This grounding shaped Graham’s approach to desegregation and politics. In the South, the Graham crusades deferred to what he called “local custom” — segregated seating. That custom was followed at a crusade in Greensboro in 1951. The climax of all Graham’s crusades was the altar call, inviting people to step to the front and accept Jesus as their savior. The response to the invitation was an individual decision. It was colorblind, too. Blacks streamed forward with whites. Graham told an interviewer in Mississippi that there was “no basis for segregation or non-segregation in the Bible.” But he made no such statements from the pulpit, Miller says.

Before the start of a crusade in Chattanooga in 1953, Graham went a step further in dealing with segregation in religious settings. “He personally removed the ropes separating the black and white sections of the audience,” Miller writes. It was his first desegregated crusade in Jim Crow country. Graham became a voice of moderation as Jim Crow was dismantled across the South. This was his ticket to the White House. Here was someone who could talk to Southern whites — he was one with a worldwide standing because of his crusades — and they would listen.

But he was such a moderate, with his calls for gradual enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education in the Deep South, his opposition to demonstrations, including the march on Washington, and his appeals for law and order, that King and others grew to consider Graham an obstacle to the civil rights movement, Miller writes. In 1965, Graham “cast his integrated services as an interracial alternative to civil rights demonstrations.”

All the while, Graham was a member of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, the largest Southern Baptist congregation on the planet. Members included wealthy oilmen H.L. Hunt and Sid Richardson. Both became fans of Graham and financial supporters of his organization. Hunt, Miller writes, was “a rabid right-wing activist,” and Richardson introduced Graham to John Connally Jr., future governor of Texas, who became treasury secretary under Nixon. The pastor, W.A. Criswell, was “a leading ministerial proponent of Jim Crow.”

As a regional spokesman for Southern whites, Graham also became the region’s chief cheerleader. He defended the South time and again from what he considered biased attacks by the national press during the civil rights movement. He touted the region’s transformation as the Sunbelt economy emerged with gleaming cities, new transportation networks, clean industries, professional sports teams and huge downtown stadiums. He provided a way for white Southerners to say, like a white Atlanta mayor, Ivan Allen, that they were too busy to hate. Yet the basic power structure remained in place. Pressed about his politics, Graham would say that he voted for the man, not the party, showing Southern whites how to leave the Democratic Party.

Close to Nixon

U.S. Sen. Clyde Hoey of North Carolina, a Democrat, introduced Graham and Nixon, probably in 1952, Miller writes. He points out that Nixon, because of his mother’s Western brand of Quakerism, was “familiar with the culture of revival tents and altar calls. This … zone of comfort goes a long way toward explaining why Graham felt a sense of intimacy and candidness with a politician whom so many others perceived as guarded, at best, and manipulative, at worst.” And Nixon, “readily drew a connection between fishing for souls and campaigning for votes.”

Near the close of 1957, Graham wrote Nixon “the first of several letters analyzing the vice president’s electoral prospects” for a 1960 run at the White House (he lost to John F. Kennedy). In one letter, Graham told Nixon he was “the greatest vice president” the country had ever had.

In Nixon’s successful presidential campaign in 1968, he and Graham sounded the same themes publicly. Graham praised Americans who responded to the turmoil of the ’60s by turning to Jesus. These people, “whom the evening news ignored, were candidates for what Graham touted as a ‘quiet revolution.’ ” In a campaign ad, Nixon spoke of quiet citizens, too: “ ‘the forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators’ — and once in office, he famously labeled them the ‘silent majority.’ ”

Graham was a Nixon enabler. He helped Nixon politically with a Southern strategy of wooing voters with a moderate tone on integration — “voluntary” is the term Nixon used, which dovetailed with Graham’s view — and an “outreach to evangelical voters.” He helped build Nixon’s coalition of support, Miller writes.

Well before the Watergate scandal that ended the Nixon presidency in disgrace, Graham knowingly risked his reputation with his public support of him, Miller writes. “If Nixon politicized Graham, Nixon also provided the forum through which the evangelist played out his political dreams.”

Charles Wheeler is a News & Record copy editor and a contributor to the books blog, “Page Turners.”