“Why Did Billy Graham Join the First Baptist Church in Dallas?”: Billy Graham, Church Membership, and the Pursuit of National Power

Historians have pored over the life and career of American evangelist Billy Graham. Robust scholarship surrounds not only his immediate impacts on American religion but his cultivation of the economic elite, his proximity to political power, and even his reshaping of American political geography: scholars have profitably pointed to his unique ties to the South in general and Texas (and its “Big Rich”) in particular. But, throughout it all, one quirk remains little more than a footnote: Graham’s five-decade membership at First Baptist Dallas. In 1953, as his career skyrocketed and propelled him toward international fame, Graham joined the fundamentalist fief of W.A. Criswell, an ardent segregationist and theological firebrand. Using previously uncited archival material, this article argues that Graham’s membership not only alleviated national tensions between postwar evangelicals and southern fundamentalists but also armored Graham with the approbation of theological agitators, punctured the hermetic world of Texas religion, and nationalized a particular “Texas theology” that had developed over decades in pulpits such as First Baptist Dallas. Church membership is no trifling thing, and a sustained exploration of Graham’s decision to join First Baptist therefore reveals a transformative moment in postwar American religion.