Does the GOP Need the Evangelical Vote?

In 1957, when I was 13 years old, I went with my brother to the Billy Graham crusade at Madison Square Garden. We didn’t go because we were particularly interested in being ‘saved.’ We went because we wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was about.

A few years earlier, when we spent a Summer month in the Catoctin Mountains outside of Washington, D.C., there was a weekend prayer meeting with a blind preacher yelling about the return of Jesus and a band playing hillbilly music which was a lot of fun.

The Billy Graham meeting was very different. It was very slick, very well organized with all kinds of Graham-ites running up and down the aisles handing out brochures and asking everyone to chip in a few bucks. Graham had a big choir behind him on the stage and when he asked the audience to come forward to receive his blessing and accept Jesus, the crowd streamed down.

It was a very entertaining night.

The next time I heard about Graham was when he started showing up at the White House in the early 1970’s to help Richard Nixon build support for the Viet Nam War. This was the point when the Evangelical movement got involved with the GOP, a relationship which was cemented in the 1980’s when Evangelical TV personalities like Jerry Falwell not only started calling for their followers to vote for Reagan, but…