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In 1948, the well-known neo-orthodox1 theologian Reinhold Niebuhr appeared on the cover of Time magazine's 25th anniversary edition. Niebuhr's stern visage was accompanied by the original sin-inspired caption: "Man's story is not a success story." Six years later, a portrait of evangelist Billy Graham stared directly out at Time's readers. A Garden of Eden scene, complete with a naked Eve and a menacing serpent coiled around the tree of knowledge, provided the backdrop.2
Their respective cover appearances were more than mere happenstance. These two giants of American Protestantism revitalized the doctrine of original sin in the post-World War II era. Their interpretations of sin differed: Niebuhr focused on the complexities of individual and social sin, while Graham focused almost exclusively on individual sin. Indeed, Niebuhr had little patience for what he referred to as Graham's "pietistic individualism," which asserted that the solution to the world's problems was individual regeneration. Despite this theological divide, Niebuhr saw great potential in the ministry of Graham, and he poked and prodded the evangelist in several mid-Fifties articles aimed in part at helping Graham realize his potential as a prophetic leader within American Protestantism. For a brief moment, then, these two leading Christian personalities were not so much polarized from one another as typically imagined but rather in "conversation" with one another. And to a large degree, ministers and some lay believers of the day followed the conversation closely, appreciating each thinker for his respective gifts to the community of the faithful.
Yet few scholars have recognized this basic point of contact in the thought of Niebuhr and Graham, however distinct their interpretations of sin, nor have they given careful consideration to the space they shared within the mid-century public sphere.3 As the two most recognizable faces of postwar Protestantism (Paul Tillich and Norman Vincent Peale were the others), Niebuhr and Graham's thought was often juxtaposed in popular periodicals. In 1955, McCall's asked the nation's religious leaders, "Is our religious revival real?" Graham and Niebuhr joined a handful of other respondents by expressing suspicion of the "revival." The thrust of their reservations had a similar tone. Graham announced, "God is interested in the quality of converts, not quantity." Niebuhr also questioned the "quality" of the surging church-going population. He wondered whether "this generation is not expressing its desire to believe in something," though perhaps unwilling "to be committed to a God who can be known only through repentance."4
This was not an isolated incident. Both figures voiced their concerns about the depth of the revival frequently, doing so again alongside one another in a Newsweek article in 1955. That same year, The Reader's Digest printed Graham and Niebuhr's reflections, one after the other, on the prospect of world peace. Both were hopeful but not unrealistic; they each cited the corruption of human nature as the biggest obstacle to any lasting peace.5 Niebuhr was, to be sure, more discriminating than Graham in his assessment of the mid-century religious situation. Graham judged much of 1950s piety positively. As A. Roy Eckardt, a neo-orthodox foot soldier, pointed out in The Surge of Piety in America (1958), Graham considered religion "a very good thing."6 Niebuhr, by contrast, considered religion a very ambiguous thing.
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