DR: I worked in the White House for President Carter and he was a born-again Christian. When that was revealed during his campaign, many people in the United States didn’t really know what born again meant, although it had been around for a while. What does born-again Christian really mean? Was it invented in the United States or did it come over from Europe?
CB: When people say they’re born-again Christians, they mean that they belong to what historians call the evangelical movement, which we date from the eighteenth century. This transatlantic movement took shape not only in the American colonies but also in England, in Scotland, and in Germany. Evangelicalism was a kind of new form of Protestantism that emphasized the authority of the Bible and the importance of a personal experience of the saving work of Jesus.
We can imagine evangelicalism as in some ways a vector of the Enlightenment. The whole idea of a born-again experience was that you, as a Christian, could empirically know that you had experienced a change that made you a true follower of Jesus. This idea sounds like John Locke’s epistemology. Locke asked, how is it that you know something’s true? He answered that you know through personal experience, you know through empiricism. This is exactly what evangelicals said—you could know whether you were born again.
DR: One of your specialties is women and religion. What role did women in the United States play in the development of these various religions? Were they allowed to be very active?
CB: Women were the backbone of churches even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1692 Cotton Mather said there were far more godly women in the world than men. Church membership rolls even then were dominated by women.
Historians have wondered why this was the case. Why were there so many women involved in churches, especially since the Bible has been used to enforce women’s subordination? There’s a long history of Christians arguing that the Bible says that women must be subject to men. But women found many scriptural texts to be empowering. They used the same Bible to argue for their worth and dignity and equality.
Women were not ordained until the twentieth century, but they played all kinds of roles informally. They served as Sunday school teachers, as home missionaries, even as foreign missionaries. There were many Protestant denominations that would not allow women to be ordained in the United States, but they would send them off to be missionaries to the so-called heathen. Women became antislavery activists, inspired by their faith. There has been a very long history of women being the upholders of religion.
DR: Today, do Americans go to religious services or to our places of worship in greater numbers or lower numbers than before?
CB: We are in the midst of a significant shift on the American religious landscape. There have been a number of surveys that have shown an increase in what’s called “religious nones.” These are people who, when they’re asked, say they have no particular religious affiliation. They make up almost a quarter of the population now, which is much higher than it was, say, twenty years ago. And that’s especially true among younger people.
DR: Do people in the United States attend church or religious services to a higher extent than people do in Europe?
CB: Definitely. It’s clear that religion is a more central part of life in the United States than it is in other Western countries. This is not true of, say, Africa or the global South, where Christianity is rising very rapidly. But the United States is unlike other modern Western nations in still having a very strong religious basis.
DR: When did Muslims come to the United States, and are they now an increasingly large percentage of people in the U.S.?
CB: Muslims are about 2 percent of the population, but they have become more visible since the 1965 Immigration Act. The Immigration Act of 1924 was highly restrictive. It made it virtually impossible for people from Asia and Africa to enter the country, as well as people from southern and eastern Europe. But in 1965 those quotas were removed by the Hart-Celler Act. Since then there has been a real growth in the number of Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus in America, and the American religious landscape has transformed in a much more pluralistic direction.
DR: What about atheism? Is that a very large percentage of the population in the United States, and have atheists not suffered some discrimination?
CB: It’s a little hard to count atheists, because they get picked up by the category of the “religious nones,” which includes spiritual seekers. Many “religious nones” believe in God, but they don’t want to practice any kind of institutional religion. Atheists, in contrast, are people who are even more overtly skeptical of religion. Atheists have faced discrimination since the early nineteenth century, when unbelievers finally became willing to name themselves openly as atheists, perhaps because of the new climate created by the First Amendment.
DR: When I was in grade school, an atheist tried to get a case in front of the Supreme Court saying that school prayer should be outlawed, and the Supreme Court upheld it. Was it a watershed moment in the history of religion in the United States when school prayer was no longer allowed in public schools?
CB: Yes. These cases in the early ’60s continue to reverberate today. Public schools are not allowed to begin the day with prayer. For many white Protestants in particular during the early ’60s, this seemed like a very threatening development that suggested that the country was changing. Some of their anger about the school prayer decisions helped to fuel the rise of the Christian right in the 1970s and into the 1980s.
The people most opposed to the school prayer decision were those who wanted to argue that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that the nation was forsaking its original religious identity. We still hear this argument today, but the United States was not founded as a Christian nation. There is a difference between a nation that was founded at a time when most Americans were Christian and a nation that was founded with an explicitly Christian identity. God doesn’t appear in the Constitution.
DR: In my lifetime, the most prominent religious figure in the United States has been Billy Graham. How did he become such an important figure, advising or consulting with presidents? What was his religion, and what was he doing that made him so popular?
CB: Billy Graham was an evangelical. If you see pictures of him when he first started preaching, he looked like a movie star. William Randolph Hearst, the media mogul, admired Graham’s opposition to communism and instructed reporters to begin covering his revival services. He was an extraordinarily charismatic preacher.
He built a very large following in these mass gatherings and, beginning with Harry Truman, he courted the attention of presidents. He became a frequent visitor to the White House as presidents realized that his presence could help them to clothe themselves in the garb of morality and to ally themselves with Christianity.
DR: As we look back on the history of religion in the United States, other than Billy Graham, who are one or two religious figures who had a particularly big influence?
CB: Someone you probably haven’t heard of before is an eighteenth-century evangelist named George Whitefield. I sometimes say that he was the Billy Graham of the eighteenth century, but it would be more correct to say that Billy Graham was the George Whitefield of the twentieth century.
Whitefield belonged to the first generation of evangelicals. Born in England, he was a Church of England minister who traveled throughout England and Scotland and then up and down the American seaboard, sometimes by boat, sometimes by horse. He preached in Savannah, in Boston, in Charleston. Some historians have said that, even before George Washington, George Whitefield was the first intercolonial American hero. Everybody knew who he was.
DR: What was the justification that devout Christians used to justify slavery in those days?
CB: Slavery is often mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Christians would point to particular texts and argue that if Abraham had been allowed to have slaves, then southern planters could also own slaves. This justification ignored the fact that slavery in t
he Bible is not race-based. War captives were taken as slaves, but there’s nothing in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament that suggests that Africans in particular were deserving of slavery. Some justified African slavery on the grounds of a passage in Genesis that states, “Cursed be Canaan: a servant of servants he shall be to his brothers,” but this passage says nothing about either Africans or black skin.
The argument over slavery often revolved around the question of whether the Bible justified it or not. Antislavery Christians argued that, even though Jesus hadn’t said anything specific about slavery, his words “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” implicitly denounced slavery.
DONALD E. GRAHAM on the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press
Former Publisher, Washington Post
“The First Amendment applies to the press, but it also applies to anybody. Someone speaking up and saying things the government doesn’t like cannot be prosecuted for that, cannot be put in jail for that in our country. What’s important here is not the rights of newspapers, not the rights of news organizations, not the right to broadcast, it’s the rights of all of us.”
It is safe to say that no government really likes being criticized by its citizens, and such criticism has cost innumerable people around the world their freedoms and their lives. In the United States, these kinds of criticisms tend to be protected by the First Amendment; and since the Bill of Rights has almost religious standing in America, the government has a much harder burden in trying to thwart or penalize the critics. In few other countries is “free speech” protected by the country’s governing documents; and where it is so protected (e.g., Russia), the reality is much different.
The American concern about free speech preceded the First Amendment’s adoption. In 1734, a British governor in New York did not like the criticism he received from a newspaper publisher and journalist, John Peter Zenger, and thus had him imprisoned for libel and ultimately placed him on trial. But a jury quickly acquitted Zenger on the grounds that what he had published was accurate.
The First Amendment—drafted by James Madison, approved by Congress, and ratified by the states—no doubt reflects the American view that free speech and a free press have social benefits far outweighing the angst of a criticized party, including the government.
There are exceptions to the concept that anyone can say or print anything. For instance, the courts have long upheld the view that publishing information that contains details vital to national security, particularly when it has been illegally obtained, does not deserve unwavering protection. The country’s national security interests have been considered to have a higher societal value.
Over the past century, perhaps the most visible situation in which the U.S. government challenged the publication of what were seen as purloined, vital national secrets was the Pentagon Papers case. In 1971, the New York Times and the Washington Post published an internal, classified analysis—taken and leaked without authorization by a former Pentagon analyst, Daniel Ellsberg—of the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations.
The Nixon administration sued to stop further publication of the papers, following the initial stories. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the publication, though both newspapers had taken serious legal risks by publishing the documents in the first place.
A few years later, the Washington Post backed two young reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, in their efforts to expose various illegal and unethical practices of the Nixon administration following the break-in at the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee. The administration repeatedly claimed that the Washington Post was printing inaccurate and unverified information about the activities that came to be known as Watergate.
The decision to back these two reporters, who were often using an unnamed source, dubbed “Deep Throat,” for their information, again put the Washington Post in the crosshairs of the Nixon administration. While the reporters’ stories proved largely accurate in the end, there was certainly a risk in publishing them.
With the Watergate and the earlier Pentagon Papers publication, much of the legal and financial risk was borne by the owners of the Washington Post, the Graham family. Katharine Graham was then the chief executive of the Washington Post, a position that her son Don ultimately assumed upon her retirement.
I have known and admired Don Graham for more than four decades, and greatly regret not pursuing the chance he gave me to buy the Washington Post in 2013 following the family’s decision to divest the newspaper. But Jeff Bezos is obviously a deeper-pocketed, more tech-savvy owner and has done a far better job as owner than I ever could have.
I interviewed Don Graham virtually in November 2020 about the Washington Post’s decision in the 1970s to pursue the publication of these controversial stories, and came away admiring even more the courage of his family in doing so.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Your grandfather bought the Washington Post out of bankruptcy. What year was that?
DONALD E. GRAHAM (DG): Nineteen thirty-three. My grandfather Eugene Meyer became the first president of the World Bank in 1946. At that time he obviously could not continue to be publisher of the Post. He had made my father, Philip Graham, deputy publisher when he returned from the war in 1945. In 1946 my dad became the publisher, and was the publisher until his death in 1963.
DR: When your father died in 1963, your mother became the president of the Washington Post Company?
DG: And publisher of the Washington Post. She continued as publisher from ’63 to ’79 and as CEO of the company until she stepped down in 1991. When my dad died in 1963, my mother faced an extremely difficult choice. I think most people expected her to sell the Washington Post, because no woman was running a company of comparable size in the United States. My mother, knowing what her father had put into the company, what her husband had put into the company, how hard they worked, how much they cared, made the very brave decision to try to take over and run it, with her four children cheering her on.
When we went public in 1971 as the Washington Post Company, I believe that she was the only woman CEO in the Fortune 1000. There were 999 guys and her. So she was in a very unusual position.
I became the publisher in 1979. I came to the Post in January 1971 as a reporter. I worked as a reporter that year, and then as an editor, and then in almost every business department of the newspaper. I had about a year at Newsweek, which we owned at the time. I learned in a classic publisher’s son way by delivering papers and selling ads and working in the production department and trying to learn the operations of the paper.
DR: Historically the Washington Post was the recipient of significant leaks from government officials. How did the Post assess, during your time there, whether that information was appropriate to publish—appropriate to publish because doing so would not endanger national security?
DG: The Post continually printed stories that came from classified government documents. As you know, many documents are classified for no particular reason, just because somebody could put a stamp on it. Senators, cabinet secretaries, many others in authority would tell things to reporters or get reporters documents.
The Post was meticulous about always trying to contact everybody and get their point of view before a story was printed. If we were working on a story, we would call the White House, the CIA, whoever else was involved and ask for their comment.
By the time I got there, Ben Bradlee, the executive editor, and later his successor, Len Downie—those were the two top editors I worked with in my many years on the paper—both knew a great deal about what the paper had published in the past. We frequently had complaints that printing a story would risk violating national security, when what was really meant was that it would risk political embarrassment to the president, the cabinet secretary, or someone else.
That was easy. There were times when our reporters had turned up information, a
nd presidents or cabinet secretaries really wanted the Post to understand that they believed it might do some harm to national security. In those cases, Bradlee or Downie tried to talk to anyone with relevant information who wanted to say, “Here’s the risk to national security.” They would listen to all sides and then make a recommendation to the publisher.
Stories that reportedly had some risk to national security were something that Kay Graham wanted to know about. There was one rule between her and Ben Bradlee, which was: “No surprises.”
There absolutely were occasions when the Post considered publishing stories and did not publish them, or did not publish pieces of them, because someone in the government said, for example, “If you publish this, you will risk someone’s life. That could only have come from a particular source.” I cannot ever remember printing a story where that was perceived to be a real, not imagined, threat.
DR: Did the president of the United States ever call the Post directly and say, “This is important to not publish,” or would he usually have somebody call on his behalf?
DG: Presidents occasionally called. My mother in her autobiography, Personal History, describes the rich interchange that she had with President Lyndon Johnson, who hated being criticized. He hated our editorials about Vietnam and our stories about Vietnam, and argued extensively with her that the stories were hurting national interests.
My mother always reached out to people in any administration and told them that she was open to complaints about unfairness and inaccuracy. She did not, as far as I know, have any calls from President Nixon personally. There was one occasion described in her book when she had a call from President Reagan, but only one.
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