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If Graham's power as a spiritual leader came from authenticity and fervent conviction, it did not mean he was incapable of change. In the 1950s Graham's warnings about a diabolically inspired Soviet empire helped inspire his frightened audience to seek solace and protection in faith. By the 1980s he was joining the peace movement. Graham was pilloried in 1982 for speaking to a staged "peace" conference in the Soviet Union and resolutely downplaying religious repression. His supporters argued that in private he lobbied the Kremlin on behalf of Jewish and Christian prisoners. Ruth Graham, herself fervently anticommunist, opposed her husband's strategy, but it succeeded in gaining him access to preach in Eastern Europe. She now says, "Jesus said go into all the world and preach the Gospel, not just the capitalist world. I mean, I was dead wrong."
Back at home Graham was always an interested, although cautious, student of politics. In public he was careful to keep his role spiritual: it took an act of Congress in 1952 for Graham to be allowed to hold the first religious service on the Capitol steps. But in private he pestered Truman about the need to turn back communism in Korea and encouraged Eisenhower to send troops to Little Rock to enforce school desegregation. According to Martin, so involved was he in counseling his friend Richard Nixon that the defeated candidate would write in 1960, "I have often told friends that when you went into the ministry, politics lost one of its potentially greatest practitioners."
In recent years, there has come a curious reversal. Fundamentalist leaders who once shunned the political realm began to move forcefully into it, bearing a moral agenda for family values and school prayer, against abortion and gay rights. And Graham, in a sense, returned to the pure power of the pulpit, preaching as forcefully as ever of the need for moral renewal but without allying himself with the political activism of the religious right. "I can identify with them on theology, probably, in many areas," he says, "but in the political emphases they have, I don't, because I don't think Jesus or the Apostles took sides in the political arenas of their day." He opposes abortion except in cases involving rape, incest or danger to the mother's life, but he is critical of Operation Rescue. "I think they have gone much too far, and their cause has been hurt. The tactics ought to be prayer and discussion."
Critics on the left are just as likely as those on the right to demand that he take a public stand. "I don't think you can save souls without working for justice," says Professor James Cone of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. "I hear Billy Graham as interested in saving souls of the poor but not interested in changing the conditions that create the poverty."