Much is made of connections between right-wing politics and conservative Christian belief, with debate over such issues as life and death, homosexuality, textbooks, and even foreign policy being framed by fervently held dogma. President Bush and other Republicans are drawing powerful energy from this combination of politics and religion, a mix that also drives Graham's rejuvenated appeal. His long-time use of the word ''crusade" for his revival meetings has new resonance in the era of the global war on terror, but Graham has been tapping into the crusading spirit from the very start of his career. A look back suggests that swift currents of religion and politics have been flowing for a long time.

On Sept. 23, 1949, President Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. The American nuclear monopoly was over, and a formerly complacent United States reacted with shock. The administration, against the advice of top atomic scientists, took the most fateful step of the arms race, secretly ordering the development of the genocidal hydrogen bomb. But doomsday fears immediately seized the public mood, too.

It was then, as I learned from historian Stephen J. Whitfield, that Billy Graham made his great arrival on the American scene. He had already pitched a large tent for a revival meeting in Los Angeles, and it began, coincidentally, a few days after Truman's announcement about Moscow's bomb. Just then, on Oct. 1, the Communists officially took over China, news that hit Americans like a thudding second shoe of the apocalypse. People flocked to Graham's sermons as they never had before. Los Angeles attendance ultimately numbered well over 300,000. A star was born, and so was a crusade.

''God is giving us a desperate choice," Graham preached, ''a choice of either revival or judgment. There is no alternative. . . . The world is divided into two camps. On one side we see communism," which has ''declared war against God, against Christ, against the Bible, and against all religion. . . . Unless the Western World has an old-fashioned revival, we cannot last." Graham had his finger on the pulse of American fear, and in subsequent years, anticommunism occupied the nation's soul as an avowedly religious obsession. The Red scare at home, unabashed moves toward empire abroad, the phrase ''under God" inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, the scapegoating of homosexuals as ''security risks," an insane accumulation of nuclear weapons, suicidal wars against postcolonial insurgencies in Asia -- a set of desperate choices indeed. Through it all, Billy Graham was the high priest of the American crusade, which is why US presidents uniformly sought his blessing.

This national spirit of radical bipolarity, understood in overtly theological terms, went into hibernation at the end of the Cold War, but the earthquake of Truman's September 1949 announcement had its haunting aftershock in the September attacks of 2001. The old time political religion woke up, and Billy Graham was still there to preach it. Graham did not expressly name the new enemy, but his son and successor Franklin did, labeling Islam a ''very evil and wicked religion." The unleashed energy of an exclusivist doctrine of salvation led, as always, to the denigration of those who are not among the saved, and, in the context of political emergency, that denigration has again become violent. Bush's war is a religious war, whether he disavows ''crusade" or not.

The lesson of 1949 is that the American fear of Soviet nuclear aggression, coupled with fear of communist global dominance as represented by China, stimulated self-wounding reactions that proved far more damaging to the United States than anything Moscow or Beijing ever did.

Once again, American fear itself is today devastating the nation. Once again, nuclear accumulation is underway. Once again, an irrational military establishment has sent the US Army on a suicide mission. Once again, civil liberties and the rule of law are jettisoned in the name of ''security." Once again, homosexuals are being scapegoated. Once again, virtue is defined in narrowly partisan terms.

Billy Graham is a lion-hearted American, and one can only wish him well. But the implications of his transcending influence, old and new, should not be ignored. More than the man himself, the nation's response to him and his themes tells us who we are.

© 2005 Boston Globe