In a 2025 speech on the Russo-Ukrainian War, Lindsey Graham, then the senior U.S. senator from South Carolina, addressed his Senate colleagues on the moral questions at stake in Europe’s deadliest war since 1945. Quoting the aspirational words of John F. Kennedy, Graham said that he looked forward to the day when democracy would reign supreme across the globe, a time “when all are free.” To bring about that era of eventual democratic freedom, Graham believed the United States needed “a moral clarity lens.”
Graham, a Southern Baptist from South Carolina, looked at American foreign policy through the moral lens of liberal freedom and democratic promise. Michael Mandelbaum, one of the leading foreign policy experts of the early 21st century, argues in The American Way of Foreign Policy that the most enduring belief in American foreign policy was that the American republic was fundamentally different from the states of Old World as reflected by its commitment to spread liberal democracy wherever possible. To be sure, there was and continues to be an American tradition of anti-interventionism, something Graham ardently dissented from in his devotion to destroying tyrants and raising up democracies.
When Graham died last week, it was the end of an era for federal and South Carolina state politics. Graham spent three decades in the Congress and before that a two-year term in the South Carolina General Assembly. Graham’s famously neoconservative foreign policy views and his role—with Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman—as one of the internationalist and interventionist “Three Amigos” is his most significant political legacy. That legacy, however, cannot be reduced to support for the Global War on Terror. Instead, Graham’s foreign policy vision was rooted in the Scot-Irish cultural, political, and religious milieu that defined the South Carolina Upstate where he grew up. Far from unreflective as a supporter of American adventurism, Graham inherited a specific conception of the role of political power in international affairs influential among early 2000s Republicans and contemporary Evangelical circles.
The connection between Graham’s internationalism and his Scot-Irish heritage is as important as it is minimally understood. Scot-Irish heritage is increasingly associated with being a “heritage American.” Earlier this year Hermeet Kaur at CNN wrote that Scot-Irish “was a popular label among the currently ascendent set of American conservatives. Vice President JD Vance, an aggressive nativist, called himself ‘a Scot-Irish hillbilly at heart’ in his career-making memoir Hillbilly Elegy.” Patrick Griffin, a history professor at Notre Dame, proposed that the moniker Scot-Irish “came to evoke the kind of grit, frontierism and backcountry roots seen as essential to American identity and its culture.” In 2026 Southern and Scot-Irish culture has become shorthand for populism and isolationism, even as these contemporary associations belie earlier Southern and the Scot-Irish political thought.
When the first Scot-Irish immigrants arrived in the Carolinas in the early eighteenth-century, they settled in a place more international than the Scotland and Northern Ireland they had left—encountering French Huguenots, Germans, and of course immigrants from other parts of the British Isles. Though largely Presbyterian, the Carolinas settled by Scot-Irish maintained an Anglican state religion and much of Britain’s aristocratic social and political institutions, even if it lacked a titled aristocracy. From the mid-eighteenth century those same Presbyterians championed the expansion of individual liberty and economic freedom, often using the Bible to make their case. They fancied themselves protectors of common people against tyrannical kings and Native American warriors. From southern Pennsylvania to South Carolina, legendary Americans like Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston wedded a culture of frontier violence to a certain mythology of America and American liberty. Jackson and Houston were not ignorant, illiterate, or insular but saw themselves as the embodiment of Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment thought paired with Protestant culture. They sought to challenge any foreign threat to the Jeffersonian Empire of Liberty they had inherited, wherever those threats were found. Both Jackson and Houston made their names fighting in imperial wars in Louisiana and the Republic of Texas. The devotees of Jefferson and Jackson attended Presbyterian, and later Baptist and Methodist churches. Each tradition arrived in America inspired by a hatred of spiritual and political tyranny.
Jackson and Houston passed the baton of democratic ideals to a succeeding generation of Scot-Irish warriors and presidents like James K. Polk. Historian Joseph A. Fry noted that Southerners espoused an aggressive and internationalist foreign policy for the first half of the nineteenth century. Later on, the defeated South of the Reconstruction Era broke from the rest of the U.S. in the Gilded Age by going against the spirit of imperialism and internationalism that defined much of late nineteenth century American foreign policy. Woodrow Wilson was, to be sure, an anomaly among southerners in the Gilded Age, but Wilson continued the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Scot-Irish understanding of how the American republic was to project diplomatic and military power.
A Southern-led foreign policy based on Evangelical Protestant conceptions of morality roared back to the political forefront when Woodrow Wilson came to power in 1913. Wilson is usually regarded as a progenitor of the modern left for having expanded the power of the state, perpetuating the idea of a so-called “living constitution.” And yet he did so from his Southern Presbyterian-informed conviction that the American republic, shaped as it was by the ideas of the Declaration of Independence, represented an incredibly powerful weapon aimed squarely at the world’s despots. The Declaration was, for Wilson, “a whip for tyrants; not a theory of government, but a program of action. Unless we can translate it into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it, we are not the sons of the sires who acted in response to its challenge.” Wilson, progressive as he was, never sought the kind of social revolution as pursued by modern leftists. When Wilson said that “you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it,” and that he believed “that the ancient traditions of a people are its ballast,” he prepared the way for a generation of conservative Wilsonians who would typify southern politics into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Graham’s votes on social policy confirmed his agreement with Wilson’s declaration that “you cannot make a tabula rasa upon which to write a political program. You cannot take a new sheet of paper and determine what your life shall be to-morrow.”
Lindsey Graham saw the American regime as a moral force to confront illiberal autocracies. His understanding of America’s role in the world was shaped by the Southern Baptist Church and by the Jeffersonian tradition maintained in the South Carolina Upstate for centuries prior to his birth. When Graham argued that the United States needed “to have moral clarity” in how it confronted Vladimir Putin, this Evangelical Jeffersonianism he represented in Congress.