Reflections on Billy Graham

Reflections on Billy Graham

Billy Graham died, and we are loath to say anything negative about the dead. Yet for me Billy Graham was a negative factor in American Christianity. Yes, he perhaps attracted a great many people to faith, but it was attraction to a version of the faith that is largely negative and whose day has come and gone. Here are some of the things about Graham’s faith that I find negative at best and destructive at worst.

His Christianity was fear based Christianity. He saw humans as hopeless sinners and God as a stern judge who would eternally punish sinners who did not repent and turn to Jesus. Fear based religion has its power I suppose, but it is based on a misunderstanding of grace and draws people to the faith for the wrong reasons. It has people fear God not love God, or at least it has them fear God first and love God only for overcoming their fear. Graham’s faith was mostly about a supposed afterlife rather than being about this life. Fear based faith always is. Graham didn’t get it that because God is a God of universal grace no one ever need fear for their soul’s eternal fate. Graham didn’t get it that Jesus didn’t come to save souls in an afterlife, he came to teach us God’s ways for this life. Like all fear based faith, Graham’s Christianity was ego centered and selfish. It was about personal individual salvation, not about remaking the world. The world is moving beyond fear based faith. Graham never did.

He was a Biblicist of the first order, that is, he thought of the Bible as the literal, inerrant words of God. I have written extensively against Biblicism elsewhere, so I won’t go into detail about it here. Suffice it to say that belief that God wrote the Bible is simply untenable. The Bible contains far too many impossible things and far too many contradictions for it to be God’s work. Moreover, seeing the Bible as God’s words rather than human words locks ancient cultural understanding and prejudices in as divine truth, which they most definitely are not. Graham may have drawn lots of people to the Bible, but he drew them an understanding of the Bible that will not hold up and that the world and the Christian faith are already moving far beyond.

He never got over condemning gay people. His condemnation of LGBT people is of course grounded in or at least buttressed by his Biblicism. He was technically correct when he said that the Bible speaks of homosexual acts negatively every time it mentions them at all. What he never understood is that while the Bible has a very few passages that mention homosexual acts, it says nothing about homosexuality. The ancient world from which the Bible comes had no understanding of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality. Thus it says nothing about our contemporary understanding of homosexuality. Graham perpetuated Christian bigotry against LBGT people. He could and should have known better.

He was an anti-Roman Catholic bigot. He opposed the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency precisely because Kennedy was Catholic. American Evangelicals have long harbored misunderstandings of and prejudices against the Roman Catholic Church and people who find their connection with God within its teachings and practices. Graham reinforced those misunderstandings and prejudices by repeating them to enormous audiences. He did Christianity and the world at large no favors with his preaching of anti-Catholic bias.

He probably wasn’t a racist, or at least he outgrew his native southern racism. He did however harbor prejudice against Jews. He engaged in anti-Jewish banter with Richard Nixon in the White House. When Nixon’s man Haldeman said publicly that Graham had done so, Graham denied it. Then the Nixon tapes came out, and everyone could hear him doing it. Being a bigot is bad. Being a hypocrite about it only makes it worse.

He was in bed with secular power. He loved associating with American presidents, especially Richard Nixon. He didn’t get it that Christianity when properly understood is radically anti-imperial. Late in life he said he regretted having been as political as he was in his ministry. There are several things wrong with that statement. First of all, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is precisely political. It is about how we live together in human community, and that makes it political. Graham wasn’t wrong for being political, he was wrong for advocating the wrong politics. I’ve read that he was a registered Democrat, but he supported conservative political positions over progressive ones. He seems to have loved being associated with men in power, and he never called them to repent of oppressive, violent political opinions and acts.

He could be a blind fool, as when he said there was no religious persecution in the Soviet Union. In 1984 a Soviet front organization invited Graham to preach in the USSR. He accepted. While he was there the Soviets pulled the wool over his eyes about the reality of religious persecution in that country. They showed him a Potemkin village Baptist church in Moscow that the Soviets used as a show piece to deny that they oppressed religion. Graham bought it. He didn’t understand how Soviet propaganda worked, setting up show pieces to prove to the world the exact opposite of Soviet reality. He said there was no religious persecution in the Soviet Union. About that he was just flat wrong, and it wouldn’t have been at all hard for him to discover the truth about religious persecution in Communist Russia. He didn’t bother. He bought what the Soviets sold him. In buying what the Soviets sold him he was nothing but a fool

He raised a son, Franklin, who is a flat out bigot. Billy Graham was bad on social issues, but his son Franklin is far worse. Franklin takes things like his father’s anti-Semitism and carries them to the extreme. We can assume that Franklin learned his bigotry from his father. No, you can’t always blame the parents for the sins of the children, but there is a direct line from Billy’s failing to Franklin’s religion of hatred.

So I guess you’ll have to excuse me. I see virtually nothing positive in Billy Graham. Like I said, he may have drawn lots of people to the faith; but he drew them to a literalistic Evangelical faith that will kill Christianity if we can’t move beyond it. So I pray for peace for his family in his passing. I do not mourn the passing of a hero. Billy Graham was nothing of the sort.