It was a little surprising that Billy Graham got a full state funeral treatment for his memorial: lying in state in the US Capitol, flags across the nation lowered to half mast, and President Trump attending the funeral service in Charlotte, NC. Perhaps it was to be expected, given the current coziness between Trump and Franklin Graham, but one might think that at least some in the Graham ministry would have been reluctant to call attention to the most questionable part of Billy Graham’s career: his fraternization with presidents, Richard Nixon in particular. Thanks to Nixon’s fondness of tape recorders, Graham’s moment of unguarded anti-Semitism in the Oval Office was made known to the world in a way that couldn’t be denied. Graham, to his credit, took responsibility for the comments and apologized for them, but, as Jeff Greenfield pointed out in his recent article in Politico, there was much more to Graham’s relationship with Nixon that was hard to reconcile with the godly image that we normally associate with America’s pastor:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/21/billy-graham-death-richard-nixon-217039
Ultimately, Graham came to regret his Oval Office politics more than anything else in his life. He may have been thinking mostly of the damage to his personal reputation, but if he had thought further, he might have seen it as the greatest long-term threat to his ministry and the evangelical brand of Protestantism that he espoused. As the following article in Politico suggests, America is becoming a much more secular nation than it was in Billy Graham’s days as a young evangelist, and one reason for this development is the increasing association of evangelicalism in the minds of younger generations with right-wing politics:
Perhaps Franklin Graham is too far along in his father’s footsteps to turn back now, but others in the evangelical community should think more about their collaboration with Trump and their role as adjunct operatives for the Republican Party. If not, the day could arrive when their megachurches with their stadium-sized parking lots will be as empty as the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. Not that this would be bad for American theology, but it might be a shame for all of that architecture to go to waste.
– Vino KT
