Dissecting Franklin Graham’s far-right crusade against Islam and Obama

On Easter Sunday, the Rev. Franklin Graham went on national television and told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that he might support Donald Trump for president, and then questioned both President Obama’s Christianity and birthplace. Graham thus completed his journey to the far-right wing of American politics.

It’s been a public trip that began after the 9/11 attacks. That’s when Graham — who is head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA), headquartered in Charlotte, and CEO of Samaritan’s Purse, a large Christian relief group based in Boone, N.C. — declared that America was “attacked by Islam,” which he described as “a very evil and wicked religion.” At the time, many noted that his father, the legendary evangelist Billy Graham, avoided condemning Islam itself, while President Bush had gone out of his way to refer to mainstream Islam as a religion of peace. Franklin Graham, on the other hand, has reconfirmed his view of Islam as “evil” on various occasions, including as recently as last year. The Pentagon was so dismayed by Graham’s anti-Islam statements that the preacher was “dis-invited” to be the main speaker at the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service last year.

“This Army honors all faiths,” said a Pentagon spokesman, “… and [Graham’s] past comments just were not appropriate for this venue.” It wasn’t the first, nor the last time Graham would stake out a position different from his father’s.

Graham’s lurch to the right and into the political spotlight has been dramatic. He has accused the Obama administration of allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to “infiltrate every level of our government,” and told CNN that Obama’s “problem is that he was born a Muslim” through “the seed of [his] father” (even though Obama says his supposedly Muslim father was an atheist). Graham’s headlong dash to the far right has taken both supporters and critics by surprise, and led them to wonder, in so many words, what has happened to Billy Graham’s son?

During the early days of Billy Graham’s career, his religious message was often entwined with the 1950s’ anti-communist frenzy. Later, although he met and prayed with every president since Truman, he became identified in the public mind as a counselor to President Nixon. But where Billy Graham’s politics mellowed with age — he now says he regrets ever becoming involved in politics at all — and his doctrinal rigor relaxed enough to anger his more fundamentalist followers, Franklin has become, if anything, more conservative and unbending during the past decade.

One expert on contemporary religion and politics thinks Graham’s rightward move could be his way of increasing his visibility, with his sights possibly set on becoming a principal leader of the evangelical movement. Dr. Laura R. Olson, professor of political science at Clemson University and author of several books on religion and politics, said, “The religious right doesn’t have a lightning rod like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson anymore … I obviously can’t read Franklin Graham’s mind, but Falwell died, Robertson is pretty marginal at this point, James Dobson (of Focus on the Family) has retired — maybe Franklin Graham has his eye on being an evangelical leader.”

In explanation of the idea, Olson continued, “Graham is getting on board the hyper-polarization of American politics today. Contrast that with back in his dad’s day, when the tone of public discourse wasn’t so harsh. Billy Graham was successful in bringing evangelical Christians out from the shadows and making them respectable and more accepted. Evangelical voices have been heard in politics for some time, and they’ve become rather lockstep, in line with socio-moral conservatism. So Franklin Graham, in a way, is doing and saying things that a lot of people in the circles he travels in are doing and saying. He’s saying things that are sort of inflammatory because that’s the way things are right now, and he’s decided, for whatever reason, that he wants to be part of the ongoing discourse. He can get away with it because he’s not the only one doing it, and it helps him strategically, too, because it differentiates him from his dad.”

Olson wonders how long Graham’s increasingly political public posture will last. “Remember, Billy Graham counseled presidents, including Nixon,” Olson said, “and he was burned by Nixon when all the Watergate stuff came out. Franklin is still, in a sense, testing how far he can go toward political involvement — because he hasn’t been chastened the way his dad was by Watergate. We’ll have to see what happens.”

A spokeswoman for Franklin Graham said the preacher’s political statements are not part of any strategy for increasing his clout among evangelicals, and that Graham usually only talks about politics when he is asked about it during news shows concerning other topics.

Graham was traveling a lot last week, apparently to every television news program that contacted him, and thus was way too busy to explain his positions to a weekly paper in the BGEA’s hometown. Graham did, however, attempt to backtrack somewhat in an interview last week with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. On that show, Graham told the host that “only God knows” whether Obama, or anyone else, is a Christian, and that “I’m not going to judge whether he’s a Christian or not a Christian” — despite having done exactly that just two days earlier. The day after talking to O’Donnell, however, Graham told FoxNews’ Sean Hannity that he is “troubled” by the preacher whose services Obama attended on Easter Sunday, and that “I wish the president could come under some good, sound biblical teaching. That’s what he needs.” Graham also told Hannity that his comments about Trump only meant that he thinks Trump has “some good ideas,” and that he wasn’t lending support to the amazingly coiffed one’s “birther” statements. Graham told Hannity he thinks Obama should invite Trump to the White House “to come and give them some advice.”

In his youth, Rev. Billy Graham’s oldest son was a rebel with an attitude and a fast motorcycle. Franklin smoked, drank, and did most of the defiant things our culture expects of a “preacher’s boy.” Today, the 58-year-old’s relief organization delivers shelter, food and medicine to places and people in serious crisis around the world.

Despite some countries’ complaints about the Christian messages that often accompany his group’s aid, Graham has compiled an undeniably impressive record of compassionate, faith-driven service. Yet another side of Graham — a prickliness and rigidity — has caused him problems. In fact, controversy, which began for Graham back in the days when churchgoers whispered about Billy’s wild kid, has followed the prodigal son. First there was a one-year suspension of Samaritan’s Purse by an evangelical watchdog group while the group examined SP’s finances. That was followed in late 2009 by an uproar over Graham taking full salaries from both the BGEA and Samaritan’s Purse (Graham gave up the BGEA salary and currently draws salary and benefits from Samaritan’s Purse which, in 2008, totaled around $530,000). News reports about the salary mix-up often referred to Billy Graham and the fact that his career’s public controversies were few, and never concerned making too much money.

Frye Gaillard got to know Billy Graham personally while extensively covering the evangelist as both The Charlotte Observer‘s Southern editor and religion editor. He is also a former Creative Loafing columnist, and the author of more than a dozen books on Southern culture and history; he is currently Writer-in-Residence at the University of South Alabama, where we contacted him. He’s not thrilled about Billy’s boy.

“My very strong impression was that Billy Graham was never a basically angry man. He’s essentially a moderate human being; for example, when the Christian right first came along, he told me, directly during an interview in the early ’80s, that ‘The right has no interest in Christianity except to manipulate it.’ That’s why, to me, Franklin Graham doesn’t seem to be a chip off the old block, either theologically or temperamentally; and those things kind of come together in this virulent Islamaphobia.

“Billy was secure in who he was, and I wonder if Franklin is the same. Billy is the first person to tell you he has made mistakes, but he never seemed to hate anybody. Franklin sure seems to, though.”

Asked about the contradiction between Graham’s international relief efforts and his angry political stances, Gaillard replied, “I don’t understand it, and I’ve never understood it. Samaritan’s Purse does a lot of good in the world, in a spirit that I see as genuine Christian charity; so I don’t know how to fit that together with his anti-Muslim statements and his attacks on Obama’s legitimacy. It’s almost like the Jekyll and Hyde of Franklin Graham, if you will.”

Dr. John Voll sees no such divide in Graham’s harsh criticisms of Islam. Voll is the associate director of Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), one of the world’s most respected Christian-Muslim organizations.

“Unlike his father, Franklin Graham wants to tell God what God can do,” said Voll. “He is trying to limit God to his [Franklin Graham’s] own small sect. The Rev. Billy Graham’s theology recognized that God can speak in many voices while Franklin Graham wants to believe that God speaks only Franklin Graham’s language.”

Voll countered Graham’s view that Islam demands “the persecution or elimination of non-Muslims” by explaining that all religious traditions sprout believers who turn to violence, just as those religions also contain believers who say other religions encourage violence. “Graham,” said Voll, “chooses to ignore the fact that most major Muslim leaders around the world oppose the use of violence that kills innocent people.” As for Graham’s declaration that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the U.S. government, Voll said, “His views on the Muslim Brotherhood have little or no relationship to reality. Yes, there are Muslim extremists who are active in the United States and who are trying to gain control of mosques, but the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization has remarkably little to do with those efforts. The major opponents of efforts by extremists to gain control of mosques are Muslims who oppose extremism. The real allies in opposing extremism are mainstream Muslims like the Americans in MPAC [Muslim Public Affairs Council]. … Basically, Franklin Graham does not seem to have an understanding of the content of the Islamic tradition and what most Muslims believe. … The majority of Muslims around the world (in very well-documented polls) advocate women’s rights, social justice, and democracy. Graham is correct in noting that there are Muslim extremists and conservatives who enforce rigid, intolerant rules in the name of ‘enforcement of Sharia.’ However, there are also many Muslims who are working to oppose those extremists.” In other words, Islam, according to Voll, is too large and contains too many divisions to be conveniently lumped into one category — just as Christianity is also too widespread and diverse to be squeezed into a pigeonhole.

If Franklin Graham continues his move to the far right, says Gaillard, it will be “bad for the country — it’s because of statements like the ones he has made that many people refuse to see a difference between Islam and Islamic terrorism. I don’t know whether Graham, at least in his views on Islam, is intellectually lazy or dishonest, but either way, it’s basically just un-American to slander a whole religion for the actions of some of its members.”

Franklin Graham’s 1995 autobiography was called Rebel With A Cause: Finally Comfortable Being Graham. Whether the elder Graham’s supporters will resign themselves to Franklin’s new, more political role remains to be seen, but it’s obvious that Graham hasn’t rid himself completely of his inner rebel. As Graham’s sister, Anne Graham Lotz, told USA Today in 2006: “[Franklin] didn’t get Daddy’s gift of diplomacy.”

This article appears in May 3-9, 2011.