Billy Graham was against the Religious Right having government power

Billy Graham at Oslo on July 3, 1955. Photo: National Archives of Norway via Wikimedia Commons.

In the landscape of American faith and politics, there are moments when history delivers a warning so precise it feels like a prophecy. Back in 1981, Billy Graham sat down for an interview with Parade magazine to talk about the quick rise of Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right. He said something that everyone should hear today.

Graham said, “I told [Jerry Falwell] to preach the Gospel. That’s our calling. I want to preserve the purity of the Gospel and the freedom of religion in America. I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. Liberals organized in the Sixties, and conservatives certainly have a right to organize in the Eighties, but it would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right.”

He then punctuated his thoughts, “The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”

I have to be honest from the start. As a Presbyterian elder, I do not agree with Billy Graham’s theology. My own faith tradition comes from the Reformed perspective. We look at sharing our faith in a very different way than the high-pressure, stadium-sized crusade model that Graham was famous for. In fact, every now and then, I find myself listening to Billy Graham’s old crusade sermons on his SiriusXM channel when I’m driving. It is a striking experience, but his theological view is still not my own.

My view of Graham is actually a lot like how the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth looked at him. As I wrote last year, two of them actually met here in Chicago back in 1962.

Barth stood up to the Nazis in Europe, so he knew exactly how dangerous it is when religion gets tangled up with the government. Barth liked Graham as a person and even called him a good listener. But Barth was deeply worried about the way Graham preached.

After he went to hear Graham speak, Barth said it felt like the Gospel was being presented at gunpoint. He felt Graham relied too much on human pressure, fear, and threats of hell, instead of the pure, joyful invitation of God's grace and freedom.

But here is the thing about our Reformed tradition. We can strongly disagree with someone's theology and still recognize when they are telling a profound truth about the world. And when it comes to this warning from 1981, Billy Graham hit the nail right on the head.

Today in America, the exact wedding Graham was terrified of has not only happened, but it has completely taken over conservative religious life. The hard right has taken the language of faith and turned it into a political weapon. It is a marriage of convenience.

People are using the government to enforce fundamentalist ideas, and they are trading the purity of the Gospel for a seat at the political table.

The saddest (or angering) part of this whole story is that the people leading this charge are right inside Graham’s own family. His son, Franklin Graham, has become a main leader of the exact hard-right political activism his father warned us about.

The younger Graham frequently uses highly partisan, divisive language. The older Graham’s warning, that the hard right only cares about religion so they can manipulate it, reads like a direct critique of the path his son has walked down.

This isn't just a critique coming from outsiders or argumentative Presbyterians like me, either. The deep splits within the evangelical movement are being felt by the people closest to the family legacy. Franklin's own sister, Anne Graham Lotz, has been one of the voices calling out this big shift, calling out his brother.

During the 2016 election cycle, Lotz publicly noted that her father never would have joined her brother's partisan political tours. She reminded people that Billy’s style, especially as he got older, was all about bringing people together, even progressives and people who didn’t believe his message, rather than pushing them into angry partisan camps.

When you look at Graham's words today, you get a powerful reminder of what happens when the Church gets into bed with political empires. The Church always loses its true voice. It stops being an open invitation to God's endless grace and turns into just another political action committee.

Billy Graham saw the storm clouds coming more than forty years ago. Today, we are standing right in the middle of the downpour. As people of faith, our job is to remember that the Gospel does not belong to any political party, and we are called to stand against any power that tries to use religion for its own political gain.