Billy Graham, evangelical heirs, and the reverend's complicated legacy; The Soul-Crushing Legacy of Billy Graham; Trum
philip panaritis
|
"Despite lifelong claims that he was uninterested in power and profit, Graham was gravitationally drawn to both.
In 1960, Graham mobilized evangelicals against John F. Kennedy, maintaining Kennedy’s Catholicism rendered him unfit. (The irony!) Lyndon Johnson reportedly wanted Graham to join his Cabinet.
“I almost used the White House as a hotel when Johnson was president,” Graham told his biographer Marshall Frady. “He was always trying to keep me there. He just never wanted me to leave.”
Graham was also close to Richard Nixon — so close that Graham took it upon himself to draft a secret 13-page plan to bomb North Vietnam. In his book “The Golden Age Is In Us: Journeys and Encounters,” Alexander Cockburn cites a declassified 1969 memo Graham wrote after meeting with missionaries in Bangkok. Graham’s plan, he wrote to Nixon, “could overnight destroy the economy of North Vietnam.”
Had Nixon followed through, that strike could have killed an estimated million people.
A recorded 1972 Oval Office conversation between Nixon and Graham, released by the National Archives in 2002, revealed Graham made multiple anti-Semitic remarks.
Graham called Jews “Satanic.” He agreed with Nixon that they controlled the national media. “They’re the ones putting out all the pornographic stuff,” Graham said, and their “stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain.”
'I Am Selling the Greatest Product in the World.' Inside Billy Graham's Evangelism Machine"When he appeared on the cover of TIME in 1954, Billy Graham — the evangelist who died Wednesday at 99 — was already “the best-known, most talked-about Christian leader in the world today, barring the Pope.”
At that point, he had already traveled the nation and the world to preach to thousands. He also made a handful of movie appearances, wrote regular newspaper columns and was broadcast on radio programs, and it had only been a few years since he first made headlines by converting a couple of celebrities.
But it was more than just Billy Graham’s charisma and belief that drew crowds of converts. His “crusades” were complicated and well-planned events designed for maximum impact.
Here’s how they worked, as TIME explained it back then: ... "
"When he appeared on the cover of TIME in 1954, Billy Graham — the evangelist who died Wednesday at 99 — was already “the best-known, most talked-about Christian leader in the world today, barring the Pope.”
At that point, he had already traveled the nation and the world to preach to thousands. He also made a handful of movie appearances, wrote regular newspaper columns and was broadcast on radio programs, and it had only been a few years since he first made headlines by converting a couple of celebrities.
But it was more than just Billy Graham’s charisma and belief that drew crowds of converts. His “crusades” were complicated and well-planned events designed for maximum impact.
Here’s how they worked, as TIME explained it back then: ... "
'I Am Selling the Greatest Product in the World.' Inside Billy Graham's ...
LIFE With Billy Graham: Rare Photos From the Early Years of His Career
|
"Graham also left behind a United States government in which religion plays a far greater role than before he intruded into politics in the 1950s. The shift from secular governance to “In God We Trust” can be laid squarely at this minister’s feet.
Graham’s message was principally one of fear: fear of a wrathful god; fear of temptation; fear of communists and socialists; fear of 
unions; fear of Catholics; fear of homosexuals; fear of racial integration and above all, fear of death. But as a balm for such fears, he promised listeners eternal life, which he said was readily claimed through acceptance of Jesus Christ as one’s savior.
Furthermore, he assured listeners that God loved us so much that He created governments, the most blessed form being Western capitalist democracy. To make this point, he frequently quoted Romans 13, particularly the first two verses. In the New American Standard Version of the Bible, they read, “Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore he who resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.”
|
