Franklin Graham Is Political Monster

Very differently, today’s Religious Right, led by Graham and other Trump supporters, takes a defensive position, angrily defending their sense of occupying a shrinking place in the nation as an oppressed minority. It’s that aggrieved identity that led evangelicals to abandon their formerly high character standards for politicians in order to embrace the thrice-married casino magnate Trump in the first place, a man who may not join them in the church pews on Sunday but promised to fight for them on America’s political battlefields. “We should have the power. We should have the power,” Trump thundered to a group of nearly 1,000 evangelical leaders back in the summer of 2016.

As much as anyone, Graham has led evangelicals’ political about-face. In doing so, he’s also distinguished himself from his father who, after an early flirtation, ultimately abandoned the political realm. Disgusted by his friend Richard Nixon’s vulgarity revealed in the White House tapes (plus embarrassed by how the recordings had also captured his own anti-Semitic statements), Billy Graham distanced himself from politics.

In marked contrast, neither Trump’s own filthy language nor hateful rhetoric has diminished Franklin Graham’s support for the president. “I can’t think of anything mean he’s said,” Graham told the Times in February. Even more tellingly, Graham has argued that Trump’s affair with the adult film actress Stormy Daniels was “nobody’s business.”

Such moral compromises for the sake of politics have long troubled some evangelical leaders, including Franklin’s father. Even in the heady days of the early Reagan years, Billy Graham refused to allow his evangelistic association to help the Religious Right, worried such work would detract from his soul-saving mission. “The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it,” Graham famously told Parade magazine in 1981.