Franklin
Graham is coming to New Hampshire this month as part of an evangelistic sweep
through New England called “Decision America – Northeast Tour” sponsored by the
Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. I will not be attending.
There was a time when I adored Billy Graham. I still hold
his memory in high esteem. His son – not so much. Franklin is too political and
his rhetoric too intolerant for me to tolerate any longer. It shows how much
evangelicalism has changed, and how much I have changed.
I used to attend Billy Graham “crusades,” back when we never
gave a thought to how offensive the term was to Muslims. While in seminary I
was a counselor at his 1977 crusade in Cincinnati and at Billy Graham films. My
father-in-law (also a Baptist pastor) thought of him so highly that I sometimes
suspected that he considered Billy as the third person of the Trinity.
Those were the good old days when “evangelical” referred solely
to one’s religious persuasion. Now it has become synonymous with the Religious Right.
Back in those halcyon days Jimmy Carter was the public face of what it meant to
be evangelical – before Ronald Reagan captured the hearts of the Moral
Majority.
Now the word evangelical means that you support Donald Trump
and a conservative social agenda. (Eighty-one percent of evangelicals voted for
the president in the 2016 election.) It means that you are opposed to abortion,
homosexuality, Islam, immigrants and a host of other “sins” and “sinners.” Furthermore
it means that one wants to enforce that agenda through legislation.
Evangelicalism used to be – at least in my mind – a
biblically-based expression of the unconditional love of God to all people. Now
it feels very unloving. At least that is the way I hear it, as voiced in the
rhetoric of Franklin Graham and others of his ilk. It also seems to be increasingly
intolerant of progressive Christians and people of other faiths.
From my perspective evangelicalism has abandoned the gospel in
exchange for political power. I am sure they see it otherwise, and might say
that I am no longer Christian. The whole situation saddens me. I am glad that
my father-in-law is not alive to see what has become of the organization that
bears his hero’s name.
I am in the process of reading my 2013 book “Experiencing
God Directly” on my podcast. As I recorded the introduction to the book
recently, I found myself reading aloud these words: “I am a Baptist. In fact I
would acknowledge the term evangelical to describe my religious persuasion,
although I seldom use this term because of its connotations in popular American
culture.”
That is no longer true. I no longer identify with the term,
and I haven’t for several years. Not because I have changed so much in the last
six years. It is because evangelicalism has changed so much. I guess I have become
an ex-evangelical or “exvangelical” – a word recently coined to refer to those
who have left the evangelical fold.
Some exvangelicals have abandoned religion completely. I
remain stubbornly Christian and incurably religious, while becoming more
progressive theologically, socially, and ethically. I have left evangelicalism
in order to remain authentically Christian. I choose to remain a follower of
Jesus and his radical gospel of love and grace, rather than walk the meandering
paths of evangelicalism. So long, Franklin Graham.
