North Carolina- Where being a religious bigot isn't so bad...if you're a Christian

Billy Graham's legacy is being whitewashed...but what else would you expect for a man who prayed with Presidents?

Rev. Billy Graham in 1966 (image via Billy Graham Evangelistic Association)

Christian hypocrisy and religious bigotry have always traveled hand-in-glove in this country. Those qualities travel well together, so much so that good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Patriots often conflate the two. It’s easy to do when hypocrisy, religious bigotry, and Christianity become almost interchangeable. The words might not be interchangeable, but the attitudes certainly are.

This hypocrisy is particularly true in the Bible Belt, where devotion to Jesus Christ has long been used to underscore and validate all manner of decidedly UN-Christian behavior and speech. Even those who assumed roles as supposed “men of God,” whom we should have been able to believe were above the fray of racism, hatred, homophobia, and all manner of exclusionary thinking, were too often responsible for much of it.

Christianity was used to justify racism and the “separate but equal” doctrine, which had no Scriptural justification whatsoever. Still, Christians justified it as faith-based (it’s what Jesus would do, don’tchaknow?). The same applied to the opposition to interracial dating and marriage, mixed neighborhoods, mixed schools, and, later on, same-sex marriage.

The truth is that America’s majority religion doesn’t cover itself in glory. A religion predicated on positive values like love, tolerance, inclusion, acceptance, and understanding has too often been used to justify exclusion, hatred, and rejection of those unfortunate enough not to be born White, Conservative, Christian, Cisgender, and Heterosexual.

Hemant Mehta

tells us that on Thursday, North Carolina honored the late Rev. Billy Graham, a man often hailed as a great “Man of God,” but one who too often caved to his darker angels, even as he preached the Gospel to millions worldwide.

On Thursday, a statue of the late Rev. Billy Graham will be unveiled in the U.S. Capitol. Since there’s no good reason it should be going up, it’s worth remembering how and why this is happening.

Each state is allowed to request two statues in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. In 2018, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper asked for a statue of former governor Charles Aycock (an avowed white supremacist) to come down to make room for the Charlotte-born preacher. Legislators in the state actually approved the change in 2015, but the formal request for a statue couldn’t be made until Graham died, which he did, at age 99, in 2018. After that, there was a ten-step process the state needed to go through, but lawmakers slowly checked everything off the list. They hired a sculptor to create a model of the statue, a congressional committee approved of it, etc.

The seven-foot bronze statue will show Graham “gesturing toward an open Bible in his hand.” He’ll be standing on a pedestal “engraved with verses from the Bible”—specifically John 3:16 and John 14:6. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned from the Bible, it’s how much God loves idols.

Indeed. There’s nothing like a graven image to remind a person what a dedicated man of God Rev. Graham was, eh?

Except that’s not entirely true. As it turns out, Rev. Graham was quite the anti-Semite, and his attitude mirrored the spirit of the era, which wasn’t exactly friendly to the Jewish diaspora.

This stranglehold [that Jews have] has got to be broken, or this country is going down the drain.

- Rev. Billy Graham

Publicly, he was an enthusiastic backer of Israel, something noted upon his death by the Times of Israel:

Graham was a counselor to Democratic and Republican presidents and, with his massive arena appearances, was a precursor of the Protestant televangelism that helped reshape the American religious and political landscapes. His son, Franklin, is one of US President Donald Trump’s highest-profile religious supporters.

The elder Graham was an early and avid backer of Israel. A tour of the country in 1960 raised the country’s profile among American evangelicals, establishing the seeds of strong pro-Israel support that persist in that community until now. In 1967, he urged Israeli leaders not to yield to diplomatic pressures that could endanger the country’s security; such entreaties, commonplace now on the American right, were unusual at the time. He made a film, “His Land,” about Israel that continues to be screened among pro-Israel evangelicals.

Graham also was a champion for the Jews persecuted in the former Soviet Union and counseled his evangelical brethren not to proselytize Jews.

“Just as Judaism frowns on proselytizing that is coercive, or that seeks to commit men against their will, so do I,” Graham told an American Jewish Committee delegation that met with him in 1973.

Behind the scenes, however, Rev. Graham was virulently anti-semitic, something that the Times of Israel also notes but that the Jewish diaspora refused to believe initially.

He received awards from the organized Jewish community and was so beloved in its precincts that in 1994, when H. R. Haldeman, a former top aide to President Richard Nixon, revealed Graham’s lacerating anti-Semitism expressed in private talks with Nixon, the Jewish community dismissed Haldeman’s account out of hand.

Surely, someone who had been so publicly supportive of Israel and Jewish causes couldn’t be anti-Semitic. It took the Nixon Library releasing tapes in 2002 that confirmed Haldeman’s account to convince the Jewish community of Rev. Graham’s anti-Semitism.

“A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,” Graham told Nixon in 1972. “They swarm around me and are friendly to me. Because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them.”….

In 2002, Graham apologized for the remarks, and Jewish community leaders accepted his apology — but the relationship would never again be the same.

“We knew that Nixon was an anti-Semite,” Abraham Foxman, then the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, told JTA at the time, whereas Graham is “a guy we all felt comfortable with … And he was so infected with this virulent anti-Semitism.”

Sadly, Rev. Graham’s anti-Semitism wasn’t an outlier in his Christian worldview. It was consistent with a generalized intolerance at odds with the benevolent preacher he presented to millions worldwide.

• He believed that anyone who disagreed with his theology would burn in Hell for eternity.

• He often said that HIV/AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality.

• He urged voters in North Carolina to vote against marriage equality in 2012.

• He responded to MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” by opining that civil rights leaders need to “put the brakes on a little bit.”

Rev. Billy Graham was not the model of integrity or Christian love and tolerance that many have built him up to be—and his children, particularly his son, Franklin, are chips off the old block. They’re every bit as arrogant, judgmental, intolerant, inflexible, and unwilling to acknowledge that their flavor of God isn’t the One, True, and ONLY Faith © as their father was.

This is the guy whose biggest claim to fame was perpetuating mythology that, if he truly inspired the Religious Right, has steered our country into a ditch. Even if he said in his final decade that he regretted some of his earlier statements, the things he proudly stood for weren’t worth defending either.

It’s one thing for Christians to say he was an inspiration. But people willing to look at his full résumé, his blemishes, and (dear lord) his god-awful children should be embarrassed by what Graham has come to represent.

That North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper has chosen Rev. Graham as a man worthy of being one of the two statues allotted to the Tarheel State seems a sad commentary on the quality of people available to honor. Indeed, a state that was one of the original 13 colonies could’ve found someone more worthy of such an honor than a bigot, hypocrite, and raging anti-Semite.

Or is Gov. Cooper simply trying to appeal to those self-satisfied Christians in North Carolina who still believe that Billy Graham was a righteous Man of God?

I think the question answers itself.

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