I had been thinking of reading Eliza Griswold’s new book Circle of Hope, but then a friend sent me a passage that included these sentences:
Franklin Graham was different from his father. Billy Graham preached broadly about God; Franklin Graham spoke exclusively of Jesus, exemplifying the rightward political and cultural swing among most evangelicals in the late twentieth century.
Billy Graham “preached broadly about God”? Billy Graham??? That’s not an idea that would survive an encounter with one Billy Graham sermon — any one among thousands, but why not start with this one? Pretty much the only thing Billy Graham did for the whole of his long career was to preach the unique saving power of Jesus.
(Imagine someone claiming that Charles Darwin wrote broadly about knowledge rather than addressing himself specifically to biology. Imagine also someone writing that and then having it published by a big New York trade house.)
Here would be a more accurate (if not perfectly accurate) complaint:
Billy Graham spoke exclusively of Jesus, but his emphasis was on Jesus as one’s “personal Lord and Savior,” not on Jesus as the one who began his public ministry by claiming the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That Jesus’s message, rightly understood and heeded, would transform not just my heart but the whole social order is not something we heard from Billy Graham. Now Franklin Graham, along with many other evangelicals, has made a rightward political and cultural swing that has taken him even farther away from the whole message of Jesus — that message being neglected in favor of a Christian nationalism that seeks political power and social control, and is willing to tolerate any behavior or unbelief by politicians who promise such power and control. It’s for very good reason that today’s politically-minded evangelicals want to put the Ten Commandments on the walls of schools rather than the Beatitudes.
If journalists want to criticize evangelicals, well, evangelicals have done plenty that rightly incurs criticism. But for heaven’s sake, people, take the time to learn something about those you criticize — the most basic, most elementary facts. If you can’t be bothered to do that, then just don’t write about those people.
UPDATE: I have had good cause to say this many times in many contexts, but it bears repeating: If you’re going to say “It’s different now than it was then,” you need to know as much about then as about now. If you’re going to say “Franklin Graham was different from his father,” you need to know something about his father. If you’re going to say that American society is disintegrating and that we’re at one another’s throats in an unprecedented way, you need to know the actual precedents. If you’re going to say that Christians now live in a “negative world” whereas they once lived in a “positive world,” you need to know something about what it was really like to try to be a faithful Christian, say, sixty years ago. As Dogberry says, comparisons are odorous, and especially when they’re based not on careful study of the available facts but on vague impressions assumed to be infallible.
