Franklin Graham: When I Said Anti-Gay, I Meant Clean Living

Samaritan’s Purse is operating a field hospital in New York City, and they are requiring volunteers to sign their statement of faith. They have the right to require volunteers to sign a statement of faith, of course, although that may not be the case if they receive government funding for their work. Still, it does beg the question—why?

Are people less able to care for the sick if they aren’t Christian? And it goes farther than that—the statement of faith requires the signer to affirm that “marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.” The majority of Americans, including the vast majority of younger Americans, favor legal same-sex marriage. Does believing that gays and lesbians should be able to marry make one less able to tend a patient? What’s going on here?

Franklin Graham, head of Samaritan’s Purse, attempted to explain as follows:

“All of our doctors and nurses and staff, (they’re) Christians,” he said. “We believe it’s very important that — as we serve people and help people — we do it in Jesus’ name.

Guys. Guys. The ministry is named “Samaritan’s Purse.” Stop and think about that for a moment.

An “expert in the law” comes to trip Jesus with his questions and Jesus tells a story to illustrate the command to “love your neighbor as yourself”: A man is attacked by robbers and left for dead, and a priest and a Levite pass him by without helping. Next, a Samaritan comes upon the man, bandages him, takes him on his donkey to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to take care of him. The point is that it is the Samaritan—a sect Jews did not associate with—and not the priest or the Levite who helped the man who was robbed. The Samaritan acted as the man’s neighbor.

How the heck does this group get away with calling itself “Samaritan’s Purse”?!

If you updated this story to tell it to evangelical Christians, the two men who passed without helping the beaten man would be a megachurch pastor and an evangelical NGO head, and the Samaritan would be a gay person. The whole story hinges on the man whose beliefs and lifestyle is considered not up to standards providing medical care to the vulnerable when others won’t. 

There is so much irony here it’s absurd.

Anyway! Franklin Graham goes on:

“Of course, I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. That’s part of who we are. So we have a long list of things we want people to understand and agree with before we take them to work with us. I don’t want a person who is going to be on the job and drinks; that’s not a good witness. I don’t want a person who’s going to be using drugs to be part of our team. I don’t want someone who’s going to be swearing to be part of our team. I don’t want someone who is trying to pick up girls, and using this as an opportunity to do those kinds of things.

“So, we try to screen the people that work with us. And we want men and women who believe the way we do and have the same core values that we have.”

Wait. What?

Graham’s statement of faith says nothing about alcohol or drugs. You can sign the statement and use all you want without violating it. This makes no sense. As to trying to pick up girls, that’s a workplace harassment issue, and is also not addressed in the statement of faith. No, really!

The only way I can even halfway make this make sense is to conclude that Graham is using approval of same-sex marriage as a a proxy for drug and alcohol use and philandering. But if that’s what he’s trying to do, why not just have people sign a statement saying they won’t drink, do drugs, or hit on their co-volunteers? That would certainly be more clear, given that there are plenty of people who don’t do these things and do affirm marriage equality, and vice versa.

(Does Graham know how many pastors have been busted for drug use or sexual assault? It is not a small number, and this is pastors we’re talking about, not laypeople!)

If Graham cared about his volunteers’ practices—whether they’re professional, sober at work, and so forth—he should address this directly rather than assuming that being anti-gay is some sort of proxy for these things, because that’s just weird. And inefficient.

But Graham is not happy with the criticism:

It seems tone-deaf to be attacking our religious conviction about marriage at the very moment thousands of New Yorkers are fighting for their lives and dozens of Samaritan’s Purse workers are placing their lives at risk to provide critical medical care.

Does Graham realize how tone-deaf it sounds to refuse to let people volunteer at his field hospital in the middle of a pandemic unless they sign a statement affirming that they’re anti-gay, in a city that’s among the most gay-affirming on earth? Because that’s really the issue here.

Remember—this is an organization that gets its name from a story about a man of questionable religious beliefs and practices who provides medical care and is rewarded with praise from Jesus.

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