The Fall of the House of Graham

Now a certain man had two sons. …

Or, rather, he had a son and a grandson. And the certain man we’re talking about here isn’t just some random guy — this is the Rev. Billy Graham.

Graham was the most prominent mass-evangelist of the 20th century. He’s a super-star preacher — the first Christian minister to be honored with a star on Hollywood’s walk of fame in his capacity as a minister. He’s still a perennial fixture in the Gallup Poll’s annual list of the Most Admired Men in America, as he has been for more than 60 years.

It’s impossible to overstate Graham’s significance and influence within his own subculture of white evangelical Christianity. Historian George Marsden has said that during the 1950s and 1960s, the easiest definition of an evangelical Christian was “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” In the decades since then, Graham — now 95 years old — has been eclipsed by a host of other faces and voices that have come to represent and to speak for white evangelicalism in the way that Graham once did as an individual. But none of them has been able to replace Billy Graham as a single, unifying figure in this infamously amorphous, contentious stream of American Christianity. And none of them has enjoyed the affection and admiration that Graham still enjoys. (Marsden’s choice of verb is telling: People such as Jerry Falwell or James Dobson may have collected impressive numbers of followers, but evangelicals never liked them the way they still like Billy Graham.)

Billy Graham’s ethos has been institutionalized in various forms over the years. He founded Christianity Today magazine, which remains the essential mouthpiece for a certain strain of mainstream white evangelicalism. For the past several decades, Christianity Today has served to loosely define white evangelicalism the way Graham did back in the ’50s and ’60s, except backwards. Back then, an evangelical was, roughly, “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” Nowadays an evangelical is, roughly, “anyone whom Christianity Today likes.”

But CT’s circulation still doesn’t rival that of Decision magazine, the monthly publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which is the primary institution now charged with carrying on Billy Graham’s mission and ideals.

The BGEA is now run by Graham’s son, Franklin, a brash culture-warrior who seems to long to be a power-player in partisan politics. Under the leadership of Franklin Graham, the BGEA has taken on a new, belligerent tone: fiercely anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist and “anti-government” (whenever the government is regulating commerce, corporations or the environment, but uncritically pro-government for anything involving genitalia, minority religions or minority groups).

I highlighted this radical change in direction at the BGEA by juxtaposing two recent covers of Decision magazine. The first heralds the organization’s 60th anniversary, harking back to the spirit of Billy Graham and celebrating his all-consuming passion for “Proclaiming Christ to the World.” The second cover — for the current issue — nicely captures the ethos and spirit of BGEA under Franklin Graham’s leadership. It shows a hellish pool of lava with the words “Cowards Destined for the Lake of Fire.” Those “cowards” are, in Franklin’s view, anyone who dares to call themselves a Christian but still fails to wholeheartedly embrace Franklin’s anti-gay, anti-feminist agenda (and his personal role as the authoritative general in charge of the culture war).

“Anyone who likes Billy Graham” will be saddened and angered by the way Franklin has twisted his father’s legacy, attempting to usurp the elder Graham’s fame and moral authority for his own purposes. That’s why I usually refer to him as “Franklin Hophni Phinehas Graham” — citing the two wicked sons of the good priest Eli in the Bible. (Or, if you don’t know that biblical story, “Fredo Graham” works, too.)

Some of us have been publicly complaining about Franklin’s hijacking and derailing of his father’s ministry for many years, but things got more interesting this week when the Rev. Tullian Tchividjian joined the chorus. Tchividjian is a prominent conservative evangelical pastor — senior pastor of the Coral Ridge mega-church in Fort Lauderdale and, until recently, a part of the influential “Gospel Coalition” of conservative Reformed pastors. “Pastor’s Tough Words About the Religious Right and Evangelicalism: ‘Big-Time Damage to the Brand of Christianity,'” reads the headline at The Blaze. (Yes, I’m citing an article from Glenn Beck’s online publication, so this can’t be dismissed as some “liberal spin” on Tchividjian’s comments.):

Pastor Tullian Tchividjian, senior pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, believes that evangelical Christianity has been tarnished by its association with the religious right. …

“I think the impression that most non-evangelicals have is that [evangelicalism is] a political movement — it’s a culturally warring movement,” he said. “Closely associating the core message of the Christian faith with a political ideology has always been a huge mistake.”

… “My take on it having grown up in the evangelical world … the sort of rise of the religious right and its close association between the church and politics has done big-time damage to the brand of Christianity in the public sphere,” he said.

Tchividjian said that if he were to strike up a conversation with a non-believing stranger about the word “evangelical,” he believes the person would likely associate the term with social and political stances, based on overall public perception.

“As important as those things might be to discuss, that’s not the central message of what it means to be an evangelical,” he said. “Historically speaking, evangelicals were good news specialists and because we’ve become so closely aligned with political ideologies and culture warring issues, what’s been lost is the core good news message of the Christian faith.”

Tchividjian doesn’t name any specific names or organizations, so what makes me think that his comments are directed directly at Franklin Graham and his reinvention/dismantling of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association?

Well, because Tchividjian is Franklin Graham’s nephew. He is the grandson of Billy Graham.

And Tullian Tchividjian loves his grandfather. That means he’s included in the category of “anyone who likes Billy Graham” — more so than most people. Ever since he was a child, Tchividjian has been steeped in his grandfather’s outlook — in Billy Graham’s long career as a “good news specialist” and in his deep remorse over his many missteps when, Billy Graham has often said, he became too “closely aligned with political ideologies.” Tchividjian’s language in his comments in The Blaze are as identical to the language of his grandfather Billy as they are antithetical to the language of his uncle Franklin.

My guess is that this is a warning shot. This time, Tchividjian is keeping his comments general and generic. And I’m sure he means what he says in a general, generic way — I’m sure he’s not solely thinking of his uncle Franklin. But it’s inconceivable that Franklin Graham and his misappropriation of the BGEA wasn’t among the foremost examples Tchividjian had in mind in this critique of the “big-time damage” being done to evangelical Christianity by partisan politics and culture warriors.

And I think that if Franklin Graham continues full-steam ahead in the direct he’s going — “Cowards Destined for the Lake of Fire” — then we may soon hear his nephew voicing this critique more specifically, naming names.

Now, I happen to think that Tullian Tchividjian’s prescription for this problem is almost as troublesome as the disease. He wants white evangelicals to return to the a-political pietism his grandfather embodied for so many years — serving as pastors, chaplains and evangelists, but never as prophets. This might be an improvement over the current state of affairs — there’s something to be said for “First, do no harm” — but it presents a false choice between combatants and by-standers. Those are never the only options. If I had to choose between Tullian and his Uncle Fredo, I’d side with the nephew because his sins of omission probably do less damage and harm than Franklin’s sins of commission. But again, that’s a false choice.

Tchividjian’s prescription — “refusing to talk from the pulpit about anything other than the Bible” — is incoherent and impossible in practice, leading to a deformed piety that excludes huge biblical themes and reduces Christian discipleship to the pursuit of studying only those few parts of the Bible that we can talk about without sounding like we’re addressing anything else. I want to come back to that in a later post, to discuss in greater depth and detail why I think the purportedly “a-political” Christianity proposed by Tullian Tchividjian and his grandfather is a huge failure of discipleship.

Here, though, I just want to highlight this growing rift between Billy Graham’s son and his grandson. What’s at stake here is the legacy of Billy Graham, which means that what’s at stake here is, in a sense, the future of white evangelicalism in America.