After September 11th, he famously called Islam “a very evil and very wicked religion,” a position that put him on a public trajectory toward the hard-right wing of the Republican Party. Personally and politically, he is far more divisive. “He didn’t shy away from talking about sin, but it didn’t feel like an assault.” Franklin Graham, by contrast, possesses little of his father’s charisma. Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, said. “Billy Graham’s style was openhanded invitation,” Robert P. As far back as the nineteen-fifties, he attempted to desegregate his crusades, inviting Martin Luther King, Jr., to stand onstage alongside him. “He didn’t have to.” (A spokesperson for Graham stressed that “Franklin never endorsed any candidate and said often during the tour that he didn’t have faith in the Republicans or Democrats, and that only God could save our country.”)īilly Graham, a lifelong Democrat who supported both Democratic and Republican Presidents, promoted a message of religious and political unity. “He didn’t say who to vote for,” Tom Phillips, a senior member of Graham’s staff, said in Spokane. Graham is careful to stress that he tells people only to “vote Biblically,” but this is a code his followers understand. To the initiated, the word “decision” is a double-entendre: it means both to make a decision to follow Christ, or to be born again, and also to make a decision at the ballot box. But the tour is, in fact, much more akin to a political rally than a religious revival, and Graham benefits from blending the two in order to turn out like-minded crowds of hard-line conservatives. Graham casts the events as “prayer and evangelism,” in the tradition of his father’s crusades. When I met with Graham in Spokane, he was on the West Coast leg of his “Decision America” tour, which has taken him to all fifty states since 2016. This summer, in response to Walmart’s sale of “ IMPEACH 45” T-shirts, Graham manufactured his own merch: a hundred-per-cent-cotton “ PRAY FOR 45” T-shirt, which sells at the Billy Graham bookstore for $15.99. But, since 2016, Graham has become known, above all, as the most vociferous evangelical ally of Donald Trump. He leads a seven-hundred-and-sixty-five-million-dollar evangelical empire, which includes the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and also his international Christian relief effort, Samaritan’s Purse. Graham is the eldest son of Billy Graham, the most influential evangelical leader in twentieth-century America, who died this past February. Yet, in the windowless hotel conference room where I was to meet the controversial pastor Franklin Graham, the frigid air made it possible to ignore impending calamity. The air was choked with ash and smoke from two duelling forest fires. A hundred-and-six-degree wind buffeted the valley. In early August, Spokane felt on the verge of apocalypse.
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