Billy Graham is Dead: Signal Boosting

Recently I wrote up a little coda that summarized my thoughts on the passing of evangelical leader Billy Graham. They were largely regretful, confused, and inspired by the fact that most reactions I'd seen to his passing were reactionary and involved a lot of people confusing Billy and his crazy son.

Tonight I read Fred Clark, the legendary Slacktivist's take on the passing of Graham, which is way smarter than anything I wrote and manages to criticize the life and work of Billy Graham while also being well aware of who he and Franklin actually are.

Read it.

Comments

[SPark]

The Slacktivist blog is so good. I check it pretty regularly. I'm not from an evangelical background myself, so some of the things he goes on about are very much from another world for me, but it's a world that's good to know about, and there are other things that sound exactly like home. Religious fanaticism is often much the same the world over, I suspect.

[BatwingCandlewaxxe]

There's a great interview with Frank Schaeffer, son of Christian activist and writer Francis Schaeffer, whose family were close personal friends of the Grahams (and who now describes himself as "An atheist who believes in G-D"). He has some interesting things to say about Billy Graham, who he worked closely with for a long time after he became an adult. Unfortunately, I'm at work right now so I can't dig up the link, but it's on Youtube.

Schaeffer made the same points that Fred Clark did in the the article you linked, only in more detail, about the continuity of doctrine between Billy and Franklin, and between Billy and the current incarnation of the American Evangelical movement.

Also according to Schaeffer, Billy Graham is primarily responsible for the rise of the commodification of the Church, the rise of the megachurches and super-rich money-obsessed preachers, and the influence of fundamentalist Christian theology in both the Evangelical movement (which was originally anti-fundamentalist) and the American religious right. Schaeffer paints are pretty bleak picture of the man as a bad and neglectful father as well, having perhaps more in-person time with Graham (thanks to working with Graham's ministry) than his own family did. Which certainly didn't help Franklin's extremist attitude any.

[SPark]

Have you read the follow-up, btw?

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/02/26/will-father-figure-put-tiny-hand-mine/

Conservatives cite from a wealth of Graham’s more conservative stances in support of the conservative side of these family disputes. More “progressive” strains of white evangelicalism cite select “progressive” aspects of Graham’s life and ministry — he once paid bail for MLK! — to legitimize the possibility of a more progressive evangelical identity. And timid establishment centrists, of course, invoke the many, many ways that Graham’s legacy endorses their preferred approach.

It's something I've fallen into myself, in a different way. Wanting to take the best and most popular of my own religious background, and point out the things he said that were progressive, that support my own stances. Not even just to claim his legitimacy, but as a way to try, somehow, some way, to reach the people who are on the "other side" and go "here is this person we both admire, and see, see how he supports my position? Can you not see that my position is actually as valid as your own?" So far it's never actually gone anywhere, though. The best I've managed is a tacit agreement that we can get along and be friends, but probably shouldn't speak of such things again.