The ad is brilliant, and Franklin Graham is furious. A group called Evangelicals for Harris has released an advertisement juxtaposing one of Billy Graham’s sermons with clips from Donald Trump’s, ah, rants.
“But you must realize that in the last days, the times will be full of danger. Men will become utterly self-centered and greedy for money,” Graham reads.
“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” Trump says. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get.”
Franklin Graham, the evangelist’s son, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and longtime Trumpist, is angry. The organization has sued to stop the dissemination of the ad.
“It may be worth noting that in all of his years of ministry and across relationships with 11 U.S. presidents, Billy Graham sought only to encourage them and to offer them the counsel of Jesus Christ, as revealed through God’s Word,” the BGEA said in a statement. “He never criticized presidents publicly and would undoubtedly refuse to let his sermons be used to do so, regardless of who is involved.”
Graham himself asserted that his father, who died in 2018, admired “the conservative values and policies” of Trump, “and if he were alive today, my father’s views and opinions would not have changed.” Well, maybe.
The aging Billy Graham did seem to endorse Trump before the 2016 election. However, several people familiar with the situation have suggested that there might have been a bit of manipulation by the younger Graham to make it appear that his ailing father favored Trump.
If the endorsement were legitimate, it would not have been the first time Billy Graham made his presidential preferences known, although his allegiances, apart from Richard Nixon, were famously fickle. While he frequently disavowed political endorsements, Billy Graham was drawn to politics and politicians, especially those with national reputations.
For example, he tracked and encouraged the political career of Mark O. Hatfield, an evangelical and a Baptist, after his election as the youngest governor in Oregon history in 1958. He promised to suggest to both Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller that they select Hatfield as their running mate should either become the Republican nominee for president in 1960.
Nixon won the nomination in 1960, but Graham pushed instead for Water Judd, a former missionary to China and Republican member of Congress from Minnesota, to be the vice-presidential choice. (Nixon selected Henry Cabot Lodge.)
That same year, on August 10, Graham sent a letter to John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee and a Roman Catholic, assuring the senator that he would not raise the “religious issue” in the general election campaign. Eight days later, Graham convened a group of Protestant leaders in Montreux, Switzerland, to strategize how they could deny Kennedy’s election in November.
Billy Graham rarely made an explicit political endorsement. When he did, as in 1972 in Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign against the Democratic senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, he came to regret it. When the transcripts of the Watergate tapes were released, Graham pronounced himself sickened by what he heard— not, it turns out, by Nixon’s many attempts to subvert the Constitution, but by his use of foul language.
(In 2006, I met McGovern in Mitchell, South Dakota. Over dinner, he told me that following the 1972 presidential campaign, Graham sought him out to apologize for disparaging remarks he had made about McGovern during that campaign.)
When Jimmy Carter, a Baptist and fellow evangelical, was running for reelection in 1980, Graham again dissembled. On September 12, 1980— coincidently, twenty years to the day after Kennedy’s address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association to confront the “religious issue”—Graham called Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager, Republican senator Paul Laxalt from Nevada, and offered “to help short of public endorsement.”
On September 23, eleven days later, Graham sent a letter to Carter’s religious liaison assuring the President that the evangelist was “staying out” of the campaign.
Did Billy Graham endorse Trump’s candidacy in 2016? Franklin Graham insists that he did. Given the elder Graham’s shape-shifting on political matters, however, it’s questionable whether the elder Graham would have stood by that “endorsement” eight years later, especially given Trump’s conduct in office—his record of 30,573 false or misleading statements during his presidency, for example.
Like it or not, Franklin, the Evangelicals for Harris ad raises a legitimate question.
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An Episcopal priest, Balmer is John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College and the author of more than a dozen books, with commentaries appearing in newspapers across the country. He is a contributing correspondent at Good Faith Media.
