Stephen Prothero is a professor of religion at Boston University and the author of Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections): The Battles That Define America from Jefferson’s Heresies to Gay Marriage (HarperOne).

While Billy Graham was leading a revival in Los Angeles in 1949, William Randolph Hearst looked at the handsome thirtysomething evangelist with flowing blond hair and famously directed editors in his publishing empire to “puff Graham.” Some six decades later, the preacher had become a silver-haired retiree whose Parkinson’s disease kept him largely out of view, but the puffery never stopped. When Graham died this week, he was hailed by President George W. Bush as “America’s pastor,” and even more lavishly by Vice-President Mike Pence as “one of the greatest Americans of the past century.” President Bill Clinton praised him for integrating his revivals. Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called him “the most important evangelist since the Apostle Paul.”

Graham’s accomplishments are, without doubt, legion. The widely cited estimate that he preached to some 215 million people is likely in the ballpark. And while the nineteenth-century lawyer-turned-evangelist Charles Finney must be credited with inventing modern revivalism, Graham perfected and scaled it, turning evangelicalism into worldwide impulse that has transformed Christianity in recent decades in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.


But almost two decades ago, Graham handed over the keys of the empire to his son, Franklin. And if you want to chart the troubled recent course of American evangelicalism—its powerful rise after World War II and its surprisingly quick demise in recent years—you need look no further than this father-and-son duo of Billy and Franklin Graham. The father was a powerful evangelist who turned evangelicalism into the dominant spiritual impulse in modern America. His son is—not to put too fine a point on it—a political hack, one who is rapidly rebranding evangelicalism as a belief system marked not by faith, hope, and love but by fear of Muslims and homophobia.

As a staunch believer in sin, Billy Graham would have been the first to admit that he was a flawed man. His determination to be about his father’s business meant he left almost all the parenting of his five children to his wife Ruth. The rabid anti-communism that caught Hearst’s attention blinded Graham in his early years to the ways the United States had fallen far short of its ideals. Graham got into bed with the wrong man in Richard Nixon. And while he must be praised for integrating his revivals (which he called crusades) and for inviting the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to deliver an invocation at his massive New York City crusade in 1957, he was missing in action when it came to civil rights legislation. After King imagined in his 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech” a “beloved community” in which “little black boys and little black girls will join hands with little white boys and white girls,” Graham dismissed that dream as utopian. "Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children," he said.

As a young boy growing up in an Episcopal household, I watched Billy Graham at least a dozen times as he preached his straightforward gospel of sin and salvation on national television. I was dazzled by what I later learned to describe as his charisma. He was tall and handsome. There was a sweet urgency in his voice. And he didn’t seem to be hiding anything behind his deep-set blue eyes. So I may be unduly forgiving of his faults. But I still view him as a good man who was ultimately chastened by his chumminess with Nixon, who worked hard to transcend the racism and anti-Semitism that swirled around him as a farm boy in North Carolina, and who understood (at his best) that the Christian message (at its best) is about love rather than fear, inclusion rather than exclusion.

When he spoke to the nation at the post-9/11 memorial service at Washington’s National Cathedral, he spoke of evil, but he did not denounce Islam. Throughout his career, Graham was criticized by fundamentalists for working with Catholics and liberal Protestants at his crusades. He prayed with Democratic and Republican presidents. And instead of castigating Christianity’s religious rivals, he focused on preaching Christ. When asked to join in common cause with Jerry Falwell after the foundation of the Moral Majority in 1979, Graham refused to yoke his organization to the cultural wars of the Religious Right and the Republican Party. And almost immediately after saying during a 1993 crusade in Columbus, Ohio, that AIDS might be “a judgment of God,” he retracted those words, telling the Cleveland Plain Dealer a few days later, “I don't believe that and I don't know why I said it. . . . To say God has judged people with AIDS would be very wrong and very cruel. I would like to say that I am very sorry for what I said.”

Franklin Graham is a very different sort of man, better known today for his right-wing political pronouncements than for his evangelism. Shortly after 9/11, Franklin Graham provided the sound bite of today’s culture wars when he denounced Islam as “a very wicked and evil religion.” He later became the standard bearer for the view that Islam is, in his words “a religion of hatred . . . a religion of war.”

In addition to purveying the birther nonsense that helped to propel Donald Trump to political prominence, Franklin Graham suggested that President Barack Obama was not a Christian and might in fact be a secret Muslim. Along with Jerry Falwell’s son, Jerry Falwell Jr., he helped to elect Trump president by swinging 80 percent of white evangelical voters to his side. And then when Trump was elected he attributed his victory not to a surge of White Christian support or to swing states in the Midwest but to divine providence.

Franklin Graham seems blissfully unaware of the possibility that there might be even the slimmest of gaps between the words that come out of his mouth and the words written down in scripture. More damningly, he demonstrates no awareness of the ways in which his political pronouncements are breaking down the evangelical witness his father devoted so much energy to building up.

During World War II era, European churches were hurt badly by the affiliation of Christianity with right-wing political movements. During the 1940s and 1950s, the United States persisted in its religiosity as European countries secularized. In fact, the Americans witnessed a powerful religious revival after the war, thanks in part to Billy Graham. That revival is over. Religion is now declining in the United States, and evangelicalism with it. In fact, over the last decade, the portion of white evangelical Protestants in the United States declined from 23 percent to 17 percent.

The most significant development in American religion in recent years is the shocking rise of the religiously unaffiliated (otherwise known as “nones”), who now account for roughly one quarter of all Americans. This increasing distance from religious institutions is accompanied by increasing distance from religious beliefs and practices. Today 27 percent of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” and another 18 percent as “neither religious nor spiritual.” There are many reasons for this decline in religious believing and belonging. But the most important in my view is the increasing identification of the Christian churches with right-wing politics. If you are among the 26 percent of eligible voters who voted for Trump, you likely applaud this development. But what about the other 74 percent?

One of Billy Graham’s few Christian rivals during his heyday in the 1950s and 1960s was the Union Theological Seminary professor Reinhold Niebuhr, who criticized Graham for his “pietistic individualism” and his neglect of social sin. Graham read and reflected on Niebuhr, but stuck for the most part to his simpler message that the world would be saved only through individual regeneration. To his credit, however, Graham internalized some of the teachings of Niebuhr, including the tendency of mere mortals to mistake God’s voice for their own, and to mistake the gospel of Christ for the gospel of American civilization. In short, Graham had a humility almost entirely lost among the public preachers of our day, his eldest son included.

The qualities of temper and judgment that made Billy Graham so singularly successful are almost entirely lacking in his son, who now imperils his father’s legacy. Thanks to Franklin Graham and his cronies on the Religious Right, American evangelicalism has now become first and foremost a political rather than a spiritual enterprise. The life of Billy Graham helped build it up. And his death may well have ensured its demise.

