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April
23, 2003
Anthony
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Chris
Floyd
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April 26,
2003
Franklin Graham's
Christian Empire
In Jesus's Name
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
My subject is Franklin Graham, one of President
Bush's very-public religious confidants. Franklin's father, Billy,
served President Nixon in a similar capacity. Billy's efforts
were crowned with a kind of earthly immortality: he's on those
White House tapes in the National Archives sharing anti-Semitic
remarks with Nixon and never flinching or clearing his throat
over the idea of using atomic bombs in Vietnam.
Franklin has pretty well replaced his
ailing father in leading the huge Billy Graham organization.
You may wonder about religious ministries being handed down like
fifteenth-century dukedoms, but the practice is fairly common
in America, and several of the nation's big ministries - the
type of outfits that might be characterized as Las Vegas Showstoppers
for Jesus - have been handed down in this fashion. This happens
in American politics, too. After all, a hand-me-down evangelist
serves a hand-me-down President who ran against (and lost the
popular vote to) a hand-me-down politician from Tennessee.
It's not that Americans accept aristocracy,
but in a nation of insanely-frenzied consumers, an established
brand name always still has some juice worth squeezing.
The youthful Franklin seems to have been
a bit of a trial for his mom and dad, reportedly exhibiting more
interest in sowing oats than saving souls. He had an obsession
with guns one could interpret as slightly at odds with the message
of the Prince of Peace. He may just have been reflecting the
quaint traditions of America's Appalachian subculture - his home
is the mountains of North Carolina - when he once cut down a
tree by blasting away at it with an automatic weapon (I did not
make this up). Apparently, he used to be fond of giving automatic
pistols as gifts.
Well, at some point, I guess the lad
realized he was burning out and going nowhere, and automatic
weapons are expensive when you like to give the very best, so
Franklin had something like the President's road-to-Damascus
experience. I doubt he recalled Henry the Fourth's saying Paris
was worth a mass (Henry of Navarre became King of France by adopting
Catholicism). It would have weighed heavily that dad's ready-made,
super-slick organization offered a handsome, steady income, all
expenses paid, especially if Franklin had come to recognize that
his next-best career option might be itinerant bingo caller.
Redemption is one of America's great
ongoing themes. It's the spiritual extension of all the plastic
surgery, injections, drugs, youth-inducing potions, diets, and
tales of lives changed by lotteries or get-rich-quick schemes,
but it does have to be the right kind of redemption. None of
your consolations of philosophy, peace of the Buddha, wisdom
of the Great Spirit, or following the Prophet will do. Lives
lived decently and peacefully from beginning to end are not admired
because they don't make juicy entertainment.
The approved American redemption-story
template includes years of inflicting hell on others, often by
abusing whisky or drugs, finally being overcome by frightful
(drug-induced or otherwise) visions of going to hell yourself,
and then spending the rest of your life annoying every person
who crosses your path with the opinion that he or she does not
know the truth. About 85% of the nation's country-and Western
singers and about 95% of its evangelists spend their declining
years sharing such tales in magazines, tapes, interviews, and
sermons. It's a major industry.
This is all by way of background to Franklin's
words about his new mission. I suppose it's possible Franklin
thinks Nazareth is a trailer park somewhere in North Carolina
or Texas which would account for his thinking that the people
in the Middle East haven't heard about Jesus, but, in any event,
Franklin is now going to tell them about Jesus, at least his
gun-totting Appalachian version. Well, almost, but Franklin has
probably been advised that proselytizing for conversion from
Judaism is against the law in modern Israel. With a Bush-appointed
Proconsul, that kind of law shouldn't get in the way of bringing
the good word to Iraqis, although he'll be a bit late to save
the souls of those smashed and broken by American bombs.
Franklin's organization, Samaritan's
Purse, claims that it intends only to bring relief services and
not evangelism to Iraq, but how valid can this claim be? The
Billy Graham organization for decades has worked only to convert
people to its narrow notion of Christianity. It has been criticized
even by other Christians for the nature of its work - cranking
out converts like sausages in a vast Midwestern meat-packing
plant. Perhaps when Franklin created his offshoot relief organization,
Samaritan's Purse, it was in part a response to this kind of
criticism.
Franklin's own words on Islam over the
last year hardly resemble a second Albert Schweitzer yearning
to help fellow beings. His tone is militaristic and has the same
nasty, parochial feel as the President's "us and them."
One looks in vain for any generosity of spirit associated with
the words of Jesus.
"We're not attacking Islam but Islam
has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He's not
the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's
a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."
Franklin here makes no distinction between
the nineteen individuals responsible for 9/11 and the world's
hundreds of millions of Muslims, yet he seems never to have made
the same kind of connections between criminals of other religious
backgrounds and the religions themselves. Did the IRA's outrages
elicit such comments about Catholicism?
"the persecution or elimination
of non-Muslims has been a cornerstone of Islam conquests and
rule for centuries."
I suppose it would be foolish to expect
any sensible perspective on history from a man of Franklin's
limited learning. The work of people calling themselves Christians
in countless wars, religious persecutions, and exterminations
just since the Renaissance dwarfs the volume of spilled blood
in all the rest of human history. The Holocaust, the African
slave trade, and the extermination of many aboriginal peoples
were the work of people calling themselves Christians.
"I believe it is my responsibility
to speak out against the terrible deeds that are committed as
a result of Islamic teaching."
Why should it be his responsibility to
speak against these particular deeds and no others? Franklin
certainly is not known as an advocate for the world's abused
and downtrodden. One does not find him shouldering this responsibility
over other terrible deeds, a number of them the dirty work of
his own government. No, his time goes to "crusades,"
the word used for decades by the Billy Graham organization to
describe its assembly-line salvation gatherings.
The denomination with which the Graham
family generally has been associated, the Southern Baptists,
has an ugly history in the United States. Extreme segregationists
founded this denomination to keep blacks out of their churches
and a century later, through the Civil Rights revolution of the
1950s and 1960s, Southern Baptists were better known for opposing
Dr. King's work than supporting it. The denomination's official
view on a woman's role in marriage is among the most parochial
in the United States. Incidentally, the Southern Baptists' Mission
Board also aims at providing aid in Iraq. Jerry Vines, former
president of the Southern Baptists, described the Prophet Muhammad
not very long ago as a "demon-possessed pedophile."
"There is no escaping the unfortunate
fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the
military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections
to terrorism."
These are the words of a man teaching
suspicion and fear rather than understanding and brotherhood.
One has to ask what such comments have to do with evangelism
or Christianity, but American fundamentalists often ignore Jesus'
clear teaching on the matter and put their visions of government
and secular affairs at the heart of sermons and pronouncements.
This suggests that politics, and a particularly nasty kind of
politics, is at least as much a driving force here as religion.
Franklin recently gave a Good Friday
service at the Pentagon. Reading that, I had the absurd image
of an early Christian preacher praying for Rome's Tenth Legion.
True, there were probably no Christian legionaries at the time,
but the fact remains that the purpose of the Pentagon is exactly
the same as that of the legions, professional killing for the
state and its policies, a purpose totally incompatible with any
words of Jesus.
But of course, the more apt comparison
would be a few centuries later when the legions did their bloody
work for a so-called Christian empire.
John Chuckman
can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org
Today's
Features
Anthony
Gancarski
When Young Mothers Die in Combat
Chris
Floyd
Desolation Row: Bush's Barbarians Teach
by Example
Marjorie
Cohn
Tax the War Profiteers
William
Lind
The Fourth Generation of Modern War
Dave Marsh
Nina Simone: Freedom Singer
Binoy
Kampmark
Malayasia's America: the War on Iraq
David Vest
Who's Looting Whom?
Standard
Shaefer
Super Imperialism: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Andrew
Rodman
Lawn Poem
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 4/23
Website
of the Day
Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East
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