I walked out of church once because of Billy Graham.
It was 1987. The church, in a Denver suburb, had the words “Bible†and “Baptist†in its name, but it didn’t view those terms the way America’s most well-known evangelist did. I was there with a friend and it was around the time Graham was planning with one of his crusades.
At these gatherings of thousands, Graham did something that forever marks him as a man before his time. Weeks before he would issue the call of salvation in a new city, he and his colleagues would meet with religious leaders in those cities: Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, whatever. He’d help those leaders understand what would happen after his altar call at the end of his sermon, and prepare them to meet with newly inspired Christians so they could speak to a man or woman of the cloth who spoke their language.
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Billy Graham didn’t come to cities across America to recruit Southern Baptists but to spread the Gospel.
The Denver church pastor that day thumped his Bible and worked himself into a lather. He noted a news article that quoted a Catholic priest, Father Ken Leone, about Graham’s graciousness in involving other church leaders in his crusades. Leone had been a priest at the Catholic Church of my youth. He was a soft-spoken man with a gentle touch who spoke to every young person he ever met as though they were his own child.
Graham, the Bible thumper said, wasn’t doing God’s work by saving new Christians and then sending them to a Catholic priest. He was the antichrist, sending the saved straight to hell.
It’s been more than 30 years since I walked out of that sermon, disgusted that Graham’s could be twisted to sow division.
On Wednesday, Graham died, at the age of 99, leaving a world that seems more divided than ever. The grace of Graham stands in stark contrast to another big news story attracting headlines on the day he died. ºüÀêÊÓƵ blogger Jim Hoft, founder of the website Gateway Pundit, may have finally reached too far into his shameful bag of slanderous tricks. A darling of the far right in the age of Trumpian excess, Hoft peddles political porn, spreading conspiracy theories, most of them invented out of thin air, in order to attack Democrats, the left, the mainstream media and anybody that he and his funders don’t find extreme enough.
After last week’s slaughter of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., by an AR-15-wielding 19-year-old, Hoft pulled a play out of his fake-news handbook: He called some of the student survivors who became passionate advocates for new gun-control measures “plants.†They were coached. They were actors, Hoft surmised, with no evidence whatsoever.
It was a page out of the post-Newtown, Conn., shooting playbook.
In the days after 20 children and six adults were slain at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, a neighbor invited me to his home to look at a video. It was of devastated parents recounting the loss of their sons and daughters, but with a twist: a commentator surmised they were actors, that the bloodiest school shooting in America’s history was a false flag operation. It was made up.
I was dumbfounded. Devastated. Scared.
These are the conspiracies so-called conservatives are being fed by sophisticated propagandists.
It starts with a post by Hoft, or Alex Jones at InfoWars. Some other site shares it. The president, or maybe Sean Hannity at Fox News repeats the canard. Your neighbor posts about it on Facebook, or maybe even a Russian bot, or both. The lie circles the globe before it can be dispelled.
After Newtown, Hoft and his ilk attacked adults. This time they went after the kids, after , after .
Americans can’t agree on guns, it seems, but most of us can agree that even in the world of trashy political attacks, kids should be left alone. Even the Conservative Political Action Conference, a yearly tribute to the far right, on a “free speech†panel.
It’s just coincidence that Hoft was in the news on the day Billy Graham died, but here’s the thing: The same Republican politicians who on Wednesday eulogized Graham as the lion that he was, have coddled and encouraged men like Hoft for years.
This time, for one day, at least, they walked out on a sermon so offensive they couldn’t stomach it.
Graham, I suspect, could have found grace in that moment. Amazing grace.