Keeping the Faith Among the Faithless

BILLY GRAHAM, among all the myriad preachers who have dotted the American landscape preaching salvation through Jesus Christ, was arguably the most compassionate, astute, and politically savvy. The other preeminent ones, including Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, and Billy Sunday, among others, were more inclinded to preach a message of hellfire, damnation, and divine retribution. Edwards' metaphor in which even the most devout Christian, while alive, dangles perpetually over the flaming pits of hell, held back and hanging by only a gossamer thread of the thinnest kind, in constant peril of the thread snapping at the first trace of sin, exemplifies this darker, terrifying brand of the Christian faith. Billy Graham did things differently. Rather than try to frighten people into accepting Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior, he preahed a message of love and compassion, beckoning folks to join the flock with love and kindness, in keeping with the message of Jesus. Noteworthy is that through his entire career, not a hint of corruption surrounded or sullied him; for all appearances and in evident fact, Graham was spotless in terms of personnal comportment, personal morality and financical conduct. He avoided the temptation of enriching himself at the expesnse of those seeking salvation by giving money to his minsitry. Few others can say that with honesty. Himself, like most devout Christians a conservative, he saw , well in advance of the evangelical political avalanche-like entry into the political arena of the late seventies and early eighties. He predicted and saw the advent of the "moral majority", the pitfalls of a marriage between religion and politics, especially the politics of the far right. He said, paraphrased, that he had deep misgivings about the possibility of a union of evangelical Christianity and the far right wing political community, because, as he put it, the far right political community has no real interest in religion. He didn't spend a great deal of time elaborating on this, peferring, as always, not to alienate anyone by disparaging them, but it seems apparent the the reverend Graham undrstood one salient,irrefutable fact: that whereas left wing people are far less likely to embrace the Christian religion than are conservatives, they are nonethelsss, in their political ideology, much more compatible with the actual teachings of the savior. Render unto Caesar. Pay your taxes to the government, give your heart and love to God. Give unto the poor. Embrace voluntary personal impoverishment. Was he talking about, in spirit, tax and spend redistribute the wealth bleeding heart liberals,or make your own way by hard work and get wealthy conservative Republicans? The answer seems evident. Barry Goldwater, as conservative as it gets and a man of deep religious faith, had the same misgivings. He said that he lamented and feared the day that the Republican party would be takon over by "preachers", meaning that a political party which combined conservative politics with evangelical Christianity was not something to be desired. Such a marriage would limit the party to a single religious ideology and costituency, in a nation with growing religious diversity. And, by pinning the evangelical religious movment to a single political party, the evangelical Christian community would be similarly constrained and limited. And yet, their warnings were not heeded, it happened, religion and politics were formally mixed together, and here we are, with an extremist mainstream political party, extremist in religious and political ideology both. On the surface, at this moment in history, it seems to be succeeding. But it is a ticking time bomb, an explosive stewing poison which cannot endure. The inherent contradictions are too great, the internal stress too great. But the line has been crossed, and the problem is, how to keep the faith while joined at the hip to a political agenda which represents essentially the diametric opposite of what the Prince of Peace preached. For those intent on trying, good luck.