Billy Graham & the Synagogue of Satan
Lost Passage of Infamous Nixon Tape Makes a Bad Story Worse
Sources for this story and further background are here.
EVANGELIST BILLY GRAHAM can be heard defending anti-Jewish conspiracies and professing that Hitler was right about some things to President Richard Nixon on a newly-released portion of an infamous Oval Office tape. The long-censored passage of the 1972 conversation confirms certain comments reported hitherto only second-hand, and adds to the historical record shocking new words and beliefs of the evangelist, whose legacy had already been damaged by the earlier, redacted releases of the tape.
One of the most beloved and influential religious figures of the past century, Graham can now be heard tutoring Nixon — a notorious bigot and antisemite who would later resign the presidency in disgrace — in views that recall the worst of a long tradition of anti-Jewish prejudice that has persisted among Christians, sanctioning discrimination, persecution and violence.
During “the Latter Days,” Graham is heard to say, Jews will be divided into the “Remnant of God’s People” and “the Synagogue of Satan.” The second group consists of those Jews in league with the devil, Graham says, who “have a strange brilliance about them” and are behind “all your religious deceptions.”
Nixon’s ranting against Jewish “domination” of media is by now old news, so also Graham’s fervent assent, and the evangelist’s already-disturbing contributions to this discussion. Graham has been long known to have warned Nixon to break the “stranglehold” of Jewish influence. But that comment takes on even darker tones in context with the new material, a bizarre speech that climaxes with references to Nazi Germany. “You see,” the evangelist explains to Nixon, summing up their exchange about Jewish influence,
Hitler of course… they had a stranglehold on Germany. On the banking of Germany, on everything in Germany. And the media. They had the whole thing, you see. But he went about it wrong…
In addition to this qualified endorsement of Hitler’s antisemitic beliefs and policies that led to the genocide of European Jews, Graham anchors his assertion about Satan-inspired Jews in his interpretation of Scripture:
This is what the Bible teaches. Whether you believe it or don’t believe it. This is the biblical teaching. This is what I believe. And I believe that they have a strange brilliance about them. They’re smart. And they are energized, in my judgment, by supernatural power.
The remarks about the “stranglehold” of Jews in pre-Nazi Germany in the formerly-censored portion are now seen to set-up to Graham’s warning that the contemporary “stranglehold” of Jewish influence “has got to be broken.”
Nixon: You believe that?
Graham: Yes, sir.
Nixon: I can’t ever say it. But I believe it.
Graham: But if you’ve been elected a second time, you might be able to do something…
The recordings were made without the evangelist’s knowledge by Nixon’s originally-secret White House taping system during an Oval Office meeting on February 1, 1972. After Nixon’s resignation two years later, Congress seized documents of his administration and authorized the National Archives to process, regulate and release the materials to the public, with restrictions for national security and privacy. Upon the evangelist’s death earlier this year, certain restricted material was now deemed eligible to be made public.
The earliest leak was in the form of an aide’s summary notes, published in 1994, over twenty years after the meeting. A redacted version of the tape was released in 2002, with key elements rumored but denied by Graham confirmed in the later release of a 1973 phone call between the preacher and president. The new release fills in the last gaps, but leaves many questions.
Hearing America’s one-time beloved “pastor,” a regular atop “most-admired” lists, speak from beyond the grave of evil Jewish conspiracies also comes at a particularly fraught moment for such a revelation. The late evangelist’s traditional constituency has become associated with movements that threaten to mainstream once-repudiated prejudices against out-groups, including Jews. Even more critically, leadership for such radical views feature the current President of the United States and Billy Graham’s own evangelist son.
THE EARLIEST PUBLISHED VERSION of the 1972 conversation said nothing about the“Synagogue of Satan” — not by that ancient and infamous name.
According to the summary of the meeting made by Nixon’s chief-of-staff H. R. Haldeman, the preacher and the president engaged in “considerable discussion of the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media, and the agreement that this was something that would have to be dealt with.” By the time those notes were released by the National Archives as a book in 1994, Haldeman and Nixon were both dead. The president’s antisemitism was by then common knowledge. Billy Graham’s response to the revelations of the White House tapes had been characterized as an expression of shock at the president’s profanity, a side of Nixon he claimed not to know.
In fact, the evangelist may have been given a pass for the Haldeman account if the more complete CD-ROM version of the diary entry didn’t include his take on Nixon’s concerns: “Graham has the strong feeling that the Bible says that there are satanic Jews and that’s where our problem arises.” That was the line quoted in the initial reviews of the book. Yet the evangelist immediately issued a categorical denial: “Those are not my words,” he declared: “I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.” Nobody talked about Billy Graham then except in positive terms, and focus shifted back to Nixon, whose villainy had reached Shakespearean heights.
If Billy Graham got a pass on “satanic Jews,” it eventually expired — for the evangelist, too, had been caught by Nixon’s hidden tape-recorder.
In 2002, most of the recording of the 1972 Oval Office conversation was made public. A private exchange of antisemitic views was now shouted from the housetops. Besides his “stranglehold” comment, Graham confessed
[the Jews] swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country. And I have no power, no way to handle them, but I would stand up if under proper circumstances.
On the release of the recorded conversation, the story blew up again. By this point the now 83-year-old evangelist seemed unequal to such controversy. He gave no interviews on the tape, and issued only the briefest of statements:
I don’t recall having those feelings about any group, especially the Jews, and I certainly do not have them now. My remarks did not reflect my love for the Jewish people. I humbly ask the Jewish community to reflect on my actions on behalf of Jews over the years that contradict my words in the Oval Office that day.
That non-denial-denial and non-apology apology is also given new context, within the full-release of the conversation. In 2002, Billy Graham’s son and supporters defended the elderly evangelist, whose reputation nonetheless took a hit from which it did not recover. It was true that there had been no actual mention of “satanic Jews” on the tape as released. But there were several portions of the recording held back, leaving gaps of several seconds or minutes. These included one conspicuous “withdrawn item” right in the middle of the exchange about Jews, right before the “stranglehold” line.
It was hard not to think the story would get worse: it soon did.
More White House tapes were released in 2009, including a 1973 phone call between Nixon and Graham that featured another critical exchange about Jews. On the call, Nixon lamented about a Libyan jetliner just shot down by the Israelis, unfortunately right as their prime minister was about to visit the US. Graham replied that the Israelis were expelling Christian missionaries just as American Jews had been complaining about being targeted by Evangelical proselytizing. The evangelist mentioned his upcoming meeting with a representative of the Jewish community to see about resolving that issue.
Hearing this, Nixon urged the evangelist to “be very, very tough” with “all our Jewish friends” — to tell the rabbi that “he’s making a terrible mistake and that they’re going to get the darndest wave of antisemitism here if they don’t behave.” Graham offered no pushback to these provocative remarks. Nixon wasn’t done, adding that “this antisemitism is stronger than we think.” He made vague reference to historical calamities of the Jews, in Catholic Spain and Nazi Germany, saying such troubles awaited Jews in America “if these people don’t start behaving.” Graham brought up their 1972 conversation, when, he said, he’d told the president about the “Synagogue of Satan.”
The release of the 1973 phone call seemed to vindicate the late Haldeman’s claim that the 1972 conversation included discussion of “satanic Jews.” Critics excoriated Graham; many supporters fell to stunned silence. There was less background on the notorious phrase in question than one might expect. Reporting tended to settle for the exegetics of a PR spokesman. According to publicist A. Larry Ross, the “Synagogue of Satan” referred to those Jews
whose lives and work are not in keeping with traditional Jewish values. Throughout his ministry, Mr. Graham has consistently stood for purity of life and the sacredness of home and marriage, according to biblical precepts found in both the Old and New Testaments.
So bland and ahistorical an explanation papered over two millennia of Christian Jew-hatred, a tradition in which that very phrase — the “Synagogue of Satan” — holds an infamous place both among the vast catalog of Christian abuse of Jews and in justifying discrimination, persecution, and violence.
SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN first appears in the New Testament, in the context, scholars say, of a bitterly-escalating war for legitimacy between the early church and Judaism. In John’s Gospel, Christ is depicted rebuking Jewish opponents as belonging to “your father, the devil.” The actual words “Synagogue of Satan” appear in the Book of Revelation, a work in the “apocalyptic” genre, visions interpretable a thousand ways and so easily weaponized for particular causes. Hereafter, Jews became associated with the Satanic in Christian polemics. Church fathers regularly engaged in vein-popping vitriol against Jews, denouncing synagogues as hotbeds of sorcery. When the empire converted to Christianity, the phrase “Synagogue of Satan” was actually inscribed into Roman Law in strictures against the Jews. Medieval Christendom made the Jews the favorite folk-devil — literally, depicting Jews with horns and hooves, casting spells, and committing ritual sacrifice of stolen Christian children. That model of blame and persecution became eminently transferable to other outgroups — witches, gypsies, Native Americans , etc.— but always found its way back to the Jews.
In the 11th century, Pope Urban II called Christian knights to Holy War against Muslims, promising remission for their sins. Not a few knights caught up in cleansing Christian spaces of infidels took to slaughtering Jews. In a very different era, “Crusades” would be the name that Billy Graham called his evangelistic meetings, until that name was finally dropped amid rising criticism during 21st century Western wars against Islamic peoples.
Even Martin Luther recognized that the Crusades were a cover for shameful plundering; he applied the phrase “Synagogue of Satan” to the Catholics. At the same time, Luther also demonized the Jews in his proto-Nixonian invective, calling for their synagogues to be burned. Such anti-Jewish currents in German theology flowed into the twentieth century, into genocide. The Nazis may not have been Christians, but, arguably, they couldn’t have done it without them. Auschwitz, for many, in so many ways, was a turning point.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council adopted Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”), an official reboot of the Church’s relationship with non-Christian religions, particularly Jews. The document offered no apologies but formally rejected antisemitism, affirming God’s unbroken covenant with Jews and absolving the Jews of the charge of “Christ-killing,” which had traditionally justified so much Jew-killing. Among backstage facilitators for Nostra Aetate was Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, a liaison to Christians, including Billy Graham.
As the Council (1962–65) added to religious energies roiling the Sixties, Tanenbaum kept his eye on some Christian movements with concern, particularly those engaged in what he saw as aggressive evangelism of Jews (e.g. “Jews for Jesus”). The rabbi lobbied Billy Graham to speak out: Tanenbaum may have dreamed of an Evangelical Nostra Aetate. After the two met, and Graham issued a statement affirming Jews and denouncing antisemitism and aggressive evangelism. Tanenbaum hailed the statement as epochal. Critics dismissed it as bland and elusive. The rabbi pushed for something stronger from Graham, who demurred. They remained friends and allies. Tanenbaum hoped to write a book about Billy Graham and the Jews.
In 1977, the American Jewish Committee, where Marc Tanenbaum was employed, gave Billy Graham the organization’s award for interfaith understanding. In a speech to the group, Graham attributed the history of antisemitism to“false Christians.” This sharp distinction reflected an Either/Or perspective typical of Graham, whether dividing the Cold War into “Christianity” vs. “Satan’s Religion” or urging sinners to “make your decision” between heaven and hell. (Defining “antisemitism” in all-or-nothing terms recalls recent controversy over binary definitions of racism: that is,by definition, the Good People can be neither racist or antisemitic, since any degree of racist or antisemitic behavior would make them Bad People.)
In 1992, Marc Tanenbaum died, two years before the publication of Haldeman’s account of Billy Graham’s views on Jews and decades before it became clear that his phrase “satanic Jews” was actually a fair representation of the evangelist’s actual words and beliefs. Tanenbaum had no idea his meeting with Billy Graham to discuss improved Christian-Jewish relations took place the very week the evangelist mentioned the rabbi by name in a phone call with Nixon, when Graham warned the most-powerful anti-Semite in the world — for the second [update: third] time — about the Synagogue of Satan.
A YEAR AFTER HIS SPEECH to the American Jewish Committee, five years after his Oval Office discourse about Jews, Billy Graham went to Auschwitz.
The death camp, the evangelist said in a statement there to reporters, was “a blot on the whole human race” — a reasonable response. But the phrase echoed strangely off Graham’s signature hymn, with its invitation to sinners to rid their souls of “one dark blot.” Ironically, cleanliness metaphors clarify the ambiguities of the purity drive, which can propel sinners to the altar or Nazis toward genocide — i.e. ridding of the body politic of “dark blots.” (As if more proof was needed that campaigns to purify the world leave the worst stains.)
For some, the dark blot of Auschwitz is on God. Billy Graham wisely avoided tackling the Problem of Evil in a death camp. He also did not mention two-thousand years of Christian demonizing of European Jews as a critical context for the Holocaust. What the evangelist did take from Auschwitz, he said, was a “conversion” experience: the one-time chaplain of the Cold War came out against the renewal of the nuclear arms race. That set him at odds with the Cold Warrior who next moved into the White House, and with his own constituency, who voted in a new era nostalgic for clearly-defined Evil Others.
Billy Graham, meanwhile, seemed pulled between strong opposing forces. On the one hand, he seemed to drift from the cultural center to the margins of what became a rising and militant Religious Right. On the other hand, his career helped make possible that rise and that militancy. If he dialed down his tone about the Communists, he kept on demonizing alternate Evil Others (of which more presently). The rhetorical strategy was fundamental: set up the starkest Either/Or options and call his audience to “make a decision.” A case might be made that this method might have been Graham’s real message.
Uneasy implications kept Auschwitz out of polite conversation until after the Vietnam War collapsed, as Watergate unraveled. Now America “discovered” the Holocaust — via a TV miniseries of that name, airing months before Graham’s visit. Scholars looking into this Holocaust-awareness felt it was less about Jews and Nazis than America and the Sixties. Denouncing Evil Others offered a ritual exorcism of inner darkness. No surprise, it was also the era when America became “possessed” by demons, as The Exorcist, novel and film, offered another ritual expulsion of Sixties demons from the national soul.
Billy Graham saw The Exorcist as proof of a rise in Satanism, by which he seemed to mean anything on the wrong side of that sharp binary that divided God and the devil. (“Billy Graham blames social ills on ‘Satan worship.’” “Graham: Satan Worship is Spreading.” “Satan Worship Held Responsible.”) A certain line might be followed, then, from the evangelist’s Cold War demonizing of “Satan’s Religion” to the 1980's “Satanic Panic.”
That culture-wide hysteria about Satanic conspiracies was driven largely by a rising tabloid media and Billy Graham’s Evangelicals. Some may well have been “false Christians,” but most were also mainstream Evangelical leaders, churches, networks and media. Nobody ever seemed to note how much Satanic Panic rehashed all the classic tropes of antisemitic myth: the global cabals, the child-stealing, the occult rituals and blood-sacrifice. Blaming fictional devils may have seemed a harmless alternative to blaming Jews — which had, of course, become taboo after Auschwitz. Yet real victims of the Panic — innocent people accused, tried, and sentenced for fictional crimes — would surely disagree. And even if Satanic Panic applied the old template to non-existent folk-devils, it breathed new life into the template during the post-Cold War search for a replacement Evil Other. It wasn’t until the new century before one was found that seemed equal to the built-up energies.
It was during those terrible days after 9/11, that Billy Graham played, for the last time, pastor to the nation. At the National Cathedral, the octogenarian minister invoked a God who cared for all, “whatever our ethnic, religious or political background may be.” Graham offered no answers for the “mystery of evil” — speaking on that topic like a man who’d been to Auschwitz. He did, nonetheless, call for a decision: America must choose what kind of people we will be. The keynote speaker at that service declared that America would be the people to “rid the world of evil” — setting the tone for the new century.
Billy Graham died on February 21, 2018, forty-five years to the day after what became a legacy-shattering phone call with Richard Nixon. His body lay at the U.S. Capitol as a symbol of both his status as an icon of American righteousness and the ambiguities of his lifelong relationship to power.
Six months later, the Nixon Library has posted the full recording of Graham and Nixon’s original Oval Office exchange about the Jews, Hitler, and the “Synagogue of Satan.” The other shoe has finally dropped into a very different world. Headlines at the time of Billy Graham’s death included “Anti-Semitic Incidents See Largest Single-Year Increase On Record.” Abroad, right-wing nationalist movements are on the march: Europe, like America, is divided amid fights over migrants and borders. Nazis have marched in the Bible Belt. Racial slurs by the president are not secreted onto White House tapes, but tweeted from the Oval Office. The most solid supporters of this regime are Billy Graham’s Evangelicals, their most visible and influential leader his son, head of what is still called the “Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.” Having already redefined his father’s key term “decision” to make it explicitly political, Franklin Graham continues to redefine his father’s legacy.
Indeed, if friendly biographers found it a challenge to maximize the distance between Billy Graham and Richard Nixon, the new challenge will be even harder: keeping the story of Billy Graham from leading to Donald Trump.
That task becomes even harder in a world that can no longer be shielded from what America’s most-beloved evangelist said about Jews, when he thought nobody was listening, except the person who most people might have once thought would be the most-bigoted and corrupt president in U.S. history.
If the concern to withhold parts of the Graham-Nixon conversation from the public for almost a half-century was the effect it would have on the evangelist’s reputation, that instinct was sound. The more frightening impact of Billy Graham’s words about the Jews, however, may be that portions of his own constituency and new converts might seize upon them as Gospel.
© 2018 Mike Hertenstein. All rights reserved.
