The Hateful Legacy of Billy Graham
For children like me growing up gay and Christian in North Carolina, few figures loomed as large as Billy Graham. Based on obituaries in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the BBC, you’d never know the damage he did to a generation of LGBTQ youth. Even a more critical stance from David Hollinger calls Graham’s prejudices “missed opportunities,” an insultingly weak term to describe the direction in which he took the Southern ideal of Christ. Graham had a unique chance to create a kindler, gentler version of evangelical Christianity. Instead, he weaponized it against a long list of enemies — from the North Vietnamese to Jews to feminists to those of us struggling merely to live with ourselves in Billy Graham’s South.
The year I was born, 1986, Billy Graham delivered these lines at the Carmel Country Club in Charlotte, North Carolina. The occasion was his high school reunion — the class of 1936. In a speech entitled “The Good Old Days,” Graham laments:
In our time, closets were for clothes, not for coming out of, and a book about two young women living together in Europe could be called, “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.”
The progression of LGBTQ civil rights was a source of constant distress to Graham. But his harmful rhetoric was not limited to the LBGTQ community. The so-called Mike Pence Rule (never dine alone with a woman) may have originated with Graham who vowed to “not travel, meet or eat alone with a woman other than my wife.” In a 1980 speech, Graham chided the increasing number of women who have “adulterous affairs” but pay the price with “drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide.” The adultery of men is left out entirely.
Today’s homages to Graham are predictable in their willingness to ignore the darker parts of his legacy. Certainly, we are all complex human beings, a mixture of light and dark on any given day. But Graham’s brand of corrosive nostalgia — the fictional past was better, the future is bright only through Christ — demanded the denigration of those who achieved more civil rights during his lifetime. Graham’s America was one of ever-encroaching sin and incivility.
Though he racially integrated his services, Graham refused to participate in The March on Washington. His sermons, time and time again, targeted those who felt “lost” in the midst of cultural change. He used others’ loneliness to enhance his own stature and wealth, abandoning his family and rendering him unrecognizable to his own son.
One could imagine Graham taking different tactics, seeking to bridge racial divides among Christians, or plotting a third way for the inclusion of equal rights for women and LGBTQ people that still fit within Biblical teachings. Instead, Graham is the reason why when we think of the world “evangelical,” we think of a White man. His son has cemented this divisive legacy, no matter how much The New York Times considers Billy Graham (laughably) to be “the last nonpartisan evangelical.”
The conflation of Republicanism and evangelicals is a direct effect of Graham’s partisan alliances. The ongoing whitewashing is an insult to the many communities that Graham consistently maligned over his long career as un-American, sinful, and lost. Graham’s defined what it meant to be a white Southern evangelical. His narrow definition haunts us today.
