The Soul-Crushing Legacy of Billy Graham
“I would torment myself for another 20 years trying to ‘reform,’ never quite able to shake the voice of Billy Graham promising me eternal damnation”
By Bob Moser
Billy Graham saved my soul. In 1973, I was ten years old, growing up in a working-class clan in North Carolina, and I had a problem: I liked boys. Also, men. And even though my family’s Methodist church served up the mildest form of Protestantism — no dire warnings about fornicators and sodomites and feminists from our pulpit — it was impossible not to know, from a million cultural cues and a fair number of spankings I’d received for “acting sissy,” that this was not good. So when I heard that the world’s most beloved televangelist was coming to Raleigh that September for one of his extravagant “crusades,” I begged my parents to take me. It didn’t take much. They knew what they were dealing with. Maybe Billy Graham could straighten out their boy.
Though Trump’s hardly a model of Christianity, the vast majority of evangelicals say they’ll vote for him — here’s how he pulled that off
Graham was then at the apex of his powers, both religious and political. Since the late 1940s, when two of the country’s most powerful publishers — William…
