Billy Graham Is Still Dead

 

February 2018

I was shocked to hear news of Billy Graham’s death today.  He’s been dead to me for years.  In fact, he never made it into my adulthood.

I grew up in two neighborhoods that could not have been more different from each other—the first was predominantly Black and the second predominantly Jewish.  The only thing they had in common is that neither group would have been welcome in the mainstream evangelical churches I was taken to as a child. 

And this was confusing because nearly every week my Sunday School class sang:

Jesus loves the little children,

All the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black and white,

They are precious in His sight.

I took that song to heart.  It was—still is--the essence of my idea of Christianity and the touchstone against which I tested every single word I heard in church.  Pure love, and nothing else.

Why was it so elusive in the churches I knew best?  What was the tension I sensed between the call to love and the hard, often angry expressions I encountered in church?  Where were the red, yellow, and black children in my Sunday School class?

Those churches gave me nightmares.

Where was the peace that passed understanding? 

I’d get a glimpse of it sometimes when I sneaked off to the Methodist church on the corner of the street I lived on.  I loved that church because it had stained glass and a choir with actual robes that sang beautiful music.  That’s where I heard “How Great Thou Art” for the first time.  And there was such a solemn reverence in the sanctuary.  No one jumped up and danced around waving hankies in the air; no one shouted out random things or acted like they were about to have a fit.  No one threatened anyone with hell and damnation. 

There was only serenity.

So when I first saw Billy Graham preaching on TV, I knew very well what I was seeing.  It was the angry gospel I encountered so often in church.  It was judgment and dire predictions about a future that threatened to be very different from the past.  An evil future where people who had known their places in the past now ran rampant over tradition.  It was a clenched jaw and a scolding finger pointed at everyone who dared to envision a different, more inclusive society.  We were in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement then with the Women’s Movement on the horizon while Graham gave bitter voice to the anxieties of white patriarchal America.

I hate to hear him called “America’s pastor.”

Because there was another preacher who spoke a truer gospel to us--all of us.  In Martin Luther King, I heard the rhetoric of love for red and yellow, black and white.  I heard the poetry of scripture so rich it moved my very young soul.  And I watched him move that gospel out into the streets:  Beautiful words became beautiful actions.  His vision captured what a truly Christian society would look like, how we would treat each other as the daughters and sons of a loving god.

The spiritual fullness of Dr. King’s sermons made Graham ring hollow even to a child’s ears.  And when I consider Graham’s legacy of greedy, grasping, ghoulish televangelists selling salve for white working-class souls and giving cover to bigotry in the seats of power, I can’t grieve for him.

Whenever I picture what lies under the Grim Reaper’s hood, it is always Billy Graham’s face I see.  He’s been dead to me for decades.