Not buying it.
You of course know by now that yesterday Christianity Today, the magazine founded by world-famous Christian evangelist Billy Graham, published a scathing editorial titled “Trump Should Be Removed From Office,” calling Trump “grossly immoral” and “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”
Today Franklin Graham counter-attacked, including this tweet:
I hadn’t shared who my father Billy Graham voted for in 2016, but because of @CTMagazine’s article, I felt it necessary to share now. My father knew @realDonaldTrump, believed in him & voted for him. He believed Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.
Trump of course quickly clutched at this, tweeting: “Thank you to Franklin Graham for stating that his father, the late great Billy Graham, voted for me in the 2016 Election.”
But just days before the 2016 election, Franklin was interviewed by the Charlotte Observer on Billy’s 98th birthday and asked about his father’s health:
“He's real quiet. Doesn’t say much... Can't see. His mind is clear. ... But he speaks in sentences of one word... It’s a party every Sunday when I go see him because he’s made it through another week... At 98, you count the days and weeks."
As for this year’s presidential race, Billy Graham “knows who’s running and that kind of stuff,” his son said, but there are no real conversations with him about it.
About three months after the election, in January 2017, the Washington Post interviewed Graham family members including Franklin, who in describing his dad’s health hardly portrayed an engaged voter:
At 98, Graham now lives in his mountaintop home near Asheville, N.C.; Franklin said his father can’t hear, can’t see and doesn’t talk very much.
We do know that in earlier years, Billy Graham had distanced himself from some of his son’s extreme politics, as the Post noted:
Though Billy Graham passed on his ministry to his son, he was not afraid to publicly disagree with him. In 2005, Larry King asked Billy what he thought about Franklin calling Islam “evil and wicked.” Billy responded, “Well, he has [his] views and I have mine. And they are different sometimes.”
It’s questionable Billy would have discussed it with his son even if he’d been physically able:
Franklin Graham said he doesn’t talk about politics with family members because he doesn’t want to divide the family. As with many evangelical families, Graham said he knows some family members may have voted differently from him in the presidential election…
It’s not as if the rest of Billy Graham’s family are lockstep Trump supporters. Judging by this granddaughter’s comments in the above 2017 Post interview, she would likely challenge her uncle’s claim about Billy’s vote for Trump:
But Jerushah Armfield, Billy Graham’s granddaughter and Franklin Graham’s niece, said the Graham family is not the single unit that many on the outside see. She said that while family members respect one another and most voted for Trump, they do not all fall on the same side of social issues or hold the same views about the role of faith in politics.
Armfield, a writer and a pastor’s wife in South Carolina, said her uncle’s suggestion that Trump’s win meant God answered the country’s prayer was bad theology. “To suggest the president-elect is an ambassador to further the kingdom in the world diminishes not only my Jesus but all he stood for and came to earth to fight against,” she said.
She said Trump “encouraged racism, sexism and intolerance, exactly what Jesus taught against.” She said that her grandfather “understood the love of Jesus that fought for the outliers while the president-elect ostracized them.”
“The evangelical leaders that endorsed Trump put power and influence over principles and character,” she said.
Exploitation of his father for personal gain would not be new for Franklin Graham. Four years earlier, experts were suggesting he was falsely putting his father’s name on some of his own more more right-wing writings to sell books:
In a blog post that made waves in the Christian press last week, Billy Graham warns churches to “prepare for persecution.” Message aside, determining whether or not the nearly 97-year-old evangelist actually issued this warning himself is another matter.
A new book bearing the byline of Billy Graham presents scholars of contemporary religion with a similar puzzle. Did Graham actually write Where I Am: Heaven, Eternity, and Our Life Beyond, a book that, despite its title, focuses mostly on hell?
...
Posing these questions about Where I Am strongly suggests that the book is, in fact, pseudepigraphic—falsely named.
Billy Graham is the sole author listed for this book. His son Franklin’s name appears on a three-page foreword, and, perhaps more tellingly, Franklin is listed as the copyright holder.
NPR mentions the controversy in its obituary for Billy Graham:
During the months when the book was allegedly being written, Billy Graham was in failing health and suffering from severe memory loss due to hydrocephalus and Parkinson's disease.
What better way for Franklin Graham to kick off his 2020 version of his huge 2016 Trump rally tour than by dishonoring his father’s legacy.