Franklin Graham, hereditary leader of the Billy Graham empire, fundamentalist religious/political pundit, media personality, and arch supporter of Donald Trump, took a rather passive aggressive side-swipe at President elect Joe Biden’s dire and straightforward warning that the honest medical assesment is, as things stand at the moment in both the national and global battle against COVID 19, that we are most likely facing, even with the roll out of the vaccines, a very “dark winter.”
Christians might have thought that if Graham wanted to contribute something, wanted to make a donation rather than asking for one, he would have added a word of encouragement consistent with Christian thought and practice––might have urged people in light of the seriousness of the situation to wear masks, social distance, self-isolate as much as possible and pray for the speedy distribution of the vaccines and their efficacy. But the ever moralizing Graham seized what he saw as an opportunity to assert the superiority of his ilk and to challenge the moral integrity of Biden, an observant Christian, and of Democrats.
“We are indeed facing a dark winter,” whined Graham––”a dark winter of moral decline and deterioration in the American political process.” For him, of course, individual, social and political morality is essentially a matter of whatever supports and justifies the capitalistic system and his position of status and privilege in it, morality is opposing abortion for any reason by any means available, morality is mechanically saying: “I accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior;” and that makes everything okay regardless of how you live or how much or how little you actually practice love.[1] It is a morality that cultivates self-righteousness by giving material aid to the poor without ever addressing the causes of poverty or embracing its remedies. It assumes people live in filth and want because of some spiritual, intellectual, or racial inferiority; or, that they lack strength of will. It is a morality that justifies caging lonely and frightened children. It is the same rationalization that allows my missiles to strew the blood and guts of someone else’s grandchild up and down their street because after all my grandchild is more valuable than their grandchild. It is moral for me to suppress your vote and the vote of your friends, or to hold you more accountable, more criminal, before the law than I do myself, my family, or my friends.
Fundamentalist morality is perhaps most infamous for its obsession with sexual matters––an obsession whose hypocrisy and weirdness has been exposed as fundamentalist like Graham, Falwell, and Jeffress have rushed repeatedly to justify Trumps sexual depravity and pathological violence––including sexual violence against women. Finally this morality, regardless the dress it wears, is the morality of blind self-will.
Now, having said all this, I hasten to note that Graham is most likely correct in saying we are about to experience: “A dark period of history as God turns His back on our nation because of its sins and our politicians embracing, and even flaunting, sin. Sadly to say, even some churches are embracing what God defines as sin. We need to confess our sins and turn to Him in true repentance.” I think Graham’s statement is correct––it’s just that he doesn’t understand what sin is or how God “defines” sin. The Bible, for example, is far less concerned with rather ordinary individual and private sexual sins (like two lonely people engaging in premarital sex or two teenagers with raging hormones having sexual intercourse before they are ready) than it is with human exploitation; less interested in a lie like telling my wife I don’t know where that new book came from, as it is with fraudulent lying, defamation, or perjury. If you read the Bible from beginning to end what you will discover is that the sins with which it is most concerned are predatory lending, refusal to pay laborers what is due them, bribery, one standard of justice for the rich and another for the poor,[2] violence, mistreatment of the stranger (immigrants and foreigners), economic oppression and failure to provide for the most vulnerable people, which were in the ancient world most often children and widows.[3]
In a recent Facebook post, January 15th, Graham compared the ten Republicans who voted for Trump’s impeachment to Judas Iscariot, the disciple who betrayed Jesus after being paid thirty pieces of silver. This self-righteous Pharisee who never tires of wagging his finger at others, wrote: “Shame, shame on the ten Republicans who joined with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in impeaching President Trump yesterday. After all that he has done for our country, you would turn your back and betray him so quickly? And these ten,” Graham continued, “from his own party, joined in the feeding frenzy. It makes you wonder what the thirty pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.”[4]
Betrayal? Betrayal? The ten Republicans who chose to act with integrity even though it could cost them reelection are not the betrayers. Donald J. Trump is a chief among betrayers. He has demonstrated over and over again that he will turn on anyone instantly who does not please him. He is like the cruel and capricious head of Spector in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love, who tolerates in others no failure, no lapse, no deviation from his own thoughts and feelings––no excuse for failing to please him. But Trump’s most egregious betrayal was his attempted coup on January 6th, his betrayal of the American people and his oath, taken on the Bible, to protect the U.S. Constitution which, had it been successful, would have resulted in the tyranny of a dangerous, incompetent, and diabolical dictator.
Like Frank Graham I too have prayed for our country and for Trump.[5] Every morning I pray: “O Lord, keep this nation under you care.” And every afternoon: “May it please you Lord so to rule the hearts of your servants, the President of the United States and all others in authority that they may do justice, and love mercy, and walk in the ways of truth.”[6] I also pray that God may turn the heart of Franklin Graham and that he may be converted to the way of Christ. If because of the steeling of his own heart that cannot be, then I pray the prayer that follows––a prayer that God will deliver the church, the people of God’s beloved community, from the influence, reproach, and shame of “professed” Christians like Franklin Graham.[7]
A Prayer for Deliverance From Fake Christian Leaders
O Lord, arise help us;
And deliver us for Thy name’s sake.[8]
Deliver us from greedy, self-serving pastors, priests, bishops, and so called religious spokesmen,[9]
whose god is their own ego, who worship the one whose name is the “Father of Lies;”[10]
who steal the offerings to build houses on the beach and retire in ease. [11]
O Lord, arise help us;
And deliver us for Thy name’s sake.
Deliver us from those who practice the most abject niddering while pretending to confess Jesus as Lord;[12]
who love flattery and prize their friendship with the rich, the cruel, and oppressors,
but despise the poor and powerless they are vowed in baptism to champion.
O Lord, arise help us;
And deliver us for Thy name’s sake.
Deliver your church, O Lord,
from Dodo birds that think they are Owls,
noxious weeds that think they are Sequoia Redwoods,
sparrows who believe they are sitting on the Eagle’s perch––
establishing the borders of Christianity to their own liking
O Lord, arise help us;
And deliver us for Thy name’s sake.
Deliver your people, O Lord, from the Grahams, the Jeffresses, and the Falwells and their kind.
Deliver us from those who make weighty moral pronouncements against abortion
for any conceivable reason –– ,
who believe refusing commercial service to homosexuals a significant act of
religious freedom, and the spread of deadly disease an essential exercise of ecclesiastical liberty.
O Lord, arise help us;
And deliver us for Thy name’s sake.
Deliver us from those who call the darkness light,
who have found nothing diabolical in hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths,
no barbaric cruelty in the orphaning and caging of children or torture of the helpless stranger,
who feel no remorse for starving children and no sadness for bigotry and violence.[13]
O Lord, arise help us;
And deliver us for Thy name’s sake.
Deliver us from all these purveyors of tyranny and insurrection;
Save us, O Lord from the fair of speech but dark of heart.
O Lord, arise help us;
And deliver us for the sake of Jesus Christ;
Our light, life, and love. Amen.
[1] John 13:35 “By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
[2] Leviticus 19:15, “You must not pervert justice; you must not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the rich.”
Deuteronomy 16:19, “You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds.”
[3] Amos 2:6-8; “God’s Message: ‘Because of the three great sins of Israel—make that four—I’m not putting up with them any longer. They buy and sell upstanding people. People for them are only things—ways of making money. They’d sell a poor man for a pair of shoes. They’d sell their own grandmother! They grind the penniless into the dirt, shove the luckless into the ditch. Everyone and his brother sleeps with the ‘sacred whore’—a sacrilege against my Holy Name. Stuff they’ve extorted from the poor is piled up at the shrine of their god while they sit around drinking wine they’ve conned from their victims.” Amos 4:1 MSG, ” . . . Mean to the poor, cruel to the down-and-out! Indolent and pampered, you demand. . . ‘Bring us a tall, cool drink!’” Malachi 3:5 NKJV, “And I will come near you for judgment. . . Against perjurers, Against those who exploit wage earners and widows and orphans, And against those who turn away an alien—’Because they do not fear Me,’ Says the Lord of hosts.”
[4] Question for Frank: Do you think Mike Pence, Chief Justice Roberts, and FBI Director Wray also betrayed Trump and should be tried for treason and hanged? Do you think Fauci should be decapitated and is head stuck on a pole?
[5] 1 Timothy 2:1-2, “Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence.”
[6] From the Book of Common Prayer, pages 98 and 150.
[7] I probably shouldn’t point this out, but I can’t help myself: Has any fundamentalist/apocalyptic/conspiracy theorist ever noticed that the numerical address for Trump Tower is 666.
[8] Taken from the final Supplication of the Great Litany, Book of Common Prayer, 154.
[9] Matthew 23:15 NKJV “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.”
[10] John 8:44 NKJV “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it.”
[11] Mark 12:40-42 NKJV, “Who devour widows houses and for a pretense make long prayers.” Philippians 3:19 NKJV, “whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame—who set their mind on earthly things.” 2 Peter 2:14 NKJV, “They have a heart trained in covetous (greedy) practices, and are accursed children.”
[12] Niddering––Old English for the worst sort of cowardice, based on an ancient Scandinavian legal term.
[13] Proverbs 3:31 ESV, “Do not envy the violent or choose any of their ways.” Proverbs 10:11 ESV, “The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence “ Ezekiel 45:9 ESV, “Thus says the Lord God: ‘Enough, O princes of Israel! Put away violence and oppression, and execute justice and righteousness. Cease your evictions of my people,’ declares the Lord God.” Genesis 6:11 ESV, “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence”. Jeremiah 23:3 ESV, “Thus says the Lord: ‘Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.'” Psalm 140:1 ESV, “Deliver me, O Lord, from evil men; preserve me from violent men.”