TIO Public Square
‘On The Border’ — Franklin Graham’s Religious-Political Scramble
by Robert P. Sellers
My son-in-law enjoys Tex-Mex food, and there is plenty of it in Texas, where he lives. One of his favorites is a Southwest Scramble – a spicy mixture of sausage, onions, green and red peppers, eggs, milk, Colby Monterey jack cheese, tortilla chips and salsa. This menu item is usually what he orders when we go to one of our favorite breakfast spots.
Photo: Unsplash
But “On the Border” does not always refer to tasty Tex-Mex food, as anyone who lives in the American Southwest knows well. For months, national attention has been drawn to the challenges which thousands of immigrants face at the U.S. southern border, now accentuated by Governor Greg Abbott’s signing into law a bill making illegal immigration a Texas state law – dedicating more than $1.5 billion to his war on the border – and launching a political showdown with the Biden administration. It is precisely in the midst of this volatile situation, only a few months before the election of the next president, that Franklin Graham has planned an evangelistic campaign, a God Loves You Frontera (‘Border’) Tour, to Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo, Eagle Pass, Del Rio, Presidio and El Paso, Texas; Tucson and Yuma, Arizona; and Chula Vista, California.
Graham, son of the late international Christian evangelist Billy Graham, is the CEO of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse. Both organizations are massively influential among Christians, especially evangelicals, and not surprisingly they are also very wealthy religious enterprises. The Evangelistic Association reported a recent annual income of $168 million, while Samaritan’s Purse has net assets of over $1.2 billion.
Franklin Graham is also an unabashed, faithful supporter and promoter of Donald Trump. In many ways, he has been one of the most vociferous cheerleaders for the former president, one whom he said has “defended the Christian faith, although he was not the best example of it.” Perhaps that is the reason he has finally admitted that Trump lost the 2020 election, and has pledged he will stay out of politics until after the GOP primary is finished.
But the God Loves You Frontera Tour is a subtle move to support his friend, President Trump. Actually, it’s quite devious. It is political persuasion masquerading as religious revival.
Any good GOP aficionado knows that Republicans are screaming about the problems “on the border” and blaming President Biden for every manner of shortcoming, from having an “open border policy” to allowing our national security and public safety to be at risk. Texas Governor Greg Abbott is committing hundreds of millions of dollars to stop the flow of immigrants across the border and is threatening to lead Texas to secede from the Union. Recently, Donald Trump single-handedly stopped the passage of a bi-partisan immigration bill in the House – a bill whose development had been in process for months – by convincing his Republican congressional followers to vote against it so that blaming Democrats and Biden for problems on the border can be a major part of his presidential campaign.
During his God Loves You Tour, Graham will visit ten border towns, to which he insists his only wish is to bring a message of personal salvation that he believes is found in their becoming Christians. The Evangelistic Association’s marketing plan seeks to engage evangelicals who support Graham to join the effort on the border through their prayers (and, by implication, financial gifts): “As we prepare for this 10-city tour from Texas to California, will you pray for God to open hearts on both sides of the border – and transform entire communities with the Gospel?” This call for the prayers from Christians is the first way that Graham’s God Loves You Tour can be termed a “religious-political scramble.” Graham wants Christians to pray for the conversion of persons on both sides of the border – and, he wants them to believe the border is in a horrible mess because of the Democrats and Joe Biden.
A second incongruent element of the evangelist’s effort is the contradictory flavors of what Graham has previously said about immigration and what he is claiming now about God’s love (and his concern) for the people on both sides of the border. Startlingly, attempting to justify Trump’s presidential comments about immigrants, he publicly asserted that immigration is not an issue in the Bible! One would think that any Christian, especially an experienced preacher, would know that how the outsider in our midst is treated is indeed a Bible issue. Joel Baden, professor of Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School, points out the absurdity of this assertion by Graham, stating that “[a]cross the books of both testaments, in narrative, law, prophecy, poetry and parable, the Bible consistently spells out that it is the responsibility of the citizen to ensure that the immigrant, the stranger, the refugee, is respected, welcomed and cared for.”
Photo: Bible Hub
For example, in the Hebrew Scriptures (Leviticus 19:34) one reads the command: “Don't mistreat any foreigners who live in your land. Instead, treat them as well as you treat citizens and love them as much as you love yourself. Remember, you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.” According to Mark Wingfield, there are 92 times the Hebrew word translated “immigrant” in English is used in the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and “in every case, the admonition is for acceptance and welcome and kindness.”
Quickly noting the incompatible ingredients of Graham’s planned tour, the social justice organization, Faithful America, has written and circulated a petition objecting to the Frontera Tour. While the 71-year-old Graham has said, “We are taking the God Loves You Tour to the southern border this year because it is one of the neediest areas of our country at this time, and people need to hear a message of hope from God’s Word,” the petition claims: “The upcoming ‘frontera’ iteration of Graham’s tour feels especially distasteful and hypocritical given that . . . Graham once falsely claimed that immigration is ‘not a Bible issue.’” Almost 21,000 have signed this petition imploring Graham not to go to the border.
Immigration and border security are a major part of Trump’s campaign against President Biden. Thus, although Graham defends his string of rallies with “evangelism-speak,” his ulterior motive of calling attention to the problems on the border and attributing them to Biden seems clear.
This religious-political scrambling of motivations behind the tour – one overt and perhaps the more important one covert – underscores the last characteristic of this odd mixture, which is the inappropriate marriage of religion and politics in a multi-city event devised to gain maximum news coverage. For all who care about the intersection of freedom of religious expression and the role of government, this is an attack on the separation of church and state, which is protected in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
The problem here is the pretense of conducting religious meetings that really have clear political overtones. In 1954, an amendment to the tax code was introduced by then Senator and Democratic Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson. This legislation prohibited organizations from involvement in partisan politics at the risk of losing their tax-exempt status. For decades this “Johnson Amendment” has been followed, but more recently it has been challenged by those who want to allow religious organizations to promote political candidates. Strictly speaking, by utilizing his evangelistic tour to call attention to political issues on the U.S. southern border, Graham is putting at risk the tax-free status of both the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse.
At one of Graham’s previous God Loves You tours, held in Spokane, Washington, in 2018, he told a reporter multiple times that salvation was his main message, that he only spoke of politics “for five minutes, maybe four.” Yet, after attending the rally, she wrote that while Graham “casts the events as ‘prayer and evangelism,’ . . . the tour is, in fact, much more akin to a political rally than a religious revival, and Graham benefits from blending the two in order to turn out like-minded crowds of hardline, [Christian] conservatives.”
To those familiar with the Christian neo-conservative terminology, the word “decision” has two meanings: it is the familiar Christian evangelism message of choosing to trust in Jesus, but also a political suggestion to vote a certain way in a coming election. As the reporter notes, “Graham is careful to stress that he tells people only to ‘vote Biblically,’ but this is a code his followers understand.”
There is a humanitarian crisis on the southern border. Thousands of poor and desperate people are crossing over the border into the United States, hoping to escape persecution or physical harm in their own countries, only to encounter barbed wire barriers, border guards, holding cells, or thoughtless shuttling to unprepared northern cities as political fodder in a presidential battle. Many of these people have walked for hundreds of miles. They may have paid enormous fees to criminal “coyotes” who have duped them, emptying their savings trying to buy freedom and opportunity. Some of them have lost loved ones on their difficult and dangerous journey.
What is needed most on the border is humanitarian aid along with policies that will make it easier for refugees to seek asylum and immigrants to start the process of seeking citizenship. Samaritan’s Purse reports that it is working along the southern border to bring relief to the people crossing the border. Working in “Del Rio, Laredo, McAllen, and other communities to provide water, food, and other emergency supplies, including hygiene kits and diapers” is commendable. It is absolutely appropriate for volunteers working with Samaritan’s Purse to identify themselves as Christians, as “people who care," as long as they don't imply that Christians are the only people who care.
But for there to be a 10-city God Loves You Tour at this precise moment – highlighting the political ramifications on the southern border under the guise of addressing the spiritual needs of persons on both sides of the border – is a tasteless and contrived scheme. It suggests that the answer to the existential human problems of exhaustion, hopelessness, illness, sorrow, poverty, threats of violence and overwhelming discouragement can be found in conversion to one particular religious path.
A Southwest Scramble” is a delightful breakfast entrée. The opposing ingredients – like milk and salsa, or onions and cheese – make an interesting and tasty meal. But Franklin Graham’s religious-political scramble” on the border is anything but interesting or tasty. The incongruent ingredients of this tour give religious freedom severe indigestion! His couching of this only slightly disguised tour as evangelism while seeking the support of his millions of Twitter and Facebook followers is problematic. His odd claim to be concerned about the eternal welfare of those on both sides of the border when he has infamously said that immigration is not a Bible issue is hypocritical. Most troublesome, his mixing of religion and politics – and thereby his attack on the separation of church and state and his disregard of the Johnson Amendment – is a strategy that Trump and thousands of Christian Nationalists no doubt applaud.
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