That Cow Might Not Be Golden But It Does Talk, It's Always More Complex Than The Common Wisdom Has It

The truly great Charles Pierce wrote a somewhat nicer obit for Billy Graham than mine. My excuse might be because before I wrote what I did, on the advice of my irreligious brother, I did some web searching about the Billy Graham Library which I'd always ignored.  What I saw didn't do anything to sweeten my mood.  About which more in a minute.

Charles Pierce goes through a bit of the dodgy information about Graham, his accepting the sponsorship of the hardly Christian livin' William Randolph Hurst, his closeness to the former most criminal President in our history,  Richard Nixon, the Jew-baiting he engaged in with Nixon caught on Oval Office tapes, etc.   I agree with Pierce that the political effects of Billy Graham's efforts to increase the power of his brand of evangelicalism has born some pretty evil fruit over the past 40 years, though he doesn't name them, the Graham style of revivalist floor show has gone total TV and has given rise to a bunch of the most putrid hallelujah hucksters whose evil is blatant.   His son, the racist, Muslim hating, gay-baiting Franklin Graham, the inheritor of the Billy Graham brand is one of them. 

Which leads me to believe that Billy Graham wasn't especially effective in getting people who he could get to praise the Lord to do the far more challenging thing of following the Lord.  His own son and heir to his kingdom is clearly farther from the Gospel of Jesus than he was. 

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I disagree with one of the things in the piece, a quote from the NYT that Pierce agrees with:

"A central achievement was his encouraging evangelical Protestants to regain the social influence they had once wielded, reversing a retreat from public life that had begun when their efforts to challenge evolution theory were defeated in the Scopes trial in 1925."

That's not how it went, one of the effects of the Scopes trial was the suppression of content about evolution in high school biology classes for about the next thirty-five years.  As Richard Lewontin put it, what happened was more complex than that conventional wisdom has it.  Talking about the revival of creationist pressure, he pointed out:

This sense of an embattled culture was carried from the southwest to California by the migrations of the Okies and Arkies dispossessed from their ruined farms in the 1930s. There was no serious public threat to their religious and family values until well after the Second World War. Evolution, for example, was not part of the regular biology curriculum when I was a student in 1946 in the New York City high schools, nor was it discussed in school textbooks. In consequence there was no organized creationist movement. Then, in the late 1950s, a national project was begun to bring school science curricula up to date. A group of biologists from elite universities together with science teachers from urban schools produced a new uniform set of biology textbooks, whose publication and dissemination were underwritten by the National Science Foundation. An extensive and successful public relations campaign was undertaken to have these books adopted, and suddenly Darwinian evolution was being taught to children everywhere. The elite culture was now extending its domination by attacking the control that families had maintained over the ideological formation of their children.

Considering that the accounts of revolution in textbooks such as commonly used before the Scopes Trial, including the Civic Biology, which Scopes was accused of teaching from*, incorporated vicious scientific racism and eugenics, I'm not sure that it being suppressed until, in horror at the Nazi application of natural selection, that aspect of entirely conventional evolutionary thought was suppressed wasn't a good thing.   I think what Lewontin points out probably has at least as much to do with the right-wing organization of Southern and other evangelical voters, when you mix in things like the ban on praying and Bible reading, and the enforced secularization of formerly non-secularlized local government activities has more to do with it than the Scopes trial did. 

It is an interesting manifestation of history that both the political militancy of fundamentalist creationism and the resurgence of Darwinian fundamentalism in biology and associated academic departments happened at just about the same time.  I think you could probably chart that pretty accurately from the mid-1970s, and I don't think they're oppositional except in that one thing.

I've often found it incredibly ironic that many of the politicians who were the strongest racists, the strongest proponents of putting fundamentalist religion in biology classes, while they opposed what they called "Darwinism" were some of the most radical of Darwinists when it came to social policy, adopting some of the harshest of passive eugenic proposals (and at times some active ones) that were an explicit part of Darwinism from the start.   You only have a problem with that if you refuse to accept that such people have no integrity, no problem with saying contradictory things and, essentially the same ethical standards as an atheist moral nihilist.  That's why such "evangelical" Christians can vote for and support Donald Trump.   And such hypocrites can be found in the conservative members of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the putrid Cardinal Raymond Burke, the enemy of Pope Francis is something of a leader of such people,  the popular media priest, Robert Barron, another.   

All of that common received wisdom, as seen in the NYT, it's ahistorical and uselessly simplistic.  And it will generally be constructed to serve the ideological narratives of an elite who aren't really interested in the truth, regional and class issues will dominate them.   Especially when it's religion, it's never as simple and easy to categorize as will fit into a neat little narrative.

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As I mentioned, I looked into the Billy Graham Library, something I'd never looked into before and can only say that it looks like it has entirely more to do with a cult of Billy Graham than it does about the Gospel or even Jesus.  As my brother pointed out, from the talking cow at the front entrance to the end of it, it's pretty much a commercial mall devoted to Graham memorabilia and a cult of his personality.  I wondered if they had a currency exchange for tourists, which would complete the a-Christian vibe I got from looking over their promotional material online.   Since I devoted a good part of the last two months to criticizing the Museum of the Bible I can't just ignore an even more blatant monstrosity masquerading as a center of the Gospel of Jesus.

Ask yourself if you can imagine any of the named followers of Jesus, in his name, erecting an edifice of the kind that the Billy Graham industry is.  When the closest of the Apostles of Jesus gave their blessing to Paul's arduous and dangerous missionary work their paramount instruction to him was "remember the poor" which he did.  I can't imagine anyone who heard Jesus teaching would do anything like that.  When Jesus gave his instruction to how they were supposed to do their missionary work, he told them not to carry money, not to wear shoes, to have only one set of clothes, to live on the charity of those they preached to, to not move in with someone who offered a nicer place to crash, to eat what they were given and to heal the sick.  I don't imagine Billy and Franklin go on a "crusade" without a change of suits or depending on maybe getting someone to invite them home.

There are plenty of Christians, many of them evangelicals who never would have anything to do with something like the Graham family industry.   For the record,  I think the Vatican complex is a similar thing.  If the Catholic church turned the entire thing into a world cultural center and moved the central governing apparatus of the Church into modest offices in some monastic setting, it would probably be the greatest advance in the spiritual life of the church in modern history.  I doubt it will happen, it's hard to get free of the trap of ownership and property that Jesus advocated.  If Pope Francis tried to do it,  Raymond Burke would probably go ballistic.  It was THE THING which started the Protestant Reformation, that some of the traditionally most anti-Catholic of Protestants (Graham opposed Kennedy because he was Catholic) created for themselves something of the same thing is worth mentioning. 

The word "evangelical" is used as cultural shorthand by a lot of people who don't really know just how different the beliefs that come from it can be.   There are liberal evangelicals who would have nothing much in common with the "evangelical" movement that most people mean when they use the term.  There are a lot of evangelicals who voted for Hillary Clinton.  There are evangelical Christians who believe in evolution, some who even believe in natural selection, there are evangelical Christians who aren't racists, many of them are members of racial and ethnic groups that the media "evangelicals" hate.  There are LGBT evangelicals who favor marriage equality.   There are liberal evangelicals who do try to do what Jesus said to do in every way.  But those aren't the ones that the NYT generally talk about because they don't gratify the preferred categories of the people who own it and work for it and their general run of readers.  I wonder what the evangelical readers of the NYT think about that. 

*  As I've written before, Scopes never did do the teaching he was convicted of in the Chamber of Commerce publicity stunt he greed to participate in.  The whole thing was a sham instigated by the ACLU in a stunt that didn't turn out the way they'd planned.   Though it might have gone better if they hadn't had the bad luck of having Clarence Darrow get involved and taking over the trial.  For fans of irony and students of the cinematic falsification of history, that's one of the richest examples.