Can the religious tradition of either of these influential ministers rescue the Christian Community from the quicksand into which we have fallen?
Billy Graham was the first to be born (1918) and the last to die (2018). He was the most visible and influential itinerate evangelist of his time. For fifty years he was the face of white Evangelicalism.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was younger and lived only 39 years, dying in 1968 at the hands of an assassin in Memphis. He led the most powerful and permanent social movement of our time, the Civil Rights Movement.
But is the legacy of either of them strong enough to counter the double-barrel attack that has left the Church reeling from its long-established role as a center of cultural and moral power?
Graham and his version of the gospel shaped the majority of Americans, including me. He preached and we practiced a religion focused on getting saved from our sins so we could secure a place in heaven when we die. Of his 34 published books, Till Armageddon and Approaching Hoofbeats fueled the popular fascination with the end of the world. There is a major boulevard on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, named for him. It takes the traveler to the Graham library, visitor center, and grave.
King sought to pull Christians into the real world, one that needed changing in accordance with biblical standards of justice and fairness. On the night before his death, his thoughts were not so much on his journey to some long-awaited heaven but on the possibilities that those he led would reach their destination. “I may not get there with you,” he said, “but I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”
Every city in America, I suppose, has a street named for Martin Luther King, Jr. And the nation as a whole celebrates his life and influence with a federal holiday.
But there is bad news to report about their respective legacies.
Graham’s white evangelicals abandoned his carefully crafted political neutrality in their headlong rush to follow Donald J. Trump. No other single episode in the last one hundred years of Christianity has been so damaging as this capitulation to the gospel of Trump. That, in turn, has pushed many professing Christians into the sad confession, “If that is what it means to be a Christian, count me out.”
King’s coalition of black Christians and white mainline Protestants is likewise suffering from a case of disintegrating influence. Millions of white Christians (and especially their children and grandchildren) once in this cohort have given up on the church altogether, even if they retain a self-designation as Christian. And even though their political family controls the Senate, the House, and the Presidency, they appear unable to pass new legislation to protect things most precious to King.
Church affiliation and Christian allegiance are in a freefall. The COVID pandemic has further undermined the vitality of many organizations and businesses, including the Church. Congregations are closing, ministers are resigning, people are quitting. Only the right wing of our religion seems to have any vitality, and it has been co-opted by the Christian Nationalists.
Leaving this question: is there any version of Christian faith and practice that has the courage, organization, and leadership to counter both the Christian Nationalism on the right and the Christian apostasy on the left. The former is determined to seize the levers of power in order to reframe these United States into their vision of a Christian Nation; the latter has given up altogether on religion and cast its lot with politics.
Neither the Christianity of Graham nor that of King seem to be likely candidates for leading the revival that we need. Alas, most of their descendants have converted either to a false gospel (Trumpism) or to a substitute savior (politics). Unless, of course, some coalition of Graham and King emerges from the mess around us; some collaboration of those in the tradition of personal salvation with those eager for social justice can coalesce into a wholistic version of Christian faith and practice strong enough, gracious enough, and persistent enough to once again make following Jesus a thing of beauty.
For this I pray, and for the soul of the church and the wellbeing of the nation.
(January 2022)
