Franklin Graham Doesn't Know God

I saw this quote in an E. J. Dionne column the other day. Seems like a good place for it.

Kimberly Moffitt, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, called my attention to Charles Gaba's powerful tweet: "Not all Trump supporters are racist, but all of them decided that racism isn't a deal-breaker." I'd invite everyone at our Thanksgiving table to think hard about this.

If anyone has Franklin Graham's e-mail handy maybe shoot that off to him. 

To Franklin Graham, overt racism is anathema. But he thanks God for the same triumph that the white nationalists of the alt-right celebrate because Graham inherited a religion that accommodated itself to slavery in America and has morphed over and again for 150 years to fuel every backlash against progress toward racial justice in American history.

I realize it's not going to help. Maybe his God is paying attention, though.

God did not intervene on Trump’s behalf in this year’s election, but the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association did. Organizing prayer rallies in all 50 state capitols, Franklin Graham spent $10 million in 2016 to rally a backlash against President Obama in God’s name. It was a strategic investment. Eighty-one percent of evangelicals voted for Trump. Just weeks before Election Day, when Graham concluded his national tour here in North Carolina, he stood on the steps of our old state capitol and told thousands of faithful followers that they needed to know the true name for those of us who call ourselves progressives: atheists.

Sadly, our brother Franklin believes that a god who does not bless white America’s fear and nostalgia is no god at all. But right here on the very capital grounds where Graham uttered his heresy, we have witnessed the power of God to unite a diverse coalition of people committed to justice and mercy through Moral Mondays. That movement, which produced the nation’s largest-ever state-government-focused civil disobedience in 2013, spread to 32 other states through this year’s Moral Revival. And while Trumpism swept the South with Graham’s blessing, North Carolina’s Pat McCrory is on the verge of becoming the only Republican incumbent in the nation to lose the governor’s office.

They're going to have a lot to answer for.