“DIVERGING ROADS - BILLY GRAHAM AND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR."
There is no
small irony that Billy Graham died in the 50th anniversary year of
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination.
They both came into the public eye in the 1950’s. King was reluctantly dragged out of the
comfort and relative quietness of a prestigious church pulpit into the life of
pubic activism and eloquence that, in hindsight, he seemed destined for. Graham burst onto the public scene in a
pattern reminiscent to modern times – William Randolph Hearst loved Graham’s
anti-communism and saw him as a vehicle for winning over the masses. Hearst’s media power sent Graham’s star
soaring in the popular imagination.
They were
both religious giants in America in the 20th century. Both had a strong sense that America had a
great religious destiny. In his most
famous speech, King lifted up the unfulfilled promise of America in his “I Have
A Dream Speech,” calling out white America to live up to our tenets of equality
and freedom for all. Graham emphasized over and over again that America was
God’s chosen nation. He also emphasized
that the goal of the religious life and of religious institutions was to
proclaim the necessity of individuals to claim Jesus Christ as Lord and
Savior.
Here, to
use Robert Frost’s famous metaphor, their two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and they took differing routes. King
continued to call America out, calling out our better selves, calling us to
re-imagine ourselves as a nation that seeks to live out the true meaning of the
idea that all people are created equal.
His strong commitment to non-violence got him in trouble with everybody,
and the deep resistance that he encountered among the power structures began to
shift him to add the ideas of justice and equity to the ideals of equality and
freedom. When he spoke out against the
Vietnam War in 1967, the powers on all
sides were stunned. And, when he began
to organize the Poor Peoples Campaign to talk about economic injustice, the powers
decided that it was enough, that he was too dangerous. It is no surprise that of the many
opportunities to assassinate him, the occasion came when he was in Memphis, not
to assist in voting rights but in raising the wages and working conditions of people
who were garbage collectors. Though we
have sanitized him and have made him a saint on MLK holiday, the reality of
King’s life at its end was reflected in J. Edgar Hoover’s assessment of him: one of the most dangerous men in America.
Graham, meanwhile,
stuck with the idea that all God cares about is what happens to individuals
when they die. His strong emphasis on
claiming Jesus Christ as Savior had little to do with our lives here on earth. It rather had to do with what our eternal
status would be. In sticking with this
emphasis, Graham became an easy captive of the powers and of the long-held
American belief that religion is an individual, not a communal, matter. This approach to religion is what enabled
white people to call ourselves Christians and hold people as slaves. It is what enables us to allow our children
to be shot down in schools because what we truly worship as a community is not
the God of Jesus Christ but the gun-god Molech who demands child
sacrifice. Though Graham did not lay
the foundation of this individualistic religion – it has a deep root in
American history – he did add some strong floors to it. He thus became an easy tool for Presidents to
trot out, especially Richard Nixon. As
far as I am aware, in contrast to the
One he claimed as Lord and Savior, Graham never opposed the unjust and
senseless war in Vietnam. Graham’s
refusal to engage communal issues of justice and equity in his approach to
Jesus and even American history made him a beloved icon in American religious
history. It also helped to build the
current religious right which is such a mean and powerful machine in our time.
As I
listened to the accolades pour in for Graham last week, I was struck by a clip
of an TV interview in which Graham was asked who he’d like to preach at his
funeral. He replied that he’d like to do
it, that he’d like to have a tape of one of his sermons played for his
eulogy. I thought that this stood in
stark contrast to MLK’s words from one of his best sermons “Drum Major Instinct,”
given 2 months to the day before he was assassinated. In it, he indicated that he asked whoever
would preach over his death not to take too long, but he would ask that they
say that he did try to be right on the war question, that he did try to feed
the hungry, that he did try to love and serve humanity.
I began
with irony, and I’ll end with it here – I don’t know who will preach for
Graham’s funeral, but for Dr. King’s funeral in Atlanta, after Ralph Abernathy
gave a powerful sermon, Coretta Scott
King chose to have “The Drum Major Instinct” played as the final eulogy for the
life of a great man.
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