"DIVERGING ROADS - BILLY GRAHAM AND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR."

“DIVERGING ROADS - BILLY GRAHAM AND MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR."

            There is no small irony that Billy Graham died in the 50^th 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 20^th 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.