Franklin Graham criticizes Christianity Today for its far-left-wing editorial to remove Donald Trump saying his father Billy voted for the president and praised him before his death
By Julio Severo
Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelist
Billy Graham who founded Christianity Today, said his father would be disappointed
in the anti-Trump editorial the magazine published on December 2019.
Christianity Today’s Editor-in-Chief
Mark Galli wrote an op-ed that said President Trump should be
removed from office, mentioning Billy Graham’s name twice, as if the famous
evangelist could support a far-leftist stance of the magazine against Trump.
“They’re a very liberal left-wing magazine
now and my father did start it back in the ‘50s,” the younger Graham said on
Fox News, explaining his grandfather was also an early editor of the
publication. “But over the last 20, 30 years he hasn’t been a part of it and it’s
drifted to the left. And this magazine does not speak for these evangelical
Christians.”
As a confirmation that Christianity Today
does not speak for evangelicals, 200 conservative evangelicals, including Graham
himself, signed a letter to the magazine’s president, Timothy Dalrymple, to
reverse its left-wing stance against Trump and against pro-Trump evangelicals.
Among the signatories of the letter are
George Wood, chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship, Rev. Tim Hill
of the Church of God, former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential hopeful
Mike Huckabee; and former Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Dalrymple refused to accept criticism that
Christianity Today has become far-left. Instead, he wrote that his magazine is
in fact “theologically conservative” and “does not endorse candidates.”
“Out of love for Jesus and his church, not
for political partisanship or intellectual elitism, this is why we feel
compelled to say that the alliance of American evangelicalism with this
presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness,” Dalrymple wrote.
Roughly 8 in 10 white evangelical
Protestants say they approve of the way Trump is handling his job, according to
a December poll from The AP-NORC Center. This is not a surprise because the
main supporters for Trump in 2016 were white evangelicals, who gave him the victorious
presidency.
The Pew Research Center reports that 77
percent of white evangelical Protestants approve of Trump’s presidency. Yet
some actions of his administration have caused confusion among evangelicals.
Even though he has been a pro-life champion — except
in cases of babies conceived in rape —, Trump has not only appointed
pro-homosexuality judges, but, just as Obama did, his
administration has also meddled in foreign affairs and rebuked Christian
nations that ban homosexuality.
However, Trump’s progressive stance on
homosexuality is hardly a problem for Christianity Today, which has the same
progressive stance.
Even
though Christianity Today voiced
all kind of left-wing criticism against Trump, there is one point where the
left-wing magazine did not voice a single criticism against Trump:
Homosexuality. It was the only issue where Christianity Today exempted Trump.
I was not so lucky. In 2009, Christianity
Today, in its Brazilian edition called “Cristianismo Hoje,” published a long
interview with me, and they saw a lot of problems in my Christian stance
against the gay ideology.
My interview with the Brazilian version of
Christianity Today was published in its printed magazine and on its website.
You can, if you read Portuguese, see it here
in Cristianismo Hoje. Because Christianity Today edited important points of
my interview, you
can also read it, in Portuguese, in full here in my Brazilian blog.
In one of the points of the interview, the
Brazilian Christianity Today said,
Severo is one of those quixotic
evangelicals, willing to fight mills that maybe only he can see. In his words,
even the Brazilian government would be interested in asking for his deportation
because of the criticism of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “The president makes an
uncompromising defense of homosexuality and abortion. How much is left for us
to consider Lula and his administration as possessed? It is destroying morality
and honesty of society,” he says. The histrionic tone gives Julio Severo’s
profile an incendiary outline that he makes a point of feeding, not just when
he speaks of homosexuality. He defends, for example, the right of evangelical
parents to homeschool their children (a practice prohibited by Brazilian law)
as a way of keeping them safe from the school’s allegedly harmful influences.
Lula was the Brazilian counterpart of
Obama and a friend of Obama. Even though Christianity Today portrayed me as a
“quixotic” evangelical — a reference to Don Quixote, who saw imaginary threats
—, the homosexualist threat is far away from being imaginary.
Fortunately, U.S. conservative
evangelicals have shown more respect for my work. WND has published several interviews
with me for over one decade and The Religion and Society Report, of the late
theologian Harold Brown, published a long essay by me in 2006 titled “Behind The Homosexual Tsunami in Brazil,”
detailing the non-imaginary threats of the Lula administration in Brazil.
Like the U.S. Christianity Today, the
Brazilian Christianity Today sees only left-wing Protestants and
non-Protestants as realistic, down-to-earth, practical and serious.
Originally, Billy Graham founded
Christianity Today in the 1950s to counter left-wing Protestant magazines. But
the progressive virus is so powerful that Christianity Today was infected. This
infection has spread, through the U.S. Christianity Today, to other nations,
including Brazil, which has its Christianity Today as spiritually rotten as the
original.
I am glad that at last Christianity Today
has been exposed by what it is now: Far left. And it was exposed by Franklin
Graham, a man who has all authority to say what he said about the far-left
magazine. I am glad also that Christianity Today, which aligns itself with
left-wing politicians, has attacked Trump. This shows that Trump is in the
right way.
Yet, I am sad that the same far-left
Christianity Today that saw a lot of problems in my Christian stance against
the homosexual ideology saw no problem with Trump’s stance on homosexuality.
Different from Christianity Today that
criticized everything about Trump, except his stance on homosexuality, I praise
his pro-life record, but
I decry the insistence of his administration to keep pressing Christian nations
in Africa to embrace sodomy.
Trump has been cowardly attacked by
Christianity Today. As an evangelical who has also been cowardly treated by
Christianity Today, I would like to offer my humble evangelical advice for
Trump to change course on the gay ideology.
I would never offer advices to Obama and
Lula, because in their socialism they would reject them. But, if given an
opportunity, I would offer them to Trump, because he is not closed to
evangelicals.
Or Trump could listen to Franklin Graham.
In a cover
story of Decision, the official magazine published by the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association, Franklin praised Russian President Vladimir Putin for
passing a law protecting children and teens against homosexual propaganda. He
also decried the efforts of Obama to attack Russian for its protective law.
If I could offer an advice to Trump, it
would be exactly what Franklin said in defense of the Russian law protecting
children and teens.
As to Christianity Today, I have no
advice, but just a question: is it too late for it to get rid of the
progressive virus?
Portuguese version of this article: Franklin
Graham critica revista Christianity Today (Cristianismo Hoje) por seu editorial
de extrema esquerda para remover Donald Trump, dizendo que seu pai Billy votou
no presidente e o elogiou antes de sua morte
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