[Franklin Graham, the son of our home state’s most famous preacher, Billy Graham, celebrated Trump’s election with this prayer of thanksgiving: “Political pundits are stunned. Many thought the Trump/Pence ticket didn’t have a chance. None of them understand the God-factor… While the media scratches their heads and tries to understand how this happened, I believe that God’s hand intervened.”]
By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber
II
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LYNCHBURG, VA – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the
convocation
at the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University January 18,
2016 in
Lynchburg, Virginia. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
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Two weeks after electing Donald Trump to the
highest office in the land, America pauses this week for a day of Thanksgiving.
No doubt, many dinner tables will be as divided as the election results—as
contentious as our anxious streets. But if we listen closely to the prayers of
those who are jubilant in this season, we may discern the false religion that
blessed Donald Trump’s reactionary campaign. Such discernment is necessary, as
we have learned through our cross-racial Moral Mondays movement, before we can
experience the moral revival that offers the only way forward together for
American democracy.
Franklin Graham, the son of our home state’s
most famous preacher, Billy Graham, celebrated Trump’s election with this
prayer of thanksgiving: “Political pundits are stunned. Many thought the
Trump/Pence ticket didn’t have a chance. None of them understand the
God-factor… While the media scratches their heads and tries to understand how
this happened, I believe that God’s hand intervened.”
While many progressives scoff at neo-Nazi and
Klan celebrations of Trump’s victory, they often fail to comprehend the deep
wound race has inflicted on white religion in America. 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
which 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.
We cannot make sense of Graham’s proclamation
of triumph without recognizing its roots in the Lost Cause Southern apologist
religion of the 19th century. Following the Civil War, black and white
ministers like ourselves worked together throughout the South to proclaim “good
news to the poor” through coalitions that supported public education, economic
empowerment, and equal protection under the law. These men (and a few women)
were evangelical preachers contributing to the work of America’s
Reconstruction. But they were viciously attacked as “political religionists” by
a plantation caste that perverted theology to frame their backlash against
“Negro rule.” Proposed changes to the
Southern way of life were branded “immoral,” and reactionary politicians
euphemistically used the term “Redemption” to rally a resistance.
Even in the violent campaign of 1876, when
black votes were suppressed through vicious Klan attacks, the Redemptionists
never officially endorsed violence. They always called for peace and a
restoration of order. But their false religion worked hand in glove with lynch
mobs to inaugurate the reign of Jim Crow.
Heirs of this movement wrote the theology
textbooks and published the Schofield reference Bibles that taught America’s
Bible-believing Christians to separate their faith from politics, in an attempt
to take the edge of biblical demands for justice. When, following the Great Depression, a
Social Gospel movement arose to challenge this division and write biblical
notions of economic justice into public policy, the industrial barons who were
the heirs of plantation capitalism fought hard against progress toward justice.
But they were smart. As Kevin Kruse has shown in his book One Nation Under God,
they knew they did not have the moral authority to wage a successful crusade
against the Social Gospel. So they hired James Fifield to teach 19,000
preachers a gospel that could warm the heart while damping the fire of justice
at the heart of biblical faith.
[I was an evangelical magazine editor, but
now I can’t defend my evangelical community]
This is the true story of faith in America.
It has not always been on the side of truth. In every era, reactionary forces
have exploited faith to push back against the very progress that God requires
of us.
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, 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 Donald
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. As Trumpism swept
the South with Graham’s blessing, North Carolina’s Pat McCrory was the only
Republican incumbent in the nation to lose the governor’s office.
As ministers who grew up on opposite sides of
the color line in North Carolina, we know the power of religion to divide and
conquer the heart of democracy. But we have also witnessed the power of “moral
fusion,” or organizing across racial and class lines to build a coalition for
progress in 21st-century America. Just as North Carolina saw a hard turn to the
right in 2012, America has experienced a backlash against our first
African-American president in 2016. The months and years ahead will not be
easy, but right here in North Carolina we have seen a Moral Movement that can
overcome Trump’s extremism. As the false gods of our past are exposed, every
knee must bow to the God of justice. We hold out hope that even brother
Franklin Graham will see the light and join the Moral Movement. Together,
following the Second Reconstruction of the civil rights movement, we can look
forward to a Third Reconstruction of racial justice and healing in America.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II is moderator of
the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in North Carolina and President of
Repairers of the Breach. He is also co-founder of the Moral Mondays movement, a
series of progressive activist vigils held in North Carolina’s capital city,
Raleigh. Together with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, he is the author of The Third
Reconstruction, newly released in paperback.