After 5 years, Pope Francis attracts love and disdain: 2-24/25-18
A new stack of books about religion: 2-27-18

Franklin Graham is not his late father: 2-26-18

There's no telling how children of famous people will turn out when they reach adulthood.

Donald-trump-and-franklin-grahamGeorge W. Bush made it to be president, like his father. But in the estimation of many, including me, W. was no George H. W. Bush, though W. has been a much better ex-president than he was a president (not unlike Jimmy Carter).

Not to equate W. and the Rev. Franklin Graham (pictured here with President Donald Trump), but something similar can be said about Franklin, who thus far is no Billy Graham, the great evangelist who died last week.

And I'm far from the only one who thinks so. Franklin's niece, Jerushah Armfield, who is Billy's granddaughter, thinks Uncle Franklin has gotten off track, too, as this Religion News Service piece details. The column quotes Jerushah this way about Franklin: “'He has an incredible humanitarian ministry that’s been on the front lines often before a lot of ministries have been there,' she told a CNN interviewer. And then she added: 'I think he probably needs to stick to doing that.'”

Richard Mouw, author of the RNS column and former president of Fuller Theological Seminary, adds this: "Graham should publicly admit that his support for the president has been seriously misleading and harmful. Graham, a member of Trump’s informal evangelical advisory board, has consistently encouraged evangelicals not to focus on character issues in thinking about Trump’s leadership."

Franklin Graham runs a terrific charitable organization, Samaritan’s Purse, but he also has been a bitter voice against Islam and has aligned himself with Trump in many ways even though the president's personal life has shown tons of evidence that he rejects the very morality that Billy Graham and other Christian evangelicals have stood for.

As Mouw points out, Billy Graham got burned by hanging out with and supporting the eventually disgraced Richard Nixon. Franklin should learn from that error.

Franklin also might want to educate himself about traditional Islam, which he has called "evil" and "wicked." It's the sort of divisiveness that we don't need in our religiously pluralistic nation.

I'm sorry Franklin has lost his father. I'm also sorry that in some respects he's also lost his way.

(By the way, one way to understand Franklin and his siblings and family better is by reading this excellent Washington Post piece by William Martin, an emeritus professor at Rice University. Clearly Billy, like almost all of us fathers, had some failures in that role.)

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REMEMBERING SLAVERY AND THE BIBLE

In commemoration of Black History Month, let's take a look -- via this Time Magazine excerpt of a new book on slavery -- at how American slaveholders misused the Bible to justify that immoral institution. It's one of the most repulsive examples of terrible biblical interpretation ever, and it helped lead to the rebellion that cost so many lives in defense of an indefensible crushing of fellow human beings.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column now is online here. It's about musicians of one religious tradition who perform music for a different tradition's worship.

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ANOTHER P.S.: I'm gathering pledges for this year's AIDSWalk Kansas City to benefit the AIDS Service Foundation. I hope you'll consider making a donation. To do so online, just go here. And thanks.

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