In 1953 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Pastor Billy Graham noticed that his crusade audience was divided into roped-off sections. He personally broke down the barriers.
For the next six decades, he preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to more than 200 million people in 185 countries. Without compromising an inch on his theological foundation, he adapted his message to the moment, for example dropping the name “crusade” for his rallies so as not to offend Muslims that he was trying to reach Christ.
Scrupulously apolitical, he did something in 2016 that the left will never forgive him for: He stood up for God’s definition of marriage as between one man and one woman and called on Christians to vote according to their “biblical values.”
His death at age 99 last Wednesday brought praise and recognition from around the world. But it also revealed how deeply some on the left hate all things Christian. Teen Vogue writer Lauren Ducas called Mr. Graham an epithet and said he was “evil.” I was going to share other examples, but why give them any value?
As a thoroughly orthodox Christian, Pastor Graham finds himself in the good company of Christian organizations falsely labeled as “hate groups.” The biggest perpetrator of this slander is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a media news source.
Last week, the SPLC, a far-left foundation based in Montgomery, Alabama, released a report with this long title: “A Year of Hate: Trump’s Support for White Supremacists in 2017, Sparking Backlash Among Black Nationalist Groups.”
The report identified 954 organizations as hate groups, up from 917 in 2016. Buried deep in the Washington Post article, the information that the number of Ku Klux Klan chapters dropped from 130 to 72 constitutes a real enhance.
Many good and decent Christian organizations, such as the Family Research Council, are still on the “hate list” and “hate map,” along with MassResistance. This conservative parent group is run by a Jewish father, Brian Camenker, who became dynamic after discovering that his children were being brainwashed with pansexual propaganda at a local public school in Massachusetts.
The hate list also includes Nazis, white nationalists and even some black nationalist groups. The report says the latter groups should not be confused with “black activist groups, such as Black Lives Matter, that work to eliminate systemic racism in American society and its institutions.”
Really? Black Lives Matter (BLM) has been working overtime, stoking racial animosity and fanning hatred of police. On August 29, 2015, protesters from the local BLM chapter in St. Paul chanted, “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon,” hours after a sheriff’s deputy was ambushed and executed in Houston.
The SPLC report also lists a number of “anti-government groups” for whose growth the SPLC blames—who else?—President Trump: His “radical views and bigotry may be energizing them in the same way he has been energizing hate groups.”
In the past few years, the transgender movement has become a novel leftist spearhead in their relentless assault on America’s fundamental Judeo-Christian culture. Just when you think they’ve gone too far, they push harder, meeting little to no resistance.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, D.C., welcomed the LGBT activist group Log Cabin Republicans despite its radical gay and transgender agenda, which is embraced by the Democratic Party.
Meanwhile, MassResistance, one of the few conservative groups fighting the LGBT agenda in schools, had its check returned and was told it was not welcome. The reason given was that it had made remarks at a 2015 event in which Mr. Camenker urged parents and conservatives to take a harder line against those who corrupt and endanger innocent children. He was not singing along with the chant-go-along that accompanies conservative acceptance of moral decay.
On February 16, Ohio’s Hamilton County Judge Sylvia Sieve Hendon, who ran as a Republican in 2010, he took a 17-year-old girl from their parents because they did not agree to hormonal treatment as part of their gender reassignment.
Not wanting your beloved daughter to become a imitation man is now tantamount to child abuse.
And there it is. Radical LGBT activist Chai Feldblum, who has triumphed that “gays win, Christians lose” when rights conflict, has been reappointed by President Trump to the powerful Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She was first appointed by Barack Obama and has aggressively promoted an LGBT legal agenda to criminalize Christianity. Millions of Christians showed up to support elect Mr. Trump. They deserve better. Her current term is ending soon, and her reappointment should be withdrawn.
In the last years of his life, Billy Graham often spoke of his belief that America’s only hope was a Christian revival resulting from the rise of a coldly pagan culture that devalued life and family and rejected God’s love.
His son Franklin, whose charity Samaritan’s Purse has helped countless people in arduous circumstances around the world, has taken up the mantle and run with it. May God grant him protection, wisdom and influence.
Robert Knight is a Washington Times contributor. His latest book is Confronting Lies and Hate: Responding with Truth and Grace (D. James Kennedy Service, 2018).
