Randall Balmer Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University. His most recent book, God in the White House: A History: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, was released by HarperOne in January 2008.
Franklin Graham’s curious statement about Barack Obama’s supposed Muslim sympathies betrays the tenets of Graham’s own faith.
In the wake of surveys showing that a growing number of Americans believe that the president is a Muslim, Graham couldn’t resist getting into the act and advancing the deception. Asserting that Obama was “born a Muslim,” Graham declared: “The seed is passed through the father. He was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim; the seed of Muslim [sic] is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim. His father gave him an Islamic name.”
But one of the mottoes of evangelical Christianity, the faith that Graham espouses, is that “God has no grandchildren.” I heard that refrain many, many times as I was growing up within evangelicalism in the 1950s and 1960s. The purpose of that statement was to impress upon young people in particular, but everyone in general, that a person’s religious identity derived from claiming the faith for himself and was not ascribed by birth.
Preachers hammered this message home, even to the point of ridiculing those who believed otherwise, those who believed that having been born into a Christian household made you a Christian. “God has no grandchildren,” the preacher would thunder, hoping thereby to encourage impressionable young people to make their own professions of faith. Very often the preacher would add a corollary to this rhetorical strategy, meant to underscore the ridiculousness of the claim that religious faith was somehow hereditary. “Just because you live in a garage,” the preacher would taunt, “doesn’t make you an automobile.”
I suspect that even Franklin Graham has employed those rhetorical devices in his own preaching. How curious, then, that he would suggest that President Obama was “born a Muslim” because his father was Muslim.
The president has written and spoken often about his own conversion to Christianity – not from Islam, for his was not a religious upbringing, but from a kind of secularism. And if he were, in fact, a closet Muslim, as Graham and the voices blaring from the downstream media continue to insinuate, why would he have his daughters baptized as Christians?
Paradoxically, Franklin Graham’s family provides powerful evidence of the importance of conversion, even within evangelicalism. Very early in his career, Billy Graham, Franklin’s more famous father, made a decision to break with the starchy, separatist fundamentalism of his own childhood in favor of a broader, more capacious evangelicalism. The key to understanding Franklin Graham is to recognize that Billy Graham’s son made precisely the opposite conversion: Having been born into an evangelical household, Franklin elected to become a fundamentalist.
God has no grandchildren.
Do what makes you better for yourself, but do not confuse it with something that makes you better than another self.
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