Billy Graham and ‘Civil Religion’

Evangelist Billy Graham fears that through its moral decadence the West is playing into Communist hands. He sees no let-up in the evil drift and feels it is being exploited by Communist leaders bent on world domination. Moreover, he thinks Communist ideology is becoming increasingly attractive to modern man as a way out of anarchy and poverty.

“We’ve lived too long in affluence,” Graham said in a long telephone interview with CHRISTIANITY TODAY on the eve of his fifty-second birthday this week. And we have used our affluence to turn away from God instead of turning toward him. We haven’t helped the poorer countries.”

He said he hopes to introduce a new urgency into his warnings of impending judgment, warnings that have characterized his world-renowned ministry for more than a generation but are conveniently overlooked by critics who have recently been labeling him an apostle of so-called civil religion.

“We can’t get away with the things we’ve being doing,” the evangelist declared from his home in Black Mountain, North Carolina. “Unless we have revival and repentance in North America and Western Europe, we will experience God’s wrath.”

The evangelist said he would come down hard on this theme in his remaining public appearances this year. After a five-day crusadeThe meetings will be videotaped and subsequently telecast all across North America, probably the first week in December. in the 70,000-seat Tiger Stadium of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Graham planned to fly to Portugal for his first preaching service ever in that country. He is scheduled to address a ministers’ meeting in Lisbon early in November.

In the interview, Graham suggested that clergymen running for political office are the ones who are promoting civil religion. Charges that the evangelist is an acceding chaplain to the establishment grow out of his long-time friendship with President Nixon. A short speech by Nixon at Graham’s crusade in Knoxville last spring and Graham’s participation in Honor America Day gave new impetus to the accusations.

A Newsweek cover story said of the July 4 event: “After 30 years of public preaching, Billy Graham had finally found his proper pulpit—and his proper theme.” The story said that Graham’s God resembles more and more the god of “civil religion—a deity which, in His American form, says sociologist Robert Bellah, is ‘much more related to order, law and right than to salvation and love.’ ” Bellah, taking his cue from Rousseau, wrote an article entitled “Civil Religion in America” that appeared in the Winter 1967 issue of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He began by attaching considerable import to the three references to God in President Kennedy’s inaugural address.

Perhaps the most serious indictment in the civil-religion theory is that chaplains to the establishment preach only those things that tend to support the status quo. White House services are often cited as examples. Graham counters: “If I told them in public what I tell them in private, they would never listen to me again—in public or in private.” He feels he has a continuing ministry with political leaders and the opportunity of exerting a moral influence upon them. The irony, says the evangelist, is that many who criticize his associations with political leaders also fault him for not getting involved enough politically.

While Graham is in Europe this month, he will participate in a special service at London’s Royal Albert Hall commemorating the 350th anniversary of the sailing of the Pilgrims and in a breakfast meeting with 300 members of Parliament. Among other dignitaries he is scheduled to see are Prince Rainier and Princess Grace, with whom he is to lunch in Monte Carlo.

After returning to the United States Graham will take part in a ceremony at Plymouth, Massachusetts, marking the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims.

Graham said he feels there are basically only two great world views, the Christian and the Communist. Christians, he declared, have failed to live up to their ethic, with its demands and disciplines. “We have flooded our churches with unconverted people,” he asserted.

The Communists, on the other hand, have been more faithful to their ideals, he feels, and have maintained a small nucleus of avid devotees who exploit every opportunity. “Right now they are encouraging our moral corruption,” Graham said, citing Lenin’s prophecy that the Communists would not have to attack the United States but that “it will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.”

Graham states, however, that he is optimistic and has great hopes for the coming generation (he is writing a book for young people, to be published by Zondervan, and an article on women’s liberation that will appear in the Ladies’ Home Journal). He also sees the Key 73 national evangelistic thrust as a “marvelous concept.” “I hope all of us can get together on it. Our own organization will do all it can.”

In another interview reported in Religious News Service last month, Graham said that if the U. S. Supreme Court rules federal aid to parochial schools constitutional, “I think the Southern Baptist Convention and other Protestant denominations should give serious consideration to setting up a massive school system like the Catholics and Lutherans have.”

He stressed that “aided” church-related schools should be fully integrated. At the same time he said he is opposed to crosstown “busing” and supports the neighborhood school concept.

Graham was critical of both the report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography and the report of the Commission on Campus Unrest. The latter, he said, “fails to adequately distinguish between dissent and violence. I believe in dissent, but I don’t believe in violence.”

Breaking Ranks

The Salvation Army, which used to march through the streets of London “Bound for the Land of the Pure and the Holy,” may be headed for a crisis in its earthly homeland. Major Fred Brown, 47, officer in charge of prestigious Regent Hall, one of the army’s most active citadels, was suspended for refusing to submit his book, Secular Evangelism, for approval to H.Q. A major controversy ensued.

Brown, a lively, friendly man who was formerly a professional footballer and is highly regarded for his work among London’s hippies and drug-takers, confirms that there was nothing unacceptable in the book itself; he was objecting to what he regards as an outdated rule. Some of his fellow officers, one the son of a former general, have also defied the censorship procedure by writing letters to newspapers in Brown’s defense. A petition with thousands of names has been submitted to army authorities, but they are standing firm.

On suspension six months ago, Brown was removed to distant Cornwall on basic pay of about $130 a month, but with nothing to do. So he wrote another book, Faith Without Religion. Notice was then served on him and his wife to vacate their quarters last month, at which time he was officially dismissed. “There abideth faith, hope, and charity,” as he himself said on another occasion, “and the greatest of these is the status quo.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Invasion Aftermath

Reports from Hungary say that two Western vice-presidents of the pro-Communist Christian Peace Conference have been dismissed as a result of disagreements in the organization over the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The two ousted officers are Professor George Casalis of Paris and Dr. Heinz Kloppenburg of Bremen. They were replaced by the Reverend Heinrich Hellstern, a Swiss, and the Reverend Herbert Mochalski, a West German.

The dismissals were reported by the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Press Service in Geneva. EPS said that the action, taken during a meeting of the conference’s “working party” committee, signified a deadlock in the conference since the Czech invasion took place in August of 1968. In the aftermath of that event Dr. Josef Hromadka resigned as president of the Christian Peace Conference and Dr. Jaroslav Ondra was dismissed as general secretary. Hromádka strongly protested the invasion.

In February of this year Kloppenburg and Casalis were two of nine signatories to a letter saying they would not participate in the working party committee and the international secretariat “for the time being” because of the “externally forced resignation of the general secretary” and efforts to ignore the leadership crisis instead of clearing up the differences in fraternal discussion.

Voices From The Middle

An influential group of Southern Presbyterians issued a definitive ten-point “Statement of Position” this month. The document of the “Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians” opposes inclusion of the denomination in COCU, but expresses readiness to consider mergers among Presbyterian and Reformed communions. Here is the complete text:

1. We reaffirm the validity of the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Catechisms as the doctrinal standards of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. We recognize the necessity for updating and modifying these standards that they may be more intelligible to the modern mind and more thoroughly consonant with the Word of God.

2. We stand for the principle of the parity of Ruling and Teaching Elders in all courts of the Church. We are for revisions in the Book of Church Order which seek to restore a proper balance.

3. We are for the retention of the present Book of Church Order provisions which place local church property control in the particular congregation.

4. We are for the unity of the Church, and strongly oppose any efforts or movements toward fragmentation within the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

5. We are convinced that while the present effort of the Church to serve people in need through the Black Presbyterian Leadership Caucus deserves our full support, it does not exhaust the costly involvement which is required of the Church to express adequately the fruit of the Gospel.

6. While recognizing the validity of the witness of other Christian communions, we believe there is a need for a distinctive Presbyterian-Reformed contribution to the life of the Body of Christ and to the world. We therefore are opposed to the inclusion of the Presbyterian Church in the United States in the proposed Church of Christ Uniting.

7. We stand ready to consider union with other Presbyterian and Reformed bodies, on the merits of the plan of union proposed, provided such a plan of union is founded on Reformed faith and order, and places congregational property under control of the particular congregation.

8. We believe that in the interest of good order and sound discipline, the boards and agencies of our General Assembly should not become involved in structural mergers with the boards and agencies of other denominations prior to union approved by our denomination as a whole.

9. We believe the present effort to restructure the boards and agencies of the General Assembly should be delayed until the matter of union with the United Presbyterian Church is settled.

10. We believe than any restructuring of the Synods by the General Assembly should be delayed until the matter of union with the United Presbyterian Church is settled.

Personalia

The Reverend Robert G. Stephanopoulos was appointed director of the Department of Interchurch Relations for the Greek Orthodox Church in North and South America. He succeeds Arthur Dore, who has served in the office since 1966 and is becoming executive assistant to Archbishop Jakovos.

Robert E. Frykenberg, chairman of the Indian studies department of the University of Wisconsin, was named president of the Conference on Faith and History.

The Reverend James R. Gailey has been elected general secretary of the United Presbyterian Board of Christian Education. Gailey, who has served on the board’s staff for more than two decades, will succeed the Reverend William A. Morrison, who resigned.

F. F. Bruce, noted evangelical scholar in Manchester, England, was guest of honor last month at a dinner on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. In the presence of distinguished scholars from Britain, Canada, and the United States, the Scots-born professor was presented with a festschrift to which an international team, including two Roman Catholics, had contributed.

Daniel Poysti of the Pocket Testament League has been holding evangelistic campaigns and distributing copies of the Gospel of John in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Copies of the Gospel also are said to be entering the Soviet Union through a “Love Letter” campaign sponsored by PTL.

A Muslim leader in Lebanon says he will run for the presidency of the republic, thus defying an accepted tradition that the president should be a Christian while the premier is a Muslim. The six-year term of President Charles Helou, a Maronite Christian, will end next September.

Religion In Transit

An official of the National Council of Churches voiced support of the report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The endorsement was reported in a news release distributed by the NCC Department of Information. It said that the Rev. William H. Genne, NCC director of family-life ministries, specifically underlined the call for more and better sex education.

Michigan may become the first state in the nation to certify teachers of academic courses about religion. The state education department has now established guidelines for certifying teachers with a minor in religion for secondary schools. Calvin College was the first to request approval of such a minor. It is now awaiting an examination to judge whether it measures up to the guidelines.

A “Cinema Institute” is being established in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, to enable Christians to broaden their understanding and sharpen their skills in films and television. Four-week courses will be offered, beginning in January and June of 1971.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.