Franklin Graham is rushing to defend President Donald Trump from a devastating and damning editorial published Thursday by the evangelical magazine his father founded 63 years ago. In that Christianity Today piece that has gone viral, the magazine’s editor in chief blasts Trump’s “moral deficiencies” and his “gross immorality and ethical incompetence,” while calling him “morally lost and confused,” and declaring his actions “profoundly immoral.”
Graham, a staunch Trump supporter who traveled the nation in the run up to the 2016 election in a thinly-veiled attempt to help get Trump elected, declares his iconic father, the late Rev. Billy Graham was also a Trump supporter.
“My father knew Donald Trump, he believed in Donald Trump, and he voted for Donald Trump,” Franklin Graham writes on Facebook. “He believed that Donald J. Trump was the man for this hour in history for our nation.”
Billy Graham died in February, 2018 at the age of 99. He turned 98 the day before the 2016 presidential election.
Calling it an “unfathomable” and “totally partisan attack on the President of the United States,” Graham asks why “Christianity Today choose to take the side of the Democrat left whose only goal is to discredit and smear the name of a sitting president?”
Graham then tries to discredit the magazine his father started.
“It’s obvious that Christianity Today has moved to the left and is representing the elitist liberal wing of evangelicalism,” he accuses.
Then he does exactly what the Christianity Today editorial warned against.
“Look at all the President has accomplished in a very short time,” Graham pleads, pointing to the economy, the defeat of “ISIS & the caliphate,” and “renegotiated trade deals to benefit all Americans.”
The list of accomplishments is long, but for me as a Christian, the fact that he is the most pro-life president in modern history is extremely important—and Christianity Today wants us to ignore that, to say it doesn’t count? The President has been a staunch defender of religious freedom at home and around the world—and Christianity Today wants us to ignore that? Also the President has appointed conservative judges in record number—and Christianity today wants us to ignore that?
Like Trump, Graham sees the world as transactional, rather than as a moral universe.
“None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character,” Christianity Today concluded.