Yonat Shimron has it covered at Religion News Service. Here is a taste:
Like his late father, Billy Graham, Franklin Graham is not a marcher.
The Graham family formula has always focused on stadium-sized evangelistic revivals.
But ahead of the presidential election, the evangelical preacher is borrowing a tactic used by civil rights leaders and Black Lives Matter protesters. He is organizing a mass prayer march Saturday (Sept. 26) from the Lincoln Memorial to the steps of the U.S. Capitol.
“It’s important that men and women of God come to Washington, and let’s call on his name and ask for his help,” Graham told RNS. “We are so divided, politically, morally, spiritually. We’re just divided. We pray that God can help unite this nation to be truly the United States of America.”
Graham insists the march is not an effort to encourage voting or to rally evangelicals to the polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election. His only agenda is to get people to repent and pray, he said.
But when he speaks about the protests against police brutality, the Democratic party or President Trump’s impending Supreme Court nomination, he echoes talking points and slogans advanced by the president and the GOP.
“The Democratic Party as a whole has moved into socialism,” Graham said.
Read the rest here.
I am all for prayer, but this event has pro-Trump politics written all over it. Here is what I told Shimron:
“It’s going to be hard to miss this as a kind of counter-march, an anti Black Lives Matter or anti-violence (march),” said John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah University and an expert on evangelicalism. “His march is clearly defining itself over and against the protests against George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.”
All of these speakers are either court evangelicals or popular Trump supporters. The event is “hosted” by Mike Huckabee and Graham’s daughter, Cissie Graham.
Liberty University, who recently dumped president and court evangelical Jerry Falwell Jr., has not changed one bit in its Trumpism. Acting president Jerry Prevo is sending 2200 students to the event. Prevo says that this is “strictly a prayer march.” I wonder if Prevo would send Liberty University students to a prayer march sponsored by an anti-Trump evangelical?
Other speakers include court evangelicals Alveda King and Bishop Harry Jackson.
In another event this weekend, Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jewish pastor who writes apocalyptic novels comparing the attacks on September 11 to the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel, is holding an event in Washington D.C. called “The Return: National and Global Day of Prayer and Repentance.”
Speakers include court evangelical Tony Perkins, court evangelical Jim Garlow, former Rep. Michelle Bachman, Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert, “MyPillow guy” Mike Lindell, singer Pat Boone, actor Kevin Sorbo, former gang member of The Cross and the Switchblade fame Nicky Cruz, American Idol star Danny Gokey, and Billy Graham’s daughter Anne Graham Lotz.
