The Sin of Sycophancy

Billy Graham was willing to damage his ministry to get Nixon elected in 1972

Donald Trump reunited with the court evangelicals on Monday night. His most ardent Christian disciples gathered, via telephone call, to pray for their leader on the evening before his presidential debate with Kamala Harris. The event was sponsored by the former president’s “National Faith Advisory Board,” an organization, headed by prosperity gospel preacher Paula White-Cain, that seems to have little purpose beyond hosting prayer calls with Trump. 

After referencing the “thousands and thousands” of people on the prayer call, Trump urged evangelicals to vote for him in November. He claimed that Harris had “presided over” a “wave of anti-Christian bigotry and persecution unlike anything our nation has ever seen.” He maintained that the Biden administration weaponized the FBI and DOJ to “persecute and arrest God fearing Christians.” Trump declared that if Harris is elected, the “millions and millions” of “illegal immigrants” coming across the Mexican border will threaten the “voting powers of Christian conservatives forever.” He even promised, if elected, to create a “task force of anti-Christian bias.”  

And then White said a prayer that, in essence, endorsed Trump’s fearmongering. She prayed that the Holy Spirit would speak through the former president during Tuesday night’s debate because, just like King David in the Old Testament, Trump was the Lord’s “anointed.” White also asked God to “bind any demonic assignment” meant to stop Trump from channeling the Lord’s voice and wisdom while on the debate stage. “We are not wrestling against flesh and blood,” she prayed, but against “principalities, powers, wickedness and darkness.” For White and her fellow supplicants, politics is spiritual warfare.

Jack Graham, pastor of a Dallas megachurch and active court evangelical during the Trump presidency, was not on the prayer call, but he felt confident on Tuesday morning. The former president of the Southern Baptist Convention tweeted: “Last night Donald Trump gathered with thousands of Christians for prayer in preparation for the debate tonight. This is the best preparation imaginable. America needs God and Donald Trump knows it.”

God answers prayers in mysterious ways. 

On Tuesday night Trump sounded more like a buffoon than an oracle of God. Whatever Christian witness White and Graham still possessed after their court evangelical years was tarnished further by their uncritical, servile endorsement of this deeply immoral and incompetent candidate. Heck, Trump isn’t even morally suitable by court evangelical standards. His position on abortion is akin to the pro-choice, popular-sovereignty Democratic politics made popular by Stephen Douglas in the 1850s: When it comes to big moral issues, let the states decide.

Six years ago I wrote about the court evangelicals in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. I suggested that the evangelicals who frequented the White House while Trump was president were trading their prophetic voice in exchange for photo-ops and access to power. I also argued that they had failed to learn from history.

Perhaps the court evangelicals should spend some time studying what happened in the Oval Office on February 1,1972. On that day, following the National Prayer Breakfast, Billy Graham met with Richard Nixon to discuss the ways the famous evangelist might help the president win a second term in office. I recently listened to all ninety-four minutes of the recording of this discussion, which the Nixon Library has labeled “Conversation 662-004.”

When the tape of the Nixon-Graham conversation was released in March 2002, the news coverage concentrated on Nixon and Graham’s anti-Semitism. Most historians have focused on this section of the recording as well. The anti-Semitic language is bad—really bad, even for the 1970s.

But the tapes also reveal Billy Graham as a political operative. The most revered holy man in post-World War II America was a campaign surrogate for one of the most corrupt presidents in American history. Graham was not in the Oval Office that winter day in 1972 for a photo-op or a chance to influence policy. He was there for a political strategy session.

Graham mentioned the upcoming Explo ‘72 crusade in Dallas and urged Nixon to consider making an appearance at the event. He told the president that most of the young people in attendance at the Cotton Bowl—dubbed the “Christian Woodstock”—would, despite their beards and long hair, be “overwhelmingly pro-Nixon.” (Nixon was intrigued, but he did not attend the event.)

Nixon also asked Graham to help him plan his speaking engagements in the months leading up to Election Day. Nixon said he could use some help securing voters in the swing-state of Pennsylvania. Graham was happy to oblige, proudly telling the president that his financial support was strongest in the commonwealth—he would “get a whole string of engagements” there in the fall. Graham told Nixon, “I want you to say, straight-out, ‘Billy, I think I need your help here.’ Don’t ever hesitate to call me. . . .” At one point in the discussion Graham asked the president to provide him with political surrogates who could help craft presidential talking points that he could “defend on television.” Billy Graham was asking Richard Nixon, a prince of this world, to direct his steps.

Graham intoned that he would do just about anything to get Nixon elected in 1972—even if it damaged his Christian witness. “If [the election] comes right down to the wire,” he told Nixon, “and it looks like I could help in a public way, even if I had to come out and say ‘I’m voting for Richard Nixon’ . . . I’m ready to put that on the line even though it would hurt my ministry . . . I’m fifty-eight [years old], I don’t know how long I have anyway, so I don’t care.” Graham was fully aware of the way his political work for Nixon would weaken his effectiveness as a preacher of the Gospel. That didn’t seem to matter. 

When the National Archives released the recording, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette covered the story with an article titled “The Sin of Sycophancy.” Graham committed this sin behind closed doors. The Trump court evangelicals commit this sin for all the world to see.

John Fea is Executive Editor of Current, a Distinguished Fellow at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and Distinguished Professor of History at Messiah University.