Franklin Graham is the son of world-famous American evangelist Billy Graham and a preacher in his own right, as well as the head of the evangelical aid organisation Samaritan’s Purse. He is best known in Britain for having an evangelistic tour cancelled in 2020 over comments on Islam and gay people, but he has successfully returned since in new tours.
Who is Franklin Graham?
William Franklin Graham III was born in 1952 in North Carolina, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham. He is the fourth of five children, married with four children and 11 grandchildren.
Franklin Graham was a child when his father Billy led “crusades” throughout the world, including the UK — big evangelistic campaigns featuring mass audiences, choral singing and lively sermons ending with a call for people to signal their conversion to Christianity by “coming forward” and walking to the front of the stage.
The first Billy Graham UK event was the 1954 Haringey crusade, when more than two million people heard him preach, with live broadcasts in towns throughout the country. Another 18 crusades were held in the UK. Cliff Richard announced at the 1966 Billy Graham rally in Earls Court that he was a Christian.
As a teenager, he was expelled from a private school in the state of New York, and later from LeTourneau College in Longview, Texas, for keeping a female classmate out past curfew. He has described how, aged 22 and on a trip to the Middle East in 1974, he underwent a conversion experience, after which he says he committed himself fully to Jesus Christ.
What does he do?
In 1974, Mr Graham joined an international evangelical Christian relief organisation, Samaritan’s Purse, which works in countries throughout the world, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in donations. Samaritan’s Purse – named in a nod to the story Jesus told about the Good Samaritan – was founded in 1970 by a Baptist pastor and humanitarian called Bob Pierce. Mr Pierce had earlier founded World Vision, another Christian aid agency but became disillusioned with how that charity had professionalised over time and in his eyes lost its religious edge. After Pierce’s death, Mr Graham became president of Samaritan’s Purse in 1979, and later chief executive, a post he still holds.
Today, Samaritan’s Purse operates in dozens of disaster zones around the world, including delivering around 90m kilograms of food to people in Ukraine. Most recently it has deployed staff to help those affected by devastating wildfires in Hawaii.
It also operates the long-running but controversial Operation Christmas Child project. This sees families in the West wrap up shoeboxes full of essentials and gifts which are they shipped by Samaritan’s Purse to children in the developing world as Christmas presents. OCC has been criticised at times for including within the shoeboxes Christian tracts and invitations to join evangelistic courses at nearby churches.
Among their other projects, Samaritan’s Purse also sends Christian doctors, dentists and nurses on short-term overseas trips to Christian mission hospitals and clinics around the world.
As well as traditional aid work, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association trains volunteers to act as emergency chaplains, alongside Samaritan’s Purse volunteers. These people are sent to local emergencies to offer pastoral support and prayer to people caught up in the disaster.
He was ordained in 1982 by the Grace Community Church in Tempe, Arizona, and in 1989 began preaching with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. He became chief executive of the association in 2000, and president in 2002, and still holds both posts.
In 2001, Mr Graham gave the opening prayer at the inauguration of George W Bush. He also spoke at the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017.
Why has he been in the news?
Money
In 2015, a North Carolina newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, reported that Mr Graham was receiving annual salaries of about $880,000: $622,000 from Samaritan’s Purse and $258,000 from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. This compared with salaries of between $350,000 and $450,000 for the chief executives of America’s top 50 charities.
Islam
Mr Graham has been criticised many times for what have been perceived as anti-Muslim comments. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he described Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion”.
In a Time magazine interview in 2010, Mr Graham was reported as saying Islam was “a religion of hatred. It’s a religion of war.” In 2010, the Pentagon withdrew his invitation to speak at a National Day of Prayer event, after objections from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and a Muslim group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
In 2011, he attacked the Muslim Brotherhood, claiming it had infiltrated “every level” of the US government.
In 2010, Mr Graham said in a CNN interview that Barack Obama’s “problem” was that he had been born a Muslim. He went on to acknowledge in the same interview that the president had renounced Islam and had accepted Christianity. But two years later, in an interview with ABC, he said that although Obama was “a fine man”, he could not know if the president was a Christian in his heart.
He later apologised to Mr Obama, saying: “I regret any comments I have ever made which may have cast any doubt on the personal faith of our president, Mr Obama. The president has said he is a Christian and I accept that.”
Gay rights
In 2012, Mr Graham criticised President Obama for supporting same-sex marriage, saying that the president had “shaken his fist at the same God who created and defined marriage”.
He later defended Vladimir Putin’s gay propaganda law, praising him for “protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda”.
Donald Trump
In 2011, Mr Graham described Donald Trump, who had expressed interest in the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential election, as his preferred candidate.
In November 2016, he told The Washington Post that God had played a role in Trump’s successful election campaign.
Mr Graham has continued to back Mr Trump even after his presidency ended in disgrace, multiple impeachment and the Capitol insurrection by his supporters. This year the evangelist has urged Americans to pray for Mr Trump after his string of criminal indictments, claiming the “Left in Washington” are trying to smear the former president to damage his next run for the White House in 2024.
In an interview with the Religion Media Centre August 2023, he conceded that Trump had lost the election: “Of course he lost the election. There’s no question about that…..I feel that he lost the election, and that’s my feeling, but there are millions of other people who don’t believe that way”. He said he didn’t know whether he would endorse anyone in next year’s presidential election. He would wait to see who would be on the ticket.
2018 UK tour
In 2018, there were protests over his visit to The Festival of Hope in Blackpool, Lancashire. The festival was organised by 200 churches from many denominations, including the Church of England, but 8,000 local people signed a petition against the visit.
The Muslim Council of Britain called on the government to refuse Graham a visa on the grounds that comments he has made amount to Islamophobia and homophobia. Three MPs also called for the visit to be cancelled.
2020 UK tour
Franklin Graham had planned a four-month tour of the UK, but the venues eventually cancelled his bookings citing opposition to his views, especially on homosexuality, as incompatible with values of equality, diversity and inclusivity.
The venues which banned him were: the ACC conference venue in Liverpool, the FlyDSA Arena in Sheffield, the SSE Hydro venue in Glasgow, the International Convention Centre Wales in Newport, the Marshall Arena in Milton Keynes, the Arena Birmingham and the Utilita Arena Newcastle.
Despite this, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) which was organising the tour, initially said it would still go ahead with the tour, sticking to original dates. Mr Graham also stuck to his guns, insisting he would not stop exposing what he saw as “sin” despite the backlash. Ultimately, the UK went into coronavirus lockdown the next month, which rendered the issue moot.
Peter Lynas, UK director of the Evangelical Alliance, said at the time that his organisation had members who supported and had concerns about the tour, but “venues, often owned by local people and run by their councils, are challenging freedom of speech and freedom of religion. We should all share concerns about that.”
2022 UK tour
Late in 2021, Mr Graham’s organisation announced plans for a re-scheduled ‘God Loves You’ evangelistic tour of the UK, with dates in 2022 in Liverpool, Newport, Sheffield and London. Some 2,000 churches were claimed to have signed up to support the tour, which would see Mr Graham preach alongside performances from a handful of well-known American contemporary worship artists.
This time, the tour went off as planned, with Mr Graham consciously claiming to be following in his illustrious father’s footsteps, 33 years after Billy Graham’s last event in London at Wembley Stadium. “Mr Graham is continuing the lifelong work of his father, and he will share the same gospel message in London that his father preached to millions of people across the city over the course of three decades,” a press release said.
Almost 20,000 people attended the God Loves You events over all four dates, the BGEA claimed.
Legal action
Following all venues for his 2020 tour cancelling his bookings in the face of a protest movement, the BGEA initiated legal action claiming discrimination against Mr Graham’s protected religious beliefs. So far, five cases have been resolved, and all in favour of the BGEA.
Most recently, a Glasgow court upheld the BGEA’s claim for discrimination against them by the SSE Hydro venue. Mr Graham had been due to speak there in 2020 before the venue cancelled. But the judge ruled there was no evidence Mr Graham would have made homophobic or Islamophobic remarks, and instead the SSE Hydro was conducting a “thinly-veiled exercise in virtue signalling…bowed to public pressure, spurred on and whipped up by political leaders online”.
The Equality Act must protect mainstream Christians’ right to gather even if some other communities vehemently disagree with their beliefs, the judge ruled. The BGEA were also awarded damages of £97,000.
2023 event
In August, Mr Graham is due to return to the ExCel arena in London for a one-off night, also under the God Loves You brand. Again, he will be joined by a number of prominent American worship artists, including Michael W Smith, Newsboys, and CeCe Winans.
In a recent interview with the Religion Media Centre, Mr Graham said he was returning to the UK despite his previous troubles because “I want to warn people of the fire that is coming”. “Hell is coming for people who turn their backs on God. I want them to know they can have a relationship with God and that’s through faith in His Son Jesus Christ,” he said. He insisted he was not “rude” about people from other religions, but while he respected their faith and right to believe what they wanted, he still wanted to preach to them that the only way to God was through Jesus.
It was his strongly conservative positions on LGBT people which had prompted the campaign against his 2020 tour, but Mr Graham said in his recent interview he still believed “homosexuality is a sin”. But, declaring everyone to be a sinner, he added he still wanted gay people to come to his events and turn to Christ. “For a homosexual out there I’d love them enough to tell them that God is willing to forgive you. And he’s willing to give you an opportunity to be with Him in heaven.”
