While Billy Graham was leading a revival in Los Angeles in 1949, William Randolph Hearst looked at the handsome thirtysomething evangelist with flowing blond hair and famously directed editors in his publishing empire to “puff Graham.” Some six decades later, the preacher had become a silver-haired retiree whose Parkinson’s disease kept him largely out of view, but the puffery never stopped. When Graham died this week, he was hailed by President George W. Bush as “America’s pastor,” and even more lavishly by Vice-President Mike Pence as “one of the greatest Americans of the past century.” President Bill Clinton praised him for integrating his revivals. Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, called him “the most important evangelist since the Apostle Paul.”
Graham’s accomplishments are, without doubt, legion. The widely cited estimate that he preached to some 215 million people is likely in the ballpark. And while the nineteenth-century lawyer-turned-evangelist Charles Finney must be credited with inventing modern revivalism, Graham perfected and scaled it, turning evangelicalism into worldwide impulse that has transformed Christianity in recent decades in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
But almost two decades ago, Graham handed over the keys of the empire to his son, Franklin. And if you want to chart the troubled recent course of American evangelicalism - its powerful rise after World War II and its surprisingly quick demise in recent years - you need look no further than this father-and-son duo of Billy and Franklin Graham. The father was a powerful evangelist who turned evangelicalism into the dominant spiritual impulse in modern America. His son is - not to put too fine a point on it - a political hack, one who is rapidly rebranding evangelicalism as a belief system marked not by faith, hope, and love but by fear of Muslims and homophobia.
You can read the rest @
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/24/billy-graham-evangelical-decline-franklin-graham-217077
I have not followed Franklin, but I tend to agree with the author. We live in a different time than Billy did. One might even call our time "the end of an age". The message of today's puny versions of William Randolph Hearst seems to be "puff Satan".
A church built on hatred instead of righteousness cannot flourish. Nor should it, and perhaps that's what Jesus was talking about in this prophecy about the 666 beast:
7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.
8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
Revelation 13:7-8 KJV
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