Lying for Jesus: Franklin Graham Edition

On Wednesday evening I attended the Wellington leg of Franklin Graham's God Loves You tour at the TSB Arena. If the name sounds familiar, it's probably because Franklin is the son of Billy Graham, who was quite possibly the most famous Christian evangelical preacher of the 20th century. Billy Graham was well known for his large revival rallies (known as Crusades), with claims of bringing millions of people to the religion. Bronwyn has previously written for us about one of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association's projects, the Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes.

Billy Graham died in 2018, and since the early 2000s his son Franklin has been at the wheel. A quick read of Franklin's Wikipedia page shows some issues that are all too common in Christian leaders - intolerance of homosexuality, an irrational level of fear of Islam, and financial shenanigans leading to personal enrichment. But then his father's Wikipedia page isn't great either, featuring antisemitism, misogynistic beliefs, etc.

These beliefs were on display at the event on Wednesday. The event started with a warm-up musical act, and then another, and then a third - meaning that it was two hours from the start of the event until Franklin appeared on stage. And then, within two minutes, he had name-dropped Donald Trump, talking about the pandemic and lockdowns, and mentioning that he had asked Trump if he knew who had come up with the idea of lockdowns. This was followed by a rambling sermon that managed to fit in both anti-abortion and anti-gay rhetoric (both of which sadly received cheers and clapping from the crowd), even though it was meant to be about Bartimaeus who was supposedly healed by Jesus of blindness.

Once the sermon was coming to a close, Franklin started a process that is quite familiar to me from seeing other evangelical churches (like Arise church) employ it; asking for those who want to join the faith to leave their seats and come to the front of the event to affirm their new belief. After all, the crux of these rallies, or crusades, is to “bring people to Jesus” by having them confess their sins and accept Jesus as their Lord and saviour. Press releases and social media posts will boast about the number of people converted in a night. For example, the event I attended last week was followed by an article claiming that “more than 150 made decisions for Christ”, including “a Muslim couple and a Chinese boy”.

This part of the service is where, to anyone paying attention and not being swept along by the moment, some fairly devious tricks are used. And these tricks are all part of an effort to maximise the number of people who join the group at the front of the service, so that the number of people who “made decisions for Christ” can appear as large as possible.

Firstly, the request for people to come to the front if they would like to accept Jesus into their hearts is usually accompanied by other reasons to join the group at the front for a blessing. Maybe you've sinned recently and need praying for. Maybe you've been feeling distant from God and want to re-affirm your belief. Maybe you know someone else who you would like to join the church, and you would like God to do this for you. Maybe you're not 100% sure that God has forgiven all of your sins. I've seen all of these used as ways of increasing the size of the group who are then claimed to be making a “commitment” to Christ, and several were used by Franklin at this event.

Next, the call to come to the front is made into a very emotionally charged event. The church band (in this case one of the three!) will start to play an emotion-evoking piece of music, something that feels very intense. Overlaid on this are the preacher's words, also said in an emotionally charged way, making it feel like it's important that you should make the decision to get out of your chair and walk to the front.

Indirect pressure is placed on people to join the throng at the front, by waiting for an excruciatingly long time. At Wednesday's event, Franklin talked about how he “felt” there were more people who needed to come to the front, and that maybe some people who were at the back of the stadium hadn't been given enough time to come down, and he asked the band to play another verse of their song (by this time probably the fourth or fifth one) while he waited. I've seen other preachers talk about how God has “spoken” to them and told them that there are people still in the audience who need to join the others at the front, and that they'll wait until these people are “moved” by God to make the decision. Even for an atheist like myself, the pressure to conform and obey, and stand at the front, is easily felt - so for someone who's unsure about their beliefs, or someone who is already a believer but feels that, maybe, they're more distant from God than they should be, it's likely to be pretty compelling.

Now, me being me, after a few minutes I thought what the heck, and hopped out of my seat to join the slowly growing group at the front of the room. After all, Franklin had said that people should come to the front if they weren't sure that Jesus had forgiven their sins, and technically this is me because I don't believe that Jesus is god, or that he has forgiven me for anything at all. For fun, here's a couple of pictures I've found of the evening where I can be seen somewhere in the crowd - it's like Where's Wally (or Waldo), but I was looking for a bald man with a white beard (I'm somewhere to the right of centre, close to the right aisle).

Now, once Franklin decided he had enough people join him, he had us all say a prayer out loud, and then pronounced that we were all welcomed into the faith (ignoring, of course, that many of the people there were likely already Christian, and had come to the front for reasons other than converting). And, once this was done, there was one final trick that I've never seen before that was pretty clever…

Earlier in the evening, when I walked into the building, I saw a well-oiled machine, with many volunteers helping out. The volunteers were easy to spot, as they were all wearing black t-shirts that said “volunteer” on the back, with the “God Loves You” tour logo on the front. I even walked past a large table with maybe a hundred or more of these shirts stacked up high - they were giving them out to volunteers from local churches as they arrived.

So, given that all the volunteers that I'd seen were easy to spot, it was quite surprising when Franklin Graham announced that, for each of us in the crowd who had come forward for prayer, there was a matching “volunteer” standing next to us with a booklet that they were going to give to us. This special type of volunteer wasn't wearing a black t-shirt, and they were indistinguishable from everyone else. So, basically, when you looked at the size of the crowd who were being “converted”, only half of the people there had made the decision to come to the front for the prayer - the other half were incognito church members who were there to talk to us.

And the first thing these stealth volunteers did? They pulled a contact form and a pen out of the booklet they had for us, and had us fill them in. The form asked for our name, age, sex, email address, phone number and home address - a surprising amount of detail. When I verbally expressed my surprise, and professed a hesitancy to give away my personal details, I was politely told that the more details I could give them the better. My hesitancy was somewhat faked to judge their response, as I'm usually fairly open to sharing my details in order to see more of how the sausage is made. In this case I gave them everything they asked for, and ticked a box at the bottom of the form to say that I just wanted to “Know More” (the choices were “Acceptance of Christ”, “Assurance”, “Rededication” and “Know More”).

Once I had completed the form, and was given what turned out to be a couple of books (titled “Living in Christ” and “Growing in Christ”), my volunteer made a painfully awkward attempt at small talk - something he was obviously not very good at. I chatted to him for a couple of minutes and then hightailed it out of there, as I was already running late for a catch-up with friends in the pub.

A few days later (on Saturday), and despite my handwriting on the form being atrocious, a letter arrived for me from the “Ministry of Billy Graham Evangelistic Association AUS/NZ”. And, although I'd not indicated that I was either accepting Christ or rededicating my life to him on the contact form, the letter congratulated me for making a “commitment to Jesus Christ” (sorry, the following image is a little hard to read - it's difficult to take a decent picture of a letter printed on posh, shiny paper!):

So, it turns out that sadly I'm now an unwitting statistic in the continuing Billy Graham (TM) Crusades, another atheist who apparently saw the light and made a “decision to follow Jesus”, even though at no time did I actually ever say that I was doing that. At least I kept the freebie pen I was given to fill in the form I suppose - although in the modern age of computers and mobile phones, I'm not sure I'll ever actually use it.