The New Yorker Radio Hour - Rev. Franklin Graham Offers an Evangelist’s View of Donald Trump

Episode Date: September 4, 2018

Like his father, Rev. Billy Graham, before him, Rev. Franklin Graham is one of the nation’s most prominent preachers, influential in the evangelical world and in the highest echelons of Washington. But where Billy Graham came to regret that he had “sometimes crossed a line” into politics, Franklin Graham has no such qualms about showing his full-throated support of the President. An early advocate of Trump’s candidacy, he has remained stalwart even as scandals pile up. Graham tells the New Yorker staff writer Eliza Griswold that Trump’s critics have forgotten that “he’s our President. If he succeeds, you’re going to benefit.” Of Trump’s many personal scandals, Graham says only, “I hope we all learn from mistakes and get better. . . . As human beings, we’re all flawed, including Franklin Graham.” Plus, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld on her love for the St. Louis grocery chain Schnucks. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Recently, the New Yorker's Eliza Griswold sat down for a conversation with Franklin Graham, who, like his father, Billy Graham before him, is one of the most influential evangelical leaders both within the Christian world and in American politics. Billy Graham was hardly a left-wing figure, but he spoke at times against racial segregation, he preached alongside Martin Luther King, and he offered religious counsel to presidents from Eisenhower to Johnson to Nixon to Ronald Reagan. Franklin Graham was an early supporter of Donald Trump, and he has remained one as scandal after scandal has hit the campaign and the presidency.

Graham has remained stalwart in Trump's corner even while opposing policies like the separation of immigrant families. Eliza Griswold spoke with Franklin Graham as he traveled throughout the Northwest on a preaching tour that he called Decision America. I've read people talking about your father's message and your message. And your dad saying something along the lines of talking about Nixon and talking about moral and ethical mistakes in a general way. But crossing a line, I think he did say toward the end of his life that he felt that maybe he'd crossed a line. line with his closeness to politics. And I was wondering how you felt about that and what you think he would say about your closeness to politics. Do you feel that you've gotten very close or

not so much? No, I'm not that close. You meet politicians from time to time. You go to Washington from time to time. For me, I stay out of Washington as much as I can. I don't go up to lobby congressman or senators. I've been at the White House for a few functions, but I try to keep my distance, but I want to speak out on issues that I think are moral issues, that we should be speaking out, should be addressing. Are there any moral issues with President Trump that you disagree on? Oh, I mean, there is, I'm looking since he's been president. I don't know if you're talking about, going back 30, 40 years of his life. I'm not sure we're going back 30, 40, and some of them are ongoing.

Well, I don't know. As far as what he's been inside the White House, I don't agree with everything he says. Don't agree with everything he tweets. But he has been very strong on religious freedom issues, which I appreciate. I was reading that at some point you said you didn't. think, you know, people say that he's been mean, and you didn't see anything that he'd said that had been mean. And that surprised me just because, like, the sound bites that I've seen in terms of making fun of people, it's just not morally kind of your jam?

I don't know if it's meanness or if it's just just who he is. I mean, he's a New Yorker, and I don't know, you've known enough about New York. I went to school in New York, high school in New York and New Yorkers have a little bit of an edge and that's just the way they are and I don't think he always means it that way it's just he says things and they're very sometimes very blunt but there's a lot of meanness in this world and you don't have to go too far many people in the media business are very mean there are other politicians who are very mean you know he's the whether you voted for him or not. He's our president. And if he succeeds, you're going to benefit, your five-year-old son's going to benefit. My 12 grandchildren are going to benefit. If he doesn't

succeed, then we all lose. So one of the times, it just comes to me now that I actually, when I was watching TV during the inauguration, I saw you stand up and give a prayer. And then I heard the speech that Trump gave, which was pretty apocalyptic about American Carnage, yeah? And I wondered at that time what you thought of that speech. Did that vision of America ring true to you? Well, I don't think I looked at it like that. I don't, there's lots of speeches that are there for the moment. I think you have to look at what the man does with his job and the work that he does. The fact that he went to North Korea is huge. The fact that he's willing to talk to our enemies. The Iranians.

And I think it doesn't mean that we give in to them. It doesn't mean that we give them what they want, but at least we talk. And I think once a conversation starts, it's easy to maybe to work our way through our differences. And I think we need to be talking to Russia. I appreciate the fact that he talked to President Putin. And there's a lot of disagreement. They felt that he should have gotten more aggressive with President Putin. But I don't think that's the way you get things done.

I think you talk and you try to work out something that will benefit the people of Europe, people especially the Ukraine, and we need to be praying. As a minister, I want to pray for President Putin and President Trump, because if the two of them can get along, we can save billions of dollars and not building arms. And right now it's almost like the media and those in the Democratic Party want us to have a conflict with Russia. So in trying to understand Putin a little bit, I've read just a little bit about your on his anti-gay stance being supportive of that. And also other people like Mike Pence, for instance, seeing him as a strong leader, that there's something to value in Putin in strong

leadership. And I don't know if there's an example for how Putin leads for the West that you think is valuable? Like, is there, or not really? Well, first of all, President Putin is the president of Russia, and he has about, I don't know what his approval rating, but I think it's in the 90s. It's way high, yeah. Everyone in the country loves him. He's going to do what's best, what he thinks, for Russia, and for Russian interest. And we talk a lot about their interference in our elections. I have no clue. Okay, no, I mean, I don't know. But I do know that the United States has interfered in many countries' elections. We've interfered in Iran with the shawl. We interfered in Vietnam

and put our own people into, we did this in Korea. So I get that. I understand that. We want someone in a country who's going to be friendly to us that we can work with. And we have tried to manipulate the politics of many nations. And so all of a sudden we get sanctimonious and we get, oh, how terrible some other countries tried to influence our elections. Well, the Clintons had a huge war chest of money that came from people into their foundation. So, you know, it's easy to point the finger. And I can just tell you that there is enough wrong to go around for both sides. In the New York Times, there was an op-ed, a couple of weeks ago about how the Russians, this Marina Boutina and other Russian operatives,

had possibly tried to use the evangelical community, like the National Prayer Reckfast, for instance, to try to establish ties over issues like the persecution of Christians, very real issues, where they didn't really, their interest was more in establishing influence than it was in the issue itself. And I wondered if you had had any sort of. sense of that from Russians that you thought you'd met people that you thought maybe this interest is not. The question is whether the idea of working together is worth it or whether you have ever felt that there might be a manipulation going on? The prayer breakfast. Yeah. And I can't speak for them because I'm not a part of the prayer

breakfast. But I go to the prayer breakfast from time to time. And I know that the prayer breakfast tries to bring political leaders from all over the world to expose them to what we're doing in our country as far as it relates to prayer. So I appreciate that. The Russians may have used this, of course, this gives us a chance maybe to rub elbows with somebody we wouldn't rub elbows with. I can tell you right now, everybody in that room has the same agenda. They're wanting to be able to rub elbows with somebody that they normally couldn't rub elbows with. So, I mean, everybody in that room. Human nature.

Political nature. You know, it is what it is. Okay. With what we're seeing nationally, this pushback against immigrants, against refugees. And when Jeff Sessions invoked Romans to justify the separation of families on the border, I spoke to many evangelical leaders who were pretty disgusted by that. And I wondered how you. you felt about that. I did not support that at all. I thought that was a mistake, and I spoke out

against it. It's just got to be a better system. I don't think you take, and first of all, these government-run facilities that take care of these kids have pedophiles working in there. And we should never be taking children away from parents, period, hold them together as a family, but take their children away where they can be exposed to pedophiles and I believe pedophiles need to be dealt with very harshly. I believe not only incarcerated, but

the molester child, I think that they would be probably a candidate for the death penalty. You do not, under any circumstances, as an adult, force yourself on a child. I mean, that gets me mad. Do you think that this very

Family separation is an issue. Immigration in general is something that the evangelical community in its diversity could come together around. I mean, here is an issue that is a moral outrage. I think they're trying to address it. But I think the president has come around to what we're saying. But he also, the president sees the political football that his opponents, they want to use the children to try to make him look bad. that's, they want to use that. So they're not real, they're not real eager to try to address this whole border issue. It's, it's a point for them. And this is the sad thing, Alaska, is the politics of all this. And it's to take human lives and children and make a football out of them. Listen, I'm all for children and families coming in legally.

I do believe that if you're caught at the border, you ought to be turned. around and sent back and come legally. For people, they've been waiting eight, nine, ten, twenty years to try to get their legal status and have someone just walk across the border and get in. No, I don't think we need to have, we need to be a country of law. So recently one evangelical leader I was talking to was Ed Stetzer. Yeah, Ed Stetzer. So he was saying, do we gain a political advantage through, you know, Supreme Court

nominations and protection of religious freedom? and other, you know, the recognition of the persecuted church. Do we gain the political advantage but lose our morality by working with this administration? No. There's some people sit around and they think too much. President Clinton did a lot of good for this country, but he brought the country also to a low that we've never had before. A lot of the moral issues that Donald Trump has had to deal with go back a number of years. To my knowledge, none of this has happened in the White House.

There is a difference. I think we do change. I know I'm not the same person I was 15, 20 years ago. And I hope we all learn from mistakes. we get better for that. So I can't speak. All I know is that as human beings were all flawed, including Franklin Graham.

Franklin Graham is the president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and he spoke with Eliza Griswold, a staff writer at the New Yorker. I'm David Remnick. Welcome back. Next week on the show, we'll meet a mother who's been deported away from her family to Honduras, and she's been trying to raise her three kids over video call.

She always wants us to give her kisses through the phone. I love you. I love you too, Mom. That's next week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Curtis Sittenfeld is an author you might know from novels like Prep, American Wife, and Eligible, a Retelling of Pride and Prejudice. Her most recent is a little less romantic than Pride and Prejudice, though. It's a collection of short stories, mostly set in the Midwest,

about people raising kids and facing middle age. And in keeping with that spirit, when we asked her to tell us about one of her very favorite places, she took us to a grocery store in St. Louis. For Gala apples, which are right here. Ugh, that was not a good one. Someone dug their fingernail into that one and then backed away. So we're in a Snooks grocery store. Snooks is a local chain in St. Louis.

And this one is in the suburb of Richmond Heights. and it's my go-to schnucks. We moved to St. Louis in 2007 for my husband's job. We came and we looked at houses, and then at one point I came into this very store and saw the produce section, and I thought, like, everything's going to be okay. I can live in St. Louis.

Like, I think that probably seeing a grocery store and seeing, like, this is nice, it's easy. It's easy to find a parking place. made me be able to envision my daily life in St. Louis and what it would be. And in fact, since then I have spent like 35% of my waking hours in Snooks. So it was an accurate like glimpse of the future. There's this construction going on, so normally it's a very soothing to come into Schnux. It's a little crazy in the background here.

All right, let me get some bananas. I have a friend who teases me that I'm like part monkey or something. Like I eat a banana, an apple, and an orange probably every day. Four of my books have come out in St. Louis. That's crazy. I got married in St. Louis. I had kids in St. Louis. So it's like I do feel like I kind of, you know, officially became an adult in St. Louis.

In schnucks, in this aisle. I don't know. I'm going to get... Oh, you know what? I need animals, actually. actually. A d'animal is basically like a yogurt smoothie. Oh my god. I didn't know they even had cotton candy flavor. I'm looking for strawberry animals. Um, although those are those are rock and raspberry. Yeah. And those are, I kind of don't want to buy a 12-pack. I want to buy a six-pack.

Maybe the reason I like the grocery is I can like privately indulge my finiquiness as a human being. I don't exactly have a witness. Okay, wait, let me see. One of my kids is very fond of the fried chicken, the prepared fried chicken. We once ate schnook's fried chicken in the schnuck's parking lot in my car, and I feel like it was like a high moment,

as mother-daughter. I have two kids. One of them has food allergies. If you have a child, or I think any family member who has food allergies, The protocol is every time you buy something, you read all the ingredients on the label every time. So I do think, like, the grocery store is really, it's tied up in sort of daily life in very mundane, practical ways, but it's also, you know, tied up in, like, my ideas about, like, safety and protecting my family.

And but I mean, so in my fourth novel, which is called Sisterland, it's about a woman who has two young kids and she lives in St. Louis. She's psychic. Like, if I'm making fun of the book, I'll say that it's a novel about buckling your children into car seats, but it's about a few other things. But there are literally probably eight scenes that take place in schnucks. literally the protagonist meets her husband inside this very snuck. So I must believe in like the romance of the grocery store at some level.

So one time, one time I was at schnucks paying for my food and I looked over and I saw this man who I swear to God was exactly as I had envisioned the husband. And in the book, his name is Jeremy. And I thought to myself like, oh my God. like I conjured him up, or, you know, or he's existed all this time, and I was, I was just channeling his existence. But it was this weird, like, he had this kind of little glasses that I pictured, and he was wearing the kind of, like, parka that I pictured. He was a handsome man, a handsome schnuck, schnapper, no shopper. Curtis Sittenfeld at a schnucks in St. Louis, Missouri. But she doesn't shop there anymore because

she's moved to Minneapolis where there's no schnucks at all. Curtis Sittenfeld's most recent book is a collection called You Think It, I'll Say It. And that's it for us today. Thanks for joining us and have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Cario, Rianin Corby, Jill Duboff, Calalia, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, Stephen Valentino, and Richard Yeh, with help from Zach Dyer, Eric Malinski, Mishi Harmon, Michelle Moses, Emily Mann, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.