Evangelicals for Harris may be sued for using Billy Graham to highlight Trump's hypocrisy
Evangelist Franklin Graham is threatening a Christian group that won't bow down to his Lord and Savior Donald Trump
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Quick note: On Tuesday night at 8:30p (ET), the Secular Democrats of America will host a “Humanists for Harris” virtual event headlined by Reps. Jared Huffman and Jamie Raskin! It’s not just about raising money; it’s about getting active in the weeks before the election ends.
I will be speaking that night alongside Andrew Seidel, Ann Druyan, Sasha Sagan, Michael Mann, Kayley Whalen, and others. Topics will include Project 2025, science, democracy, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and more.
You can register here for free. (Do it.)
Evangelical Franklin Graham and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association are threatening to sue Evangelicals for Harris over ads depicting Donald Trump as a Christian hypocrite by featuring his comments alongside the late Billy Graham’s words.
To put that another way, the BGEA might sue an organization that makes its namesake Billy Graham look amazing… because it simultaneously shows that Trump is an asshole who doesn’t respect Christian values.
In case you need a reminder of why they’re fighting, it’s because white evangelicals are key to Trump’s success. Roughly 80% of them backed Trump in 2016 and 2020. If Kamala Harris can put a dent in that 80%, especially in the swing states, her path to the White House would become that much easier because white evangelicals are one of the GOP’s most reliable voting blocs.
Evangelicals for Harris is eager to help make that happen. The group was the creation of Faith Voters, a 501(c)(4) organization that previously sponsored Evangelicals for Biden in 2020. The progressive Christians behind it make a rather straightforward argument: Both Harris and Tim Walz are Christians themselves (Baptist and Lutheran, respectively) and they’re pushing for policies that would help Americans who have been struggling—with jobs, health care, raising families, etc. Even their support of climate change policies can be framed as trying to preserve the home God gave us and what could be more Jesus-like than that?
They may disagree with Democrats on matters of LGBTQ rights and reproductive freedom, but they refuse to be single issue voters on those topics. Plus, to paraphrase one of their talking points, “pro-life” means taking care of people after birth, not just before it, and Trump has repeatedly denigrated people he hates, put people in harm’s way for political gain (like Haitians in Springfield), and threatened to upend healthcare access for the people who need it the most.
Trump hasn’t just taken the Christian vote for granted; he’s leaned into the worst stereotypes of evangelicals in order to argue they have no other choice, even holding up a Bible outside a church for a photo-op after having his team use tear gas on peaceful protesters.
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Trump is, famously, the thrice-married racist who paid hush money to porn stars he was having affairs with when his current wife was pregnant with his fifth child. A sexual abuser. The Two Corinthians guy. The candidate caught bragging about non-consensually grabbing women because he was a celebrity. The guy who lies about everything. The guy who couldn’t name his favorite Bible verse. The guy who sold a freely available Bible, branded it with his name, and raked in a whopping $300,000 in royalties from gullible supporters.
Of the many, many things you could call Donald Trump, devout isn’t one of them. Not a single white evangelical church in America would ever allow this guy to be their pastor if they wanted to be taken seriously, and yet more than half of Republican voters (a good chunk of whom would describe themselves as conservative Christians) seriously believe Trump is a person of faith.
It’s not because he does any of the things you’re supposed to do as a Christian. He sure as hell hasn’t put any thought into theological debates.
If Donald Trump worships anyone, it’s himself.
The only reason anyone would think he’s a person of faith is because Trump just tells people he is. They believe the lie. They buy into the pandering. Or else they think installing right-wing justices on the Supreme Court for political reasons is the equivalent of accepting the divinity of Christ, and they’ll pretend to accept his lie in order to achieve a far different goal.
If that’s how white evangelicals want to be defined, then so be it. But the people behind Evangelicals for Harris refuse to sit idly by while that happens. So they’re pushing back.
The group’s first ad called out Trump’s hypocrisy by showing a clip from a Billy Graham sermon saying Christians needed to ask God for forgiveness… followed by one of Trump saying he never did that.
They’ve since posted other ads, like this one of Billy Graham urging Christians to “keep clear” of men like Trump—men who are greedy, abusive, violent, arrogant, and hedonistic.
With a million-dollar budget, the group can pay to run those ads in swing states where the message might differ from what conservative pastors might be saying from the pulpit, urging Christians to ignore the obvious and vote for someone they’d easily call the devil if he were a Democrat.
No wonder Franklin Graham is furious. The idea that the Democratic ticket is worth supporting because they more closely resemble the Christianity his father preached for decades highlights his own failures as a red-pilled Christian messenger.
On two separate occasions now, on September 27 and October 2, the BGEA (which Franklin Graham runs) sent cease-and-desist letters to Evangelicals for Harris, telling them to take down any ads featuring Billy Graham because it constitutes copyright infringement.
“It may be worth noting that, in all of his years of ministry and across relationships with 11 U.S. presidents, Billy Graham sought only to encourage them and to offer them the counsel of Christ, as revealed through God’s Word. He never criticized presidents publicly and would undoubtedly refuse to let his sermons be used to do so, regardless of who is involved,” said the [BGEA’s] statement.
(It’s true. Billy Graham didn’t criticize presidents publicly. He preferred to cozy up to them in the White House so they could trash Jewish people in private.)
Evangelicals for Harris has responded with a statement saying they won’t be silenced. The clips they use in their ads are allowed under “fair use” protections, they say, explaining why in great detail.
In short, EFH’s use of the short segments of Billy Graham’s speech is legal, fully appropriate, and well within our rights. EFH will not be removing the “Keep Clear” advertisement in response to your demand. The advertisement is a transformative, noncommercial use of less than two percent of a widely disseminated video, aimed at a market that BGEA was prohibited from targeting. Thus, use of this footage qualifies for the protections of the fair use doctrine…
On X/Twitter, the group was even looser with its pushback:
In response to our first ads, Franklin Graham went on a conservative media tour calling us names and telling Christian audiences to ignore the Scripture and Donald Trump’s own words in our ads. When that failed and tens of millions of Christian voters not only listened to but shared our ads, Franklin Graham turned to a page in the Trump playbook and is trying to silence us with threats of a long and costly court process.
Franklin is scared of our ads because we do not tell people what to do or think. We merely hold Trump’s own words up to the light of Scripture, the necessity of repentance, and Biblical warnings against leaders exactly like Trump.
The fact that BGEA hasn’t actually filed a lawsuit—only threatened to do so—tells you how strong the Evangelicals for Harris case is. If Franklin Graham thought he could shut them up, he would’ve done it by now. Instead, he’s about to learn that he just amplified their cause.
The irony of the legal threats is that the message isn’t really being used to criticize anybody. They’re highlighting the differences between the Christianity that Graham publicly espoused and the rejection of it by white evangelicals’ candidate of choice. That should be considered a win for the idea of Christian values and Graham’s legacy! But because Graham’s words are being used to take down Trump, the BGEA hates it.
They’d rather see Trump win than have Billy Graham’s message get resurrected.
There’s something deeply funny about a Christian ministry attacking another group for spreading the ministry’s message.
But this is why Evangelicals for Harris deserves support. They’re giving white evangelicals permission to do what so many of them know is the right, moral, and Christian thing to do: vote for a Democrat.
White evangelicals have been fed a steady diet of Trump propaganda for years, often from many of their own pastors. They are told they cannot be faithful Christians and vote for Democrats. They are told that the Republican Party, regardless of its flaws, is anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ and great on other social issues, while ignoring the reality that those GOP policies have led to more suffering (and, ironically, more abortions).
Evangelicals for Harris doesn’t support all the Democrats’ policies, and in some cases, many members strongly oppose them. (Guess what? Join the club.) What sets them apart, though, is that they refuse to let Trump destroy our democracy because he promises to appoint Federalist Society judges to the bench. They know that the doomsday scenarios about a Democratic administration going after churches are bullshit. They cherish religious liberty for everyone, not just members of their own tribe. And when there are only two viable candidates on the ballot, and one of them is a proven dumpster fire, every person who cares about a particular cause knows it’s perfectly valid to say one option is better while working to advance the change you want to see.
If you believe that treating others compassionately, and working to help the “least of these,” and bringing civility and decency to the public square, and centering your faith around forgiveness rather than hatred is what Jesus wants, then there’s no discrepancy between the faith and politics of Evangelicals for Harris.
If anything, the group is too kind to Billy Graham. He was, as I mentioned, antisemitic. He opposed LGBTQ rights. He was ambiguous when it came to racism.
(To his credit, he rightly called out the unholy alliance between religious fundamentalists and political conservatives in a 1981 magazine profile when he said, “it would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”)
No one is arguing that Evangelicals for Harris will make or break the race. No single group will. However if they can peel off some of those ambivalent Christians who might feel pressured to vote for Trump even though they don’t really want to—and there are many Christians under that umbrella—it could make a difference in a close election. It would be a hell of a lot easier to get some of those white evangelicals to vote for Harris (when their hearts are already there) than spending energy trying to convert hard-core Republicans, third party voters, or people who are generally apathetic about politics.
All the more reason to support their cause even if their reasoning doesn’t align with your own.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
If no one else has said it, I will: It isn't slander or libel IF ITS TRUE. To me, it looks as though Evangelicals For Harris is taking a page out of The Lincoln Project playbook, simply quoting the desired sources verbatim, with little other comment, and allowing the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
To me, it looks to be potentially damned effective. I'll be curious to see what evangelicals think.
Nothing ever demonstrated the disconnect between religion and morality quite like the evangelicals pledging their unconditional love for the most corrupt, incompetent and grotesquely immoral President in our history. They were foolish enough to believe Trump would give them a role in government, and he played them for the fools they are.