Of God and greenbacks

[calabi-yau]

Articles like these give me the willies.

Of God and greenbacks

When a Billy Graham Crusade comes to town, you don't just need faith in your heart when you attend, you also need a full wallet. Tim Adams joins the flock in Kansas City and meets the son destined to inherit the Graham family business

Sunday October 17, 2004
The Observer

Here they come. They have been called, but the movement is hardly noticeable at first. People shuffling along rows of seats, excuse me, ma'am, excuse me, sir, in ones and twos. Married couples in matching shirts holding hands. Now, some groups of giggling teenage girls, wondering if they should, smoothing their hair, checking their bags. Young men holding Bibles. Enormous people in outsize shorts, following their bellies, manoeuvring gargantuan backsides through gaps in the crowd, gripping half-gallons of Coke. People with sticks, on the arms of carers, watching every step. A silent army descending solemnly in bright white Reeboks and Nikes.

Soon the first few make it down on to the magic green of the floodlit grass of Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Kansas City Chiefs. They are drawn to the centre, the few joining with others, the luminous turf steadily covered. At either end of the stadium - a great concrete oval of orange plastic seating soaring up to the black night sky - on enormous flat screens a vast face is watching their progress, unmoving.

It is a face that demands to be on a stamp, or the back of a dollar bill, or carved into rock: the slightly hook nose, the firm jaw, the eyes darting under heavy brows, the silver hair swept back just so. It is a face that has been on screens just like these, framed by advertisements for Budweiser and Pizza Hut and First National Bank, all over the world. A face that created this very spectacle 60 years ago, has seen it unfold inevitably a thousand times and never tired of it. Occasionally, a hand, shaking now a little with Parkinson's and age, moves up to those huge projected eyes, as if maybe ( who knows? ) to stop a tear in its tracks.

This is the third night of Billy Graham's crusade to Kansas City, to the heart of the heart of America, and the numbers of the saved are slowly growing. Evangelists normally love lightning - apocalyptic forks of it appear on the covers of several of Graham's million-selling books, including Storm Warning and Approaching Hoofbeats - but on the first night of this mission, violent thunder had kept the attendance down to a handful hunkered under stadium overhangs in polythene capes. 'Hell,' as Robert Frost once observed, 'is a half filled auditorium.'

Tonight, though, the banked seats are full and Graham can mould that initial adversity, the heavenly downpour, into his sermon, just as he can talk of the great natural disasters that have spared him this year: how he and his family endured at their home in North Carolina hurricanes Ivan and Jean; how 169 bridges were swept away from their neighbouring valleys; how a huge mudslide passed within 12 feet of their timber house; how they lost their generator and lived in darkness for several days, Graham himself bedbound recovering from a broken pelvis. And so on. Until it is hard not to believe, as bright-eyed people have been telling me all evening, that it is a miracle the 'America's pastor' is here at all.

That opening night was the first time Graham had preached to an audience all year. 'I feel,' he said, his rich voice cracking a little, ever the showman, 'like a teenager. Like I'm starting over.'

He approaches the microphone these days, at 85, on a Zimmer frame, helped by his son. He pauses halfway through his text, a loose aggregation of good ol' boy anecdote and scaremongering scripture, to take a seat. As he watches the people come on down to be born again, he leans forward every now and then to remind them of the urgency of the moment, the lateness of the hour. And all the time he speaks, as his volunteer tellers take the names of those baseball-capped souls who will, no doubt, be joining him in paradise, you are invited to think of the numbers whose names have been entered in this way before, of all the statistics that stack up behind him.

America loves zeroes and, if nothing else, Billy Graham provides the reassurance of noughts, the comforting economies of scale. This is his 435th Crusade; he has preached live to 210 million people in 185 countries; more than any man who ever lived. He has provided guidance for almost every American President since Truman. He was Nixon's close confidant, Reagan's devout ally. He stood at George Bush senior's side, Bible in hand, when the President launched Operation Desert Storm. He helped George W Bush through his drinking problems. He has more appearances on Time magazine's annual list of the 10 most admired people in the world - 46 - than anyone else.

Though these facts come thick and fast, it is another of the evening's big numbers that gives me particular pause. Each night in Kansas City, the Crusade proceedings are opened with a brisk bit of business. This four-day event will cost, we are told, $4.8 million. This is to be raised by donations. 'Pull the envelope out of your programme, pay by credit card, write a cheque or simply put cash in it,' says one of Billy's sharp-suited warm-up men. 'Better still, just give us your wallet,' he suggests, before adding, 'I'm kidding about that last one.'

The faithful may have only to walk out on to a football field to ensure ever lasting life, but, it seems, salvation does not come cheap. As the lines of people file down I do a quick calculation. Each saved soul is currently coming in at about $750 a pop.

Then, as soon as the God-fearing men and women of Kansas are assembled, Billy Graham gets up, his work complete. Tomorrow, he says, he'll talk about 'the Day of Judgment, and about the great tribulation of the end times when some will be taken up to heaven and many will be left behind'. 'It should,' as Graham's sidekick of 50 years, Cliff Barrow, points out, 'be a very enjoyable afternoon. Bring your friends!'

In essayist Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter With Kansas? (published here as What's the Matter with America?) , he explores the reasons why the American heartland and, particularly, his home city, has turned so resolutely to God and the right. Historically, Kansas is a blue-collar state, the most 'normal' place in America, where Superman grew up and where Dorothy yearned to return. These days, conservative commentators like to call Kansas City the capital of 'red America', the great swath of the country that has come out in recent elections for Republicans and shows up crimson on electoral maps. It is, for them, a 'region of humility, guilelessness, and, above all, of stout yeoman righteousness ' as compared to the blue of the coastal conurbations, where people are 'unobservant, liberal-minded, relativistic'.

David Brooks, writing approvingly in the Atlantic Monthly , described the population of red America as 'perfectly happy to be slightly overweight and a little underpaid'. Ann Coulter, the author of the number one bestseller How to talk to a Liberal (If you must), calls Kansas City her 'favourite place in the world ... they're Americans, they are great, they are rooting for America. I mean, there is so much common sense!' Billy Graham shares this feeling: 'You are the best people in America!' he repeatedly tells his heartland audience, by which he means, really, you are the best people in the world.

'Kansas,' Thomas Frank argues, 'may be the land of averageness, but it is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness.' The Kansas state-school board has cleansed the curriculum of the necessity of teaching evolution. Public events, including the Billy Graham Crusades, are picketed by people with banners proclaiming that God Hates f*gs. Pro-life spectaculars are routine. There is something very appropriate about the fact that Kansas City's biggest export is Hallmark Cards, flogging overpriced platitudes to the world (the Hall family, who own the company, are the Republicans' biggest donors in the state).

In this climate, Graham's brand of commercial self-righteousness plays perfectly. ('God,' as Frank says, 'meets Mammon'). The evangelist, I am repeatedly told, is the 'real deal', progenitor of any number of similar Christian enterprises, but the original and still the best. He offers a version of Christianity which is shaped to fit American capitalism and individualism and, moreover, which supports a traditional, parochial American way of life and American power in the world.

He is not so much a preacher as a broker offering stock options in God's corporate plan. Unlike most pastors, he does not have to bury the dead, perform weddings or organise bring and buy sales. 'I would love to see you all for a cup of tea,' he says to those who come forward, 'but we will have plenty of time for that in heaven.'

What he - and the rest of his far more wacko imitators - offers to the heartland is certainty and safety, as well as a sense of affirmation of their morals. This sense of shared value is more a style than a rigorous programme. Frank argues that of all the divides in America, the key one is between the perceived authenticity of tradition-minded red America and its godless liberal nemesis. 'While liberals commit endless acts of hubris, sucking down lattes, driving European cars, trying to reform the world, the humble people of the red states go about their unpretentious business, eating down-home foods, whistling while they work and knowing they are secure under the watch of George W Bush, a man they love as one of their own.'

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[calabi-yau]

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The great lie of this position, Frank argues, is that Bush has done more to undermine those traditional American values, by pandering to vast corporations, by slashing the tax burden of the rich, by rushing America to war, than almost any President in history. In this, though, Bush is convinced, he has God (and Billy Graham) on his side. Rarely has it been more straightforward for a rich man to feel eligible for a celestial upgrade than in Bush's America.

At 85, Billy Graham is planning just two more Crusades, one in Los Angeles next month and one in New York next year. Then he will see how he feels and probably hand all of the work over to his son, Franklin. This process of the succession has already begun. Franklin is 'CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association', which has just moved into a new $13m headquarters in North Carolina (and which has an annual turnover, used mainly to run its Crusades, of $109m). He draws a 'modest' salary of around $200,000 (his father, reluctantly, takes a little more) plus the use of the corporate plane, which he flies across the globe. He provided the blessing at the inauguration of Bush, just as his father had blessed Bush's father.

In a hotel room in Kansas City, I ask Franklin Graham if he feels ready to take on his father's work.

'Well,' he says, in his quiet, measured voice, 'nobody can take his place in the world. But I have already done 100 Crusades of my own.' He is off to Nova Scotia in a couple of weeks, then Chile, and so on.

Does he share his father's love of the heartland?

'People can come and visit New York,' he says. 'But that is not America. Los Angeles is not America. These small places are America: a good work ethic, where people will take care of themselves. And where they live by Christian values.'

I wonder if he sees that divide in political terms?

'The difference between the political system in this country and many others is that religion is a big part of our life. The media in our country are mostly liberal and they have their ideas. But we have ours.'

Franklin Graham became notorious in the first Gulf War by sending thousands of GIs biblical tracts in Arabic, to spread the word among their Saudi hosts. General Norman Schwarzkopf, trying to keep peace with Riyadh, was outraged. Does he regret that?

'Here's my feeling,' he says. 'Saudi Arabia asks the United States to come in. But while the Saudis were willing for the blood of American soldiers to be spilled to save their oil fields, US army chaplains were asked to take the cross off their uniforms. I thought that was wrong. The Saudis gave every American soldier material to introduce them to Islam, and I thought we had every right to tell the Saudis what we believe.'

Since the inauguration, he says, he has maintained a very close relationship with the current President.

'I'm at the White House next week to do a Bible study for the President's staff,' he says. 'I speak to the President's advisers on issues all the time.'

Graham has been most involved with formulating the Bush administration's policy on HIV/Aids. It was he who helped to secure the surprise $15 billion earmarked to address the disease worldwide and it was he who helped to shape a policy which favours the preaching of sexual abstinence over the distribution of condoms.

'We [should] obey God and his laws,' he says in this regard. 'God has given sex to be used between a man and a woman in marriage, not between two women, not between two men. [If you deviate] sooner or later it is going to destroy your health. It could end your life.' (To protect himself from such temptations of the flesh, like every other man in the Billy Graham organisation, he never allows himself to be alone in a room with a woman other than his wife, Jane Austin, whom he married soon after he was 'born again'.)

It is not clear quite how much advice Franklin Graham offers to the White House on foreign policy, though he says he has helped to shape thinking on Sudan, which he has visited on Crusades. After 9/11, he infamously denounced Islam as 'an evil and wicked religion'. I wonder if he stands by that?

'It is certainly a very violent religion,' he says. 'You hear the calls from the mullahs every day on the internet. The vast majority are calling for the death of Jews, the killing of Christians. I have not heard one Anglican or one Baptist say we should kill Muslims.'

Does he therefore see the current conflict as a struggle between good and evil as his President appears to?

'We are in a Third World War. Tony Blair understands that. George Bush understands that. It is a global fight against Islamic fundamentalism.'

And do such events, in his opinion, signify the imminent approach of a Judgment Day?

'Certainly. I think Judgment Day is approaching fast. I think there are major prophecies that have been fulfilled. The rebirth of Israel. All of this was foretold. The great tribulation will come then. And this world will be judged for rejecting Jesus Christ. In America now, you cannot mention His name on television, you cannot teach the Bible in school, but you can talk of Muhammad all you want. Why is that? Because the great tribulation is coming. The true followers of Jesus will be taken up and the remainder left behind.

Does he feel ready for Judgment Day?

Franklin Graham flashes a quiet smile, as if the answer were self-evident.

There is a measure by which Americans can determine how close we are to the Last Days. They can just log on to the RaptureReady website which monitors the world's press and comes up with a daily 'rapture index'. On the final day of Graham's Crusade, appropriately enough, this index is at an annual high of 155, owing to a couple of reported earthquakes. On the bus to Arrowhead Stadium, along a flat road on which Baptist churches stand side by side with truckstop lap-dancing bars, this sense of impending doom is almost palpable. Particularly for the one man who has turned up with a Kerry/Edwards badge on his coat.

'The one thing that Kerry hasn't shown is how he is going to secure America,' the man is told, when he sits down. 'He keeps getting asked, but he doesn't know. He's a flip-flopper.'

'At least,' another says, with some certainty, 'Bush doesn't lie to us.'

'How can you tell when a liberal is lying?' another wonders, by way of a joke. 'When he opens his mouth.'

The man with the badge points quietly to the President's failures in Iraq.

'There's more people get killed every day on the freeway than soldiers getting killed in Iraq.'

He mentions the trillions of dollars racked up in budget deficit.

'You have got to keep a positive approach to life. If you don't, you are going to miss so much about America.'

The chief defender of the President's record in this one-sided debate is a man wearing a jacket emblazoned with the logo of the Smiling Bus Chapel, of which he is the proprietor. The Smiling Bus Chapel, he explains, will tour from Minnesota to Texas, saving souls at Greyhound stations and truckstops. It will have an altar and pews on board, as well as 'satellite communications'.

'I want American people in heaven,' he explains of his mission. 'The Lord told me to make it easy for people. Billy Graham started all of this, by bringing God out of the church. I make it even easier by coming to them. I tell them they don't have to go to church, they don't have to do any of that. They have to make a commitment in their hearts on my bus.'

And do they? I ask

'Well,' he explains, 'the bus is not licensed yet.'

Shouldn't salvation be a bit more tricky than getting on a bus? I wonder.

But by now, the conversation has moved on to the relative merits of Jesus Christ Superstar against The Passion of the Christ. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is the work of the devil apparently (and not just its melodies); the television networks which insist on broadcasting it should be shut down with immediate effect. Mel Gibson's epic, meanwhile, is the Word of God, or as close as we are ever likely to come to it. On this, there is agreement from Republicans and Democrats alike.

At the Arrowhead Stadium, after the usual preamble about the shortfall in contributions and a plea to stump up the remaining $1.8m ('We're not leaving until we have it'), Graham launches, as promised into his apocalyptic stride. He is not going to talk politics, he says, it is not appropriate at election time. 'Still,' he suggests with a smile, 'I have my views. I think you can guess 'em.' Fifty thousand Kansans can.

And, really, politics is what he does talk. In between anecdotes about down- home folks from Texas, he lists the world's horrors, the things all right- thinking Kansans should fear. The papers are full of crime, killing and rape. There are hurricanes in Florida; there are locusts in West Africa. In Haiti, apparently, they are 'eating each other'. All these are signs, signs that the Second Coming is upon us, that the End Times are approaching. And chief among these celestial signals 'is what is happening in the Middle East ...'

Graham hardly needs to elaborate further, before allowing the stadium to fall silent and offer his audience their solution. 'The choice is yours,' he says.

And right on cue, here they come again. Slowly filing down the aisles. Ready to join their fellow Americans in eternal life.

All Americans believe in God -
True or false?

Mostly true. 64% of Americans believe in God, 17% believe but sometimes have doubts, 4% believe only part of the time; only 15% of the population are atheists. All of the believers are convinced to a greater or lesser extent that America has a special place in God's plan, with around 25% believing that it is God's chosen country - offering as evidence the US's 'superior' democracy and fabulous wealth.

[karpomrx]

This is the stuff of America....this is the myth of a shared past which never existed,of a bright future which is never quite defined.
The mythology has much more power than any pointy-headed liberal and his "facts", running the gamut from the welfare mother in a Cadillac to the evil ones giving away condoms to teen-agers.
It denies the danger of environmental degradation, or turns the disasters into promos of fear and salvation.
Elmer Gantry is in the White House, though he does lack the ethics of the original.In the novel, Gantry never stooped to murder.

[POA]

"MacJesus-Over 210 Million Dis-served."

[POA]

'People can come and visit New York,' he says. 'But that is not America. Los Angeles is not America.

Perhaps someone will rectify this clearly horrible mistake.