Billy Graham was on the wrong side of history The truth concerning the whitewashing of Billy's Graham's past and opposition to the "Civil Rights Movement". | Matthew Avery Sutton | Opinion | The Guardian

"...  In the late 1950s, Graham integrated his revivals and seemed to support the burgeoning civil rights movement. This is the Graham most Americans remember.



But as the movement grew, expanded and became increasingly confrontational, the evangelist’s position changed.



Once leaders like Martin Luther King Jr began practicing civil disobedience and asking for the federal government to guarantee African Americans’ rights, Graham’s support evaporated.



Within days of the publication of King’s famous 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Graham told reporters that the Baptist minister should “put the brakes on a little bit”.



He criticized civil rights activists for focusing on changing laws rather than hearts.



In 1971, Graham published The Jesus Generation, a book on the coming apocalypse. Looking for signs of Jesus’s second coming had become an obsession of Graham’s, as it was for millions of other evangelicals in the mid-20th century.



In the book Graham praised the wisdom of young people who rejected the federal government as a tool for rectifying injustices.



“These young people don’t put much stock in the old slogans of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society,” he said. “They believe that utopia will arrive only when Jesus returns. Thus these young people are on sound Biblical ground.”



For six decades Graham taught Americans that the federal government could not be an instrument of God to bring about justice, not on race matters and not on other significant issues. Although he believed in racial equality, his theology blinded him to what we now know was the best means for achieving that equality.



More recently, the evangelist denied the threat of global warming as well as federal efforts to stymie it..."



Billy Graham was on the wrong side of history | Matthew Avery Sutton | Opinion | The Guardian