The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American

by Andrew L. Seidel

Franklin Graham, son of and heir to Billy Graham’s evangelical empire, put a face on these statistics less than a month after the numbers were released. In a May 2018 Associated Press interview, Graham said that Donald Trump’s affair with porn star Stormy Daniels and the subsequent hush money was nobody’s business: “That’s for him and his wife to deal with. I think when the country went after President Clinton, the Republicans, that was a great mistake that should never have happened. And I think this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody’s business.”79 But this was a change for Graham. Almost exactly twenty years earlier, he went after President Clinton. In a 1998 Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “Clinton’s Sins Aren’t Private,” Graham wrote, “The God of the Bible says that what one does in private does matter. Mr. Clinton’s months-long extramarital sexual behavior in the Oval Office now concerns him and the rest of the world, not just his immediate family. If he will lie to or mislead his wife and daughter, those with whom he is most intimate, what will prevent him from doing the same to the American public?”80 It turns out that what the biblical god says depends on the point Graham is trying to make. Deep down, the evangelical concern was not over morality, but over being able to claim a divine sanction for whatever was considered moral. This conception of morality and of human rights is dangerous.