The Rev. Samuel Wynn admired Billy Graham and his evangelistic association for decades, joining its spiritual crusades and urging fellow Christians to do the same. But no more.
“I will never again support anything by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,” said Wynn, the superintendent of a United Methodist Church district in Fayetteville, N.C.
The source of Wynn’s ire: The BGEA’s recent removal of language on its website calling Mormonism a “cult.”
The scrubbing followed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's pilgrimage to Billy Graham’s mountaintop home in Montreat, N.C. After the Oct. 11 meeting, Graham pledged to “do all I can to help” Romney, according to a campaign aide.
The BGEA said it cut the “cult” language “because we do not wish to participate in a theological debate about something that has become politicized during this campaign.”
But Wynn and other conservative Christians accuse Graham of putting partisanship above piety and risking Christian souls to help Romney, a Mormon, win the White House.
“My question to Billy Graham is, What’s more important for the kingdom of God: politics or the message of Jesus Christ?” said Wynn.
Evangelicals berating Billy Graham is like Catholics dissing the pope. Through his globe-trotting crusades and passionate preaching, the nearly 94-year-old evangelist has converted countless Christians and almost single-handedly ushered evangelicalism into the modern age.
But when “the greatest proclaimer of the gospel in the last century,” as one Southern Baptist called Graham, embraced Mormonism last week, he confirmed conservative evangelicals’ worst fears about the 2012 election: That Romney’s rise would lift his Mormon church to cultural prominence and acceptance within mainstream Christianity.
Howell Scott, senior pastor Bethel Baptist Church in Alamogordo, N.M., said the BGEA’s declassification of Mormonism as a cult “will have disastrous unintended consequences.”
“The most immediate consequence will be the acceptance and approval of Mormonism as a legitimate Christian 'denomination' or faith group,” Scott wrote on his blog last week. “The blurring will only increase if Mitt Romney is elected president.”
Most evangelicals do not consider Mormons Christian because Latter-day Saints revere Joseph Smith as a prophet, consider the Book of Mormon on par with the Bible and conceive of the Christian Trinity as three separate gods. Mormons acknowledge those differences but insist they are Christians.
Graham has been accused of crossing sectarian lines before, said Bill Leonard, a professor of church history at Wake Forest School of Divinity in North Carolina. The evangelist irked fundamentalists decades ago by inviting mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics to join him on stage during his crusades.
But Graham’s implicit acceptance of Mormonism last week came on the heels of a much-hyped study showing that Protestants are losing ground in the United States and amid a presidential campaign that includes — for the first time in history — a GOP ticket without a Protestant.
“There’s a sense that Protestants are beleaguered right now,” said Leonard, “and in another four years may be even more so.”
Leonard and other experts suspect that Billy Graham's son, Franklin, who is also the BGEA’s president and CEO, was behind the move to declassify Mormonism as a cult. The younger Graham is a more eager culture warrior, while Billy Graham has expressed regret for his past partisanship.
Just this week, Franklin Graham published an editorial entitled “Can An Evangelical Christian Vote for a Mormon?” The answer was an enthusiastic yes.
Several conservative Christian bloggers, including Scott, note that the BGEA, Franklin Graham and his Christian aid group, Samaritan’s Purse, are all longtime clients of public relations executive Mark DeMoss, a Romney campaign adviser.
DeMoss said he knew nothing about removing the “cult” language until he read media stories last week. In fact, DeMoss said, for the last six years — since Romney’s first White House run — he has urged evangelicals to forget about candidates' theology and focus on their values.
“I am not advising anyone about how they discuss or treat theological differences in a political context,” DeMoss said, “and there is no evidence I have done so with Franklin Graham or his father.”
The BGEA did not respond to a request for comment.
In a recent article in Christianity Today, a magazine founded by Billy Graham, several evangelical leaders supported the BGEA’s cult declassification.
“One very good thing about the Romney candidacy is that it is causing both evangelicals and Mormons to clarify terminology in civil dialogue — as among friends,” Jerry Root, director of an evangelism institute at Wheaton College in Illinois, told the magazine. Other evangelicals quoted in the article disagreed with the decision.
In the end, the Grahams’ attempts to ease evangelical consciences about voting for a Mormon may backfire.
Bart Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, said he had been prepared to vote for Romney — until last week.
“The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association probably cost Mitt Romney my November ballot when it stopped calling Mormonism a cult explicitly because of this election,” Barber wrote on his blog.
“For the sake of my congregation, when Billy Graham is muddying the waters of the gospel, I have an obligation to provide clarity,” Barber continued.
“For the sake of Mormons in my community who need to know of their need for the gospel of Jesus Christ and who are being reassured in their damnable heresy by none less than Billy Graham,” Barber said, “I have an obligation to provide clarity.”
This is a tough one because I agree with the evaluation of Mormonism as a cult. In fact I believe it is one of the most dangerous cults out there because it tries so hard to appear a mainline orthdox christian denomination. It is anything but that. There are many more doctrines of Mormonism that are totally unbiblical and heretical.
I also believe we are not electing the next pope, but the best man for a secular, governmental position. I believe there are certain Roman Catholic doctrines that are heretical, but if a Roman Catholic were running against President Obama I would vote for him in a heartbeat. This country is on the verge of a takeover by the forces of darkness, ready to lose our sovereignty to the United Nations. I know, hand over the tin hat. Oh well, I’m willing to accept it because of our dire situation. The new testament teaches that we pray for peace in our country in order that we might spread the gospel of the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ, His burial and resurrection for us. Maybe if things get worse it may further that goal more than comfort. It certainly has in China.
Still, I wish that Mr Graham would have left it alone and allowed God to work it out while leaving in place the warning against Mormonism, but I understand his urgency about what may come upon us with another four years with Barack Obama.
Politics over Gospel truth.
Conservatives blasted and berated Obama over Rev. Wright and Obama’s black liberation theology but Romney’s 30 year service and leadership with a white supremacist religious org is ok? (White first until 1978)
The hypocrisy in that is outstanding.
Even a Muslim probably has about as much theological similarities to a Christian as Mormonism if you line up secondary beliefs.
It amazes me how ideologues can swallow camels while straining gnats.
I’m not leveling these observations at you Dennis, I don’t know you. This is just my own thoughts about the issue.
No problem Eric, I am much less sure about my opinions on politics than on faith. I agree with you, that there is much hypocrisy in both camps. I used to spend much more time worrying and fretting about politics, and still believe that we should act on our convictions, but I have re-prioritized my time to much more Bible study and thinking on those things and my life has been blessed by God for it. I am grateful that God is in control of it all, and also grateful for your comments, Eric. I hope I get to meet you one of these days.
If you consider traditional Christianity as defined by Augustine and the church fathers, then what Billy Graham preached is also a cult. Graham preached against evolution, which the LDS church accepts, and preached a literal interpretation of the Bible which is radically different from the traditional church fathers.
So who’s right and who’s wrong? Nobody really get’s their theology right, not even the church fathers. Maybe it’s better to quit pointing fingers at everybody we think is wrong and spur each other on in faith? I quote Paul at this point: (Phil 3:15-16)
15 All of us who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.
16 Only let us live up to what we have already attained.
(NIV)
Dennis, I hear ya, it’s a wrestle and we all have to find our own way in it all. I look forward to meeting as well, I apprecite your invovlement here.
Bruce,
I think getting stuff right is part of the benefit of dialouge and even debate. I definately think getting personhood right is important, especially in matters of race. I would hope that we all would work towards getting things right as a society. It’s what the civil rights movement was about and it’s at the core of many other issues. I would never choose to base my inactivity or lack of voice on a matter simply because people have gotten such and such wrong. This is true in matters of science, social matters and even faith. In my opinion and that is what I am trying to live up to.
I believe somethings are wrong.
I disagree in matters of faith. To be right or wrong is an intrinsic part of rational thinking and of science. Certainly science can advise religion, but in the end, religion is about knowing God, not about being right or wrong. It’s an entirely different sphere of knowledge.
Right and wrong used to be the standard way of thinking until the age of relativism. Right and wrong certainly have no place in the darwinian way of thinking. As higher animals here by chance you have no standard whatsoever in judging me as to right and wrong. If we are a cosmic accident, surviving by being the fittest, murder would no doubt make sense from time to time, whose to judge, just kill them too!
Sorry to play devil’s advocate here but God in His Word set the standard for right and wrong. I’ve never heard of the ten suggestions, but I do know about the ten commandments. Those are about right and wrong. Understanding the Scriptures overwhelms the unbeliever with a sense of judgement. Knowing the God of the Bible is impossible without understanding my own sin and inability to please God with my “religion”. I hate the word religion and have never considered myself as “religious”. I love God, and am forever grateful for Jesus substitutionary death for me. I haven’t read much of the “fathers” writings and don’t believe I realIy need to. The more time passes, the more light God has given to faithful students and teachers of the Bible. I appreciate the sacrifices the early Christians went to in order to preserve the Scriptures and stand for God as best they could, but my understanding of the Bible comes from my own study, guided by the Holy Spirit, and listening to men of faith who believe in it’s truth.
I also believe in the message that Billy Graham preached, and I’ve have to be shown where the church fathers didn’t believe that same core message. It’s the same one the apostles Peter and Paul preached, and if they didn’t believe that then they weren’t any fathers I’d want to listen to. Jude called it the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and to contend for it. If there’s nothing to know for sure then there’s nothing to contend for! In the Phillipians passage you quoted Paul explained his religious pedigree in verses 1-6 and in verses 7-11 counts all that effort at knowing God as dung that he might gain the righeousness that is in Christ by faith alone. That is the idea he was presenting as to God’s revealing the truth of it to someone’s conscience.
I was a Mormon elder for more than 40 years before I decided to fully resign from Mormonism in 2013, and have my name removed from all church records. During that time I was mainly a missionary, and came to realize, in 2000, what I should have realized in 1970, when I joined the Mormon cult; that the LDS Church is not, as was never, Christian. The proof that Mormonism does not derive from Biblical New Testament Christianity lies in the church’s own theological doctrines and the written texts that prove them. The Mormon Church knows that their investigators (prospective Mormons) would never accept the basic theology of Mormonism established in 1844, in Nauvoo, Illinois, by Joseph Smith in his “King Follett Discourse,” and which was popularized in the late 1890’s by Mormon Prophet Lorenzo Snow’s couplet, “As man is god once was, and as god is, man may become.” The teachings in the King Follett Discourse were placed in the book, “Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” so that they could say that the “King Follett Discourse” was no longer canonized LDS scripture. But the essentials of the King Follett Discourse,” that the Mormon father god was once a mortal man who lived on an earth like planet earth, and changed, and changed, and changed during his mortal life to follow all of Mormonism’s commandments, and died, was resurrected, and attained Mormon exaltation to be made a god, with a capital G; these essentials had to be taught to the Melchizedek of the Mormon Church. So they were published in a 1984 Melchizedek Priesthood Study Guide lesson, entitled “Man May Become Like God.” The 1984 Study Guide was entitled, “Search These Commandments.” Mormon Prophet Gordon B. Hinckley was the counselor under Mormon Prophet Spencer W. Kimball who supervised the writing of the 1984 Study Guide.
You see, the 60,000+ full-time Mormon missionaries tell their investigators that the “Book of Mormon” contains the fullness of Mormon doctrine and that the Church operates under the theology contained in the Book of Mormon, but the fictional Book of Mormon is basically Trinitarian and contains a theology that is vermy much like protestant Methodism, such as one God, and that the one God has no beginning and no end, and that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin. The real Mormon theology is something that Christian investigators would never accept. If the missionaries taught that to them, their investigators would ask them to leave and never come back.
The BGEA Website and Franklin Graham should realize that Mormonism is not Christian, but pagan polytheism with a facade of lies. Mitt Romney was a Mormon bishop and a stake president. He accepted, what is called, lying for the Lord a long time ago, and that;s what he did when he spoke to Billy Graham and his son Franklin about removing Mormonism from the list of cults. I am only speaking the truth,as Jesus and the Apostle Paul would have wanted me to do.