Dear Billy: You saved your soul and ruined Christianity. Pray for us.

By Kay Campbell

Oh Billy. You are haunting my dreams. During these days after your death – they just buried your body — while you in some form are now returned to the Eternal, everyone here in America is talking about you. The wave of articles and tweets about you has now, predictably, moved on from the first tear-drenched ululations of hagiography to the bitter yelps of condemnation.

Me? I’m just sad.

You could have been great for Christianity, you know. You could’ve been a prophet. But you flubbed it.

You tried: It’s cool that in 1953 you tore down the barriers between whites and blacks at your crusades. It’s cool that you kept your own income relatively modest and transparent (gosh, I wish your boy Franklin had learned that lesson).

But then you lost your way in the lure of publicity and the intoxication with powerful, rich men. You started mistaking the whisper of your own prejudices for the urgings of God.

Everyone knows now that you were anti-Catholic (especially if one ran for president), loved death (to the Communists in Vietnam), hated gays (“a perversity that leads to hell,” you thundered), feared the drive for true Civil Rights for African-Americans, and sneered at Jews. It’s such an ugly underside to your white-maned, square-jawed handsomeness. What’s worse: It’s the main likeness of you that your children seem to emulate.

Alas! All that embarrassing human-ness looks so tawdry in the glow of saintliness that came to be projected on you. Like someone switching on the lights at a nightclub – everything seems faded and cheap. Many Americans, you see, keep hoping that some tall white guy who is powerful and very sure of himself can save them. They hoped you could.

Salvation – you see? That’s what people crave, and that’s what you offered. Such a simple path: Say these magic words! Jesus will save you!

You tried, of course, with your network, to get anyone who committed their life to God connected with a local church. For many, it stuck, and some of the millions who came to your crusades did find an entry into a life of peace and service to others.

That’s cool. As we know from the Bible, God can use even a donkey to do Heavenly work.

But not even God has been able to save Christianity — particularly the American Evangelical form that has now infected South America, Asia, and Africa – from your heresy. Oh Billy – we know you read the Bible. But how could you have come to the conclusion that the main point of a religion is to save one measly human life? God’s vision is so much bigger than that!

Here’s the thing, Billy: The message of Jesus wasn’t about how people save their own sorry hides. The whole point, you see, isn’t to save oneself – God’s addicted to forgiveness the way your Franklin is addicted to Islamophobia. The message of Jesus is about saving neighbors – really saving them now, not later — from hunger, pain, injustice, loneliness, anger. The Gospel is an invitation for mere mortals to work with God Almighty to build God’s kingdom “on Earth, as it is in Heaven,” as Jesus put it in the prayer that I’m pretty sure you and I both believe actually originated with The Man Himself.

You probably know that now, since – if Heaven is turning out to be as you imagined it — you’re getting to meet all kinds of translated humans. By now you’ve have time to see that so many that you’d consigned to Hell have some of the best seats: Gandhi, that gay man you knew as a kid, that atheist you once talked with, the lesbian couple who could finally get married – all collected back into the love of God along with the likes of you.

Surprise!

I expect you can laugh about it now. Or weep. Either way, while you frolic in Eternity, we’re still stuck here with the rubble of the Christianity you helped to destroy and a world in despair.

Please pray for us!