A visit to the ministry’s website (www.samaritanspurse.org) reveals the impressive range and scope of its efforts to bring relief and support for people in need around the world. In the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis in Central America, Turkey, India, Indonesia, and the U.S. Gulf Coast, Samaritan’s Purse has airlifted emergency supplies such as food, blankets, and temporary shelters, then followed up by building thousands of durable one-room homes—a project so impressive that the U.S. government AID program funneled money through the organization to build additional houses. In other initiatives, the ministry has built an orphanage in Moldova; set up a big water-filtering project in Ethiopia; helped establish a silk-production industry in Laos by distributing 600,000 mulberry saplings (to provide food for silkworms) to help families increase their income; delivered planeloads of food, medicine, and supplies to homeless people in Rwanda and to refugees in Afghanistan; and dispatched hundreds of medical professionals to different parts of the world as volunteers under its medical arm, World Medical Mission. In 2012, the organization sent disaster relief units and hundreds of volunteers to help survivors of Hurricane Sandy.
Greg Laurie, a noted California evangelist and pastor and a member of the Samaritan’s Purse board, observed that Franklin “will go into virtually impossible situations and get something done. He won’t take no for an answer.”
For several years Samaritan’s Purse has been heavily involved in Sudan in response to pleas from southern Sudanese Christians who had suffered atrocities at the hands of their own countrymen, mostly northern Muslims who have killed nearly two million of them and have tortured and displaced millions more, even selling them into slavery. Flying into areas officially off-limits to international agencies, Samaritan’s Purse pilots delivered emergency supplies that included bags of maize and sorghum seed (staples of the Sudanese diet), basic medical supplies, mosquito-nets dipped in natural insecticide to help ward off malaria, and tools to help refugees reestablish their lives. In 2014 the organization distributed more than 1,500 metric tons of food each month to nearly 90,000 people in refugee camps in the region. Opened in September 1997, the eighty-bed Samaritan’s Purse hospital, staffed primarily by international volunteer medical professionals working for a few weeks at a time, has treated more than 100,000 patients in an area that had been without adequate medical care for more than two decades. The hospital has been bombed repeatedly, killing some personnel. Because of his organization’s work in Sudan, Franklin Graham was asked to testify before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he called on the United States to join with other world powers to bring down what he regarded as “an illegitimate government.”
In February 2002 Franklin took on a significant—and to some, surprising—challenge when to date when Samaritan’s Purse, in cooperation with BGEA and at a cost of $2.3 million, organized “Prescription for Hope,” an international Christian conference on HIV/AIDS that drew more than 900 frontline AIDS workers, church and government leaders, and medical providers from 87 countries to Washington D.C. During the five days of the conference—which featured such speakers as Senators Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and the First Lady of Uganda, Janet Museveni—Franklin called on Christians to show “Christ-like care and compassion for the infected and affected.” This was not simply an attention-grabbing venture. Since 2002, Samaritan’s Purse has worked with AIDS patients and their families in more than forty-two countries. In another bold effort to fight a deadly epidemic, Samaritan’s Purse attracted international acclaim in 2014 when its extensive efforts to combat the Ebola outbreak in Liberia led to its being named, along with a small number of other organizations, as Time magazine’s Person of the Year.
Interestingly, and in contrast to these dramatic, often life-saving efforts, a program that began in 1993 as a heart-warming little venture to brighten a few children’s lives at Christmas time has become Samaritan’s Purse’s largest program, at least from a budgetary standpoint. The program, known as Operation Christmas Child, is simple in its essence. Donors, mostly children from affluent Western countries, pack a shoebox with candy, small toys, school supplies, and perhaps a pair of socks or mittens and send it to Boone along with nine dollars to cover shipping costs. After being checked at large processing centers in Boone and Charlotte to make sure they contain no inappropriate items such as food that might spoil or dangerous or inappropriate toys, the boxes are securely wrapped, then packed with others for eventual distribution to children in countries ravaged by war, poverty, or natural disasters. Imagining the delight in the eyes of a child in Albania or Zimbabwe as she opens her little box has proved irresistible, as has the opportunity to have one’s own children and grandchildren feel some connection with and responsibility for those less fortunate. In the weeks before Christmas 2016, Samaritan’s Purse planes and trucks delivered more than 11.5 million shoeboxes to distribution points in 104 countries. The total cost of Operation Christmas Child for that year topped $281 million, over 54 percent of total expenses for the combined U.S. and Canadian organizations. One might argue that this substantial amount of money could be used to meet more vital needs, but most of it is generated by the program itself and would probably not otherwise be available. Perhaps more importantly, hundreds of thousands of families who might not think of giving money to buy wood stoves or water filters or mulberry saplings will form a bond with an organization that has thought about such things.
Throughout the growth of this ministry Franklin has insisted that his efforts at social amelioration are subordinate to evangelism. “Our goal and our purpose,” he asserted, “is to take an ugly situation and turn it around so we can preach the Lord Jesus Christ—not in a crusade environment or a mass rally, but one on one, in small groups. People will listen out of respect—‘I am interested that you would come all the way from America to my corner of the world. You are here and you helped me. I am interested in who you are and what you believe.’ Our being there in those circumstances generates a sincere interest. We planted over a hundred churches in Kosovo alone.” His obvious success at both kinds of ministry has drawn real admiration from within BGEA, including the admission that “when you think about it, his ministry is really more complete than his father’s . . . and that’s good.” There is also a recognition by some that many contemporary young people are attracted more strongly by a demonstrated commitment to relieve human suffering than by a passionate proclamation of original sin or substitutionary atonement.
One of the fears expressed by and for the generation of Evangelical leaders reaching the end of their careers at the close of the twentieth century was that their successors, having grown up in times of affluence and relative ease and having experienced Evangelicalism as a significant part of the cultural mainstream rather than a marginal movement fighting for respectability, would be too soft, too willing to compromise with “the world,” too willing to water down their message to gain popularity. Ironically, despite his early wildness, Franklin Graham seems not only firmly committed to a quite conservative view of Scripture and Evangelical theology, but also more willing than his father to condemn both sin and sinners in blunt, unyielding terms. In this respect, as one observer noted, he is more like the young Billy Graham than the older one and may even be more like that earlier notable exponent of “muscular Christianity,” Billy Sunday. “I want to confront you in love,” Franklin has said, “But I’m warning you that there’s a hell and there’s a heaven, and your soul lives for eternity. [God] has a standard, and that standard doesn’t change. . . . [I]f you continue this behavior, you may die, and your soul will be separated from God for eternity.”
Franklin certainly says things his father probably would not have said after becoming a national and international figure. He exhorted a 1999 Wheaton College graduation class not to “lower the flag” by being “tolerant of people who live in sin,” and was clearly willing to follow his own admonition. His father surprised many during the Monica Lewinsky scandal by saying
, on NBC’s Today show, “I forgive [President Clinton] . . . because I know the frailty of human nature and I know how hard it is—especially a strong, vigorous young man like he is. . . . He has such a tremendous personality that I think the ladies just go wild over him.” In contrast, Franklin said flatly, “A lie is a sin, and sex outside marriage is a sin. It doesn’t matter if you’re the president of the United States or Franklin Graham or a busboy in a hotel.” He didn’t deny the reality of temptation, but felt it could be avoided by following the same rules that had helped his father avoid scandal for so many years: “I will never be alone with another woman or travel with my secretary alone,” he told a radio interviewer. “I’ll always make sure there are other people with me.” As for Bill Clinton, Franklin said, “For the sake of the country, the best thing he can do is quietly resign. Let Al Gore pardon him and get it off the front pages and into history.”
In the same spirit, Franklin differed with Evangelicals who had given positive reviews to Robert Duvall’s movie The Apostle. Franklin told his Wheaton audience, “When Hollywood portrays the Church of Jesus Christ as immoral, no, don’t you tell me this is a great film. No way. Hollywood portrays a minister of God’s Word as a murderer, a womanizer, a drinker, bringing the level of the pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ down to the level of trash.” On the other hand, Franklin brought Jim Bakker to his father’s home for Sunday dinner the weekend after the disgraced evangelist got out of jail, and he continued to act in a supportive fashion, in keeping with his belief that God not only condemns sin but also forgives it. Bakker, incidentally, had a more favorable view of Duvall’s movie, seeing it as “the story of a man who did a terrible thing, but his heart, like David’s, was toward God. . . . Either we believe in grace or we don’t. So I have to accept the grace in that story.”
Franklin also sounded harder than his father on other “sins of the flesh.” To the consternation of many conservative and abstemious Christians, Billy Graham freely acknowledged that Jesus and his companions drank wine, that the Bible does not command total abstinence, and that he occasionally lifted a glass himself. Franklin, a former drinker, draws a sharper line: “The world says, ‘You want to drink? That’s great. Just be responsible [and] have a designated driver.’ No, it’s not OK. It’s wrong. It’s a sin.” When asked his opinion of American drug policy, he said, “I think that people who sell drugs—I’m not talking about people who use it, but about those who traffic in it—I think they ought to be executed. They are killing and destroying lives. They are no different than Timothy McVeigh. You want to stop drugs? Then [make it clear,] ‘You deal in it, you get caught, you pay with your life, because you are taking lives. You are a murderer, a killer, a destroyer of families.’ I tell you, if you get that tough, you are going to clean up the streets pretty quick.” He readily acknowledged that the American drug war in South America is “crazy” and riddled with corruption, he urged enlargement of treatment programs to help people get free of drugs, and he conceded that execution might be too harsh for lower-level dealers. But, he said, “If we are serious about it, we need to be tough. We have to be a little bit meaner. We are so timid about the death penalty. For people who deal and traffic in drugs, there need to be severe, severe penalties.” To discourage users, he also favored a policy that relies heavily on punishment as a deterrent: “You can cut off demand pretty quickly with laws that make it such a risk that you never, ever want to get caught with drugs. Singapore doesn’t have too much of a drug problem. It’s a great place to live. It’s a wonderful society. It’s clean, it’s beautiful. A beautiful place.”
Franklin’s decisive, sometimes authoritarian opinions and statements may help account for his appeal to a generation grown skeptical of moral relativism. Even those not inclined to share his views may have little quarrel with his call for a more stringent sexual morality and abstention from alcohol and drugs; his approval of harsh penal sanctions obviously resonates widely throughout society, at least among white Americans. But some of his comments on international political issues have been bolder and more controversial than those of his father, who typically tried either to sidestep controversy or to express any criticism he might have of a current administration in circumspect language and muted tone.
In a 1999 interview with Christianity Today writer Wendy Murray Zoba, Franklin said, on the record, that the United States should not have gotten involved when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. “He was just taking back what originally belonged to Iraq. . . . Kuwait is part of Iraq. It is.” Samaritan’s Purse not only provided aid to Iraq after the Gulf War, but also sent young single men into the area, hoping they would marry Christian Iraqi women and remain in the country as missionaries. (In another attempt to use the Gulf War as an opportunity for evangelism, Franklin helped U.S. troops smuggle Arabic-language New Testaments into Saudi Arabia.) Years later, after watching a video of Serbian soldiers brutalizing Bosnians in Sarajevo, Franklin said he would have had them executed. Commenting on atrocities in Sudan, he threw a combination punch, noting that “black brothers in Africa are being annihilated by the Muslims, who are Arabs. . . . But Jesse Jackson is silent. What is that?”
During a festival in Lexington, Kentucky, in October 2000, Franklin stirred the ire of Arab Americans when he reacted to violence in the Middle East by saying, “The Arabs will not be happy until every Jew is dead. They hate the state of Israel. They all hate the Jews. God gave that land to the Jews. The Arabs will never accept that. Why can’t they live in peace?” The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee immediately called on BGEA “to repudiate these shockingly racist comments which condemn each and every Arab as a genocidal bigot and suggest that Palestinians have no rights in their own country because ‘God gave that land to the Jews.’” None of these provocative statements or actions is of a kind one associated with Billy Graham. In fact, in the days immediately following Franklin’s statements about Arabs, the elder Graham issued a statement saying he was “praying for and supporting the efforts among leaders of both sides in the search for peace.”
In a similar vein, Franklin has been more pointed than his father in claiming unique superiority for Christianity over other religions. While Billy never wavered in his effort to proclaim the acceptance of Christ as the only reliable road to salvation, he was clearly troubled by the prospect that people who had never heard the gospel message would be condemned to eternal damnation (see p. 576), and he was often at pains to avoid appearing to be an opponent or critic of other faiths, particularly the major world religions. Franklin seems untroubled by the prospect that his comments might offend some who do not share his convictions. To the familiar, if naive, question as to whether Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists were not all serving the same God that Christians worship, he said, “It’s not the same God. There’s one God and he has a son, Jesus Christ. Friends, there’s no other way.” On another occasion, he said, “It wasn’t Mohammed of Islam who died for the sins of the world. It wasn’t Buddha who died for the sins of this world. . . . It was the Lord Jesus Christ.” And after a trip to India, he marveled at “hundreds of millions of people locked in the darkness of Hinduism. It was an unbelievable eye-opener for me to see how pagan religion blinds and enslaves people. These people were bound by Satan’s power.”
Further, Franklin’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan differed sharply from his father’s irenic observations. Twice, including on the NBC Nightly News, he called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.” Predictably, these words brought a strong response, from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (which failed to get a meeting with Franklin), but also from the president of Stop Hunger, a relief organization. Franklin backtracked slightly, noting the millions of dollars Samaritan’s Purse had poured into Muslim countries and claiming he had been “greatly misunderstood.” Yet in the Wall Street Journal, he observed that “The persecution or elimination of non-Moslems has been a cornerstone of Isl
amic conquest and rule for centuries,” adding that the Qur’an “provides ample evidence that Islam encourages violence in order to win converts and to reach the ultimate goal of an Islamic world.”
This is not to say that Franklin sees no virtue in religions other than Christianity. In discussing President George W. Bush’s controversial “Faith-Based Initiative,” Franklin parted company with Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, both of whom had said that Muslim groups should not be eligible for assistance under the proposed program. “Let’s say that Muslims have a way to get kids off the street after school,” he volunteered. “I may not like the fact that they’re Muslims, but why should they be discriminated against? If they are doing a good job, I say thank God somebody cares enough to [help those kids].”
Franklin has also followed his father’s lead in welcoming virtually all denominations, including Roman Catholics, to participate in his festivals as full partners. Still, he feels bound by conscience and calling always to make it clear that he is a minister of Jesus Christ, not a spokesman for some kind of civil religion guaranteed to offend no one. At a memorial service for the victims of the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999, he asked the 70,000 mourners gathered before him and the millions more watching the live CNN broadcast, “Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? Have you trusted him as your Savior?” Extolling the example of seventeen-year-old Cassie Bernall, whose confession, “Yes, I believe in God,” apparently prompted Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to kill her, making her a born-again martyr and heroine, Graham told his hearers that the only way they could be prepared to meet God should their own lives end suddenly was “to confess our sins, repent of our sins, and ask God for his forgiveness and to receive his son, Jesus Christ, by faith into our hearts and into our lives.”
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