Billy Graham remembered

The pastoral insensitivity of the dispute surrounding Graham’s burial beggar’s belief, the kind of thing to make the great evangelist practice rolling before he gets to his grave. I am sorry for him, Mrs. Graham, and his family.

The statue business, on the other hand, is deliciously ironic - something out of Monty Python - given Graham’s tradition’s fierce iconoclasm. The next thing you know folk will be ransacking the man’s person and possessions for holy relics.

As for Graham himself, I am glad to hear of people’s experiences of his warmth and sanctity. But I confess he never did it for me. Just the opposite. I know Graham became less strident, more mellow, and indeed more open, “ecumenical”, as the years passed, and he has even apologised, if not for his anti-Semitism, then at least for his infamous anti-Semitic remarks - when the tape of them was released. But his born-again altar-call evangelism put pre-Christian me off the faith for years, and his de facto position as court prophet to presidents - in particular Johnson and Nixon - puts him in the ranks of Hananiah, not Jeremiah. As for his part on Dubya’s Damascus Road, I just wish that he had then led Bush to the wilderness rather than to Washington.

Let’s home Billy Graham finds peace in the rest of this life, and rest in the peace of the next.