-- Billy Graham
Leaders like Billy Graham could help heal this country.
Many of the conservative Evangelicals who are now hailing Billy Graham as Pastor to the Nation might be put off by my demographic profile: a northern, secular, liberal Democrat, living in a big city in a blue state, who reads the New York Times, watches MSNBC, and has a Harvard degree. But the Baptist preacher from the mountains of North Carolina did not flinch at working with me.
Without ever inquiring about my faith or lack thereof, he personally supported my authorship of a book about the stories of people who had known him, Billy Graham & Me, affording me the cooperation of his closest colleagues and eventually writing an afterword for the book. He was not naïve about the bitterness of the red and blue divide, yet he chose to focus on the purple in all of us.
Long before the alt-right fringe made inroads into the Republican party, Graham championed diversity and inclusion. His compassion was not transactional, his faith needing no affirmation from sophisticates and celebrities to prove its worth. For Graham, everyone was his equal; only God is above us. He didn’t serve people because they were Christians; he did it because he was Christian. He had taken up the cross to preach the Good News that his God loves you even if you don’t love Him back, encouraging instead of persecuting those deemed sinful by his theology. Continue here....
-- Steve Posner
