「歴史の邪路」 - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

承前*1

Matthew Avery Sutton*2 “Billy Graham was on the wrong side of history” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/21/billy-graham-wrong-side-history

『ガーディアン』はビリー・グレアムの訃報*3と同時に批判的な論評を掲載している。
要するに、”The world’s most famous evangelist let his apocalyptic anticipation of the coming kingdom of God blind him to the realities of living in this world.”ということだという。
「公民権運動」*4を巡って；

In the late 1950s, Graham integrated his revivals and seemed to support the burgeoning civil rights movement. This is the Graham most Americans remember.
But as the movement grew, expanded and became increasingly confrontational, the evangelist’s position changed.
Once leaders like Martin Luther King Jr began practicing civil disobedience and asking for the federal government to guarantee African Americans’ rights, Graham’s support evaporated.
Within days of the publication of King’s famous 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Graham told reporters that the Baptist minister should “put the brakes on a little bit”.
He criticized civil rights activists for focusing on changing laws rather than hearts.

また、「地球温暖化」問題を巡る変節；

More recently, the evangelist denied the threat of global warming and rejected federal efforts to stymie it.
In a 1992 book focused on the signs that the world was nearing its end, the preacher suggested that if humankind were going to survive, businesses needed to reduce pollution and stop contributing to global warming.
In a revised 2010 version of the book, Graham eliminated the phrase “global warming” from the text altogether. Global warming no longer existed in the mind of Graham as a real threat.
He went on to assure readers that the earth would not “be saved through legislation”. The federal government, he indicated, had no business passing laws to protect the earth for future generations.

その背後にある反連邦（政府）主義のバイアス；

In 1971, Graham published The Jesus Generation, a book on the coming apocalypse. Looking for signs of Jesus’s second coming had become an obsession of Graham’s, as it was for millions of other evangelicals in the mid-20th century.
In the book, Graham praised the wisdom of young people who rejected the federal government as a tool for rectifying injustices.
For six decades, Graham taught Americans that the federal government could not be an instrument of God to bring about justice, not on race matters and not on other significant issues. Although he believed in racial equality, his theology blinded him to what we now know was the best means for achieving that equality.

「原理主義」と「福祉国家」の反目；

Graham, like most fundamentalists of his generation, determined that the New Deal state represented godless competition for the churches rather than a potential ally.
This is a message that appeared again and again in Graham’s many books on Jesus’s second coming. Only the return of Jesus would right social wrongs, he concluded.
The expansion of state power, in contrast, was a necessary precursor to the rise of the antichrist. The evangelist felt sure that as we approached the end of time, the world’s governments were going to take away Christians’ rights and liberties.
The New Deal, with its intrusive regulations, was the first step; Obamacare, with its contraception mandates, the most recent.
Yet Graham insisted that the inevitability of the second coming was no justification for indifference. “We must not feel that we are to sit back and do nothing to fight evil just because some day the four horsemen will come with full and final force upon the earth,” Graham wrote. Instead, he prodded evangelicals to elect people to office who shared
They did. White evangelicals have played an outsized role in recent political campaigns, supporting every Republican presidential candidate from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

*1:http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20180227/1519691319

*2:See eg. https://history.wsu.edu/faculty/matthew-a-sutton/

*3:Harriet Sherwood “Billy Graham, famed Christian evangelist, dies aged 99” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/21/billy-graham-christian-evangelist-dies-99 Alan Webster “Billy Graham obituary” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/21/billy-graham-obituary