The Rev. Billy Graham admitted in his later years that he had learned a hard lesson after the Watergate scandal exposed his cozy complicity with President Richard M. Nixon: Pastors should not become too enmeshed with politicians and partisan politics.
“Looking back I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn’t do that now,” he said to the magazine Christianity Today in 2011.
Now, the movement that he helped spawn is divided over the very danger that Mr. Graham — who died last week at age 99 — had warned about. Evangelicals have become locked in a tight embrace with President Trump and the Republican Party, and some of them are now asking whether they have compromised the Gospel message.
Among Mr. Trump’s most vocal evangelical supporters, few are as high-profile as Billy Graham’s eldest son and the heir to his ministry, the Rev. Franklin Graham, who is 65. Though admired among evangelicals for his aid work in hardship zones with the charity he leads, Samaritan’s Purse, he has drawn criticism for his unstinting support of the president.
Franklin Graham has defended the president on television and social media through the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the crackdowns on immigrants and refugees, the Stormy Daniels scandal, and the slur against Haiti and Africa.
