The Peculiar Aftermath of Billy Graham’s Death

Last week, at the age of 99, notorious megachurch pastor Billy Graham died of natural causes at his North Carolina home; and by notorious, I mean in the eyes of women (whom he didn’t want to be educated), Jews (whom he said controlled the media), and of course queer people (whom he thought God punished with AIDS).

After he passed, politicians and public figures from Ted Cruz to Barack Obama were praising him for his lifelong commitment to evangelicalism. In Senator Cruz’s public statement on Graham’s passing, he lauded Graham for “his legacy, and the ministry he has left behind, which continues to transform the world for the better.”

This is what I initially noticed: all of the older, mostly-cis, mostly-straight, mostly-white Christians on social media writing lionizing captions above announcements of Graham’s death. After sifting through all of this, I made the presumption that this must be how almost everyone but me felt about this man.

As it turned out, this so-called consensus was mainly present for mainstream politicians and Christians. As I took a closer look at people’s reactions to his death, the only ones getting teary were people who were ultimately unaffected by the rhetoric Graham used throughout his life, those who maintained the naive notion that he was some kind of unifying force. A good deal of them are either stuck in the days where every president looked to Graham for their moral and political counsel or held in the days where their parents constantly talked the man up as some moral champion.

When members of the queer and feminist communities have tried to speak against Graham for his anti-abortion, anti-atheist, anti-gay, or anti-whatever views, they have often gotten labeled as ridiculous whiners, especially in light of the fact that he recently passed. Hell, you don’t even have to be a liberal deviant such as myself to get burned by these people.

In his critique of Republican atheist George Will’s National Review article “Billy Graham: Neither Prophet nor Theologian,” conservative commentator Todd Starnes called this piece “anti-Christian mockery” and an “ugly attack” with roots in liberal media lies. This is just one of the hundreds of rants lambasting anyone who dare step out of the political consensus around Graham, which they’ve manufactured over decades.

That silencing groupthink is exactly what the LGBTQ community has faced for years, and I say we don’t take it. It’s one thing to pay homage to someone who has passed and remain respectful, but that doesn’t change the legacy that Graham left behind.