Franklin, Katrina & God

Local Leader Ties Hurricane Damage
to Mardi Gras Revelry

Last week I had the privilege of meeting four Tibetan monks while they were in residency at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk. After a discussion about the nature of Buddhism, I realized that although I had learned a few things, I was left with more questions about the religion than actual answers.

They assured me that that was the way it was supposed to be.

It was a stark contrast to today’s atmosphere of religiosity in America, where many churches claim to have the answers to age-old theological questions and some religious leaders have no problem speaking for God. Some of them even claim that God used Hurricane Katrina to wipe out New Orleans so the city could be rebuilt with a less sinful veneer.

In a phone interview with the Associated Press last Monday, Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham and head of Boone-based Samaritans Purse, stated, “New Orleans has been known for years as a party town. It is a city that has strong ties to the gay and lesbian movement and these types of things.”

The following day, in a speech reported by the Lynchburg News & Advance, Graham was even more specific when he declared, “This is one wicked city, OK? It’s known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It’s known for sex perversion. It’s known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans. There’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years. (We) believe God is going to use that storm to bring revival. God has a plan. God has a purpose.”

First of all, let me state that I have had a wonderful time every time I have been in New Orleans, even though I have never been booked on the orgy and Satan worship travel package. I’ve been to Mardi Gras and, yes, I’ve seen some drunk guys and some topless girls. I would wager, however, that nearly every single one of them was from out of town. New Orleans’ reputation as a sinful city has been earned primarily from tourists looking to cut loose for a few days. In that regard, it is no different than Las Vegas, Myrtle Beach or dozens of spring break destinations in Florida.

As far as the citizens of New Orleans are concerned, they are a diverse lot but they tend to take their stake in Christianity rather seriously. They support and uphold as many Christian churches as any other Southern city of similar size and for Graham to suggest that God needed to wipe the slate clean by devastating their homes, schools and churches is ludicrous, ignorant and offensive.

Of course, this is the same man of God who a few years ago declared, “The God of Islam is not the same God of the Christian or the Judeo-Christian faith. It is a different God, and I believe a very evil and wicked religion.”

That, my friends, is not how you win friends and influence people. That is how you cheese off over a billion people worldwide with a few poorly chosen sentences.

And that’s a shame because Graham’s organization, Samaritans Purse, has done a tremendous amount of good in the world, especially when it comes to quickly bringing relief to areas stricken by disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Asia last winter. Thanks to the Internet, Graham should have realized that his comments deriding Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion,” would be disseminated worldwide. Those words no doubt saddened peaceful practitioners of that religion while they also gave its violent extremists a new recruiting tool. Those are also words that could very well endanger Graham’s own relief workers in places like Indonesia.

But for Franklin Graham and many of the louder evangelicals in the United States, wagging their fingers and claiming intimate knowledge of the wrath of God is just too darned irresistible when bad things happen to supposedly bad people. Of course, you just don’t hear too much from them when a church van crosses the centerline and collides with a family of four. For that matter, you didn’t hear much talk about God’s will when New York City was caught in the crosshairs four years ago. Certainly any sin that might be found in New Orleans can be found by the truckload in the Big Apple. Is it easier to point to the hand of God for causing Katrina because it was a natural disaster, or because the victims were generally blacker and poorer than they were in New York’s Twin Towers?

Although I have a lot of respect for Samaritan’s Purse and the good work it does, I wish its leader was a little more like his father. Billy Graham always seemed ready to point his flock toward faith as a source of comfort. His son too often uses faith as a source of confrontation.