HuffPost columnist Neil J. Young wrote an article titled "The Religious Right's True Colors" where he eviscerates Franklin Graham. He starts as follows.
Franklin Graham is on a crusade across California. But unlike his father, Billy, who launched his career as the world's most famous evangelist in Los Angeles and held numerous revivals across the state through the decades, Franklin has not come to California to win souls to Christ. Instead, he's looking for voters he can deliver to the Republican Party.
Young did not mince his words.
Manipulating religion in service of the Republican Party, and especially Trump, now appears to be exactly Franklin Graham's project. In regular appearances on Fox News and now on his tour across California, Graham has fanned the flames of white evangelical resentment and outrage. Such a dark and alarmist vision might seem to contradict the hopeful joy evangelicals claim their faith provides, but it aligns perfectly with the cynical and conspiratorial worldview Trump has brought to the center of American politics. As such, white evangelicals' support for Trump doesn't expose their hypocrisy, as plenty have contended, so much as it plainly reveals their heart.
In other ways, Graham's California campaign mirrors the isolationist retreat that Trump has carried out with his foreign policy. Rather than reaching out to other conservative Christians, like Mormons and Catholics, as the early architects of the Religious Right often did, Graham's efforts focus solely on evangelicals. That's an unusual political strategy given how important coalitions are to electoral successes in the United States, but it's a tactic that plays directly into the growing separatist sentiment among many white evangelicals.
Some winnable congressional races in California are at a tipping point. The presence of an organized Evangelical Right presence could make a difference in places like Orange County.
There is a pathology to the behavior of the Evangelical Right. Recently I interviewed Dr. Hollis Phelps , Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Mercer University in Macon Georgia. His analysis was spot on and is one that Democrats and Progressives must heed to beat this indoctrination.
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