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Black Evangelicals, White Evangelicals and Franklin Graham's Repentance

By Lisa Sharon Harper
Franklin Graham. Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images.
Franklin Graham in his home office, Boone, N.C. 2003. Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images.
Mar 1, 2012
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When Franklin Graham expressed doubts about President Obama’s Christian faith during and interview on Morning Joe last week, it reminded me of an uncomfortable dinner I had in the late ‘90s.

I sat down for a pleasant meal in the home of two great friends — one of them a white evangelical faith leader deeply committed to social justice. Well into the evening’s conversation —when we’d dropped all our pretenses and our exchanges moved well past mealtime niceties — one friend asked me something that caught me entirely off guard.

“Do you think Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Christian?” he said.

I was dumbstruck. I had never heard anyone actually ask that question before.

“Yes,” I replied. “What would make you doubt that?”

As he explained, it became clear: My friend wasn’t sure whether Dr. King was a Christian because King’s Christianity didn’t look like my friend’s Christianity.

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Franklin Graham in his home office, Boone, N.C. 2003. Photo by David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images.
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