Faith gets good press. But its real value depends on what precisely you put your faith in, and how you use it. As I’ve said before: religion is a hammer. You can hit someone in the head with it. Or build them a house. Your choice.
Take two of the most prominent Chicago theologians of the past half century, Rev. Billy Graham and Prof. Martin E. Marty. Each used their similar faiths to take vastly different approaches to the crises of their turbulent era.
Graham, a minister ordained in the Southern Baptist Church, used his popularity as a ticket into the White House. There he curled up in the lap of power and became the personal pastor to 11 commanders in chief, starting with Harry Truman and running through every president up to Barack Obama. He baptized Dwight D. Eisenhower and spoke at the funeral of his golfing buddy, Richard Nixon.
He cast himself as a kind of spiritual adviser, but he was really just a hallelujah chorus, offering moral validation. Graham sidestepped civil rights. He sneered at Vietnam War protesters. “It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something,” he reassured his pal, Lyndon Johnson.
You don’t need the perspective of years to see Graham ducking the great ethical challenges of his day. Martin Marty, a Lutheran religious scholar, saw exactly who Graham was.
“A man in transit between epochs and value systems, he has chosen to disengage himself and distract us by shouting about the end of history,” he wrote in the Sun-Times in 1965.
Marty’s pulpit was far smaller than Graham’s. But he used it vigorously to advocate for civil rights. When Martin Luther King personally invited him to Selma, he recruited colleagues and went. He not only opposed the war in Vietnam, but founded an organization, Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam, to do so.
You can gauge the impact of each man by what he left behind. Graham left us with his son, Franklin, perhaps the coldest stone hater calling himself a man of God on the American scene today.
Marty left us with the University of Chicago’s Martin Marty Center, which works to encourage interfaith dialogue, viewing religion as something that should bring together people of different faiths, not drive them apart.
Marty warned against acting as the “servant of a God of prey whose goal it is to annex and enslave.”
He reminds us:
“Nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive. To be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it.”
I had lunch with Marty in 2017, when his book on Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was published, and reached out to him to plumb his thoughts now. But he’ll be 97 in a couple weeks, and avoids the public eye he used so well for so long. No matter, his voluminous writings — he is the author of more than 50 books — provide what we need.
“One of the real problems in modern life,” Marty writes, “is that people who are good at being civil lack strong convictions and people who have strong convictions lack civility.”
Is that true? Yes civil people, being civil, aren’t good at bullying and browbeating. But there are other kinds of strength. Quiet courage. The ability to face difficult facts, endure hardships. A lot of people are struggling, I know, to figure out how they are going to endure the next four years. And I thought that Billy Graham and Martin Marty provide models, templates of different approaches. Their era was the same. The country was the same. The issues were the same.
But one man used his faith to flatter power, and glorify himself, and, not incidentally, rake in the bucks.
And another tried to bring people together, to help others, and offer faith as grace, as hope.
Right and wrong do not change with administrations. What changes is the prevailing breeze, and it was sad — though not surprising — to see what boats tacked toward Mar-a-Lago. The tech titans lining up to join Elon Musk, prancing joyfully before our new leader. Maximizing their advantage. Easy to look on that and despair.
But if you look down at your hands, they’re still there. The ability to act is not taken away from us. Not yet. Our nation might lose itself, but we can stay found. We can try to maintain our decency, refuse to submit to the pressure to betray our core American values — pluralism and democracy, liberty and freedom — and be the best people we can be, doing what good we can, when we can.