Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger responded to a video of Rev. Franklin Graham circulating over the weekend, when thousands gathered on the National Mall in Washington for a prayer rally billed as a “rededication of our country as One Nation under God.”
Kinzinger, who has been an avowed Trump antagonist since the MAGA takeover of the GOP, placed his Trump criticisms against Graham’s assertion that there is today a “downward moral decline, spiraling ever deeper into the mire.”
Graham laments an America in which “things that wouldn’t have been talked about 30 years ago — sinful behavior that should make us blush is now celebrated and flaunted on Main Street America.
Saying America is “sick with sin,” and noting “transgenderism, same sex marriage, opening women’s locker rooms to men” as reasons we have “to rededicate ourselves,” Graham begins a list of sins that includes “unimaginable violence, rapes, murders, mass shootings.”
In his reply, Kinzinger added “paying hush money to a mistress and attempting an overthrowing of the govt. and the acceptance of outright lies” — the latter, pointedly, all things of which President Trump has been accused of.
Kinzinger said of Graham’s remarks about lower moral standards in America: “I agree. Never would the GOP have been ok with a president paying hush money to a mistress and attempting an overthrowing of the govt. and the acceptance of outright lies. Really is astounding.”
I agree. Never would the GOP have been ok with a president paying hush money to a mistress and attempting an overthrowing of the govt. and the acceptance of outright lies.
Really is astounding. https://t.co/1bnAbGgHWR
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini)
(@AdamKinzinger) May 17, 2026
Graham also laments what he characterizes as a lost familiarity with the Bible among present-day Americans, saying that “a majority of Americans have little to no understanding of biblical truth.”
Blaming the removal of the Bible from schools, in part, for this lack of biblical literacy, Graham asserts that 250 years ago the “Bible was taught in schools” and extrapolates from its diminished place in modern pedagogy a torrent of violence and sin that he believes the U.S. must “repent as a nation,” or face God’s judgement.
Trump, who has benefited politically from the support of evangelicals, delivered a choppily edited pre-recorded Bible reading for the prayer rally on Sunday to mixed reviews — see below.
Trump: pic.twitter.com/G2n0P14m7G
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 17, 2026
Trump originally read this passage for a Bible marathon reading in April. It is the seventh chapter of 2 Chronicles from the Old Testament, which contains the passage: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”
Graham has courted controversy in the past, and his rhetoric has not always aligned him with those of his faith.
In 2022, Rodney Kennedy wrote in the Baptist News: “Graham flirted with Nazi ideas of blood and purity when he joined the ‘birther’ movement against President Obama and chirped that ‘the president’s problem was that he was born a Muslim’ because his father was and ‘the seed of Islam is passed through the father.’ Obama’s father was an atheist. President Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ.”