When bested in debate, progressives often retreat to the safe and comfortable ground of ad hominem attacks, accusing their opponents of racism, sexism, and Nazism. In 2023, Lutheran “minister,” Iowa representative, and now congressional candidate Sarah Trone Garriott (D), repeated all the same attacks — albeit in mild form — with her own unique twist sure to provoke head-scratching: “It’s Billy Graham’s fault.”
You read that correctly. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) reverend blamed evangelist Billy Graham for the “white [hear: racist] patriarchy [hear: sexist]” she alleged was the basis for contemporary evangelicalism, something she associated closely with “Christian nationalism [read: Nazi-esque].” What was the basis for this charge? “Billy Graham really modeled this attractive, strong, macho guy persona.”
America’s leading evangelist of the 20th century certainly was a powerful preacher, but that’s what happens when God’s Spirit uses a man’s witness to share the gospel of the cross of Jesus Christ for the salvation of thousands upon thousands of souls (1 Corinthians 1:18). Would Trone Garriott prefer evangelistic preaching that is unattractive and weak? Graham was often remembered for the intensity of his eyes and the sincere conviction of his speech, which bored into the souls of his hearers.
That sort of masculine strength is a far cry from the toughness of John Wayne (to whom Trone Garriott compared Graham), the brutality of a cartel kingpin, or the predatory “toxic masculinity” that was justified by the Sexual Revolution. Indeed, the man who originated “the Billy Graham rule” to preclude the very possibility of impropriety with women is better seen as a biblical example of humble prudence than an embodiment of the brash self-reliance associated with the term “macho.”
The famed evangelist would likely have troubled himself little with Trone Garriott’s aspersions. After all, he served a Savior who told his followers, “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matthew 5:11-12).
To the extent that electoral politics is a popularity contest, by attacking Graham, Trone Garriott picked a fight she could never win, even against a dead man. The many Americans who remember Billy Graham fondly see through the criticism. Yet Trone Garriott’s choice to blame Graham was met with laughter by her audience at Ames United Methodist Church.
And it was a deliberate choice. Trone Garriot did not merely blame Graham in an extemporaneous aside that ran on too long. “It’s Billy Graham’s Fault” was the very title of a slide in her PowerPoint presentation. It set the stage for the entire narrative she spun around the character of evangelicalism in the late-20th century.
That narrative, strangely, began with a fairly decent description of the theological convictions that describe evangelicalism. Evangelicals, according to Trone Garriott, are characterized by four beliefs: the “Bible is the ultimate authority,” “Christ’s atonement and sacrifice is central,” Christians should have a “born-again salvation experience,” and they should “actively work to spread the good news.” This description roughly corresponds to that used by Lifeway Research in their surveys of evangelicals.
Yet Trone Garriott quickly interpreted these points in ways that made it clear she knew very little about evangelicals at all. “What does it mean to hold the Bible as the ultimate authority when Americans are biblically illiterate?” she asked. She seemed to suggest that evangelicals inconsistently appealed to the Bible as an authority without much understanding of its contents. Her presentation never suggested that there was a category of people who read the Bible daily and apply its teaching to their lives.
Likewise, on evangelism, Trone Garriott suggested that evangelicals were really proclaiming a false gospel. “What we see more and more is that the good news that a specific variety of Christianity is professing in the world is white patriarchy,” she claimed, “white, masculine power — violence, dominance.”
She alleged that this form of Christianity needs — and has always needed — threats to combat, so that white, masculine power structures can justify their own existence by providing protection against these threats. Trone Garriott strongly implied that such threats were not really threats but merely manufactured to serve the interests of entrenched powers. She provided examples: communism, nuclear annihilation, the civil rights movement, and the women’s rights movement.
Where to even begin with this list? Trone Garriott’s highly selective — nay, impressionistic — reading of history is more calculated to advance a narrative than to correspond to dates and events. For instance, the greatest threat of nuclear annihilation faced by the U.S. came in the Cuban missile crisis during the administration of liberal Democratic President John F. Kennedy. The presidents who embroiled America in wars to prevent the spread of communism (Korea and Vietnam) were liberal Democrats Harry S. Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson. Quite aside from the McCarthyism of this era, it is hard to deny that communism and nuclear annihilation constituted very real threats recognized across the political spectrum.
Ironically, Trone Garriott suggested that the threat-conjuring “white patriarchy” that she associated with Billy Graham and evangelicalism has now lapsed into its own “political violence.” As she flipped to a slide of a J6 protestor holding a Bible, Trone Garriott warned, “We have seen religion and political violence showing up more and more in our public spaces. It’s something that’s just in our faces, and something we’re very concerned about, and something that feels very threatening at this time.”
First, Trone Garriott fails to mention that the religion most associated with political violence is radical Islam, not evangelical Christianity. Second, it’s a bit inconsistent for her to warn of threats herself, yet take the warnings of threats from others as proof positive of an ulterior agenda at work.
Trone Garriott hopped quickly over these points to address the race issue. She alleged that evangelicals fail to fully confront racism because, in their worldview, “Racism … becomes couched as a personal issue and not a systemic one. It’s about your personal relationships with individuals. There’s a lot of emphasis on the individual in this kind of evangelicalism.”
Trone Garriott blamed Billy Graham, who she admitted supported some of the civil rights movement, for backing away too soon. She connected her racialized straw man of evangelicalism with the backlash to school integration, the formation of Christian schools, the push for parental rights, and the refusal to acknowledge any racism in American history. She invited her audience to make the connections to contemporary political issues.
But American history will not bear the weight of such libel. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention — America’s largest evangelical association of churches — adopted a resolution that confronted the organization’s historic ties to slavery and racism; “unwaveringly denounce[d] racism, in all its forms”; and “apologize[d] to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”
Trone Garriott’s account of parental rights was just as fictitious. Decades before Billy Graham began to preach, the Supreme Court issued landmark rulings in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) that recognized parental rights in education. Meyer held that parents have the right, if they so choose, to have their children instructed in a foreign language. Pierce preserved the ability of Catholic nuns to run a parochial school. In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), the Supreme Court upheld the right of Amish parents to pull their children out of school at age 16. None of these Supreme Court precedents involved evangelicals, and none of them support the picture of a MAGA-coded, aggressive “white patriarchy” that Trone Garriott was trying to paint.
Nevertheless, that brought Trone Garriott’s narrative of “Christian nationalism” up to the present day, where she argued that the “white patriarchy” running contemporary evangelicalism has made the “GLBTQ Movement” into another bogus “threat” to its identity, using it to justify such legislation as private school vouchers, “book bans” (hear: removing porn from school libraries), and “sports bans” (hear: protecting girls’ sports from male intrusion). Recall that her presentation was given in late 2023, a high-water mark for state legislatures passing girls’ sports bills and legislation to protect minors from gender transition procedures.
“A new ‘threat’ that we see today is the GLBTQ movement,” imagined Trone Garriott. “It’s a challenging of that status quo, of the way that things have been, of who’s a man and who’s a woman and how relationships are. It’s very threatening to the idea of the white male, powerful figure, because it muddies the waters and makes things ambiguous and confusing.”
Once again, the reordered acronym “GLBTQ” was a deliberate choice appearing in one of Trone Garriott’s slide headlines. The reversal of “L” and “G” in the familiar acronym for a spectrum of sexual deviance suggests that Trone Garriott had spent enough time considering each element of the acronym and its history to conclude that the letters should be reordered. Trone Garriot can distinguish the “L” from the “G,” but not Billy Graham from Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes.
On the girls’ sports issue, Trone Garriot’s insinuations grew truly absurd. “It’s really couched as, ‘There’s a threat against women.’ And white men are responsible to protect women from threats. And so, a lot of the legislation is, ‘We’re going to protect these feminine, weak, fragile girls from a threat to their bodies, their persons, their identity in this way.’”
Of course, the issue is “couched” that way because it’s true. Female athletes have been permanently injured, sexually harassed, and denied fair competition by being forced to compete against bigger, stronger males who claim to be women. But the deeper irony is that Trone Garriot is now accusing the “white patriarchy” of defending the same women’s rights legislation (such as Title IX) as she accused them of opposing in the women’s right movement.
Is the “patriarchy” trying to suppress women or defend their rights? Trone Garriott cannot give a single answer. But she is certain of two things: the patriarchy is “white” (for no obvious reason), and it is identical to both evangelical Christianity and far-right political groups that have nothing in common with Christianity at all.
Trone Garriott is following in the footsteps of Texas Rep. James Talarico (D), a “Presbyterian seminarian” who recently won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Earlier this month, media reports drew attention to Talarico’s past anti-biblical comments on abortion, gender, and racism. Now, Trone Garriott has been shown to be a member of the growing ranks of politically liberal clergy who use their vestments as cover for political activism, while accusing evangelicals of the same conflation of politics and religion.
Apparently, it has become a new fashion on the Left to wrap their politics in the garb of Christianity as a mockery of evangelicals.
