When Donald Trump returns to office, be a Martin Marty, not a Billy Graham

Faith gets good press. But its real value depends on what exactly you believe and how you use it. As I have said before: religion is a hammer. You can hit someone in the head with it. Or build them a house. Same hammer. Your choice.

Take two of the most prominent Chicago theologians of the last half century, the Reverend Billy Graham and Professor Martin E. Marty. Each used their similar beliefs to take vastly different approaches to the crises of their turbulent era.

Graham, an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist Church, used his popularity as a ticket to the White House. There he curled up in the lap of power and became the personal chaplain to 11 commanders in chief, beginning with Harry Truman and running through every president up to Barack Obama. He christened Dwight D. Eisenhower and spoke at the funeral of his golfing buddy, Richard Nixon.

He cast himself as some kind of spiritual advisor, but he was really just a hallelujah chorus offering moral validation. Graham bypassed civil rights. He mocked Vietnam War protesters. “It seems the only way to get attention today is to organize a march and protest something,” he reassured his friend, Lyndon Johnson.

You don’t need a years-long perspective to see Graham avoiding the great ethical challenges of his time. Martin Marty, a Lutheran religious scholar, saw exactly who Graham was.

“A man straddling eras and value systems, he has chosen to free 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 defend 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 Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, to do so.

You can measure the impact of each man by what he left behind. Graham left us with his son, Franklin, perhaps the coldest rock hater who calls 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 people of different faiths together, not drive them apart.

Marty warned against acting as “the servant of a predatory god whose goal is to annex and enslave.”

He reminds us:

“Nothing is more important than keeping 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 solicit his thoughts now. But he will be 97 in a few weeks and shuns the public he used so well for so long. Either way, his voluminous writings – he is the author of more than 50 books – provide what we need.

“One of the real problems of 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 it true? Yes, civil people, being civil, are not good at bullying and breaking. But there are other forms of strength. Quiet courage. The ability to face difficult facts, endure hardships. I know many people are struggling to figure out how to get through 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 problems were the same.

But one man used his faith to flatter power and glorify himself and, not coincidentally, rake in money.

And another tried to bring people together, help others and offer faith as grace, as hope.

Right and wrong do not change with administrations. What is changing is the prevailing breeze, and it was sad – but not surprising – to see which boats were headed for Mar-a-Lago. The tech titans are lining up to join Elon Musk and are happily marching ahead of our new leader. Maximize their advantage. Easy to look at it and despair.

But if you look down at your hands, they are still there. The ability to act is not taken away from us. Not yet. Our nation may lose itself, but we may remain found. We can try to maintain our decency, refuse to submit to the pressure to betray our core values ​​– pluralism and democracy, liberty and freedom – and be the best people we can be, doing the best we can when we can.