It’s a bit of a shock.
Evangelical Christians are among the most ardent supporters of Israel, seeing them and their struggle as central to prophecy. Among them is Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel.
The shock is to learn that perhaps the greatest Evangelical preacher of all time, Billy Graham—in public strongly pro-Israel, as is the case with his prominent son and heir, Franklin—once uttered harsh words about modern Jews, many of whom are descendants of ancient Israel while others descend from converts in Turkey and eastern Europe during the Middle Ages.
As The New York Times reported in 2001, “It seemed impossible, when H. R. Haldeman’s White House diaries came out in 1994, that the Reverend Billy Graham could once have joined with President Richard M. Nixon in discussing the ”total Jewish domination of the media.” Could Mr. Graham, the great American evangelist, really have said the nation’s problem lies with ”satanic Jews,” as Mr. Nixon’s aide [Haldeman] recorded?
“Mr. Graham’s sterling reputation as a healer and bridge-builder was so at odds with Mr. Haldeman’s account that Jewish groups paid little attention, especially because he denied the remarks so strongly,” noted the newspaper. ‘Those are not my words,” Mr. Graham said in a public statement in May 1994. ‘I have never talked publicly or privately about the Jewish people, including conversations with President Nixon, except in the most positive terms.’
That was the end of the story, it seemed, until the tape of that 1972 conversation in the Oval Office was made public by the National Archives.
Three decades after it was recorded, the North Carolina preacher’s “famous drawl,” said The Times, “is tinny but unmistakable on the tape, denigrating Jews in terms far stronger than the diary accounts.”
On the tape Graham had complained that American Jews were “the ones putting out the pornographic stuff.” Today, the complaint expressed by certain Evangelical writers and podcasters is that Israel is running American foreign policy.
The Jewish ”stranglehold has got to be broken or the country’s going down the drain,” Graham had continued, suggesting that if Mr. Nixon were re-elected, ”then we might be able to do something.”
No one questions the goodness of Billy Graham, who brought millions to Christ and served as a beacon in dark times. But his views of Jews were complicated (as is now the case with certain prominent Evangelicals in the wake of Gaza and Iran).
”I go and I keep friends with Mr. Rosenthal at The New York Times and people of that sort, you know,” he told Mr. Nixon, referring to A. M. Rosenthal, a Jew who was the newspaper’s executive editor. ”And all—I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel.
“But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.”
One Jewish spokesman said it was a need to awaken Jews to the intense dislike for them among many evangelical Christians, except insofar as Jews are useful to the fulfillment of Christian apocalyptic prophecies, as The Times put it in 2001.
In some corners, many modern Jews, it is claimed, including those in leadership positions, are not fully descendants of the authentic Jewish tribes of Judah and Benjamin, but of the Edomites at the far southern end of southern Israel and northern Jordan. (Among famous Edomites: King Herod and Judas, who quoting Revelation 2:9) some have called the “synagogue of Satan”: those who say they are Jews but technically are not.) As for the Catholic Church, it has tried to encompass all ethnic groups, and during the Holocaust hid Jews from Hitler.
It’s a tender subject, to be sure; many things we simply don’t know.
All we know for sure is that we are called to love everyone.
