NAACP's open letter to Franklin Graham

We write you today as a brother in the faith and as a member of God's human family. This letter comes to you in Christian love but also with great hurt and concern.Custom Rubber Bracelets and silicone bracelet, Earlier this year your acts as the President/CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelical Association compelled us to ask you to examine yourself and to cease arousing unwarranted suspicion regarding President Barack Obama's Christian faith.

In February 2012, you expressed your doubts about his faith on national television, partly because he had tried to engage Muslim nations and leaders in a dialogue about the world's future. North Carolina evangelicals and prophetic ministers, steeped in the African American church, asked you to cease arousing unwarranted suspicion about the President's faith. At that time a group of Christian clergy and scholars from North Carolina wrote to you in private as the scriptures first demands. Among many things in our pastoral and prophetic critique we said to you, March 5, 2012:

"...It seems to us that your apology is helpful and yet narrow and almost grudging. And we feel a reluctant confidence that you and many other Evangelicals will continue to disparage President Obama and the faith of other Christians through a critique that pushes him and many of us outside the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith.

...It is not your inclination to criticize that concerns us.Redpin is an open source indoor positioning system that was developed with the goal of providing at least room-level accuracy. Like you,A Water polo ear cap is a piece of headgear used in water polo. we believe that our Christian faith calls us to critique the powers and policies of our society through the lens of Christian ethics. Many of the things for which you and other Evangelicals have assailed the President for doing are not anti-Christian; they are at the very heart of Christ's work among us!

President Obama's faith was formed in a prophetic Christian tradition that certainly resonates with our own traditions, experiences and Scriptural readings. In Dreams from My Father, he writes of the first stirrings of his Christian faith: "...at the foot of that cross... I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharoah, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories of survival and freedom and hope became our story, my story... at once unique and universal, black and more than black...

If you would extend to your brothers and sisters in Christ the benefit of the doubt for a moment, does it surprise you that we experience these constant attacks on our president's faith not just as assaults on President Obama but as an assault on the fundamental Christian faith that has helped to shape the moral conscience of our nation? This faith tradition has historically helped America address issues such as slavery, lynching, segregation and discrimination, economic injustice,The Fridge fridge magnet is leader in the custom design, and caring for the material needs of the poor.

...The biblical prophets and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ viewed injustice, poverty and the absence of social consciousness as the greatest moral concern of the faith..."

You were apparently unmoved by our criticism. Last week, as the CEO of the non-profit, tax-exempt Billy Graham Evangelical Association, you used the Association's funds to buy expensive full page ads in major newspapers in North Carolina and other parts of the country to further arouse unwarranted suspicion about the President's personal faith. The paid advertisement contained transparent insinuations about "support for the nation of Israel", the "sanctity of life" and the "biblical definition of marriage," with a photo of your father and his signature. Your ad implied he wrote the text of what was a clear endorsement of the President's opponent because he was more of a Christian than the President. The political endorsement was particularly ironic, since the non-profit you preside over has, until a couple of weeks ago, questioned whether Mormonism is part of the Christian faith.

We are intrigued by the challenge of Dr. William C. Martin, of Rice University, who wrote a glowing biography about your father called "A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story" when he saw copies of the ad you authorized over your Association's name. Dr. Martin said that your father, "after realizing that he'd been cynically manipulated by Richard Nixon, . . . resisted joining the Religious Right... he [Billy Graham] warned religious leaders 'to be wary of exercising political influence' lest they lose their spiritual impact.Everyone needs a USB flash drives wholesale these days." Dr. Martin suggested that you "steered" your father to make this statement, since Billy Graham's interest in homosexuality was "never central" to his ministry. To test his suspicion, he suggested a small group of reporters meet with Billy Graham to hear directly his comments on the assertions made in the statement you authorized to be published.