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Palin's evangelical pilot Franklin Graham leads her Haiti trip

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY
Updated

Sarah Palin, the Pentecostal who freely invokes God at every political turn, and Glenn Beck, who is winning over evangelical Tea Party folks despite clergy's distrust of his Mormon faith, are the emergent leaders of the religious right, according to Lisa Miller's latest survey in Newsweek.

Yet the coverage leaves out Palin's evangelical pilot -- literally and figuratively -- Rev. Franklin Graham.

That's him, in the photo above, squiring Sarah Palin (and Fox News) around Haiti this weekend to visit the works of his nonprofit aid and development agency Samaritan's Purse.

Unquestionably, this NGO is often first on the ground with medicine, food, shelter and support in natural disasters. Help is dispersed without any religious screening for recipients although the aid workers are clear that they're motivated by Jesus.

However, Franklin Graham, who has succeeded father Billy at the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, is more often in headlines for his condemnations of Islam and anyone else who doesn't see Christianity his way.

The last flurry of attention that got him loads of air time to decry Islam is when he was uninvited from leading a Pentagon worship service on the National Day of Prayer for his repeated attacks on Islam, even as he professes how much he loves Muslim people (and wants to bring them all to Christ).

Graham has long been a Palin supporter. A pilot with his own planes and a fleet for Samaritan's Purse, he brought her to meet his father at Billy Graham's mountaintop home in North Carolina. And it was with Samaritan's Purse, not, say the Catholic Relief Services or Southern Baptist North American Mission Board, or the United Nations, that Palin went touring relief programs in Haiti.

According to the Samaritan's Purse web site, she stayed exclusively within the programs they run while calling for more worldwide attention to Haiti. It's unclear how much she was exposed to what other groups, religious and governmental, are already doing.

And Palin is equally Graham's champion, defending him on Islam and traveling with him on other aid missions, Sarah Pulliam Bailey blogs at Christianity Today. She puts it in the context of Palin's otherwise fairly limited religious outreach, noting:

Palin has not done the same kind of religious outreach that we saw President Obama do before the 2008 election. As far as I know, she hasn't done any interviews with Christian media about her latest book and seems to prefer Fox News, TLC, Facebook, and Twitter for her outlets.

So, how is Franklin Graham, the primary person with the ear of one of the two "emergent" leaders of the Newsweek religious right pantheon not a more influential voice in the political background than several on the Newsweek list?

Miller calls the religious right a potent, diffuse movement -- so diffuse for example that its hard to figure how they got their accompanying list of top 11 voices under one headline. It's a mix of evangelicals and Catholics and not all politically influential.

The overall coverage sets the religious right up as Obama vs. Christians in 2012. Rev. Tony Campolo, a sociologist, and confidant of President Bill Clinton (interesting credentials for assessing the religious right) tells Miller:

The marriage between evangelicalism and patriotic nationalism is so strong that anybody who is raising questions about loyalty to the old, laissez-faire capitalist system is ex post facto unpatriotic, un-American, and by association non-Christian.

But what a curious list it is, with moderates like Rev Joel Hunter, possibly the closest pastor to the president, says Miller, and doctrinaire Catholics like Robert George, considered a force among the most conservative Catholic bishops, and oddly, Rev. Jim Wallis, the evangelical left founder of Sojourners. The text with Wallis' profile portrait doesn't even try to make the case for how he's on this leading-to-the-right list.

They appear like background singers with Palin and Beck leading the band. John Green, political scientist at the University of Akron tells Miller.

Beck's gift, and Palin's, is to articulate God's special plan for America in such broad strokes that they trample no single creed or doctrine while they move millions with their message."

Does God take sides? Scripture would say yes -- God is on the side of the poor says Mark Silk. Blogging at Spiritual Politics, he says,

Sheesh, you'd almost think that the Almighty had His own purposes.

Will Palin's increasingly public ties to Franklin Graham burnish her image with the religious right at the cost of losing other Christians, center and left?

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