► Year after Billy Graham's death, son Franklin Graham, grandson Will Graham, poised to lead A time of ‘growing disquiet’Īuthor Stephen Prothero, a professor of religious studies at Boston University, described the grandchildren as “outliers in their own family and in the wider white evangelical community” in their willingness to accuse their uncle of abandoning Billy Graham’s example of non-partisanship by tying his ministry so tightly to Trump. Graham declined to comment through a spokesperson. Although they are not the first among evangelicals to publicly charge Franklin Graham with undermining the memory of his father, the fact that they are bringing the charge from within the family brings powerful momentum to it. Tchividjian and his more outspoken sister, Jerushah Duford, whose mother, Gigi Graham Tchividijian, is Billy Graham’s oldest daughter, have emerged as the family’s most visible critics of their uncle and of Trump.īoth have written several books, separately and together, about their grandfather and his worldwide ministry, which was rooted in the North Carolina mountains near Asheville.
Gigi graham full#
► Franklin Graham doesn't preach like his father and his supporters are OK with itįor those who hadn’t followed the insular world of evangelical Christianity, this exchange blew into full view a rip in the Graham family’s fabric that mirrors a larger split within the entire evangelical community – a split likely to be accelerated by Trump’s defeat for reelection. What a glorious memory!"Ī reader of this Twitter exchange weighed in with a question to Franklin: Is your nephew calling you a liar? "I’ll never forget that day in 2016 when my grandfather shrugged off the symptoms of Parkinson’s and hydrocephalus, got up out of bed for the first time in a year, drove down to the polling station, and cast his vote. In a response to his uncle’s post, Tchividjian wrote with withering sarcasm: That was too much for another Billy Graham descendant, his grandson Aram Tchividjian. Trump was the man for this hour in the history for our nation." My father knew, believed in him & voted for him. "I hadn’t shared who my father voted for in 2016 but because of article, I felt it necessary share now. So Franklin fired back at the magazine with a powerful riposte to his millions of social-media followers:
![gigi graham gigi graham](https://static.billygraham.org/sites/billygraham.org/uploads/pro/2014/03/gigiphoto.jpg)
But the insult was compounded by the fact that Christianity Today had been founded by his recently deceased father, Billy Graham, the revered evangelist often called America’s Pastor. To Graham, it was bad enough to read such an attack on Trump. Franklin Graham, the scathing editorial in Christianity Today last year calling his friend Donald Trump “a leader of grossly immoral character” and urging that Trump be “removed from office” was heretical.