An instructive controversy over Statuary Hall

Billy Graham’s life was as American as lives can be, and certainly among the nation’s pastors and evangelists. This is, after all, the country once described by G. K. Chesterton as a nation “with the soul of a church.” Graham received many honors in his lifetime. He is set to earn yet another.

The U.S. Capitol features a hall of statuary representing two figures from each state. One of North Carolina’s honorees of the past had a fraught racial past and is to be replaced by a statue of Billy Graham, one of the state’s favorite sons. And yet, in a recent column for the Charlotte Observer, Sherri Zann Rosenthal argued that honoring a Christian evangelist in this way would violate America’s tradition of church-state separation.

Zann’s resistance to a statue honoring Graham as a representative of North Carolina history is further evidence of secularism’s desire to whitewash American history of its religious dimension and to interpret its story void of religion’s public influence. But erasing history does not work, and rightly honoring the role of religion in public life is essential to telling the history of America with integrity.

During his decades of evangelism, Graham played a role that will be remembered in the annals of American history. He addressed live crowds estimated to exceed 210 million people, with a higher total of over 2 billion if broadcast audiences are included. His crusades were massive public events in large cities.

While ambition caused many preachers to stumble, Graham built an admirable reputation for avoiding even the appearance of scandal. At the same time, with the exception of a notable misstep in getting too close to presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Graham met with every president from Truman to Obama and generally managed to rise above partisan politics. At the dedication of the Graham library in 2007, attendees included Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush. His nearly unblemished record led Americans to choose him for the Gallup organization’s list of the top ten most admired persons a record 61 times.

Outside of his evangelistic legacy, Graham took courageous stands regarding race. Early in the 1950s, he refused to preach to segregated audiences and took down ropes, informing organizers they could go on without him if they didn’t like it. Graham invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to share his pulpit during a crusade in New York City. In the early 1970s, he denounced Apartheid in South Africa during a crusade there and carried on correspondence with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. He proclaimed that there is no scriptural justification for segregation and that whites would face divine judgment for any claim of racial superiority.

After the 9/11 attacks, Graham was the natural choice to lead services at the Washington National Cathedral. At the end of his life, he became the first American religious leader to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. He received the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In addition, Queen Elizabeth II, who had once requested and received a personal visit from Graham, made him an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

His was a quintessentially American life, but also, to be sure, a Christian life filled with proclamation of the gospel. And the question Ms. Rosenthal asked as to whether such a person can be honored in the capitol is instructive. It should be clear that the implication of such a view would be that devout Christians would be excluded from any prominent place in the American pantheon. But America’s story cannot be told apart from religion’s place in its storyline. Graham’s legacy reflects the truth of religion’s inevitable engagement with democracy.

The desire for secular erasure reaches back toward the French Revolution, not the American Revolution. The philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau dreamed up a civil religion with a bland moral outlook and a single, intolerable sin—no citizen could believe another citizen would go to hell. The purpose of this invented religion was social cohesion rather than grappling with the truth of a transcendent God.

The situation in the United States is very different, and Americans have resisted the ardent secularism of the French revolutionaries. The American landscape includes a Christian landscape. Part of the reason Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many other voices for moral change have been so effective is their ability to speak forcefully to the Christian conscience.

The proper separation of church and state doesn’t require a sterile secularism that would delete a world-shaping figure such as Billy Graham—a country boy from North Carolina who lived his long life on the global stage. A statue of Billy Graham in Statutory Hall would bring honor to North Carolina, credit to the nation, and would tell the American story through Graham’s remarkable life.