Editor’s note: This profile is part of a GPAHE series examining the people shaping American Christian nationalism in post–Project 2025 America. Christian nationalism is distinct from Christianity itself; mainstream churches have publicly rejected the movement as a distortion of the Christian faith. The figures profiled here are the architects of a theocratic, political project working to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian supremacist rule and dismantle democratic institutions.
Franklin Graham inherited the most famous name in American evangelicalism. He has spent two decades turning it into a Christian nationalist political machine, federally funded and aimed at remaking the country.
Key Takeaways:
- Graham heads up two nonprofits. Samaritan’s Purse paid him $8 million from 2015 through 2024. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association stopped filing 990s in 2015 after the IRS reclassified it as a church, hiding the rest of his pay from the public.
- Samaritan’s Purse has collected more than $350 million in federal grants since 2016. When Trump and Elon Musk gutted USAID in January 2025, Graham cheered the demolition, then collected $19 million in reimbursements weeks later.
- Operation Christmas Child hands children in 175 countries a gospel booklet with a sinner’s prayer and a pledge card. Samaritan’s Purse describes the program as evangelism, discipleship, and multiplication.
- Trump named Graham to the Religious Liberty Commission in May 2025. The commission’s report drops July 4, 2026, six weeks before midterm voting opens.
On May 17, 2026, tens of thousands of people on the National Mall watched Franklin Graham appear on a giant screen and tell the country it had become “morally rotten, completely sick with sin.” His evidence was transgender Americans, same-sex marriage, and policies letting trans women use women’s locker rooms. The 73-year-old preacher had pre-recorded his sermon and stayed home.
The event was Rededicate 250, a day-long prayer rally organized by Trump’s Freedom 250 commission, the first in a string of administration-backed events leading up to the country’s 250th birthday in July, including a UFC fight on the White House South Lawn on June 14 and a fireworks display Freedom 250 has billed as the largest in world history on July 4. Speakers at Rededicate 250 included Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, House Speaker Mike Johnson, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Paula White-Cain, Robert Jeffress, Samuel Rodriguez, Lou Engle, Eric Metaxas, Jonathan Falwell, and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Gabbard, a Hindu, and one Jewish leader were the only non-Christian voices on the program, Religion News Service found.
Graham insists that Christian nationalism is a label invented by the press to smear conservative believers. He has been making that argument since the term entered mainstream usage.
American Christian nationalism is a theocratic political project working to impose a narrow, authoritarian vision of Christianity on the country — dismantling democratic institutions, delegitimizing elections, and reshaping the government around the rule of a chosen few. The movement frames its politics in the language of spiritual warfare, treats opponents as demonic, and aims to fuse American national identity with conservative Christian rule. The record of what Graham actually does keeps getting harder to square with his denial.
From his father’s pulpit
Billy Graham counseled every American president from Eisenhower through Obama, mostly in private. He spent his last decades trying to repair the damage from his closeness to Richard Nixon, damage the Nixon tapes cemented when they caught the elder Graham agreeing with the president’s antisemitism. Before he died in 2018, Billy warned his son against partisan entanglement. Franklin ignored him.
The first public sign that Franklin would run his father’s ministry differently came two months after September 11, when he told NBC Nightly News that Islam was “a very evil and wicked religion.” The Pentagon rescinded his invitation to a 2010 prayer service over the comments. In 2010, he went on CNN and pushed the false claim that Barack Obama had been born a Muslim. By the mid-2010s, he was attacking same-sex marriage and warning Christians of “open season” against them.
The structural break came in January 2016. Billy Graham had spent six decades preaching at indoor stadium crusades that he kept officially nonpartisan. Franklin launched the Decision America Tour, a $9 million Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) project that took him to the steps of all 50 state capitols in an election year. The first rally drew thousands to the Iowa Statehouse on January 5, three weeks before the caucuses. By the time the tour wrapped in his home state of North Carolina in October, BGEA counted 186,000 in-person attendees and another 200,000 watching online. “Your vote matters,” he told 7,000 people in Columbia, South Carolina. “I want to put God back in politics,” he told the crowd in Salt Lake City. Graham said the tour was nonpartisan. The message at every stop was that Christians had to vote for biblical candidates against a country sliding into sin, and the vote available that November was for Donald Trump.
Graham prayed at both Trump inaugurations. In 2017, he read from 1 Timothy and told the new president that the rain falling on the ceremony was a sign of God’s blessing. The 2025 invocation was something else. “Father, when Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out,” Graham prayed that January, “you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand.” The audience applauded. The family brand was now openly tied to the Trump White House.
Between the two inaugurations, Graham defended Trump’s alleged affair with Stormy Daniels on MSNBC by suggesting the reporting might not be accurate. He declared in January 2018 that Trump had stopped sinning when he took the oath of office. In November 2019, he told Eric Metaxas on his radio show that opposition to Trump was “almost a demonic power.” Peter Wehner answered in The Atlantic that two of the most prominent figures in American evangelicalism had decided to demonize the president’s critics. Six years later, Graham and Metaxas serve together on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission.
After Trump survived a gunman in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, Graham led the prayer that opened the Republican National Convention that month. He was inside the Washington Hilton ballroom on April 25, 2026, when a gunman opened fire at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner; the next morning, Graham posted on X that Trump’s survival was the hand of God, not luck. Theologians call this divinization: it positions Trump as God’s anointed and casts every opponent as an enemy of God.
The spiritual war
“Every demon from hell” had been turned loose in American culture, Graham told thousands of evangelical broadcasters at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Orlando in May 2023. The LGBTQ+ movement was leading the charge. In Decision magazine, the BGEA publication he edits, he wrote of children being “offered up on pagan altars of personal pleasure and immorality.” In Tennessee in 2017, he called the country’s condition “spiritual cancer.”
This is the working vocabulary of the New Apostolic Reformation and the Seven Mountains Mandate, the dominionist project that teaches Christians to seize seven realms of cultural influence — government, media, education, family, religion, business, and arts — through spiritual warfare against the demonic forces controlling each one. Graham’s commission colleague Paula White-Cain is one of the movement’s best-known figures. Rededicate 250 speaker Lou Engle is another. Graham is not the movement’s ideological architect. He is its most credentialed frontman. The family name still associated in many Americans’ minds with mid-century stadium revivals now lends its weight to a project aimed at replacing democratic pluralism with Christian rule.
The Statement of Faith
Samaritan’s Purse has required every paid employee to sign a Statement of Faith since the charity’s founding in 1970. The policy drew public scrutiny in 2020, when New York state senators objected after Samaritan’s Purse opened a COVID field hospital in Central Park. “For 50 years,” Graham wrote on Facebook in response, “we have asked our paid staff to subscribe to a Statement of Faith.” The document is posted on the charity’s own website. Item 9 reads:
“We believe God’s plan for human sexuality is to be expressed only within the context of marriage, that God created man and woman as unique biological persons made for each other. God instituted monogamous marriage between male and female as the foundation of the family and the basic structure of human society. For this reason, we believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.”
A gay applicant cannot truthfully sign that clause. Item 8 requires every staff member to commit to evangelism and discipleship as a condition of employment. These are the terms governing a charity that has received more than $350 million in federal grants since 2016 and runs federally funded disaster operations in the United States.
The money
Samaritan’s Purse brought in $1.4 billion in revenue in 2024, roughly double its take five years earlier. Schedule J of the latest Form 990 discloses first-class and charter travel for Graham, travel for companions, and personal services, including a maid, a chauffeur, and a chef. The board includes Graham, his son Edward (who is also the charity’s COO), his brother Melvin Graham, and his sister Cissie Lynch. Schedule L of the 2024 990 lists two sons-in-law as directors on payroll, a director’s son, a director’s spouse, the spouse of another director, and the daughter of a key employee.
BGEA, Graham’s second nonprofit, operates without that level of disclosure. In 2024, MinistryWatch listed BGEA among evangelical ministries that have hidden their financial data by reclassifying themselves as church associations. The last public BGEA Form 990, filed for 2014, reported $258,677 in compensation for Graham from BGEA on top of $629,821 he drew from Samaritan’s Purse the same year. Donors have no way to see what BGEA has paid him since.
Operation Christmas Child, the shoebox program Graham calls the public face of Samaritan’s Purse, is the largest single delivery channel for the charity’s evangelism. Each child receives a 12-lesson follow-up discipleship course called The Greatest Journey. UK reporters who obtained the gospel booklet included with the toys found a sinner’s prayer of conversion and a pledge card pitched at children too young to read them on their own.
The commission
Trump created the Religious Liberty Commission by executive order on May 1, 2025, and named Graham to it. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick chairs the 13-member panel. Patrick has long denied that the First Amendment establishes a separation of church and state. Ben Carson serves as vice chair. Graham’s fellow commissioners include Paula White-Cain, Eric Metaxas, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Bishop Robert Barron, and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik. Five of those six appeared on the Rededicate 250 program on the Capitol Mall May17, 2026.
The commission is required to deliver a report by July 4, 2026, on “threats to domestic religious liberty.” PBS reported that the panel’s hearings have focused almost entirely on grievances from conservative Christians who feel constrained by anti-discrimination law, public-school curricula, and the secular state. The report will steer the White House Faith Office and the Domestic Policy Council in drafting the religious-exemption rules everyone else will have to live under. Its release falls six weeks before midterm voting opens.
In his own words
“We’re not attacking Islam, but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He’s not the Son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It’s a different God, and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion.”
— NBC Nightly News, November 16, 2001, two months after September 11.
“I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim. His father gave him an Islamic name.”
— CNN with John King, August 19, 2010, on whether Barack Obama was a Christian.
“In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Our president and his attorney general need to learn from Russia’s president on this issue.”
— Decision magazine, March 21, 2014, praising the Russian law criminalizing “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” to minors.
“Islam has declared war on the world, and it’s high time we acknowledge it and respond decisively.”
— Facebook post, November 16, 2015, after the Paris and Beirut attacks.
“There is no hope for America outside the Church of Jesus Christ. Your vote matters.”
— Decision America Tour rally, Columbia, South Carolina, February 9, 2016, to a crowd of 7,000 outside the state capitol.
“President Trump I don’t think has admitted to having an affair with this person. And so this is just a news story, and I don’t even know if it’s accurate.”
— MSNBC, January 23, 2018, asked about reports that Trump’s lawyer paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 in hush money.
“Well, I believe it’s almost a demonic power that is trying — it’s a spiritual battle.”
— Eric Metaxas Radio Show, November 21, 2019, on opposition to Donald Trump.
“Every demon from hell has been turned loose. The world has deteriorated so quickly. We cannot be deceived and we can’t be fooled. We need to get ready and be prepared.”
— National Religious Broadcasters convention, Orlando, May 22, 2023, keynote address.
“Father, when Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand.”
— Invocation at Trump’s second inauguration, U.S. Capitol, January 20, 2025.
“After three assassination attempts, some people say that President @realDonaldTrump is one lucky man. I don’t think luck has anything to do with it — I believe it is the hand of God. What do you think?”
— X post, April 26, 2026, the morning after a gunman opened fire at the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
“America has become morally rotten, completely sick with sin, transgenderism, same-sex marriage, opening women’s locker rooms.”
— Rededicate 250 rally, National Mall, May 17, 2026.
