Billy Graham and Me

       I missed Billy by two days in 2000, likely his last stop at Bridges BBQ in Shelby North Carolina. I found out on Jan 5 he had been there on the 2nd, rough dates. In the 60s when we drove up from Gaffney his picture was on the wall with Jesse Helms. That about tells the story there but I have more.

     Al Mohler the fundamentalist traitor in the Southern Baptist Convention who flipped on Roy Honeycutt at Southern Seminary where Mohler became President told Bonhoeffer scholar and Baptist Minister's son Charles Marsh a few years ago most folks would be surprised how active Billy was behind the scenes for the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention.

    Still Graham has the tributes of President Carter at the Billy Gee Museum in Charlotte in 2007 and Clinton showed up too. Obama was the last to pray with him, but Franklin got Trump, helped get the pussy grabber elected so it's a mysterious world in the Baptist faith.

     Will Campbell's great friend at Furman LD Johnson was chair of the Billy Graham crusade in Greenville SC at Textile Hall in1966 where my Gaffney friend Steve Wright got saved. And a year later I saw Billy Gee again in Miami with Gregory Walcott at the SBC national convention in Miami.

   Never saw him again but did see Cliff Barrows while at Furman at Taylors Baptist and his son Buddy Mooned my sister's graduating class at Mars Hill in 1978. I was there but didn't see Buddy's Happy White Ass.

   So they had some fun along the way and it's hard to glue it down.

    Over the years I have talked to some of Billy's descendants, detractors and apologists. Ive Read Marshall Frady on Graham, paid for that biography in Knoxville in 79 and Still have my copy. Read Steven Miller on Graham and Nixon and my friend Randall Balmer easily googled piece Billy Graham and the Judgments of History.

    My Rhodes scholar nominee Friend and great Baptist pastor of my generation Richard Kremer who had the pulpit for a while at Charlotte's high dollar St Johns Baptist; we've talked about Billy too. Kremer as a high school student went several nights to the Montgomery Alabama crusade in late 6os of Billy's heyday.

   All the good things said about Billy now woulda been embraced by my grandfather WD Shorty Fox, a  prayer warrior with an 8th grade education who also prayed for me. So that's in my guts too; then again Billy hosted Nixon in Knoxville a few weeks after Kent State--Nick Saban was there--and Al Gore's father was purposely not invited.

      Like all of us Billy was a man of his time, The Cold War and only three TV networks with a captive audience. And he was Johnny Cash's friend and later a daughter was a good friend of Gaffney beauty Andie Macdowell.

    So I only saw him twice in person, barely missed him at Bridges but like millions of other southern white boys who followed him about 30 years, he was part of the extended family.

    I hope to keep talking to some later members of the family, maybe at Furman by Mid April.

     May he rest in Peace.

   But here on earth some of us in Jesus Name will give Franklin Hell till he comes around to better discernment.

Gowdy farewell interview on Fox, Bonhoeffer and Lincoln Not happy

   I think it was Feb 7 a Tuesday Martha MacCallum gave Trey Gowdy the most part of the hour for a farewell interview to the US House. She was quite lubricious, almost a nauseous look like Eddie Murphy's aunt in Nutty Professor talking about Oprah's Steadman.

   But it got worse. Gowdy the theological product of FBC Spartanburg SC where he shares membership with Billy Graham; the product of their Truth for a New Generation Conference stretched disbelief at the end. He invoked the names of Jesus Christ, Lincoln and Bonhoeffer as his guiding lights.

      For one Lincoln is the subject of a four part biography by Sidney Blumenthal who Gowdy demonized in the Ben Ghazi hearings. Ive read most of the first two installments. They are sterling. Gowdy is no Lincoln heir, in fact he is not even of the plateau of Blumenthal who he deplores. Gowdy could learn a lot from Blumenthal.

     But his greater blasphemy is with Bonhoeffer. His FBC Sburg conference have hosted the discredited Constitutional and American founding father's "scholar" David Barton--see the Baptist global news link on Barton; they have also hosted the bonhoeffer impostor and Trump apologist Eric Metaxas.

    Upshot is time for Furman and Wofford, historic Baptist and Methodist institutions in Gowdy's district to have shared conferences on Bonhoeffer and the blashphemy Gowdy and the TFNG conferences  is making of his legacy.

   Bring Baptist Ministers son and authentic Bonhoeffer scholar Charles Marsh to campus. Have Furman grad Karen Guth who wrote the easily googled Christian Century piece Claims on Bonhoeffer back to alma mater where her Father Jim Guth is a poli sci proff legend.

    A Recent book  How Democracies Die by Harvard scholars, endorsed by Fareed Zhakaria (sp?) is in play in this matter. Call Gowdy out.

   I've had enough of this sham.

My response to Trump SOTU; Tipping Points

      Yep you can hear me online from my live call in January 31 on the 1A Program on NPR. I called in as Stephen from Collinsville to talk about Trump and DACA and him calling Crimson Tide Heisman Trophy Winner Derrick Henry a son of a bitch in Huntsville Alabama last fall.

     Our Senior Senator Richard Shelby invoked "tipping points" for his rationale not to support Roy Moore in the US Senate Race. Can Shelby, big friend of the University of Alabama, whose wife teaches at Georgetown, who is a "Legend" of the University and very proud of its nationally recognized Honors Program not invoke the same tipping points re the current President of the United States who called a Heisman Trophy Winner of Nick Saban's Crimson Tide a Son of a bitch for not seeing the NFL National Anthem morass the same way Trump has and Sean Hannity have demagogued it.

    Will Shelby join the Honors Program at U Bama in a group read of the new Book How Democracies Die and see if they together don't come to the same conclusion as the authors that in Trump world we have regressed to George Wallace's 60s Bama, the Louisiana of Huey Long, the Father Coughlin world Sean Hannity now imitates and the McCarthyism that move Eisenhower to take Ole Joe to the Woodshed.

     Let me back up a little cause Ive about jumped the shark. How did I get here.

      Well I'm almost 65 now and It's way past time I stand with the folks Ive talked about a good bit of my life as the ones I most admire and the moments they stood tall. I've talked a lot on this blog about Judge Frank Johnson and how he told Wallace's lawyers in 65 the matter of contempt is for this court to decide, not the alleged contemptors.

    Stewart A Newman stood behind the sacred desk in Columbia South Carolina in 1956 after Criswell told the Babdist preachers you wouldn't call a chigger a chiggerow now would ya. Newman spoke to to say: "WA Criswell doesn't speak for me.

   Newman visited our house in Hayesville, NC in 1960. And if 1977 at the Shoneys in Gaffney we had a good chat with my Dad.

     I texted the good chaplain, the right reverend Jim Pitts a few days ago to try one more time to get it right about the EA McDowell award in Charleston SC circa 1974 after then Governor Jimmy Carter gave the final address to the SC Southern Baptist State Convention.

     Pitts presented the award that day to his great friend Martin England a co founder of the Koinonia Farms the Furman graduate who couriered Martin Luther King's Letter out of the Birmingham Jail in 63 to its almost instant international acclaim.

    In a serendipitous moment in 74 somebody said let's have lunch. And they did.

    So If I am gonna champion these people, not to mention Marshal Frady and Will Campbell, Bonhoeffer and Civil Rights scholar and fellow Baptist preachers son Charles Marsh--google his religion and politics essay on guns and the NRA-- and call Viola Davis and now Eric Motley heroes and Rosa Parks and Maria Moreno; I guess its time to make certain to Donald Trump and Nick Saban and Paul Finebaum and the boys at the Shed in Collinsville, Alabama--some of them my friends--just where I stand on these matters.

    Tell Will Ainsworth and Rick Burgess and Don Crawford and Cliff Simms in the White House and Jeff Duncan in the US House I said so.

   Yeah that's me talking on the radio from Collinsville Alabama where my Mother's family goes back to the 1840s and and I'm proud of her.