As Trump returns, be a Martin Marty, not a Billy Graham

Martin Marty in 2017

     Faith gets good press. But its real value depends on what precisely you put your faith in, and how you use it. As I've said before: religion is a hammer. You can hit someone in the head with it. Or build them a house. Same hammer. Your choice.
     Take two of the most prominent Chicago theologians of the past half-century, Rev. Billy Graham and professor Martin E. Marty. Each used their similar faiths to take vastly different approaches to the crises of their turbulent era.
     Graham, a minister ordained in the Southern Baptist church, used his popularity as a ticket into the White House. There he curled up in the lap of power and became the personal pastor to 11 commanders in chief, starting with Harry Truman and running through every president up to Barack Obama. He baptized Dwight D. Eisenhower and spoke at the funeral of his golfing buddy, Richard Nixon.
     He cast himself as a kind of spiritual adviser. But was really just a hallelujah chorus, offering moral validation. Graham sidestepped civil rights. He sneered at Vietnam War protesters. “It seems the only way to gain attention today is to organize a march and protest something," he reassured his pal, Lyndon Johnson.
     You don't need the perspective of years to see Graham ducking the great ethical challenges of his day. Martin Marty, a Lutheran religious scholar, saw exactly who Graham was.
     “A man in transit between epochs and value systems, he has chosen to disengage himself and distract us by shouting about the end of history,” he wrote in the Sun-Times in 1965.
     Marty's pulpit was far smaller than Graham's. But he used it vigorously to advocate for civil rights. When Martin Luther King personally invited him to Selma, he recruited colleagues and went. He not only opposed the war in Vietnam, but founded an organization, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, to do so.
     You can gauge the impact of each man by what he left behind. Graham left us with his son, Franklin, perhaps the coldest stone hater calling himself a man of God on the American scene today.
     Marty left us with the University of Chicago's Martin Marty Center, which works to encourage interfaith dialogue, viewing religion as something that should bring together people of different faiths, not drive them apart.
     Marty warned against acting as the "servant of a God of prey whose goal it is to annex and enslave."
     He reminds us:
     "Nothing is more important than to keep the richness of our pluralism alive. To be aware of many different people and different ways, and deal with it."
     I had lunch with Marty in 2017, when his book on Martin Luther's 95 Theses was published, and reached out to him to plumb his thoughts now. But he'll be 97 in a couple of weeks and avoids the public eye he used so well for so long. No matter, his voluminous writings — he is the author of more than 50 books — provide what we need.

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