In the early 1950s, with considerable material support, an evangelical preacher began history-making missionary work in the USA.
Billy Graham fascinated people with his call for more faith and based his religious offensive on the Christian Bible.
If today on this planet about 400 million people adhere to this so-called evangelical faith, then the beginnings of this lie in Graham’s missionary work.
While the beliefs were still characterised by a certain “openness” in the beginning, they have developed into an increasingly narrow prison of thought until today:
- the literal interpretation of the Bible of both the Old and New Testaments
- the rejection of scientific knowledge
- the condemnation of other religions
- the designation of further missionary work as a God-given “crusade
- the dogma of material prosperity as a consequence of correct belief
- the spread of an ideology of the material combined with the religious as described in Waymark 5.
These examples may suffice to illustrate the increasingly strong religious-ideological narrowing.
Two further symptoms are to be mentioned. Since the path of the soul is reduced to a single life, manipulative fear is used. Either man follows this construct of the so-called evangelical faith or he is condemned and loses his existence. This dogmatism is linked to the grip on the purse of the “sinners”, which has led the superstars of this religious tsunami to indescribable material wealth.
The most threatening factor in the meantime is the liaison with politics, the influencing and moulding of political persons who are supposed to represent the desired principles in order to then receive support for their elections in return. In the process, the moral and ethical conduct of these persons plays no role and is dismissed as incidental. The proven lying and cheating last American president has thus become their messiah and was and still is supported by them without reservation. His task was essentially to change the justice system into a fundamentalist one.
For the individual human soul on its way through the incarnations, the entry into this thought prison is a lost time, because soul growth and thereby gained insights are not obtained from parroted simplified beliefs.
Billy Graham’s initially well-intentioned initiative has now been hijacked by money-grubbing demagogues to whom the separation of church and state is only an obstacle. The more a political figure is willing to espouse the required mindless beliefs in a double standard, even if he or she personally acts completely differently, the more likely he or she is to gain the support of this organisation for his or her political goals.
It may be left to the theosophical reader to examine the question of what background forces have taken possession of this movement.
