Franklin Graham’s multi-city “Route 66 God Loves You Tour” will soon roll through the High Desert, but he will not make an official appearance here, as the evangelist heads to the National Orange Show Event Center in San Bernardino, his last stop.
Graham, the president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, told the Daily Press the Oct. 2 visit in San Bernardino will be his first in decades.
“I was in Victorville maybe 25 to 30 years ago when I spoke up there,” said Graham, the son of the late preacher Billy Graham. “And of course, this will be my first time in the San Bernardino area so I’m looking forward to it.”
During a phone interview, the 69-year-old Graham called the High Desert and Inland Empire a historic part of California that has grown and developed rapidly over the last two decades.
“But even with the growth, the need is the same,” Graham said. “People need to know that there is a savior. People need to know that there’s hope and that that hope doesn’t come from Washington D.C. or Sacramento. Our hope comes from God and his son, Jesus Christ.”
Graham said during each stop of his eight-city tour, he plans to deliver the message that “people can have a relationship with God through faith in Jesus.”
Graham’s tour
From the 1920s to the 1960s, millions of people drove Route 66 from Chicago to Southern California as they looked for a “new beginning and a new start in life,” Graham said.
“I want to come back to this iconic highway and go into the population centers along the highway and visit a slice of mid-America,” Graham said. “I think the strength of our country is not in our big cities. The strength of our country is in the smaller cities and more rural areas. That is where I think the strength of America still lies.”
More that 8,700 people attended Graham’s first stop at the Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Illinois on Sept. 19, according to WJOL radio.
In Missouri, he spoke before large crowds at the World Wide Technology Raceway in St. Louis and at the Ozark Empire Fairgrounds and Event Center in Springfield.
Graham is scheduled to appear Tuesday at EXPO New Mexico in Albuquerque, then he’ll move to the Ft. Tuthill County Park Fairgrounds in Flagstaff, Arizona on Thursday before heading to San Bernardino.
At the Orange Show, Graham’s musical guests will include the Newsboys, which appeared in the films “God’s Not Dead,” “God’s Not Dead 2,” and “God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness.”
The Newsboys have had 33 No. 1 radio hits, four Grammy nominations and two American Music Award nominations.
Also performing will be singer, pastor and Spanish speaker Marcos Witt, 59, who has received five Latin Grammys and two Billboard awards, as well as award-winning guitarist Dennis Agajanian, who began his career in the 1960s and has performed with Johnny Cash, Charlie Daniels, Ricky Skaggs, Michael W. Smith and Darius Rucker.
Agajanian has performed at Billy Graham and Franklin Graham’s events for more than 45 years.
The spiritual climate
“I think the spiritual climate of the nation without question is in trouble,” Graham said.
He said abortion and homosexuality have been accepted by politicians, “which grieves the heart of God.”
Graham said he does not entirely blame pastors for the “spiritual degradation” of the nation but does “blame them to a degree” for “not speaking up, warning people and pushing back against the culture.”
Graham claims many pastors are afraid to speak out and “they just go with the flow and not make waves” because they may lose congregants or income from their churches.
“Pastors should make waves,” Graham said. ‘When you proclaim the word of God, it goes against culture, it goes against society, it goes against the world. Pastors need thick skins, and they need to be tough as they declare the word of God in truth.”
Graham said he believes the nation’s spiritual health would be stronger if if pastors over the last 40 years would have held to biblical truth.
Many claim Graham’s view of gay people is “detestable” and “out of step with the country he thinks he still has a prominent voice in,” according to the Washington Post.
In 2020, Graham and Samaritan’s Purse drew criticism when they established a mobile hospital in New York’s Central Park to treat COVID-19 patients.
Graham’s group asked volunteers to agree to a statement of faith that includes the line “marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female,” according to Newsweek.
The COVID-19 pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many states and local governments began restricting churches from meeting, which pushed most services online while some met despite the shutdown.
Graham said he appreciates Grace Community Church lead pastor John McArthur, who stood and fought and won a court battle against the city of Los Angeles on that front.
“The government has no authority to shut us down,” Graham said. “What made me mad about the pandemic was that you could go to Lowe’s hardware, Home Depot and some of these big stores, but you couldn’t go to church.”
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in August voted to authorize a $400,000 payment to settle a legal battle with Grace Community Church over MacArthur’s defiance of COVID-19 restrictions in the early months of the pandemic.
Under the agreement, which the board unanimously approved without discussion, California will also pay the church $400,000, according to Christianity Today.
County officials said it was decided in the context of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in February that told California it couldn’t enforce a ban on indoor worship because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Graham called McArthur’s victory a victory for freedom and the church.
The California ‘exodus’
“There is a mass exodus out of California because I think people are fed up with high taxes and crime,” Graham said. “Los Angeles and San Francisco, which were once beautiful cities, are now filled with crime, drugs and homeless people who defecate on the streets.”
Graham believes many people would flee the state but don’t have the opportunity.
“I think of the farmers who have their land and now they’re so regulated it’s almost impossible for them to grow their crops and make a profit,” Graham said.
Graham hopes the last people to leave California are Christians. He said they should stay and be “a witness and a testimony” of the love of Christ.
“I don’t think the people of California realize what’s happening, and they’re allowing their great state to be destroyed,” Graham said. “It really is an exodus.”
The state’s population fell by more than 182,000 last year, the first yearly loss ever recorded for the nation’s most-populous state, the Associated Press reported.
In recent years, more residents have left California for other states than have moved there, a trend Republicans say is a result of the Golden State’s high taxes and progressive politics.
California has been steadily losing people to other states for years. From 2010 to 2020, about 6.1 million people left for other states and only 4.9 million arrived from other parts of the country, according to an analysis of census data by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and San Francisco lost a combined 88,000 people in 2020. Meanwhile, major inland cities including Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield added population, evidence of people fleeing high-priced coastal cities for cheaper living, the AP reported.
Doors to Graham’s event open at 5:30 p.m. on Oct. 2 with the presentation beginning at 7 p.m. at the National Orange Show Events Center 689 S. E Street in San Bernardino.
For more information, visit www.GodLovesYouTour.com.
Daily Press reporter Rene Ray De La Cruz may be reached at 760-951-6227 or RDeLaCruz@VVDailyPress.com. Follow him on Twitter @DP_ReneDeLaCruz.
