The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) recently established a $1.3 million legal defense fund to help Christians facing legal action in Europe.
The Graham family is urging Christians around the world to speak out against legal challenges to their religious freedom.
BGEA President Franklin Graham told Fox News on Wednesday that the seed money for the legal defense fund came from BGEA’s court victories against censorship in the United Kingdom.
“We preach a message of God’s love, but when a small group of activists in the U.K. called it hate, we were canceled. Our advertisements were removed from buses and venues dropped our events,” he recalled.
“We stood our ground and challenged the decisions in court. Though it took seven years, all nine legal disputes were resolved in our favor,” he said.
Graham described the defense fund, bolstered by contributions from the Samaritan’s Purse charity that he also heads, as a “war chest to help other Christians in Europe who are threatened or intimidated into silence and not expressing their faith.”
“The silencing of Christians isn’t just happening in other countries,” he added. “BGEA and Samaritan’s Purse have also been involved in many different legal cases that affect the freedom of believers to live out their faith here in the U.S.”
“We want Americans who are standing up for biblical beliefs in court to know that we are with them — they are not alone in this fight,” he said.
The defense fund is named after Franklin Graham’s father, the late Rev. Billy Graham. Franklin’s daughter Cissie Graham Lynch said she wanted the fund to become a symbol of hope and strength for Christians facing lawfare and cancel culture.
“You could be canceled for speaking the truth. You may be called names. But every time you choose to fight that fight, you help build a stronger foundation for other people of faith to stand on,” she said.
“There is no human liberty more precious and important than the freedom of speech and religion. We must work to preserve the right to proclaim the Gospel here in the U.S. and in the U.K., because the stakes are far too high to stay silent,” she declared.
“We are seeing so many concerning cases in the United States where Christians are dragged into the courtroom if they share their beliefs in the workplace, at school, or on sports teams. If you care about preserving religious liberty and free speech for the next generation, we all need to pay attention,” she warned.
Petitions urging venues in the United Kingdom to cancel Graham’s events in 2020 cited him describing Islam as a “very wicked and evil religion,” and denouncing then-presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s homosexuality as “something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised, or politicized.”
“Franklin Graham’s views are wholly inconsistent with our city, which is preparing to welcome huge celebrations and tens of thousands of people this summer for UK Pride,” a gay rights group stated in its petition to have Graham banned from Newcastle’s Utilita Arena.
As Graham said in his interview with Fox News, his ministry sued seven venues in the United Kingdom that canceled his duly contracted appearances under pressure from activists, and the ministry obtained favorable outcomes in every case. BGEA’s total compensation of over $660,000 dollars U.S. from those cases formed the nucleus of the new defense fund and struck a remarkable blow for free speech in a United Kingdom that has grown increasingly hostile to the concept.
Christianity Today (CT) on Tuesday pointed to a smattering of other court victories across Europe, in jurisdictions where Christians have been pushed out of politics. The BGEA defense fund could become an important instrument in the effort to revive European Christianity by defeating efforts to silence its beliefs as “hate speech.”
“Our work on things like abortion was more and more difficult within institutions that are deeply biased and influenced by the ideological control of our opponents,” European Center for Law and Justice chief Gregor Puppinck told CT.
“We must fight to try and help Christians to express themselves… within societies that are increasingly hostile to our values,” Puppinck said.
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