Source: www.hafsite.org
UNITED STATES, May 7, 2010: Activists of the Indian-American community and the Hindu American Foundation have denounced Reverend Franklin Graham, the son and heir apparent of evangelist Reverend Billy Graham, for maligning Hinduism during an interview where he largely continued his attacks on Islam. In an interview to the USA Today newspaper on May 4, renewed his attacks on Islam, which he had done a day earlier with the conservative media outlet Newsmax, saying, “Muslims do not worship the same God the Father I worship,” and then took a nasty swipe at Hinduism’s many manifestations of God. “None of their 9,000 Gods is going to lead me to salvation. We are fooling ourselves if we think we can have some big kumbaya service and all hold hands and it’s all going to get better in this world. It’s not going to get better,” Franklin Graham said in the controversial interview.
Suhag Shukla, managing director and legal counsel, Hindu American Foundation said, “Graham’s hate-filled stab at Hindus represents the worst of Christian bigotry and thankfully the fastest-waning segment of Christian-Americans.” She noted that “surveys have shown that Americans, a majority of whom are Christian, are increasingly subscribing to a more Hindu-like worldview. Well-regarded surveys like Pew and Harris have found that 65 percent of Americans, 37 percent of whom are white evangelicals, believe that many religions can lead to Eternal Life and 24 percent believe in reincarnation. These findings combined with the continued exponential rise in popularity of Hindu spirituality and yoga, I believe, shed better light on the true nature of Graham’s statement,” Shukla said, adding, “that they are more desperate cries of a shepherd trying to recapture a fleeing flock than a representative voice of Christians in America.”
She acknowledged that “Graham fails to recognise the role that his brand of narrow-minded Christianity as well as other fundamentalist interpretations of the world’s religions have played in not only many of our nation’s problems but those of the world, including terrorism, wars, violation of civil rights, human rights, atrocities and annihilation of entire cultures and communities.”
Shukla noted “American pluralism is a reality and the sooner Graham and those like him accept it, the sooner we’ll be able to move on and address the pressing issues facing our nation, regardless of all of our different colors and creeds.”