“During the Trump presidency, I don’t believe this attitude has changed—certainly not at Wheaton College, the evangelical institution where I now teach. Yet cries of ‘evangelical’ complicity in our current political predicament grow ever louder. Lately I took a walk through the Billy Graham Center Museum here on campus, to see whether I had got this whole thing wrong.”

When I was an evangelical convert in high school in the 1990s, the Religious Right was rallying—not that it mattered to us. To be a Christian, I and my friends were learning, was to become an exile. The first book we studied seriously, on the tattered couches of our youth pastor’s parsonage, was the Book of Daniel. A Jewish exile in Babylon, Daniel taught us how to live apart from the blood sport of high school popularity contests. The ethos was well illustrated by the cover of the Keith Green album we listened to, titled No Compromise.

It showed Daniel standing with nonchalant defiance amid a prostrate crowd, while the reigning authority’s furious henchman vainly commanded his assent. Ours was the kind of faith that would take a placard with Daniel 3:16 (“O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you”) alongside John 3:16 to a football game.

During the Trump presidency, I don’t believe this attitude has changed—certainly not at Wheaton College, the evangelical institution where I now teach. Yet cries of “evangelical” complicity in our current political predicament grow ever louder. Lately I took a walk through the Billy Graham Center Museum here on campus, to see whether I had got this whole thing wrong.

Walk through Wheaton’s museum and you’ll see the section devoted to Graham’s attack on apartheid in South Africa. “Billy Graham: ‘Apartheid Doomed,’” announced the newspaper headlines after his 1973 visit, the font so large it filled an entire front page. “The spirit of reconciliation we sense in many of South African hearts,” claimed Bishop Alpheus Zulu of Zululand, “can be traced back directly to the Billy Graham meetings held in Durban and Johannesburg in 1973. … From that moment on we were on the road to reconciliation.”

Graham also famously cooperated with Christians of other traditions, and came under heavy fire for doing so. Collections of memorabilia record his controversial trip to Russia at the height of the Cold War, his interactions with Romanian Orthodox Christians, and his relationship with Pope John Paul II. Graham collections also show a Bible written in the Algonquin language, ample evidence of Graham’s fruitful cooperation with Native Americans, and images of his children and their ministries. I refer especially to the preaching ministry of Graham’s daughter, Anne Graham Lotz. Evangelicalism, more than any other mainstream Christian tradition, has been a historic platform for women in ministry.

None of this is to deny Billy Graham’s coziness with political power, and one remarkable set of golf clubs in another Graham collection illustrates this uncomfortably well. It’s odd to think of the evangelist vacationing in the Mediterranean, but so it was in the mid-1960s. Graham rented some equipment at the Monte Carlo golf club. He had one of the best games of his life, and asked the golf pro whether he could purchase such remarkable clubs. The golf pro declined. A few weeks later Graham related this story to his golfing buddy Richard Nixon. Some time later, underneath the Grahams’ 1967 Christmas tree, those very clubs appeared—a gift from Nixon himself. Which is to say, the most powerful man in the world used his influenced to acquire high-quality sporting equipment from the Côte d’Azur for America’s Pastor.

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