Within the serried ranks of nepo babies, Franklin Graham reigns supreme. Out of all of them, he might be the best known and most successful. He’s parlayed his daddy’s evangelism empire into a generational dynasty by playing upon his audience’s biggest fears. But that audience has aged, and he along with it. He has locked himself into a cage shaped like Endtimes conspiracy theories, where he dances for Boomers’ and Gen Xers’ entertainment. Today, we’ll check out that cage—and see why he might have trouble attracting younger fans.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 7/4/2025. They’re both available now! From introduction: Info about Stop Killing Games; Where to sign the initiative.)
SITUATION REPORT: Franklin Graham’s latest preaching gig reveals the trap he’s made for himself
On June 21, Franklin Graham preached a sermon to London evangelicals as part of his “God Loves You” tour. This event is part of a huge evangelism tour that kicked off in March. This tour, sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) that he runs, has had this 72-year-old trotting all over the world.
This isn’t the first “God Loves You” event in London. The first occurred in 2022, and Franklin Graham spearheaded that one, too. It attracted enough people to justify a 2023 return, which had 10k people attending. And that justified a 2025 return. The event ran at Excel London, which has also been holding an extended live Squid Game event since May.
He told the crowd, “Since I last preached here in London two years ago, the world seems to be one step closer to Armageddon… Many people feel hopeless.” Then, he told them that converting to his flavor of Christianity would totally cure that hopelessness.
For this year’s “God Loves You” night, Premier Christian News reported that the venue hit its capacity of 15k people. The site reported that “many” attendees were young, though of course they don’t offer specific numbers. They also got a quote from “a 16-year-old girl” who told them:
Everybody is hungry for God in my generation right now, and He is moving. [Source: Premier Christian News, 6/23/2025]
Premier Christian News says she was one of “hundreds” who “responded to the Gospel invitation” Graham issued. That this was her conversion night is extremely unlikely. In her statement, she uses advanced Christianese that she could only know if she’d been an evangelical already for some years. At most, she only confirmed her affiliation with Graham’s flavor of Christianity—though her testimony will no doubt declare this night her official conversion.
Somehow, I doubt that some huge number of Gen Z or Alpha people were clamoring for Franklin Graham’s preaching. I suspect they were more interested in hearing Michael W. Smith and CeCe Winans, or The Afters. But those are Gen X and Millennial faves, for the most part, not Gen Z and Alpha catnip.
Regardless, Franklin Graham’s message hasn’t changed one bit. His audience really hasn’t changed at all, either. Either he refuses to retool his message for the youngest adult generations, or he can’t. And both options present evangelicals with bad news.
Franklin Graham, the poor little rich boy
Billy Graham passed away in 2018. At the time, Franklin Graham was 65 years old: an ancient Skeksis yielding the scepter to a very slightly less ancient one in an evangelical riff on The Dark Crystal (1982).
By 2018, Franklin Graham had already been working in ministry for decades. He took over the charity Samaritan’s Purse in 1979, running it very similarly to BGEA. I don’t think he liked being considered the scion of the Billy Graham empire. Still, he certainly helped with his father’s work during his lifetime. Afterward, though, Franklin’s leadership soon led Politico to name him personally in 2018 as one of the reasons why evangelicalism has declined so swiftly in America. (How many evangelicals can say that?)
Politico blamed Franklin Graham for turning evangelicalism into more of an extremist right-wing political identity than a religious belief system—and they’re dead right, though I don’t see Franklin Graham as the “rebranding” agent here, but more of a chaser-after-trends. His father had already fused evangelicalism with Republican politics after WWII. He helped engineer evangelicals’ initial moral panics about Communism and homosexuality. All the son did was pick up the pieces and carry on.
But Millennials seemed to care very little about those pieces.
The most hilarious sorta-cameo appearance in Christian movie history
Franklin Graham has always had trouble appealing to anyone younger than the oldest Gen Xers. When I saw him pop up as a plot device in the first God’s Not Dead movie in 2014, I burst into laugher.
In the movie, a young Muslim woman secretly converts to evangelicalism behind her strict, traditionalist father’s back. Soon enough, though, her younger brother rats her out for listening to Franklin Graham sermons on a mobile device. In confronting her, her father picks up the device, sees what it’s playing, then literally throws her out of their home with nothing but the clothes on her back.
Out of every single preacher Ayisha could be listening to that her father would instantly recognize as off-limits, the movie writers went with Franklin Graham of all options? Nabeel Qureshi was right there, for chrissakes! If Qureshi was too highbrow for those writers, Ergun Caner was making a name for himself in the early 2010s with gullible evangelicals!
That’s when Franklin Graham really pinged my radar. His appearance in this movie seemed at first like product placement, no different from a character onscreen drinking a particular brand of soda or prominently displaying branded sneakers. It was completely out of place, and yet so very, very evangelical. Evangelicals, particularly those of a certain age, would get why Ayisha had to be listening to Franklin Graham. So his preaching went into the movie.
The eternal war of Franklin Graham
Franklin Graham has always preached the same message about the urgent need to convert to his flavor of Christianity before it’s too late. To communicate that urgency, he frequently preaches about the “Endtimes.” The Endtimes is a wild set of conspiracy theories that older evangelicals believe will happen when the world ends.
Originally, fundamentalists were the Endtimes fanatics. But after their end of Christianity fused with evangelicalism, even highbrow evangelicals embraced the idea as well. Typically speaking, Endtimes messages shoehorn Bible verses—particularly ones from the Book of Revelation—into modern headlines. Then, believers try to scare listeners silly by claiming the world is ending Any Day Now™.
In Endtimes fantasies, every major earthquake becomes “earthquakes in divers[e] places.”
Every war looks like “nation rising against nation.” And every popular world leader, including “just about any pope,” seems to earn the title of “the Antichrist,” a demon-controlled pawn who will supposedly unite the world. Once he does that, he’ll use his power to systematically exterminate TRUE CHRISTIANS™ for rejecting his agenda.
That’s the message Franklin Graham preaches. No matter the occasion, he always uses it to threaten people with Doomsday and Hell. In 2021, for instance, he famously corrected Boris Johnson in one of his tweets:
@BorisJohnson said we are “one minute to midnight” as it relates to climate change. I believe we’re one minute to midnight—not regarding climate change, but on God’s clock, when He will bring judgment on those who have rejected Him & His Son, Jesus Christ. [Source: Premier Christian News, 11/3/2021]
“One minute to midnight” comes up fairly often in evangelical Endtimes fantasies. It means that the end of the world is coming Any Day Now™. Franklin Graham doesn’t care about climate change. He instead pushes Judgment Day, which is part of the Endtimes belief package, as the real threat to humanity.
Of course, Boris Johnson was completely correct. We blew past 1°C in 2015, then 1.5°C last year. We’re already seeing catastrophic real-world effects from it. But evangelicals keep striking out with “God’s clock.” All Franklin could do there was tell his audience that “the world seems to be one step closer to Armageddon.”
Armageddon is the giant world war mentioned in Revelation 16:16. Endtimes believers constantly discuss how this or that global conflict ties into it. Naturally, Billy Graham also preached about this war.
(You can book tours of the area!)
Gen Z and Alpha people have completely different concerns and priorities
Gen Z and Alpha are already shaping up to be the least evangelical generations in modern history. They might be the least religious generations in general, too. On social media, I constantly see them saying they know nothing about Christianity or other religions. In popular analog horror series like “Gemini Home Entertainment,” these series’ frequent religious references fly right over the heads of younger audiences. Their world becomes more secular by the day, it seems.
Even evangelical young adults don’t care about Israel or earthquakes in divers[e] places. They already perceive their world as completely dystopian. They’re scared of real things already—things that evangelicals can’t fix, because they’re often the ones making them happen in the first place through their political activity. And all the older folks can do is push harder on their stupid culture wars.
That’s why I cracked up over that 16-year-old girl’s statement in Premier Christian News. “Everybody is hungry for God” is just Christianese for “everyone wants to hear about my religion and join up.” Nobody outside of evangelical culture would even know that phrase. And it’s a [citation needed] moment if there ever was one! Evangelicals have been having a problem with retention of its young adults for decades now.
By the way, “he is moving” is also Christianese. It means people are actively seeking information and joining up. Again, [citation needed]. The decline of Christianity has bottomed out for now, but Pew Research predicts further declines as today’s secular young adults have children and then raise them entirely without religion. Without steady access to heathens’ children, which Christians used to have in abundance but now struggle to find, their decline can only enter a vicious spiral.
The young ones are rejecting Franklin Graham’s entire schtick
Some right-wing Christian Zoomer men get way into evangelicalism, but even they don’t talk about Endtimes stuff. Aside from threatening people with Hell, they don’t even seem to care much about specific Endtimes events. They’re far more interested in evangelicalism’s political identity.
And Zoomer women are leaving that kind of Christianity in droves precisely because of that political identity.
But Franklin Graham can’t change now, even if he wanted to—and I doubt he would ever want to. By now, his existing audience expects him to support and preach certain topics. He’s on very comfortable ground with those topics. He can’t tackle young adults’ concerns because he promotes the specific evangelical culture-war stances that fueled those problems.
Evangelicals’ xenophobia breeds violence, white Christian nationalism, and opposition to immigration. Its leaders pander to the powerful and wealthy, abandoning the poor and causing the costs of living to skyrocket.
And in recent times, evangelicals’ focus on Israel as the necessary linchpin of Endtimes events is directly contributing to Republicans’ loud support for a foreign government accused of constant war crimes—including genocide.
When younger adults recognize these facts and turn away from evangelicalism, all leaders like Franklin Graham can do is try to rephrase their ideas. Any deviation from them will outrage existing supporters—while not guaranteeing at all that new ones will join up as a result.
It’s not fun to be trapped in one’s own cage. But these days, that’s where Franklin Graham is stuck! He’s preaching Armageddon and the Endtimes to an audience that increasingly thinks they’re living in it, and he has no relevant answers for them.
NEXT UP: Reviewing Alpha Course video #3, which asks why Jesus died. Their (non-)answer is quite illuminating—see you soon! <3
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