PRESIDIO — Last Saturday afternoon, the world-famous evangelist Franklin Graham visited Presidio on the sixth leg of his “God Loves You” tour, following the U.S.-Mexico border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Coast. Presidio was by far the smallest city along the route, which started in Brownsville on February 24 and will wrap up in Chula Vista, California, on Saturday.
Around 300 people attended the late afternoon service; one volunteer said they had given out over 500 packages of devotionals, magazines and donation forms throughout the day.
The Presidio show came hot on the heels of stops in Eagle Pass and Del Rio, which have seen their own influx of celebrities in recent months: Gov. Greg Abbott, former President Donald Trump, tech scion Elon Musk. The two sleepy border towns have become a political battleground, pitting the state and federal governments against each other and sparking headlines around the world.
Despite the place and time — performing in some of the most embattled Texan border communities during a presidential primary — Graham insists that his event isn’t political. Instead, Graham says his preaching targets all who have been impacted by the militarization of the border: law enforcement, local residents, migrants and the churches caring for all of the above. To the ordinary people caught in the fray, politics is poison and Jesus is the antidote.
“People on both sides of the border are overwhelmed, they’re tired. They’re discouraged,” he told The Big Bend Sentinel. “Ours is a spiritual message: we want people on the border to know that God has not forgotten them.”
The message is more literal in Presidio than most. From the window of Graham’s tour bus, you could see La Sierrita, the mountain where the devil came down to earth. As the story goes, when God cast Satan out of Heaven, he was sent to the Big Bend — finding Alpine too lush and green, the devil set his sights on Ojinaga, which reminded him more of hell.
Unlike Marfa, Presidio’s little sister to the north, people like Beyonce rarely stop by to pose for photos and mingle with locals. Indie country darling Zach Bryan filmed at the Presidio International Dragstrip a few months ago, but Bryan is a birthday candle compared to Graham’s Olympic torch.
In a town where the largest gatherings in recent memory include a UFO festival and the crowning of an Onion Queen, Graham is the closest thing to a rock star Presidians have seen this side of the river in a long time.
Between dual CEO roles at Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, founded by his father, and Samaritan’s Purse, a worldwide relief ministry, Graham nets around $1 million a year. But his star power drives donations: his website estimates that he’s preached to over 570,000 people since he began regularly touring the country in 2016.
If Graham is a rock star, “God Loves You” is his borderlands Burning Man. In a matter of hours, a team of forklifts and death-defying audio techs transformed the small-town high school stadium into a state-of-the-art sound stage, with speakers stacked two stories high and jumbotron screens perched strategically for all to see.
For the most part, the service stayed true to its apolitical roots. In contrast with recent Republican messaging on the influx of migrants on the border — “ground zero” for an invasion of criminals from a “failed narcostate” incapable of policing itself — not a single critical word was spoken of immigrants or of the United States’ southern neighbor.
Leading the congregation in songs that flipped between English and Spanish, musician Marcos Witt insisted that the bilingual service was a rehearsal for the afterlife. “God loves Mexico,” he said. “We’ll sing in Spanish in Heaven.”
Graham’s off-stage relationship with politics is more complex. His father, Billy Graham — arguably the most influential evangelical Christian of all time — counseled every American president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama.
The elder Graham was a staunch proponent of the Civil Rights movement and a supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. “Evangelicals can’t be closely identified with any particular party or person,” Graham declared in 1981. “We have to stand in the middle, to preach to all the people, right and left.”
Of course, the reality was more complex: Graham was fervently anti-communist and opposed the candidacy of John F. Kennedy on the grounds that he was Catholic. He had particularly knotty relationships with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan that made some observers question his impartiality. “I haven’t been faithful to my own advice in the past … I will in the future,” he said.
His son has struggled to walk the same line. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, the younger Graham stumped for Trump. He announced last year that he would not endorse Trump in the 2024 primaries — but showed support in other ways, expressing displeasure when E. Jean Carroll, who accused the former president of sexually assaulting her, won an $83.3 million settlement. “Simply put, Democrats are using the system & changing the law,” he tweeted.
On immigration, Graham’s views hit a few Republican talking points — chief among them, that federal immigration authorities are being hamstrung by an ineffective Biden administration. But his rhetoric lacks some of the racial dog whistles employed by the more extreme end of the bell curve. “Some people think everybody coming across is a bad person,” he told The Sentinel. “I don’t blame the people coming in. But [smugglers] take advantage of them and steal their money, and you hear these horrible stories, especially of things that have happened to women.”
Graham does not want to see the border shut down. He doesn’t want people to give up their languages and culture. He’d also like to see the economy bolstered by an easier and more efficient guest-worker program.
In 2019, Samaritan’s Purse — the relief nonprofit he leads — toured Texas along the Rio Grande, connecting asylum seekers with temporary housing and passing out hygiene kits and diapers. “People don’t understand the border — so I’m gonna shed a little light and try to share God’s love with as many people as I can,” he said.
To a secular audience, Graham’s messaging might seem wildly political. In the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s magazine, Decision — passed out by volunteers in green and blue vests at the event — the issues fall squarely on the right-hand side of the aisle. The magazine features a Q&A with former Vice President Mike Pence and makes a point to condemn anti-Zionism and “woke culture.” Another article praises teachers fired for refusing to use students’ preferred gender pronouns and suggests conversion therapy might reduce the rate of suicide among LGBTQ people.
During his sermon, Graham addressed gender and sexuality more simply and explicitly. The message boomed from the speakers so loud that the sound seemed to echo between the Sierrita and the Sandhills — no one in town could avoid it. “God made sex,” he reminded the crowd. “But sex has to be used the way God intended: in a marriage relationship between a man and a woman.”
Regardless of political bent, there is no fire and brimstone. Graham’s ultimate message is that anyone who turns their life over to Jesus can be forgiven for even the most serious spiritual offenses. “I’m sure that some of you out there tonight have had an abortion, and it’s bothered you every day since,” he said. “God will forgive you tonight. He’ll take that guilt, he’ll take that shame and he’ll set you free.”
At the end of the sermon, Graham invited anyone seeking salvation to come forward and receive a blessing of absolution. Nearly half the audience approached the stage, the sinners ranging in age from those wheeled in strollers to those bent over walkers. Some wept, some knelt, some raised their hands to the sky. The collective feeling of relief was palpable, coinciding with a sunset that broke the heat of an unseasonably warm afternoon.
When the prayer was over, Graham left the stage and the musicians returned, playing upbeat music to temper the heaviness. Attendees danced it all off, drones whizzing overhead and cameras flashing in the background. The giant screens encouraged those who had been saved to text a hotline; a message in Spanish revealed that God also uses Whatsapp.
Throughout the event, he told the audience that God loves Presidio — and so does he, ever since he first rode through the Big Bend on a motorcycle five years ago. “There’s something about the beauty of the desert along with the mountains,” he told The Sentinel. “What I like about the border here is that it doesn’t have fences and barbed wire — it’s like what it used to be.”