Evangelical leader Franklin Graham just revealed a shocking secret about his father…

Squinting through one half-open eye across a large wooden table, I wonder if this is the first Lunch with the FT to begin with a prayer. It’s a reminder that I am in the presence of American religious royalty.

Franklin Graham is America’s best-known evangelist and heir to its best-known evangelical name. His late father, Billy Graham,was “America’s pastor” — a counsellor to presidents and preacher to millions, famous for “crusades” to save souls everywher e from Australia and the UK to China and the Soviet Russia.

Franklin Graham has continued that mission, and also runs Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian charity that delivers aid to war zones such as Ukraine and Gaza. It has its own pilots and its own planes, which bear the motto: “Helping in Jesus’ Name”.

And earlier this month, on the final climactic night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he was on stage — squeezed into the schedule between wrestler Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Fighting Championship mogul Dana White — to pray for Donald Trump. “God spared his life,” Graham said, referring to the assassination attempt on the former president five days earlier. He has not officially endorsed Trump, but his admiration for him is plain.

This is not unusual for a conservative Christian elder in America. Just last month — before the shooting in Pennsylvania and then Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the Democratic ticket upended the US election — Trump was the star attraction at a gathering in Washington of evangelical leaders. Evangelicals as a group have become a loyal bedrock of support for Trump in the past eight years, and helped propel him into the White House in 2016. He returned the favour in office by appointing conservative Supreme Court justices who in 2022 helped overturn Roe vs Wade, the 1973 ruling that protected the right to abortion. Trump’s rallies these days open with prayers from local church leaders.

Graham is a hero of the church movement too. And I am in North Wilkesboro, a sleepy town on the edge of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains that gave birth to the Nascar motoring sport franchise, to ask him, after everything now associated with Trump — the 2020 election denial and 2021 violence at the US Capitol, the court cases and felony convictions — whether Trump is still the leader evangelicals want.

But we are off to a cool start. To what I thought was a broad opener about the political divisions in America as the country hurtles towards November’s election, Graham retorts with a swipe at the media groups — unnamed — that he blames for polarising the nation. “We don’t have journalism any more in America,” he says. “It’s about picking a topic and spinning things for the candidate that you support.

We are eating food from the canteen at Samaritan’s Purse’s headquarters, a bright, modern office of carpeted floors and wood-framed walls adorned with pictures of the charity’s work around the world. One is a portrait of Trump’s vice-president and Graham’s friend, Mike Pence, holding a Bible.

Graham, 72, is wearing a navy blue jacket over a light blue shirt, the top button undone. He has broad shoulders, an aquiline nose and his white hair is pushed back, a touch unkempt. He has a weathered, outdoorsy look.

“Let’s eat — or your tacos are going to be cold tacos,” he says, before I get another question out. I start tackling a heap of nachos with ground pork, and melted white cheese. Graham has opted for a juicy prime rib sandwich with onions.

Trump is more popular among American conservative Christians than almost any other religious group. “Born again” Christians make up the majority of the US’s Protestant population and more than 80 per cent of white evangelicals would vote for him in November, according to Pew Research. They will be a crucial component of Trump’s base of support in November.

What has long marked out evangelicals — who consider the Bible the word of God and seek a personal relationship with Jesus — is their focus on personal behaviour, eschewing everything from swearing to sexual promiscuity and gambling. Their strictures about holy living seem to evaporate, however, when they consider Trump.

“Trump — he’s been demonised by the media very well,” says Graham, although he concedes: “Is he the poster boy for Christianity? No, he’s not. He’s done a lot of very terrible things in his life.”

But he has also done much good, argues Graham: his pre-Covid economy was strong, inflation was low, and he was president during a period of relative peace in the world, in contrast with the major wars that have erupted since Biden entered office.

Trump has also delivered for Christians. “President Trump was the first one to speak at the March for Life,” notes Graham, a reference to the anti-abortion rally that Trump addressed in 2020. “First president ever to do that. So there are things that evangelicals appreciate, that Christians appreciate.”

Trump also put “dozens” of real Christians in power, including Pence, says Graham. “I’m talking cabinet level, ministerial level, staff. I think two-thirds of the staff were Christians.” By contrast, Biden surrounded himself with a “very radical group”. “I can’t think of one person in the Biden administration who would be supportive of the views I have as a Christian,” Graham says.

Does he doubt the faith of Biden, a churchgoing Catholic? Graham publicly questioned Barack Obama’s Christian faith in 2012, before apologising. Graham won’t judge Biden’s faith. But he is certain that the president is overseeing a creeping secularism that threatens Christianity in the US.

“This country has given great freedom to people of faith,” he says. “And we are losing that a little bit in this country. A little bit of our religious freedoms every year. I think they’re under attack by people that would be secularist, people that don’t believe in God . . . and people that hate God. They don’t believe God should have any say in daily life.”