By S. Ratnajeevan H. Hoole –

Anointed Christian Leader, Chosen by God: Franklin Graham

Donald Trump is now the new leader of Christians, anointed by God. He is called “The New Moses.” The famous Billy Graham’s son, The Rev. Franklin Graham, campaigned for Trump in 2024 (see Photo). He claims that Trump, chosen by God, recently escaped death when shot at because “God turned his head and saved his life.” He describes Franklin as “one of America’s best-known evangelists, arguably its most famous preacher.”

It is not clear how, as the BBC notes, The questions asked about Trump’s character – including accusations of sexual misconduct and his alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels and associated hush-money trial– don’t dim Mr Graham’s view [of Trump].

Trump is usurping legal guardianship of Christians assuming he is anointed by God as publicly stated by Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham’s who has a massive following in Colombo among members of Youth for Christ, Campus Crusade for Christ, Graduate Christian Fellowship, FOCUS (the Fellowship of Christian University Students, a plagiarised version of the better known and larger Fellowship of Catholic University Students), the Grace Churches, Back to the Bible, and many others. These all look to America for inspiration and have an English-speaking leadership and are easily influenced by Trump. Just knowing the Grahams make careers in these circles.

Around the time I went to Colombo, the intense American influence through organisations like YFC was clear and deleterious. A typical evangelical meeting would have youths led by an older person directing and culminating it with an “Are you Born Again?” sermon.

This message was preceded by warmup games. In one such game – I declined participation – a boy and a girl in their teens would be paired, and one person’s left hand and the other’s right hand would be put in a paper bag and the bag tied. With their free hands, they had to engage in competitive games with the other paired boy-girl teams.

These games attracted attendance. By the late 1980s YFC had a full-time worker in Jaffna with meetings in Chundikuli and Uduvil. Locals were scandalised when now westernised youthful boys and girls were engaged together in the contact sport of volleyball in the Uduvil playground as warmup for the meeting.

These organisations claimed not to be churches and not in competition with churches. However, they had their meetings on Sunday evenings, and attendees would cut Church in the mornings saying they had a worship service in the evening. Priests were upset.

YFC’s immense success in terms of attendance came from making the youth feel Western, if not American, and giving them access to members of the opposite sex whom they normally cannot speak to.

With increasing Western influence, today, 50 years later, things are worse. Those days’ youth in development are now pastors and usually of depressed backgrounds as the upper castes with money and English have fled. Some new leaders forcibly kiss students and when the abused student dares to file a complaint, the other leaders suppress the complaint, claiming to safeguard institutional reputation. (I have separate affidavits from two girl students in Trincomalee on which I have no Board support for any punishment against the offending Baldaeus Theological College board members).

Already we see these aspiring pastors getting scholarships to read for degrees in India, England, Scotland, Canada and Amerca. Based on “experience,” they get MA degrees without a BA. Set up thereafter as qualified pastors and exploiting their foreign connections, they attract foreign funds which they then steal and build personal mansions.

What next with Trump’s increasing influence on Evangelicals?

As Franklin Graham tells the BBC,

“Remember when Jesus told the crowd, ‘Let the one without sin cast the first stone and that slowly, the entire audience began to disappear? All of us have sinned.”

It is these magic words that have attracted many criminals and child and women molesters to become Christian clergy. God loves and forgives is an excuse for every sin, with no room for repentence and absolution.

I too wonder how these organisations talk up the Grahams when I have heard them boasting of the Grahams in my university days. Recently my late brother was Dean at Colombo Theological Seminary (CTS) and I was a Lecturer teaching Anglican Heritage there. He was asked by the CTS Board to assign teaching to a Minister (as I recall at the Four Square Gospel Church) who was habitually chased off from parish to parish for abusing women and had run out of places to be posted to where his antecedents were unknown.

His big brother was the head of his Church and on the CTS Board.  My brother refused because that would endanger his students. But the CTS Board chair, a Youth for Christ and Graham man, ordered my brother to take on this man known for pawing women. It was a reason why my brother left CTS and started Baldaeus Theological Seminary in Trincomalee

I join the BBC in asking, “What makes so many see this man [Trump], who isn’t known to have an especially strong faith, as sent from God? And what does that say about Christianity more broadly in a country where the numbers of churchgoers are in rapid decline?”

Sri Lankan Christianity is in real danger as these Anglo-Christians take over the new free churches where their dispossessed caste membership is looking for ways to enrich themselves, marry stylish brides and climb up the social ladder because they are more likely accepted overlooking caste because they are baptised.

I venture that holding up Trump  and these fraudulent ministers as Christian leaders will kill the Sri Lankan Church which is already suffering from vanishing numbers.

In the new Christianity defined by the anointed Gold-Bible selling Trump, free-sex is the norm. We can see how that has already infected Sri Lankan Evangelicals. In their view, remarriage with surving spouse is monogamy so long as there is divorce. The Muslims’ and the Mormons’ polygamy are vast improvements because the wife is not thrown out and has to be provided for. I have seen in these dispossessed-caste churches, divorce being encouraged on flimsy pretexts to a get the man for one of their own women. Not a small number of clergymen are divorced and remarried or engaged in adultery.

Trump himself has been accused by his first wife wife Ivana in a divorce deposition of raping her in a fit of rage in 1989. For a partial list of Trump’s accusers, see here.

Ivana married twice more after Trump (and twice before him) with Trump hosting the $3 million reception or giving her a $3 million ring. It shows how polygamy for Trump and polyandry for Ivana are within Christian monogamy because they divorced.

Obligations from Faith Giving Way to Organisations

The Bible is replete with the idea that we should choose our company carefully. The Book of Psalms in its opening verse advises us. “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor sit in the seat of the scornful.” Proverbs 13:20 uses the word wicked for scornful, while St. Paul (1 Corintians, 15:33) admonishes us “Bad company ruins good morals.”

Choosing good company is advice  that we (whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist) received as children and give our children.

However, as adults our organisations take over. Should our employer hire a horrible person we need to work with, we must do so or lose our job. So we adjust our morals.

At an Election Commission dinner I was reserved a seat at the high table next to General Shavendra Silva. I had little choice but to smile and shake hands – although the US has imposed sanctions on him in the form of a travel ban on him and his family entering the United States. He was found accountable through command responsibility for “gross violations of human rights, namely extrajudicial killings, by the 58th division under his command” when up to 70,000 Tamil civilians were killed.

This brings me to President Donald Trump and his sex crazed disrespect for women. Good Christians cannot hobnob with him or seek jobs in his administration. But to climb in their career, many do.

In a recording brought out by The Washington Post and broadcast by  ABC News, the conversation goes like this in a 2005 recording that became public in October 2016. Donald Trump in an off-camera conversation with then Access Hollywood host Billy Bush boasts of kissing and groping women without consent:

“You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful… I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” …”And when you’re a star they let you do it… You can do anything”. … “Grab them by the pussy”. …”You can do anything”.

In the same recording, Trump discussed an unsuccessful attempt to seduce a married woman:

“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and f**k her. She was married”.

This from the anointed Christian leader chosen for us by God!

When the tape was released during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump issued a video apology carried by the BBC saying, “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologise,” and dismissed the remarks as “locker room talk.”

However, in subsequent years, he has reportedly questioned the tape’s authenticity, despite his apology and  the widespread confirmation that the voice was his. During a deposition in a related civil case in 2022, Trump defended his comments, stating that his assertion about stars being able to do anything to women was “historically” and “largely” true.

Trump is a liar whose support base remains intact despite all the evidence that comes out.

As the monogamous Mormon presidential candidate Mitt Romney remarked aptly, “Hitting on married women? Condoning assault? Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America’s face to the world.”

Paedophile, Wet Pant Trump, and Lying for him

Former Miss Hispanic Arizona Tasha Dixon says Trump would walk in on ‘Half-Naked‘ youthful contestants at a dress rehearsal for the Miss USA pageant in 2001.

It is almost impossible to not conclude that Trump is a paedophile backed by the Christian Right.  Sixteen women (other reports go much higher) abused as minors named by the Public Broadcasting Service have accused Trump of serious sexual assault.

Elon Musk, Trump’s buddy (himself married thrice like Trump, not counting their mistresses) implied that Trump is a paedophile  after their falling out, that the president was in what are known as the “Epstein files”— Trump  denied any wrongdoing, saying  “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island’.” Flight logs released in 2021 as part of Epstein associate Ghislane Maxwell’s trial, however, indicated Trump flew on plane to the Epstein island nine times.

Trump lies again and again, but his vote base remains intact.

As reported by the Times of India (Nov. 1, 2024 on his book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House), Michael Wolff who has written perhaps the most about Trump, Jeffrey Epstein’s photos in Epstein’s safe were of topless girls seated on the laps of Epsteig and Trump who shared a girlfriend and there was “a telltale stain in front of Trump’s pants, and the girls in the photo were laughing at it.”

The Anointed Trump’s Seduction Techniques

Wolff’s book describes how President Trump used to brag that sleeping with your friends’ wives makes “life worth living,”  says The New York Daily News.

Wolff writes, “In pursuing a friend’s wife, Trump would try to persuade the wife that her husband was perhaps not what she thought.” Trump would then have his secretary ask the husband to stop by his office and subject him to “constant sexual banter”, while having the wife listen via speakerphone. Asking the husband “Do you still like having sex with your wife? How often? You must have had a better f–k than your wife?”

And the culmination from the anointed Christian, “We can go upstairs and have a great time. I promise.”

According to The Guardian, after Trump’s attempt to stop the book failed, it soared from 48,449th on Amazon’s bestselling books list to No 1. Ultimately it sold 1.7 million copies in its first three weeks and a total of 5 million copies worldwide.

Trump and Women Working for or with him

When that is Trump’s thinking, I wonder what happens when all these MAGA Christian women like Pam Bondi work so closely with Trump. When Trump met his ambassador to Sri Lanka Julie

J. Chung, can I be blamed for thinking to myself if she would give in if Trump made lewd requests because he is a Star?

After telling Trump that his name appears multiple times in Epstein’s client list, Pam Bondi now denies it. Is it because Trump is a Star that Bondi brazenly lied, if that is what she did, about Trump’s name being mentioned several times in those files?

Lying, Servile Underlings: Bondi, Patel and Whoever Else

The “Client List Bondi stated in a February 2025 Fox News interview that an alleged Jeffrey Epstein “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review”. A later memo from the Department of Justice and FBI explicitly stated that their systematic review found no evidence of an incriminating “client list” or credible evidence of blackmail.

In mounting evidence of a coverup, FBI Director Kash Patel told a congressional Judiciary Committee on Sept. 17, 2025 that “he does not know how many times President Trump’s name is mentioned in the Jeffrey Epstein files. However, Kash Patel told the House Judiciary Committee members that Trump is “absolutely not” implicated in any wrongdoing in that investigation.  The question is how he came to that conclusion after telling the same committee that same day he has not even reviewed all of the Epstein files. When asked if Donald Trump’s name appears on Jeffrey Epstein’s client list, he flatly refused to answer.

It is the nature of power. Everyone bends once political loyalties enter the picture. For instance, Marco Rubio, who called Trump a con artist, joined him as secretary of state once Trump was elected.

Although Bondi is of Southern Italian descent, she married multiple times and is said to be Lutheran. The question is, can the Star Trump ask her for anything? Why are men amenable to their wives working with Trump? Is it all for the power and prestige that come from doing Trump’s bidding?

An Un-Christian Administration: Polygamists and Polyandrists

Trump has nominated many accused of sexually predatory behaviour to his administration, as reported by The Pennsylvania Independent (Dec. 10, 2024)  These include:

1. Matt Gaetz, nominee for attorney general withdrew upon revelations he had had sexual encounters with underaged woman.

2. Pete Hegseth, successful nominee for secretary of defense, was accused of sexual assault in 2017. He paid the alleged victim cash as part of an out-of-court settlement.

3. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., successful nominee for secretary of health and human services, reportedly apologised by text message to a former family babysitter, Eliza Cooney, who accused him of sexual assault says the BBC. Asked by the Boston Globe if more accusations could follow, he would only say “We’ll see what happens.”

4. Linda McMahon, successful nominee for secretary of education, and her husband Vince are being sued by five former employees of the WWE, the professional wrestling enterprise they founded, where a staffer had sexually abused them.

5. Elon Musk, Trump’s pick to co-lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, and his SpaceX corporation reportedly were sued in July by eight former employees who claimed they were improperly fired for coming forward with allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company. The Wall Street Journal reported that as CEO, Musk had sexual relationships with a former intern and an employee.

6. Herschel Walker has been promised a position to build a missile defence shield. He took responsibility for domestic abuse against his former wife.

7. David Sacks is Trump’s selection as his artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar. In 1992, he defended a student accused of statutory rape, suggesting that the law prohibiting it is “a moral directive left on the books by pre-sexual revolution crustaceans.” (NB. A crustacean has a shell like a crab, so I do not know what he meant). Later, with future PayPal founder Peter Thiel, he co-authored a book called “The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Tolerance on Campus,” in which the two dismissed date rapes as “seductions that were later regretted.”

On Homosexuality Versus Adultery and Fornication

On homosexuality, although Trump and his MAGA seemingly do not contradict the biblical teaching that it is an abomination before God, large numbers of them (including Trump) are married multiple times with a surviving previous spouse. In what way is that less of an abomination? And fornication which seems well-accepted in respectable American society?

It is cafeteria morality, where we take moral principles we like, while calling those principles we adhere to, to be abominations before God when someone violates them.

Despite the claims to being Christian, the Trump Bandwaggon has usurped Christianity. Indeed, even on the Democratic side, although Joe Biden was promoted as a Catholic, the Church never excommunicated him for his wife Jill Biden’s husband, Bill Stevenson being still alive. The worst is that the Bidens were “married” by a  Jesuit!

If marriage is permanent as the Church teaches, then she is polyandrous. Divorce does not dissolve the Biden marriage.

The Catholic Church seems to play the same game as the MAGA crowd but more subtly. They are all in violation of the rules for choosing the company they keep.

Biblical Roots of Political Asylum/Refuge

Few know that the concepts of political asylum and refuge are biblically rooted – I doubt that the red-necked Evangelicals know this.

Leveticus 19: 34 says, “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” Asylum even for the murderer is ordered in Deut. 19; 2-4: “Thou shalt separate three cities for thee in the midst of thy land, which the Lord thy God giveth thee to possess it. … Thou shalt prepare [and] divide thy land, which the Lord thy God giveth thee to inherit, into three parts, that every slayer may flee thither. And this is the case of the slayer, which shall flee thither, that he may live: Whoso killeth his neighbour ignorantly, whom he hated not in time past.”

This inveterate Christian culture of centuries of standing, Trump has uprooted. He is a terrorist deploying heavily armed and masked agents of ICE, the US immigration as Customs Enforcement Service, to strike terror in the hearts of legal residents. Even law-abiding citizens are being deported in violation of judicial orders. Children fast asleep in the middle of the night have their bedroom doors broken, and ICE agents carry off their citizen parents and deport them before courts can intervene or court orders served.

It is a national scandal that people who came to the US seeking safety face  serious misconduct by on-duty ICE agents, including sexual assault, and even murder. They come heavily armed and in masks to Terrorise lawful citizens

The most egregious anti-Christian act of the chosen Trump’s administration was when, on All Saints’ Day, Nov. 1, 2025,  Catholic leaders, including Chicago Auxiliary Bishop José María García-Maldonado, were recently blocked by U.S. ICE Agents rom entering a detention facility to serve the Eucharist (Holy Communion) to detainees.

Assault and Rape of those who came for Refuge and Safety

America as a country has changed from the time I pledged my loyalties to its principles. It was very tolerant then but no longer so.

America as a country has changed. It was very tolerant but is no longer so. When I taught human rights to engineers, I took my class to the US Federal Immigration Courts where I was accepted as  recognised expert on Sri Lanka. The judge froze his hearings and gave a talk in open courtmto my students on asylum.

I had given testimony on behalf of several tens of Sri Lankan asylum claimants, and nearly all of them immediately received asylum, with just a handful going on to win on appeal. I had to fly to many cities, and one claim that went wrong was rectified on appeal. In that claim an Indian translator rendered the question “Were you tortured?” in Tamil as “Were you subject to himsai?” himsai being a word we do not use in Sri Lanka. Without understanding, the claimant said no and had to be denied at that point. That was reversed on appeal when the explantion of different Tamil languages in Sri Lanka and India was proffered.

In another case, a homosexual Sri Lankan making advances to a plainclothes policeman in a park late at night was arrested and about to be deported, but my testimony that homosexuality was a punishable crime in Sri Lanka got him his asylum.

This is what Trump has changed. Even legal citizens are being deported in violation of judicial orders. Children fast asleep in the middle of the night have their bedroom doors broken and ICE agents carry off their citizen parents and deport them before courts can intervene or court orders are served.

Welcoming the sojourner and providing political asylum to refugees is very much Judaeo-Christian, though many uneducated Evangelicals whose Christianity is limited to being “Born Again,”  do not recognise asylum and refuge as Judaeo-Christian principles.

I too am born again when I confess my sins and receive absolution washing me of my sins, prior to receiving the Blessed Sacraments. I walk out of Church a new man, Born Again.

Conclusion

Trump and the Christian Right have taken over Christianity and turned it into a caricature that neither we nor Jesus Christ would recognise.

Unless the US can arrest and reverse this trend of putting charlatns in leadership, the wealth and influence through Christian parachurches in countries like Sri Lanka where America is admired will cripple Christistianity worldwide because the US free-sex culture will be immitated all too easily worldwide. ///it is difficult for strict monogamy to compete aganst a Trump church that permits free sex.

Faithful Churches need to assert themelves and go back to the roots of Chritianity. In many ways Zohran Mamdani who was elected Mayor on Nov. 5, 2025 encapsulates Christian family values better than Trump and those on his racist bandwaggon  who claim to be Christians, if not Christian leaders. His election moves the US away from racism and augurs well.

What we share with Mamdani (but not with Trump) includes: belief in one God, the sanctity of human life and dignity, the importance of family, and a call to justice, mercy, and charity. We also share a belief in a day of judgment, the existence of heaven and hell, and a history that includes figures like Abraham, Jesus, and Mary. In addition, Mamdani is monogamous.

How many of these values does Trump share with Christians? Ugh!