“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” That is Jesus, speaking on a hillside in Galilee, in the Sermon on the Mount — the most famous passage of peacemaking in the entire Bible. Lindsey Graham grew up in the Southern Baptist tradition where that verse sits in every pew Bible. He spent the rest of his political life making sure it never once applied to a vote he cast.
The bipartisan eulogies are flowing — senators from both sides praising Graham’s humor, his dealmaking, his fierce partisanship. “A fierce Republican partisan one day and a key bipartisan ally the next,” said Dick Durbin. Adam Schiff lauded his “sense of humor.” Donald Trump ordered flags at half-staff until Saturday. The Wall Street Journal called Graham someone with “outsize influence on US foreign policy.” Aipac posted that Graham was “a great friend and true champion of the U.S.-Israel relationship” — the same Aipac that had given Graham more than $400,000 in donations in 2025-2026 alone, his largest organizational haul.
But influence is not the word that matters here. What matters is the shape of that influence, and what it cost.
Before Graham was a senator, he was already pushing for the Iraq invasion. “We’re looking at going after Saddam Hussein,” he said in March 2002, “not to contain him, but to replace him.” The war came a year later on the lie that Iraq possessed chemical weapons. It killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Graham supported it long after the premise was exposed as false. By 2010, he was at the Halifax International Security Forum calling for the United States to “neuter” Iran — not a surgical strike, he clarified, but the destruction of the regime’s ability to fight back. In 2015 he sat with John McCain and Joseph Lieberman publicly denouncing the Iran nuclear deal. In 2017 he was a prime backer of moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, calling it “the undeniable capital of Israel.” The Wall Street Journal is right about outsize influence. The question is influence in service of what.
That influence was exercised consistently in one direction, and the ledger is now public. When Israel began its devastating war on Gaza after the Hamas attacks of October 2023, Graham told a Senate appropriations hearing: “Give Israel what they need to fight the war they can’t afford to lose. This is Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids.” He was asked, on camera, whether the killing of children and mothers and families who were not militants aligned with Christian values. “I don’t buy that at all,” he replied. Israel should “flatten Gaza.”
When Norway’s sovereign wealth fund divested from Caterpillar over the company’s role in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, Graham publicly threatened Norway with trade tariffs and visa restrictions on fund executives. When Greta Thunberg joined a humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza, he posted on X: “Hope Greta and her friends can swim!” He wanted the United States to participate directly in Israel’s aerial operations against Hezbollah. “I want our fingerprints on that,” he told the Times of Israel. He lobbied fellow senators on attacking Colombia — “We’re going to blow them up and kill the people that want to poison America,” he told CBS News.
At the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit on 31 October 2025, Graham said it all in one sentence: “I feel good about the Republican party. I feel good about where we’re going as a nation. We’re killing all the right people, and we’re cutting your taxes.”
We are killing all the right people.
Read Matthew 5:9 again. “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Not “blessed are the ones who kill the right people.” Not “blessed are the nations that flatten cities because their allies told them to.” Peacemakers. The Greek is eirenopoioi — those who make peace, who actively create the conditions for peace rather than the conditions for slaughter. The word is plain. The instruction is plain. The man who claimed the Bible as his authority spent forty years making sure that instruction never reached the Senate floor.
The Sunday-school reading of that verse was always personal — be kind to your neighbor, turn the other cheek in your daily conflicts, bless those who persecute you. It was never applied to the United States Senate, where the same congregations’ members sent their representatives to vote on war. The peacemaking was private. The killing was patriotic. And somehow the contradiction never surfaced — not in the Bible study, not in the women’s ministry, not in the pastor’s Sunday morning politics-and-faith sermon. This is the same tradition that turned Charlie Kirk’s grave warnings into ironic memes and mockery — a culture so reflexive in its performance of faith that the substance of the gospel was always the first casualty.
Now read Micah 4:3. “They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.” Micah wrote that in the eighth century BCE — centuries before Jesus, in the prophetic tradition Graham claimed to honor. The vision is specific: swords beaten into agricultural tools, nations disarmed, the end of war-training. Graham’s vision was specific too: more bombs, more weapons, more “fingerprints” on more military operations across more countries. Isaiah 2:4 says the same thing. The prophets — Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah — are unanimous on this point. God’s requirements are justice, mercy, and walking humbly. Not “God requires that you kill the right people.” Micah 6:8 names it in plain language: “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
The Evangelical tradition that formed Graham took these texts and did something remarkable with them: it read them so narrowly that they applied only to personal morality — your private sins, your individual salvation, your Sunday behavior — while the public square, the Senate floor, the military appropriations bill, and the bombs falling on Gaza were exempt. The legalism was not in the verse. The legalism was in the reading. The Bible said “blessed are the peacemakers.” The trick he learned in Sunday school — read the Bible through a one-way mirror, where your own sins are the only ones that count — said “blessed are the ones who vote to fund the bombs.”
Amos 5:21–24. “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them… Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” This is God, speaking through the prophet Amos, to a nation that worshiped regularly and oppressed relentlessly. The worship was correct. The policies were murderous. God was not impressed by the worship.
Lindsey Graham attended church. Lindsey Graham quoted Scripture. Lindsey Graham told a room full of political-religious allies that the United States was “killing all the right people.” Amos told him, in advance, exactly what God thinks of a nation that sings hymns on Sunday and votes for war on Monday.
The casualties are not abstract. A recent United Nations independent commission found that Israel has killed 20,000 children and injured 44,000 more since October 2023. The commission determined that Israeli authorities have deliberately targeted Palestinian children, resulting in genocide and atrocity crimes in Gaza and war crimes in the West Bank. In Lebanon, Israeli air strikes continue to kill children and erase entire families. Graham called this “Hiroshima and Nagasaki on steroids” and wanted more of it. He wanted the United States to flatten Gaza, to blow up boats in the Caribbean, to put American fingerprints on Israeli air strikes in Lebanon, to threaten Norway for divesting from a company that demolished Palestinian homes. He told a humanitarian aid worker to learn to swim.
This is the legacy. Not the bipartisan warmth of the eulogies. Not the humor, the dealmaking, the Senate friendships. The legacy is a man who held a pew Bible in one hand and a military appropriations vote in the other, and never once noticed that the Bible said the opposite of what he voted.
The trick he learned in Sunday school — the Evangelical legalism that turns the Bible into a one-way mirror showing only your own private sins while the Senate floor goes uninspected — made peace a private virtue and war a patriotic duty. The Bible does not make that distinction. The Sermon on the Mount does not say “Blessed are the peacemakers in your personal life, but in the Senate do whatever the defense contractor wants.” It says “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The word applies from the kitchen table to the Capitol floor, or it means nothing. And the congregations that re-elected him six times heard the same Bible and chose the same senator.
Matthew 25:31–46. “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” Jesus is speaking about the criterion of final judgment — who is welcomed and who is turned away. The test is how you treated the hungry, the stranger, the sick, the imprisoned. Not how many bombs you dropped on the right people.
It is not Christian. It is the Christianity of this land — the one Frederick Douglass named in 1845, the one that blessed slavery while quoting Christ, the one that blessed segregation while quoting Christ, the one that now blesses the flattening of Gaza while quoting Christ. Douglass wrote: “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.” Lindsey Graham lived entirely in the first one. He called it faith. The prophets called it something else.
Mourn him if you wish. His family deserves their grief. But the ideology he carried — the fusion of Evangelical identity with permanent war, the reading of the Bible that makes God the chaplain of the Pentagon — that ideology killed people. It is killing people still. The longer this thinking lives on, the more peril we will all face.