These days anyone who volunteers at a Catholic Church has to go through a vetting process and be finger-printed. Then there are a lot of rules about never being alone with children, or driving them anywhere alone, and keeping classroom doors open. The priest who ran one of the sessions I attended said, that we can’t eliminate snakes. But, he said, we can cut down the grass that allows them to approach unseen. This is a structural approach to eliminating threats. It’s useful because you don’t have to know ahead of time who the bad person is.

Many years ago I read a book about Billy Graham. It was written by a Rice University professor, and when I started thinking about this blog post I thought I should try to find the title. William Martin, a sociology professor, wrote the book I read in 1990. Called A Prophet with Honor, it was published by William Morrow. As it happens, Professor Martin wrote more about Graham, and Zondervan republished the book in 2018. I haven’t read the second version; what I’m about to say is from old memories, so don’t hold it against the author.

I didn’t really know anything about Billy Graham when I read the book. I wasn’t into evangelicalism, and I wasn’t against it. I was bringing up small children and wanted to read something that wasn’t distressing.

Graham saw himself as part of a long line of evangelists, most of whom I never heard of, but they were widely influential. He studied their careers and came to the conclusion that, when they struggled in their ministry, it was for three reasons. I’ll say upfront that I have forgotten reason Number 3. It might be politics or it might be something else totally. However, the other two reasons were money and sex. Having given the matter deep thought, Graham’s response was to consider how to combat these three problems, in order to minimize the possibility of his message being diluted by a scandal.

Graham believed deeply that he wasn’t any better than the preachers who had gone before him. Therefore, what had tempted them and taken them down, could tempt him. But he also thought he could structurally arrange his life to make it more difficult for him to fall in these ways. And he did.

He was never again alone with a woman, except his wife. As his fame grew, he had to send outriders to hotel rooms where he would be staying to check behind the curtains. This seems ridiculous but sometimes women would bribe a desk clerk to let them into his rooms. They claimed to want special private spiritual direction. Nope.

Graham also arranged his money so that important people were on the boards of his foundations. The idea was that they would not allow shenanigans because they, themselves, wouldn’t want to be tarnished by money scandals involving someone else. I think he mentioned the head of Quaker Oats being on a board. Also, of course, the temptation to enrich themselves would be less if the board members were wealthy from some other source.

This idea is actually deeply Catholic. It’s called avoiding the near occasion of sin, and is the resolve that Catholics used to make when they finished confession. Embedded in the old Act of Contrition are the words, “I firmly resolve with the help of Your grace to sin no more, and to avoid the near occasion of sin.”

Why is this on my mind? And why am I calling this political? Because I don’t want to read story after story saying that no-one understands what motivated the guy who tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump — story after story saying the FBI is looking into it but they haven’t determined X or Y or Z.

NO. STOP. We all know that this young guy had murder in his heart

because he acted on it.

He also justified it somehow. I don’t care how he justified murder. People will seize upon whatever is said and get distracted. Only, no-one is going to be safer even if we understood all the winding and twisting of the mind that arranged to shoot.

On the other hand everyone that the Secret Service protects will be safer if actual protocols, like communications between the protective layers around a subject, work properly. The failure in Butler was deep. A few apologies for structural failure will be useless, unless they are followed by that firm purpose of amendment.