With Franklin Graham taking his father’s place at the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the occasion’s arrived for some cosmetic reimagining of who “God’s Ambassador’s” fiery, and occasionally mean-mouthed son, really is. In a long profile written by Cathy Lynn Grossman, religion reporter for USA Today, Franklin reinvents himself from the bigot who condemned Islam as “a very evil and wicked religion,” to an impetuous rebel for Christ. Grossman labors long, and intelligently, on the theological and diplomatic distinctions between father and son — where the elder Graham would speak nondenominationally about “the Lord,” and in his later years made efforts to work with other religious groups, Franklin goes out of his way to dedicate his civic-ceremony prayers to Jesus, and has frequently been accused of using his own charity organization, Samaritan’s Purse, to manipulate vulnerable people into conversions — but in the end, the younger Graham’s charm wins out, as he describes his evangelical jabs at non-believers: constructing his father’s memorial library so that the only way visitors can enter is by walking through an oversized cross. Less flattering topics were covered in Grossman’s ranging interview with Graham, but unfortunately, these are relegated to side-bars where Graham’s non-answers went unchallenged, as when he explained away his post-9/11 Islam comments as simultaneously an unfair fixation of the media and also something about which he hasn’t “‘backed down either, and I see it the way I see it.'” In other words, the man taking over one of the most influential Christian organizations on the planet — and one which does a lot of business with U.S. politics — still thinks that Islam is wicked, he just wishes the press would shut up about it, already.