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The documentary Enemies within the Church shows that similar human sins thrive in US evangelicalism and Eastern Europe
“He who is faithful in the small will also be faithful in the great, while he who is unjust on a small scale, will also be unjust on a grand scale.” So said Jesus to his disciples in the sixteenth chapter of Luke.
We should count these words among the many verses that American evangelicalism has lost sight of. Believers in Jesus Christ should understand the parallels
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between injustices that happen within their immediate social orbit and injustices they see writ-large on the nightly news. The little things and big things have an important and enduring relationship because people’s misconduct in one’s sphere mirrors and compounds their misconduct in the other.
Let us consider, for argument’s sake, someone who has very few resources but applies the few resources he has to abuse other people. It is safe to conjecture that such a person would probably commit war crimes if he were rich, powerful, and able to command thousands of troops to follow his bidding. If he had no regard for the damage done by his nonviolent and supposedly mild cruelties, it would not be hard to numb him to the damage done by violence.
Once he’s numb, anything becomes possible, because he no longer heeds the voice of the Holy Spirit.
So why do I bring this up?
A documentary came out about abuses of power within American evangelical churches, called Enemies within the Church. If you made it this far into the present article, you really need to go to this website (www.enemieswithinthechurch.com) and see it. I realize that most people right now are consumed with news about Ukraine. But the human concerns that drive readers to follow the Russian invasion bear upon the urgent information provided in the documentary.
What does the evangelical church have to do with the price of tea in Ukraine?
Americans are hearing leaders like Russell Moore denounce Putin for being a “murderer and tyrant” as well as “an abuser of evangelical Christians, other religious minorities, and even his own country’s orphans.” Wow, that’s rich. “Rev. Dr. Moore” has engaged in his own venal tyrannies. When he was president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, that organization didn’t just attempt to liberalize tens of thousands of American churches toward an agenda fundamentally at odds with the Bible. The ERLC minions also destroyed people’s careers, joined in campaigns of character assassination, and ruthlessly invaded institutions to get access to their resources, the most prominent example being the way the ERLC clique went savagely after Paige Patterson and his allies in order to install their friends and fellows at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Politics is as complicated in the church as it is at NATO. Russell Moore is an easy target for outrage. But as Enemies within the Church points out, like most supervillains of church life, Moore was promoted and protected by a host of people who have yet to be held accountable for the damage done to American evangelicalism. Documentary producer Judd Saul worked carefully to bring these abuses to light. If people don’t understand the stakes and scope of the problem, if they fail to defend the bride of Christ against those who are abusing her, then American churches don’t stand a chance.
Many people I respect have told me there’s no point fighting the fight of Enemies within the Church. They tell me the camp championed by the documentary—call it “the Christian right” if you wish—has already lost the war.
Since the story about Ukraine broke, I’ve had heart-to-heart conversations with my friends on both left and right, especially who have been ruthlessly canceled. I’ve called up people like Michelle Shocked and Denise McAllister to find fellowship with those who went through cancel culture as I did. Authoritarian sins caused me and so many other Christians to lose our careers, friends, family, and reputations. It is obvious that the warmongering against Russia will bring cancel culture to a whole new level. People who question the dominant warmongering narrative should expect to be labeled pro-Putin, racist, and fascist, and forced to choose between their values and their ability to survive. What seemed like our “personal” issues with censorship and institutional abuses now appears ready to bring Western civilization into World War III and thermonuclear war.
My friends may be right; perhaps all is lost. For my part I have withdrawn from social media and almost all public debate because I feel I did what God asked me to. I think God has given me leave to “cultivate my own garden” (pace Voltaire’s Candide) away from the toxic sparring with people like David French, Colby Adams, Jonathan Merritt, Hannah Williams, Karen Swallow Prior, Janet Mefferd, and the rest. The wisest thing my father ever told me was, “the world is full of a--holes. Avoid them so you don’t smart smelling like them.”
I’ve also realized that almost nobody in the public square believes the ideologies they wear as labels. There is no shortage of famous people embroiled in debates about LGBT and Christianity, including the pastors who answered John Macarthur’s call to protest against government bans on conversion therapy on January 16. In LGBT debates, however, most commentators do not seem to care about whether self-identified gay or trans people can turn to Christ and live out the Bible’s vision for sexuality. They care about winning the debate.
I know many of these self-proclaimed gospel defenders from my ten years of being involved in debates. They weren’t there when these battles mattered or when their advocacy could have made a difference. They let countless people get banned, shunned, and crushed. Most of them have fallen into a predictable routine and need to perform their Christian beliefs in order to pay their bills and save themselves from loneliness and embarrassment.
Culture wars and conventional ground wars have something in common. They have to be fought. They require strategy. They depend on funding, morale, and courage. To win wars you have to do something. And it saddens me to see Christians wanting to do something about Ukraine, where they can’t accomplish anything valuable, while they continue to do nothing about the disastrous fall of Christ’s bride at home.
That’s the key point getting lost in the fog of war. On the whole American Christians do not know very much about Ukraine or Russia. Unless they want to push American politicians to become entangled in yet another conflict far removed from us, full of ambiguities and devoid of clear-cut good and bad guys, we can’t do anything about Ukraine from here other than pray. We should pray. But when it comes to the same timeless sins of hubris, domination, callousness to suffering, deceit, greed, vainglory, ambition, and aggression, take note—there is more than enough of that in our own church world, and evangelicals can do something about it close to home.
The culture war plays a major role in the Russia-Ukraine War. The term “clash of civilizations,” coined by Samuel P. Huntington, could apply to Russia’s friction with the west as much as scholars applied it to the collision of Christianity and Islam. Within the supposedly Christian west, one worldview anchored in timeless moral standards wrestles mightily against another worldview, which is not anchored anywhere but floats on the whims of postmodern, posthuman, relativist thinking. The United States has been exporting its sexual decadence, reckless consumerism, and general hedonism all over the globe. In the last fifteen years, Russia has played the counterbalance to the US in cultural terms, because Putin and other Russians have refused to go along with the west’s redefinition of gender, sexuality, family, history, and morality. A lot of Christians who agree more with Putin than with Biden on morality find themselves in a difficult dilemma if they embrace the anti-Putin propaganda which boosts the anti-morality of America’s political hedonism. They also find themselves in an awkward position if the situation tempts them to defend everything Putin does.
Saul and Gordon came out with their film in November 2021. It is no surprise that all the platforms that need to be airing it are working hard to erase the truths the film exposed. The movie documents how people with unchristian agendas have grossly distorted scripture, even turned it against itself, in order to capitalize on the social capital that comes with America’s pastorate. No matter how little talent one has, no matter whether someone believes in Christ or not, he who controls the pews has access.
My own history with the documentary, and evangelical corruption
I was interviewed and appeared in the documentary because I had firsthand experience with the subject matter. I have learned the painful truth that there is nothing Christian, right, or conservative about what people perceive as the Reagan-legacy Christian right.
about 1 year ago
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