Vice, which is among the top one hundred websites in America, ran an article about “The Woke Young People Trying to Make Christianity Cool Again.” The term, Woke, is urban slang originating with the pop-culture film, The Matrix, and refers to someone who has been awakened to the important cultural realities around them (for those of you not hip enough to dig their jive). Highlighted in the article are five up-and-coming “Christian” leaders who are breaking stereotypes about evangelicals not being bleeding heart, gay-affirming, environmentalist Marxists.
Those spotlighted by Vice include Brandan Robertson (the limp-wristed, lisping pastor of Missiongathering Christian Church in San Diego, which is affirming of his status as a “bisexual”), Rachel Lamb (who founded Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, an environmentalist group that proposes controlling climate change by Marxist-driven social policy), Matthew Maly (who advocates against the death penalty, and ostensibly against the Noahic Covenant and maybe Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2), Broderick Greer (a homosexual associate pastor at Grace St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Memphis, who focuses his efforts on race-baiting activism), Tabitha McDuffee (who runs a website, Faith and Forced Migration, and advocates against enforcement of immigration law) and Liz Dong (who serves on the Evangelical Immigration Table, advocating against national borders).
We would encourage you to peruse that article at Vice to see a brief overview of these God-hating leftists, operating under the guise of faux religiosity.
Russell Moore is the deep-drawled spokesman for Southern Baptists on political issues, running the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the SBC. He is the protege of Dr. Albert Mohler, formerly employed by Southern Seminary, and a board member at The Gospel Coalition, which has pretty much merged into a singular organization with the ERLC in recent years (they share board members, writers, and conferences as though they were identical entities). Russell Moore is also a lifelong Democrat, former Democratic staffer, and named his child after a Democratic congressman who voted for President Barack Obama.
What does Moore have in common with these five leftists? Well, it’s easier to ask what Moore doesn’t have in common with these leftists.
Liz Dong, the last leftist highlighted in the Vice article, serves on the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), which is funded by George Soros and has an explicitly globalist agenda. In fact, the Evangelical Immigration Table doesn’t legally exist, and is merely an extension of the Soros organization, the National Immigration Forum, which has given a quarter-million dollars to the EIT to lobby evangelicals to support illegal immigration. Eric Metaxas and other pseudo-conservative leaders quit the EIT when they realized it was just a pawn of George Soros. One evangelical leader who didn’t quit the EIT – and in fact who still supports it – is Russell Moore.
When Moore called a border wall a “golden calf” while protesting the election of Donald J. Trump, it wasn’t a poorly contrived comparison or momentary indulgence; it was a window into Moore’s leftist soul, which is rooted as strongly in the Democratic party as it is the Word of God. Moore has repeatedly made supporting illegal immigration into a “gospel issue” and strongly rejects enforcement of standing immigration law. Moore has been able to do what someone like Dong – with all of her more-overt liberal sympathies – could never do, and that is convince evangelicals that they are duty bound to erase national borders and remove common sense restrictions on immigration. Simply put, Moore and Dong are on the same team, serve on the same immigration council, and work for the same man – George Soros.
Like Broderick Greer, the black homosexual pastor in Memphis, Moore has also focused extensively on Cultural Marxism and identity politics. While refusing to call out the sinful ungodliness of Black Lives Matter, both Greer and Moore have condemned white supremacy at the drop of a hat. Both have been utterly silent on problems within the black community, and have instead chosen to focus on destroying monuments of Confederate (and Christian) war heroes and abolishing the Confederate flag. Both have repeatedly castigated the police, while refusing to impugn guilt toward BLM anarchists in Ferguson or rebuke their atrocious, violent, racist behavior. Both have sided with the corpse of cop-beating thug, Michael Brown, rather than siding with law and order. Both Greer and Moore have said that unless evangelicals spend time in church discussing racial injustice then “black lives are invisible to your people.”
Matthew Maly spends his time advocating for criminal justice reform. While he focuses his efforts on abolishing the death penalty, Russell Moore – to his credit – supports the death penalty, at least tangentially. They do, however, have one thing in common – they both insist that the penal system is too busy punishing crime. Like Greer, above, all three men believe that non-violent criminal records should be expunged. Both Moore and Maly use biblical argumentation to argue that the right’s “tough on crime” ideology is unscriptural. They have both opposed Attorney General Jeff Session’s policy changes on sentencing and prosecution, which they feel is too punitive for law breakers. Both argue that because a disproportionate number of prisoners are black it demonstrates an institutional racism in the penal system (as opposed to the possibility that black people commit a disproportionate amount of crime). Both are what has classically been called, “bleeding heart liberals.”
Rachel Lamb, the environmentalist covered in the Vice article, spends her time encouraging churches to take up “creation care.” Creation care, of course, is a slang term for environmentalism that was popularized by the Jim Wallis wing of leftist evangelicalism. If you look up the tag for creation care at the ERLC website you will find articles published that advocate for a radical environmentalism. Moore has said that evangelicals don’t lament ecological disasters enough, that deep sea drilling is a moral issue, and wrote a post saying that Christians should care about Earth Day (if ever there was a pagan holiday, it is Earth Day) and went so far as answering the question if Christians should celebrate the holiday with a simple, “Yes.” Using nuanced language of the Evangelical Intelligentsia that would make Karen Swallow Prior proud, Moore repeatedly ties in Christian moral duty with supporting whatever crazy environmental scheme is currently being promoted by America’s leftists.
While Moore hasn’t gone so far as to say homosexual behavior isn’t a sin – like that advocated by Brandan Robertson (from the Vice article) – he has refused to call homosexual desire sin. Moore hasn’t gone “full inclusion,” but he certainly embraced Justin Lee and Matthew Vines in fellowship over a meal (in violation of 1 Corinthians 5) and made the Wall Street Journal characterize him as having a “softening tone on homosexuality.” Moore’s tenure predicated Albert Mohler doing a 180 degree turn on reparative therapy, and has created a whole new “Eunuch Class” of evangelicals who are being told that celibacy – rather than monogamous heterosexual marriage – is their best course of action, giving up hope that God can change the nature of homosexuals through the power of conversion and sanctification.
The only substantive difference between Russell Moore and the up-and-coming crop of evangelical leftists is that Moore has convinced a large swath of evangelicals that he’s not a leftist.
