In this bombshell report by Pulpit & Pen, we will demonstrate how Democratic financier and organizer Zack Exley is behind the successful attempt to change the political ideology of America’s major evangelical institutions, ministries, and seminaries through propagation of what is known as “Social Justice.”
SUMMARY
We will explain—with a compilation of original sources, some of which have been recovered after they were deleted from the Internet—the driving political force behind the takeover of America’s Reformed evangelical community and demonstrate the money ties between a powerful Democratic financier and evangelical leaders who are steering churches into progressive ideology for political purposes.
Far from being an organic, Bible-driven movement, the ideas presented at institutions like Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 9 Marks, Together for the Gospel, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and The Gospel Coalition are driven by a gameplan orchestrated by Exley, and the purpose is to keep evangelicals from voting Republican in the upcoming 2020 election cycle.
There is no doubt that Reformed evangelicalism—historically a bastion of conservative Christianity—has been overtaken by ‘woke’ Social Justice ideology over the course of the last several years. Many people have wondered why so many formerly conservative leaders and entities— especially those related to the Southern Baptist Convention and the parachurch ministry, The Gospel Coalition—have converted almost entirely to an ideology that seems sympatico with the talking points of the Democratic Party. Research conducted by Pulpit & Pen now has the answer as to how this coordinated effort to turn Reformed evangelicalism to the political left has been accomplished.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AS IT RELATES TO EVANGELICALISM
The concept known as “Social Justice” was invented by Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio, a Jesuit priest in the 1840s. D’Azeglio’s work ran in concert with his contemporary, Karl Marx, and fed off of his communitarian ideas. His ideas were largely relegated to Roman Catholic and, in particular, Jesuit-influenced circles for more than one-hundred years. However, Jesuits who had adopted his views of Social Justice in Peru (and elsewhere throughout Communist-influenced South America during the Cold War) adapted his ideas further to create Liberation Theology, the formation of another Jesuit priest, Gustavo Guttierez.
Out of fear that Communists would win full control of South and Central America during the Cold War, Guttierez’s band of Roman Catholics combined their efforts with the continent’s liberal Protestant minority to formulate an ideology that could embrace Marxist economic ideas while maintaining theism (Marxism was typically opposed to religion, and the South American religious community was looking for a way to appease the Communists and keep religion alive under Soviet-influenced revolutionary leadership). It’s here that ideas were put together that would be presented to the world at the First International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974. Here, Marxists found allies in the World Council of Churches with the assistance and influence of the major ecumenical evangelical leaders Billy Graham and John Stott. Through this effort, Marxist principles like the redistribution of wealth were perversely wed with Bible-twisting Christian proof-texts.
Between the time that Liberation Theology was first formulated after the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1958 (when theists in South America began to panic and look for a theological way to wed their ideas with Communism) and its coming-out party at Lausanne (1974), similar ideas began to take root in America in 1966 as propagated by heretical ‘Christian’ scholar James Cone. It was here that a uniquely North American version of Liberation Theology would be developed which mirrored that of the South American Jesuit-led ideology; this new North American strain was aptly named Black Liberation Theology.
Black Liberation Theology was also derivative of another, earlier movement in America, founded upon Marxist principles and known as the Social Gospel Movement. Developed by Washington Gladden and popularized by Walter Rauschenbusch, the turn-of-the-19th-century movement sought to combine Marxist principles with evangelical ideas. In fact, Rauschenbusch claimed that religion was the best means to promote socialism, saying, “the only power that can make socialism succeed…is religion. It cannot work in an irreligious country.” Rauschenbusch promoted this so-called “Social Religion” and was opposed vehemently by American evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, who considered the focus on social ills to be a distraction from the Gospel emphasis that belonged to American evangelicalism. These earliest American Social Religion activists sought to do things like abolish alcohol, mandate vaccinations, and create universal childcare but were largely rejected by American’s Bible-believing churches as a distraction from the church’s real mission.
These ideas—Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology, Social Justice, and Social Gospel—were 19th and 20th Century attempts to Christianize Marxism. While mainstream denominations like the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, Episcopalians, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the American Baptists, and the United Church of Christ all embraced these ideas, conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church of America rejected them, as did a swath of smaller denominations and independent churches who generally opposed the National and World Council of Churches and their globalist agendas.
In the 1980s, an additional ideology arose, but, unlike the ones heretofore mentioned, it was not one that was primarily religious. Building upon the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism (a term coined by a Marxist writer, Trent Schroyer), America’s law schools formulated an idea called Critical Race Theory. Some know it by the name Identity Politics. The idea was simple: although economic Marxism has failed in the West because high income and class mobility thwarts class envy, a division could still be possible by separating people into identity groups such as race, sexual minorities, and victimhood status. Undoing the work of the American Civil Rights Movement, Critical Race Theorists sought to divide rather than unite society in order to overthrow the established social order, an idea at the heart of Marxist philosophy. Until recently, this a-theological idea wasn’t embraced by American evangelicals in the same way as Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology, Social Justice and the Social Gospel and thus remained a political, rather than religious, idea.
EVANGELICALISM’S ORCHESTRATED LEFT-TURN
Something has drastically changed in the last several years within conservative evangelicalism. Although it has taken place in all corners of American religion, the most recent embrace of Marxist ideas has come from a surprising segment of religion—Reformed Christianity.
Leading the efforts to turn American evangelicals to the political left and embrace traditionally Marxist ideas (whether 19th Century economic Marxism or 20th Century cultural Marxism) have been those labeled as “New Calvinists” by their opponents. Some, but not all, fit the description of the Young, Restless, and Reformed, a label created by journalist Collin Hansen (who, incidentally, has also been a leader in the modern Social Justice Movement).
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary suddenly created a “Department of Kingdom Diversity” and hosted a “Malcolm X” read-in to verse students on Black Nationalism militancy. SEBTS president Danny Akin told professors that if anyone spoke out against Critical Race Theory they would be subject to “sensitivity training” or firing. SEBTS began to teach the works of James Cone, commending his Liberation Theology to students (the 6-part series, available publicly, demonstrates that they weren’t merely learning about Cone but were promoting Cone’s ideas). SEBTS Dean, Brent Aucoin, began to viciously attack student whistleblowers who were concerned about the leftist trajectory of the institution.
Southern Seminary president Albert Mohler began to platform some of the most radical Social Justice advocates in evangelicalism both at his seminary and through the organization on which he serves as a council member, The Gospel Coalition. The worst of these advocates was Russell Moore, the confessed Communitarian and former Democratic staffer who runs the Southern Baptist Convention’s ERLC.
Moore, while at the ERLC, has made amnesty for illegal aliens and open borders a major focus of his 4-million-dollar SBC budget and spends the majority of his time promoting immigration lawlessness and deriding the President of the United States. Moore has called a border wall a “golden calf,” likening it to idolatry, and has gone so far as to claim that Jesus was an illegal alien himself. The ERLC has greatly softened its tone on homosexuality, and several of its research fellows endorsed the pro-LGBTQ “Revoice Conference.” Moore has been absolutely absent on the abortion fight and utterly silent on gay marriage since Obergefell vs Hodges. Instead, Moore has focused the ERLC’s attention on animal rights, fighting for a Mosque to be built in New Jersey, “racial justice” (a loaded Liberation Theology term), and decriminalizing illegal immigration.
The Gospel Coalition, founded by Tim Keller, has been the single greatest driving force for pulling evangelicals to the left. The aforementioned First International Conference on World Evangelicalism, which sent the ideology of Social Justice out into the world, held its Third Congress in Cape Town, South Africa in 2010. Keller was its keynote speaker. Since that time, Tim Keller, who by all practical definitions is a Marxist in every possible way, has been using The Gospel Coalition to push for these various Marxist subsets—Social Justice, Liberation Theology, and Critical Race Theory in particular—to be adopted by Reformed evangelicals reading TGC publication.
The Gospel Coalition and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (which has so much personnel overlap they’re basically the same organization) co-hosted a 2018 conference called MLK50, which promoted CRT concepts like White Guilt, Identity Politics, and castigated color-blindness, which was ironically a hallmark of Martin Luther King’s philosophies. From that time onward, these organizations have demanded Affirmative Action and hiring quotas for denominational employment.
Also thanks to The Gospel Coalition, which is stacked with New Calvinist leaders like H.B. Charles, Mark Dever, Albert Mohler, and Ligon Duncan, a new celebrity class has emerged in evangelicalism known as “Sexual Minorities.” Whereas prior to 2017, the conventional evangelical notion was that God the Holy Spirit redeems fallen sexual natures through conversion and sanctification, TGC began to trope out “Same-Sex Attracted” Christians who had a singular message; God will not change you. Sam Allberry, a gay (celibate) Anglican priest has become perhaps the most well-known homosexual celebrity promoted in circles belonging to TGC, the SBC, and the PCA. Allberry—who has encouraged non-sexual but physical “intimacy” among homosexuals and encouraged churches to let homosexuals adopt children—is just the beginning of a parade of homosexuals who have been brought out to teach evangelicals about sexuality. Others include Jackie Hill Perry, a militant, butch Social Justice Activist who still oozes masculinity, Gospel Coalition contributor, Rebecca McLaughlin, and many others. The idea that God will not change the desires of Same-Sex Attracted ‘Christians’ can be traced directly to the “Southern Baptists Breaking Bread with Homosexuals’ Conference in 2015, in which Albert Mohler denounced Reparative Therapy, which he formally had vigorously defended.
A broad coalition of the ‘woke’ evangelical leaders—like Russell Moore—work on the Evangelical Immigration Table, which is a subset of the National Immigration Forum, and its largest financial donor is George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Eric Metaxas got off the board for the Evangelical Immigration Table when he discovered that it was a Soros front-group, but Moore has happily governed the organization without caring that it’s doing the work of a Democratic billionaire financier.
Men like Anthony Bradley, who once argued quite publicly that Black Liberation Theology is nothing more than the “channeling of Karl Marx” now claims that any link to Marx is pure conspiracy theory and is a leading advocate of the movement he condemned only a few short years ago.
Albert Mohler, who once debated Jim Wallis on Social Justice (Mohler claimed at the time that Social Justice was not the business of the church) now has a position—just a few short years later—that is indistinguishable from that of Jim Wallis (with whom Russell Moore serves on several Social Justice boards, including the aforementioned Evangelical Immigration Table).
Any attempt to seek clarity from these Southern Baptist and The Gospel Coalition leaders has been met with outrage, contempt, and attacks. A brief trailer of a new documentary released last week by Founders’ Ministries led to a full-out condemnation by four ‘woke’ SBC seminary presidents. And now, in another breaking news story that is developing, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is scrubbing from their website all material from Matthew Halland promoting radically leftist Critical Race Theory ideas acknowledging his own racist tendencies.
These men are subversive, secretive, and united in their desire to turn America’s largest conservative voting block—evangelicals—into leftists, adopting the same philosophies that were known in the past as Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology, Social Justice, Social Gospel, and Critical Race Theory.
WHO’S MAKING THIS LEFT-TURN HAPPEN?
We know that these institutions are receiving deep Dark Money from leftist Billionaire financiers. James Riady, Bill Clinton’s money man, a Clinton Foundation Member, and ex-con who was convicted of more than 80 misdemeanors and a felony for using corrupt foreign cash to affect America’s political system, is a major financial contributor to Westminster Philadelphia (a Reformed evangelical seminary), Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary, and The Gospel Coalition.
Although Riady cannot come back into the United States because the State Department has banned him, his wife is flown in to speak at Reformed Theological Seminary, and Ligon Duncan flies to his compound in Indonesia to pick up gratuitous amounts of cash for his seminary. The RTS newsletter, which repeatedly lauded the partnership between Riady and RTS, has been removed from the Internet since we first reported it last year.
That RTS is leading the Social Justice movement, we are told, is mere coincidence, in spite of Riady’s Lippo Group funding ‘woke’ Reformed institutions. Likewise, The Gospel Coalition has run articles promoting Riady’s globalism center, which masquerades as a religious school but is really a money-laundering scheme to get his political money back inside the United States.
Likewise, we know that George Soros is funding the Evangelical Immigration Table and its parent organization, the National Immigration Forum. We also know that a number of his sub-organizations are giving Dark Money to The Gospel Coalition, which is mysteriously funded and won’t report the source of their income.
With all that said, there’s a massive piece of the money puzzle that’s missing.
That piece is Zack Exley.
Who is Zack Exley?
Exley (born 1969) is a vastly successful tech consultant who has capitalized on his wealth and influence to launch himself as a political money-man, organizer, and ideological activist. After running the Wikimedia Foundation and then Thoughtworks, Exley began to start extremely influential leftist-progressive political think-tanks and money machines. He is known for founding the New Organizing Institute, which gave Democrats a leading edge in campaign technology development in the last several elections.
Exley’s first real foray into the national political scene was organizing more than 100 political protests against George W. Bush during the 2000 election cycle. Then, Exley set up a parody site to attack President George W. Bush with the domain, GeorgeWBush.com and practically invented “fake news,” operating his website with such nuanced parody that most could not tell the difference. He also did this to CNN, and because his site was viewed more as intentional misinformation than parody, CNN actually was able to get his site removed.
During the Iraq War, Exley was the director for MoveOn.Org, the rabidly liberal organization that originally developed to help Clinton in the press during his impeachment proceedings. Now, MoveOn.Org is a massive political machine that funds Democratic projects around the nation and schemes how to change the voting patterns of various demographic groups.
In 2004, Exley joined the John Kerry presidential campaign. He also worked for the UK’s labor party in 2005 in their (liberal) re-election efforts.
In 2015, Exley joined the Bernie Sanders campaign as the director of digital communication and is largely seen as the single greatest factor in Sanders’ meteoric rise. Exley’s ability to convert a characteristically un-charismatic personality like Sanders into a pop-culture sensation among young people proved his ability to master propaganda and change the course of public opinion. He developed near-legendary status for his ability to turn Sanders into a political phenomenon. Below is a video of Exley explaining his contributions to the Sanders campaign.
Exley is also the author of book, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything. The book is a spin off of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the radical leftist radical who Exley calls a “moderate.”
Currently, Exley helps run the “Justice Democrats” organization, which was responsible for the election of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and whose website says their goal is to elect more candidates just like her. Exley founded the Justice Democrats along with Cenk Ugur of The Young Turks and Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk. Notice that both of those individuals are vehemently anti-Jesus. Exley, however, isn’t a religious figure even though he’s spent much time and effort mobilizing evangelicals (as you’ll see below). Justice Democrats is proud of being responsible for giving us the infamous “AOC.”
As you can see, the logo of the “Justice Democrats” is derivative of the Communist Hammer and Sickle logo, and perusing their website will demonstrate that their policies are identical to that of Karl Marx. You can read more about that here.
Exley is also the co-founder of New Consensus, the organization behind the creation and promotion of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’ Green New Deal.
However, what makes Exley most interesting for us in the current discussion is his 2006-2010 gameplan to take over evangelicalism for Democrats by using “Social Justice” as the propaganda vehicle to accomplish the task.
REVOLUTION IN JESUS LAND
Exley had a blog—now removed from the Internet altogether—called Revolution in Jesus Land. It has been scrubbed from the Internet, but we’ve managed to find a fix to the problem and pull up some old screenshots.
The Democratic operative and major political thinker spent time opining on the best way to get a powerful Republican voting block—ostensibly one that is impervious to Democrat infiltration—to change the way they vote. Exley wanted Republicans to either vote Democrat or stay home. And in doing so, Exley laid out the gameplan that was taken up by evangelical institutions (whose hands were greased by Riady, Soros, and Kern Family Foundation cash) to turn us leftward. The plan was focused on infiltrating conservative seminaries and parachurch organizations with Social Justice ideologies, in order to change their voting patterns, as you yourself can see in archives of Exley’s blog on the WayBack Machine.
You can see a screenshot below.
Exley—who is not a born-against Christian—termed the Social Justice Movement “The Fourth Great Awakening” and spent his time laying out the strategy.
“Those goals include,” he writes, “eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender, and class lines and for immigrants — and even separation of church and state.”
It’s almost as though he’s the editor for The Gospel Coalition.
Revolution in Jesus Land stated its goals on its website. The following is a lengthy excerpt, but please read the whole thing.
This blog is a plea to the progressive movement, to take another look and get to know the diverse and complex world of evangelical Christianity in its own terms. Here you’ll find interviews, commentary, analysis and other dispatches from all over “Jesusland.” This tour will explore everything from the workings of the local church, to the evangelicals’ vibrant, decentralized national leadership training infrastructure to theological questions such as, “How in the world DO they read the Bible literally?” and “Do they really think I’m going to hell?”
There are two really big reasons to come along on this tour:
First, progressives will never achieve their goals as long as they are hostile toward and ignorant about the faith of 100 million of their own people who are born again Christians.
Second (and we know how difficult this is to believe) there is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state.
By learning to work together with “progressive” evangelicals, secular progressives will stand a better chance of achieving their goals and also learn an enormous amount from these remarkable people and their organizations that will help secular progressives strengthen their own movement.
This evangelical “revolution,” as one Christian pollster has labeled it, is unquestionably the fastest growing and most surprising of American social movements today. Whichever way you measure, it probably dwarfs the secular left. From mega churches to tiny country churches, evangelical Christians are rediscovering the “gospel of the God of the oppressed.” Perhaps the most surprising among these are the suburban, white evangelicals who are stepping outside of their comfort zones to “get into relationship” with the poor, the oppressed, the homeless, prisoners—the people of whom Jesus said,
Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me….Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. —Matthew 25
They are building houses for and teaching job skills to homeless people, they are creating tutoring programs for kids in failing schools, they’re paying health care bills and sending off rent checks for people living on poverty wages—and there’s even a movement afoot among these people to move their young families out of wealthy suburbs and into forsaken inner city neighborhoods, putting their kids into broken and often violent public schools. And in their Sunday services and Bible studies they are questioning the very foundations of modern American capitalist ideology.
On this blog we will attempt over time to provide evidence, and to explain the inner logic of this culture’s narratives, theologies and passions, and to flesh out the larger context of this movement that is shaking up nearly every American community and producing so many exceptional leaders.
So—welcome to Jesusland. We hope you enjoy the tour.
Exley, a major Democratic thinker and progressive organizer, saw the handwriting on the wall and discerned the times, probably viewing Russell Moore and Tim Keller as bellwethers for where evangelicalism was heading. Exley wanted to capitalize on this movement and give evangelical institutions the cash it needed to move forward with their progressive slant.
Even though he spent several years trying to figure out how get evangelicals to focus on Social Justice, Exley only did so for the purpose of getting them to vote Democrat (or, at least, not vote at all). See the video below.
CONNECTIONS BETWEEN EXLEY AND THE EVANGELICAL SOCIAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT
After laying out his thoughts on how to take over evangelism for Democrats (website now deleted), Exley began to pop-up with important evangelical leaders, a group he had no former connections as an unabashed secularist.
Zack Exley, aside from founding the movement that brought us Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, is also a member of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
This is a promotional video from Zack Exley for Open Society Foundations, which advocates a complete dismantling of the Nation-State (hence its lobbying against sovereign borders and basic immigration enforcement). Exley serves as a fellow of the Open Society Foundations.
Exley’s role at Open Society, according to its website, is to handle the financial grants and determine who gets Soros’ money. You can see his bio at Open Society Foundations from the below screenshot.
Consider this: Exley, who spent years publicly brainstorming how to get evangelicals to adopt Social Justice to move them politically left, is now helping Soros hand out his cash. To whom do you think he is handing out his boss’ cash?
Exley is filtering the cash to evangelicals who are “investing” in Social Justice, including the ERLC. You can see from the Evangelical Immigration Table website, Russell Moore is listed as a “head” of the Soros organization. Leith Anderson, the National Association of Evangelicals (an ecumenical organization that heavily partners with the ERLC) recently endorsed a change of position on homosexuality and is now fighting for “gay rights.”
It has already been well established that the ERLC is a head of the Evangelical Immigration Table (see above), and that the Evangelical Immigration Table was founded and funded by Soros’ National Immigration Forum. The purpose of these organizations is to open America’s borders to tens of millions of undocumented Democrats.
Exactly how many of America’s leading evangelicals were roped into serving Soros’ board has not been widely reported, however. Consider the video of Ed Stetzer, leading a Lifeway-funded survey group designed to help Soros “reach” evangelicals, which—for some odd reason—hasn’t yet been pulled from YouTube.
Additionally, Soros is funding the Center for Intersectional Justice out of Berlin. It is heavily associated with the Frankfurt School, and is run by Kimberly Crenshaw Williams, who invented “Intersectionality,” a key component of Critical Race Theory (as you can see below, right).
Funding the organization, as you can see below, is none other than Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
This same Open Society Foundations is the organization funding Russell Moore’s Evangelical Immigration Table, and its shell companies are funneling money from every ‘woke’ evangelical institution from SEBTS to The Gospel Coalition.
Crenshaw, the director of the Center for Intersectional Justice and founder of Intersectionality, has made it clear that, for the ideology to work in America, it must have a religious appeal to evangelicals.
Crenshaw wrote in the Washington Post in an article entitled Why Intersectionality Can’t Wait, “This is why we continue [the work of Intersectionality], calling for holistic and inclusive approaches to racial justice…And it is why thousands have agreed that the tragedy in Charleston, S.C., demonstrates our need to sustain a vision of social justice that recognizes the ways racism, sexism, and other inequalities work together to undermine us all. We simply do not have the luxury of building social movements that are not intersectional, nor can we believe we are doing intersectional work just by saying words.”
This is the precise ideology being taught by SEBTS, as the evidence shows. Other organizations, like TGC are engaging in this language as well.
The question isn’t if money is being filtered to evangelical institutions from George Soros through Zack Exley, the only question is how much. Because these are non-profit religious organizations, they are not bound to the same reporting standards of other organizations, making them the perfect place to launder Dark Money from Soros, Riady, and Kern.
THE FACTS REMAIN
The facts remain; a major Democratic operative who is responsible for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign and also responsible for the 2018 election of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, spent four years (2006-2010) laying out a gameplan to move evangelicals to the political left by focusing on “Social Justice.”
Then, Exley began to work for Open Society Foundations, which is the organization that determines how to best spend George Soros’ fortune dedicated to leftist activism. And we know for sure that some of that money is being filtered to major evangelical leaders and institutions through things like the Evangelical Immigration Table. Furthermore, we see the ideology coming into evangelicalism, like Intersectionality, through Soros-funded organizations.
We must wake up and realize that the battle over Social Justice in evangelicalism is not merely theological—it is also political. Those of us trying to defend the Gospel are up against the deep pockets of the Democratic and Globalist machine.
What’s at stake is not only authentic Christianity but Western Civilization.
[Contributed by JD Hall, #the15]
