On September 19, the Associated Press published an article with the headline, “These evangelicals for Harris are voting their values—by backing Kamala Harris.” This headline intrigued me. I wondered what values evangelical Christians could possibly share with Harris, since evangelicals live by the Bible and especially the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I have my suspicions that these “evangelicals” featured by the mainstream media are not what they seem. The intended effect here may be to cause enough doubt among true evangelical voters that they stay home on Election Day. Although those voters would not vote for Harris, they may no longer feel comfortable voting for Trump, either.
Yes, Donald J. Trump’s flaws are well known, though permit me to point out that many of his alleged and most egregious transgressions occurred while he was yet a Democrat. Since Christianity is a “come as you are” religion, most Christians understand that people are not bound by the mistakes they make during the journey of life. What some Christians struggle with is the contradictions that they see within Trump and the Republican Party more broadly. The GOP’s platform has retreated from its non-negotiable stances on the sanctity of human life and the importance of marriage as a permanent union between one man and one woman. Given the divorce rate in America, the standards were perhaps too high for the latter to carry much sway. Even so, the Republican platform more closely aligns with those convictions shaped by Biblical truths than the Democrats’ alternative.
Let’s look at Vice President Kamala Harris’s current policy stance on certain issues versus her platform on those issues during her presidential bid (she has assured her donors and followers that her values remain the same — wink-wink!) Harris supports the killing of unborn babies at any stage of development. Reproductive freedom, the euphemism for abortion, comes with no limits in her mind. In 2019, Harris is on record in an American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire stating that she would cut financial support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and offer gender transition surgeries to border crossers. Since the Biden-Harris Administration has tried to rewrite Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (now blocked by the Supreme Court), it is a safe bet that she supports men competing in women’s sports. Former President Trump has made it clear that he opposes biological males participating in women’s sports and would eliminate the expansion of the law that allows men to compete against women.
Despite Democrats and Republicans moving closer together on pivotal issues, Bible-believing Christians would still find more like-minded people in the Republican Party.
With all that in mind, the question still begs: does Harris offer a certain appeal for evangelicals, and should the Trump team be concerned? One such Harris-friendly evangelical group, Evangelicals for Harris, is targeting Christians with ads and arguments meant to persuade them that Harris is closer to their views than Trump.
I decided to dig a little deeper into Evangelicals for Harris to determine if they are disaffected Republicans who believe that Democrats best represent Christian values. What I discovered takes us back to 2008 and the decision that progressives made to go after the religious vote following the election of Barack Obama. First of all, Obama kept in place Bush’s Faith-Based and Community Initiative that allowed churches big and small to feed from the federal trough. It provided federal grants to churches who were providing social services to underserved populations. This meant that some of the black megachurches whose pastors had endorsed George W. Bush quickly switched their allegiances to Obama. Under Obama, money flowed to any organization or group that could make a religious claim. Not surprisingly, that’s when we saw the emergence of liberal evangelical groups supported by private and public funds.
Federal dollars eroded at the common understanding of evangelicalism, making the meaning fuzzier and fuzzier. It was no longer just about Jesus and the Gospel. Evangelicalism was opened up to progressive interests: its purposes now included advocacy for global warming and reproductive freedom. This attracted the dark designs of atheists bent on remaking America in their godless image, such as George Soros.
A 2010 op-ed by Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, documented Soros’ influence well: “George Soros’s Evangelicals.” His article focused most prominently on Richard Cizik, the former head of The National Association of Evangelicals, who had represented the organization in Washington, D.C. for almost three decades. Two years earlier, Cizik had been forced to resign from that position but had reinvented himself with a return to power with a new organization he founded, New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. Now, Cizik serves as the executive director of Evangelicals for Democracy. Soros’s Open Society Foundation funded Cizik as well as another progressive “evangelical” Jim Wallis, the theologian who founded and edited the Sojourners Magazine and also received money from the Open Society Institute.
The influence of those like Soros wouldn’t be possible if existing evangelical powerhouses weren’t receptive to them. Using Marxist and Fabian socialists-inspired strategies, America’s churches (including the Southern Baptist, America’s largest Protestant organization) have been infiltrated with progressive evangelicals who are indeed shifting the organization and its member churches to the left. In 2019, the Southern Baptists shocked the world with its adoption of Resolution 9, “on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality,” clearly concepts that its members were clueless about. One provision of the tortuous resolution stated that “critical race theory and intersectionality should only be employed as analytical tools subordinate to Scripture—not as transcendent ideological frameworks.’ Thereby, it brought into its midst a godless approach rooted in conflict theory. When the organization’s conservatives attempted to revisit the issue and insist on the authority of scripture unaided with Marxist tools, leaders of progressive black churches like Reverend Dwight McKissic, A Baptist Pastor, from Texas threatened to leave the organization.
Ironically, McKissic is one of the Evangelicals for Harris quoted in the AP article I mentioned earlier. According to him, there is “no moral superiority of one party over another.” For proof, McKissic cited “the GOP’s decision to ‘abandon a commitment to ban abortion with a constitutional amendment’ and to soften its stance against same-sex marriage in its party platform.” Although the authors of that article would have you believe that McKissic is an evangelical Christian who sees commonality with Harris, there is no evidence I am aware of that McKissic ever supported Trump, or the Republican Party once Obama came on the scene.
Reverend Jim Ball, Executive Vice President for Policy and Climate Change at the Evangelical Environmental Network, is the organizer of Evangelicals for Harris. He has stated that “Diversity is a strength for us. We’re not looking for total unanimity. We’re looking for unity. We can be united while we have differences.”
It is these connections that lead me to believe that much-publicized evangelicals supporting Harris such as Evangelicals for Harris are, in truth, wolves in sheep’s clothing: progressives seeking to pull away Christian Trump supporters by pointing out his lack of humility, his “meanness”, waffling on issues like the sanctity of human life and the sacredness of traditional marriage. Whether they are successful at making any serious inroads into the traditional evangelical base remains to be seen. What is clear is that part of the strategy is to create disillusionment in the followers of Jesus Christ, hoping that this group will stay at home on election day. We can only pray that Christians are wise to the game.
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Dr. Carol M. Swain is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Faith and Culture (Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church) and is the author of The Adversity of Diversity: How the Supreme Court’s Decision to Remove Race from College Admissions Criteria will Doom Diversity Programs (co-authored with Mike Towle). X (carolmswain), LinkedIn (carolmswain), Instagram (drcarolmswain), GETTR (carolmswain) and Truth Social (carolmswain).
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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