Megan Basham is an evangelical Christian writer who has gotten my attention by her challenges to anti-conservative evangelicals, such as David French, Russell Moore, Tim Keller, etc. She’s written some amazing articles for the Daily Wire, but her latest is the most important one yet. In it, she talks about how Biden Democrats used woke evangelicals to spread propaganda to conservative churches.

Here’s the article:

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

[…] Stetzer is… the executive director of the Billy Graham Center and the editor-in-chief of Outreach media group. He was previously an editor at Christianity Today and an executive director at LifeWay, one of the largest religious publishers in the world. That’s to say nothing of the dozen-plus books on missions and church planting he’s authored.

During their discussion, Collins and Stetzer were hardly shy about the fact that they were asking ministers to act as the administration’s go-between with their congregants. “I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work,” Collins said. Stetzer replied that he sometimes hears from ministers who don’t feel comfortable preaching about Covid vaccines, and he advises them, in those cases, to simply promote the jab through social media.

“I just tell them, when you get vaccinated, post a picture and say, ‘So thankful I was able to get vaccinated,’” Stetzer said. “People need to see that it is the reasonable view.”

[…]Stetzer… ended the podcast by announcing that the Billy Graham Center would be formally partnering with the Biden administration. Together with the NIH and the CDC it would launch a website, coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide clergy Covid resources they could then convey to their congregations.

Much earlier in the pandemic, as an editor at evangelicalism’s flagship publication, Christianity Today (CT), Stetzer had also penned essays parroting Collins’ arguments on conspiracy theories. Among those he lambasted other believers for entertaining, the hypothesis that the coronavirus had leaked from a Wuhan lab. In a now deleted essay, preserved by Web Archive, Stetzer chided, “If you want to believe that some secret lab created this as a biological weapon, and now everyone is covering that up, I can’t stop you.”

Only two days before Stetzer published his essay, Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by CT. The outlet introduced him as a “follower of Jesus, who affirms the sanctity of human life” despite the fact that Collins is on record stating he does not definitively believe, as most pro-lifers do, that life begins at conception, and his tenure at NIH has been marked by extreme anti-life, pro-LGBT policies. (More on this later).

Megan has a lot more to say about other pious, charismatic useful idiots in the article.

Joe Carter

Here’s Joe Carter, who writes for the woke evangelical publication “The Gospel Coalition”:

Certainly The Gospel Coalition, a publication largely written for and by pastors, didn’t probe beyond the “facts” Collins’ offered or consider any conflicts of interest the NIH director might have had before publishing several essays that cited him as almost their lone source of information. As with CT, one article by Gospel Coalition editor Joe Carter linked the reasonable hypothesis that the virus might have been human-made with wilder QAnon fantasies. It then lectured readers that spreading such ideas would damage the church’s witness in the world.

Joe Carter has been far-left for some time. Another person who climbed the church hierarchy through piety and charisma, but doesn’t know anything about the real world.

Russell Moore

If you’re looking for the truth about how to handle a virus, you won’t get it from a pious, charismatic pastor:

[T]he Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), an organization funded by churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

While a webinar featuring Collins and then-ERLC-head Russell Moore largely centered, again, on the importance of pastors convincing church members to get vaccinated, the discussion also moved on to the topic of masks. With Moore nodding along, Collins held up a basic, over-the-counter cloth square, “This is not a political statement,” he asserted. “This is not an invasion of your personal freedom…This is a life-saving medical device.”

You can read more about this in the latest announcement from the Centers for Disease Control. I’ve talked about Russell Moore often on this blog. I’m not sure how someone this far to the left was able to climb to the top rungs of the Southern Baptist hierarchy.

Tim Keller

Megan writes:

Former megachurch pastor Tim Keller’s joint interview with Collins included a digression where the pair agreed that churches like John MacArthur’s, which continued to meet in-person despite Covid lockdowns, represented the “bad and ugly” of good, bad, and ugly Christian responses to the virus.

Haven’t paid any attention to him recently because of his views on evolution, socialism, and critical race theory.

Hugh Ross

Although I am an old-Earth creationist like Hugh Ross, I was surprised to see him endorse a pro-abortion, pro-LGBT theistic evolutionist like Francis Collins:

I don’t think anyone would call Hugh Ross a very politically-aware person, but this was ridiculous. Francis Collins isn’t automatically a good person just because he has elite degrees and political power. Elite degrees and political power are great, but they don’t automatically make you a good Christian. Hugh Ross has never been very intelligent about policy or politics. He was careless about Collins and it is a huge mistake.

Further reading

If you don’t know much about Francis Collins, you should read this article about him from Evolution News. They go over his record on abortion, experimenting on aborted babies, LGBT activism and theistic evolution.

Oh, and here are some other names Megan names in a tweet:

D. French is David French, who used to write for National Review, which has also lurched to the left.

Please don’t listen to these people. They’re wolves.