Megan’s new book is popular that it’s up to #11 on Amazon as of Sunday night, when I am writing this post. The book talks about how some popular evangelical pastors and teachers have aligned themselves with the secular left on issues like abortion, LGBT, immigration, global warming, health care, etc. I got the audio version, read by the author, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

So what’s in the book? Here is one article in First Things containing a sample chapter about how some evangelical pastors and leaders align themselves with the secular left on LGBT policy.

It says:

In 2000, Jon Stryker, gay heir to a one-hundred-billion-dollar surgical supply conglomerate, launched the Arcus Foundation, a grant-making institution that soon became the largest funder of LGBTQ initiatives in the United States. But after legislative defeats like the passage of a 2008 California law banning gay marriage, Stryker’s foundation began devoting tens of millions of dollars to, in its words, “challenging the promotion of narrow or hateful interpretations of religious doctrine” within every major Christian denomination.

[…]Between 2014 and 2018, the Reformation Project, a brand-new organization led by twenty-three-year-old Harvard dropout Matthew Vines, received $550,000 in grants. The purpose of the funding, according to Arcus, was to “reform church teaching on sexual orientation and gender identity among conservative and evangelical communities.”

[…]Enter Greg and Lynn McDonald. In 2015, they founded Embracing the Journey, an organization for Christian parents of LGBTQ children, at the urging of North Point’s executive director, Bill Willits. They had recently relocated to the Atlanta area and had begun attending services at the church. Over a breakfast meeting with Willits early in the year, Greg happened to share that his son had come out as gay in 2001, and he described how his and Lynn’s process of acceptance eventually led them to become informal counselors to other parents of gay and transgender kids. Willits was “captivated” by their story and revealed that North Point had already begun exploring new ministries in that vein. He urged them to film a video for Stanley’s Drive Conference that May.

As Stanley introduced the McDonalds’ video to approximately two thousand church leaders from all over the country, he urged those leaders not to view homosexuality through a “political” lens. Instead of suggesting that ministers use the Bible as their foremost frame of reference, he urged the audience to approach the issue through a “relational lens.” His example for relational was the McDonalds’ story.

And this part was interesting. As someone who has tried and tried and tried to get evidential apologetics into churches, I was astonished to see how churches approached Vines’ teaching material on LGBT:

As might be expected, given how seriously he takes his mission, Vines’s courses are far more rigorous than the kind of light, Wednesday night discussions the typical evangelical church offers on such subjects, if it offers them at all. Over a period of three months, the Reformation Project requires participants of one program to complete the equivalent of an advanced college course, all for the purpose of preparing to subvert the faithful churches Vines has called “the last stronghold of homophobia.”

When I was reading this article, I could not help but think of the episodes of Knight and Rose Show that Rose and I did about the definition of marriage, and then our interview with Dr. Frank Turek about LGBT as a whole. Naturally, our conversations were about evidence. We wanted to follow the advice of 1 Peter 3:15, and give an evidential defense of Jesus’ views on these issues, that would be convincing to non-Christians. But Andy Stanley doesn’t like evidence, he wants to be “relational”. You know, “don’t judge”.

Here’s another article in The Federalist with a sample chapter about evangelical pastors and immigration.

It says:

In January 2020, Baptist Press, the house organ of the Southern Baptist Convention, published a lie. The question is whether the outlet knew at the time that it was a lie.

The article was not attributed to any specific author and was labeled an “explainer.” It claimed to debunk reporting from the conservative news outlet Breitbart, which revealed that the Evangelical Immigration Table, a group that lobbies for various amnesty policies in the name of Jesus, was funded by left-wing, atheist billionaire George Soros. This was not a small matter because, largely under the direction of, first, Richard Land, and then Russell Moore, the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission had become a key leader in the EIT. Nor were Land and Moore alone. Leadership for a host of trusted evangelical organizations, including the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the NAE, World Relief, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Focus on the Family, Prison Fellowship Ministries, and the Wesleyan Church, had joined hands with the EIT. If it was being bankrolled by Soros, they would all have a lot of explaining to do.

[…]From the outset, the group focused not on encouraging Christians to meet the material and spiritual needs of immigrants in their own communities, something few would object to, but on pushing them to lobby lawmakers for specific legislation.

[…]By late 2013, the group was soliciting proposals for “mobilizers” to “activate” pastors and congregations, explaining that “81 Republicans in the House who may vote for immigration reform represent districts whose population is at least 20% evangelical Christian. Over the last year, the [EIT] has worked to engage pastors and congregants in 16 of the 20 states that are home to these districts.”

[…]The EIT’s efforts to see the bill passed began in earnest in January 2013, as the group pushed churches to join a 40-day study of cherry-picked Bible verses, titled “I Was a Stranger,” that they insisted applied to U.S. immigration law. Instead of studying the Bible, churches involved with the EIT began recruiting their congregants for political activism.

The first thing that popped into my head reading these chapters was “why haven’t evangelical churches been teaching their congregants evidence to confirm Biblical positions on issues like atheism, feminism, socialism, sexuality, Darwinian evolution, abortion, marriage and divorce, etc.” These evangelical churches seem to be fine with persuading Christians to accept the politics of the secular left. Where is the effort from these shepherds to get Christians to defend the truth claims of the Bible with evidence?

By the way, there is a good conversation on the book here with Dr. Frank Turek and Alisa Childers, and another good conversation here with Krista Bontrager and Monique Duson.

I’m not sure if you heard about this, but Britain had an election recently, and they decided to elect secular leftists. What is the secular left championing? Open borders immigration policies, two-tier policing, and suppression of speech critical of the regime’s policies or ideology. Let’s take a look at what it’s like to be a taxpayer in the UK and live under secular left fascism.

Consider this article by Tim Dieppe, which appeared in The Critic.

There is a perception that the police can treat Muslim protestors differently to white protestors. Scenes of police running away from an Asian-led protest in Leeds contrasted with riot police responding in Southport. Indeed, protestors in London mocked the police there, chanting, “Where the f*** were you in Leeds?”

I disagree with any armed protests, and would never attend one. Violence is never justified, except as a last resort in self-defense when all other options have been exhausted. (Although in the UK, self-defense against violent criminals is effectively illegal – it is illegal to brandish a kitchen knife at trespassers from inside your own home)

But there’s more evidence of two-tier policing in the past, as the article explains:

Two years ago I wrote about how Christian evangelist Hatun Tash was arrested by police in Speakers’ Corner after having her Qur’an stolen from her. You can watch footage of the incident here. Hatun had broken no laws and done nothing wrong. In fact, she was the victim. No one was arrested for stealing her Qur’an. The crowd of Muslims mocked her as she was brutally frog-marched off into a police van amidst chants of “Allahu Akbar”.

Only after being strip-searched, having her glasses removed from her so that she could not read, being questioned at 4:00am, arrested again, and detained for a total of 15 hours was she finally released without charge.

Hatun’s stolen Qur’an was later found by the police. She deliberately uses a large copy of the Qur’an with holes drilled through it to remind Muslims that a famous Islamic apologist admitted that “the standard narrative [of the origins of the Qur’an] has holes in it.” This is undoubtedly provocative, but it is nowhere near being a crime. Astonishingly, video footage shows the police later finding her copy of the Qur’an and handing it to Muslim onlookers! One Muslim shortly afterwards brazenly put out video footage of himself holding the stolen Qur’an! Isn’t there an offence of handling stolen goods? Did the police take any action? Did they heck.

This was not the first time that Hatun has been wrongfully arrested. Metropolitan Police paid out £10,000 for wrongful arrests in 2020 and 2021. They also issued a statement of apology. Sadly, they don’t seem to have learned their lesson.

Police policy appears to be to effectively to enforce elements of sharia law. If you offend Muslims you will be arrested. Hatun has proven this several times. There are no arrests, however, for offending Christians. Not that there should be any arrests for causing offence at all. Being offensive is, after all, not an offence. If it were, we would not have free speech at all. Not that the police seem to understand this or be at all interested in protecting free speech, particularly when it comes to Islam.

What really grates, is that there are also no arrests for assaulting or stealing from Christians — even when done in broad daylight with multiple witnesses and video footage. Even when repeated requests are made for action to be taken. What other conclusion are we supposed to draw than that two-tier policing is a reality?

The police are warning people not to talk about two-tier policing on social media, and threatening action against anyone who does. Why would they try to suppress this? Well, the police in the UK want potential tourists in the West to think of the UK as a peaceful country, where tourists are safe from criminals. “Our open border immigration policies are working fine”, they say, “nothing for you to worry about here”.

But there’s a lot for you to worry about:

Since 7 October we have seen police stand by while protestors call for Jihad or chant antisemitic slogans. The police response to Islam-related protests or riots is clearly muted in comparison to the reaction to white protests. Video-footage of an unarmed 72-year-old white woman with a pacemaker being arrested by five riot police in London went viral on the internet.

Videos of pro-Palestine groups of masked and sometimes armed men congregating and threatening or attacking people with no police presence to be seen, contrast with riot police out in force for unarmed white groups.

Here’s what we mean by two-tier policing:

Video footage emerged on Saturday showing a police liaison officer in Stoke-on-Trent telling Muslim protestors that they could leave their weapons at the mosque. He said:

We will work with you guys for the best solution. The EDL lot I’ve been assured have left.

If there are any weapons or anything like that, then what I would do is discard them at the mosque.

Don’t give anybody any reason to have any interaction with the police, so if there’s any weapons, get rid of them, we are not going to arrest anybody. You don’t want us to make arrests or start dispersing people. Is that alright?

Police have now admitted that public confidence was undermined by this incident and are said to be reviewing the incident. It is a criminal offence to carry a knife or a weapon. Allowing Muslims to leave their weapons at the mosque rather than arresting them for this crime is another example of two-tier policing.

This is similar to how the British police declined to investigate complaints from mothers about their daughters being sex-trafficked by Muslim men. They didn’t want to “inflame racial tensions”. And if you criticize them for what they’ve done, then they want to punish you for it. But if you post a meme that criticizes the secular left, then the police are all over you. This is fascism.

The article notes:

Even more concerningly, Met Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Row1ey, appears to want to criminalise people who claim that there is two-tier policing. In an interview with Sky News he suggested that people who say that there is two-tier policing are legitimising violence. He added: “If you’re a keyboard warrior, you’re not safe from the law if you incite violence.”

Would you live in a country like that? Would you even visit it? I would expect the police in the UK to join in the murdering of me, rather than protect me from actual criminals. They are serious about collecting their salaries paid for by taxpayers, but not serious about doing their job of protecting those taxpayers. At what point can we just describe law enforcement in the UK as Gestapo or Stasi? They exist to protect the secular left regime from criticism. That’s it.

And just to be clear, half my family is Muslim, I have very dark skin, and I am a legal immigrant (by employer sponsor, in the highest category of merit) to the United States. No problem with any of that. But I think I’ll decline from ever setting foot in the UK, and so should you. It’s not any different than any other corrupt country running the communist fascist playbook. I wouldn’t visit a garbage country like Venezuela, just as I wouldn’t visit the UK.