Well, it was the result of having multiple pastors tell me essentially the same story
about quoting the Sermon on the Mount parenthetically in their preaching.
Turn the other cheek to have someone come up after and say,
where did you get those liberal talking points?
>> Speaker 2: That was Russell Moore,
an evangelical leader who's now the editor in chief of Christianity Today.
He is outraged and shocked over the fact that evangelical people of
faith have increasingly begun to reject some of the more
loving teachings of Jesus Christ and the Christian religion.
In fact, he's alarmed at the number of self professed Christians who
believe that the Bible and its teachings are subversive.
So he was speaking to NPR during the audio you just listened to.
Let's hear a little more of what he has to say and
then we'll suss out what's really going on here.
>> Speaker 1: And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios when
the pastor would say, I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ,
the response would not be I apologize.
The response would be yes, but that doesn't work anymore, that's weak.
And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself
are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.
>> Speaker 2: Why are we in a crises?
Well, Moore suggested that the roots of the problem really come down to
disconnection, loneliness, sense of alienation,
even in churches that are still healthy and functioning.
And legitimate concerns about the state of society that are being portrayed
as an existential threat by conflict entrepreneurs, he argues.
So look, we're, I think gonna be kind of critical
of people who are part of the evangelical faith.
But I really wanna hone in on the fact that this is not unique to evangelicals.
I think that this is a thought process that we're seeing across the board.
And I'll explain what I mean by that in just a moment.
But Jake, go ahead.
>> Speaker 3: So look, I knew they would turn on Jesus because first of all,
they are the establishment and Jesus led a revolution against the establishment.
He threw out the Money Changers in the temple.
The Republicans worship money changers.
Now on Wall Street, they say they're the most important beloved people in
the world, not Republican voters.
Republican voters don't love bankers.
Republican politicians and Republican thought leaders and
evangelicals like these guys love Wall Street.
They say, give me 13 private jets.
That's what Jesus wanted you to do, right?
These phonies, these fakes, these prosperity preachers, right?
So now secondly, Jesus said give away all of your worldly possessions.
Look, I wrote about this in my book, tyt.com slash justice to pre order.
Jesus was so communist he'd make Karl Marx blush.
It was only a matter of time before they found out what Jesus was actually
preaching.
So the minute that conservatives,
evangelical folks in America found out that Jesus is massively liberal
give away all your worldly possessions, no rich people can go to heaven.
Do you hear that in your local church?
Anybody ever hear that in their local church?
Maybe you go to a great church and then you hear that, but
you're in the minority, okay?
Because all these frauds and phonies that Jesus hated are leading all these churches
right now, and they're all telling you, give me money.
Jesus loved money.
Yeah, Jesus loved war.
Did he?
Because I thought he said, turn the other cheek.
Weak, Jesus is weak.
>> Speaker 2: I wanna focus on that real quick, right?
The turn the other cheek element of this and
how increasingly evangelicals have kind of rejected that, right?
So you heard Russell Moore talk about that a little bit,
how they say that that kind of mentality doesn't work anymore.
And that really resonated with me, because, again, I don't think that that's
necessarily unique to evangelical voters or evangelical people of faith.
I see that kind of mentality across the board, the idea, no, no,
you don't turn the other cheek.
You don't love thy neighbor.
You fight the other side.
You fight your opponents.
You never let up, right?
And that kind of mentality, I think, has been incredibly counterproductive and
toxic in today's society because it has discouraged people from finding
common ground even among those they see as their political opponents.
>> Speaker 3: And look, guys, they did this as a campaign to divide us.
>> Definitely. And to make us hate each other and
to turn Christianity, which was preaching love.
That's why Christianity is the biggest religion in the world.
The reason Islam is close is because they preach equality and
that all the races were equal.
They both preach help the needy.
Right, and help the poor, and most of the world was needy and poor.
So that's why these religions were super popular.
And Jesus's main revolution was love.
Love one another, love your neighbor, right?
But evangelical leaders in this country purposely stripped away the love and
replaced it with hate.
>> Speaker 2: Absolutely. >> Speaker 3: They took stuff
out of the New Testament and just threw it away, threw it in the garbage.
Sermon on the Mount is the most important thing in the Bible.
It's the core of Jesus's message.
They almost never teach it anymore, right?
Because it's loving, it's caring, etc.
And they despise that.
Instead, they take Old Testament stuff that's more hateful,
that Jesus actually tried to change, and they no, no, this is a real Bible,
hate gay people, hate these people, hate that people.
And look, Anna showed me this, and I put a little snippet of it in my book.
>> Speaker 3: Paul Wyrick.
>> Yeah, Paul Wyrick was trying to find a way to get Republicans to win, okay?
And so he's the guy who set up the Heritage Foundation, Alec,
the Moral Majority.
He's like the leader of the Republicans back in the 1970s and 80s.
And he's the one that we also show you guys all the time that says,
we don't want more people voting, our power grows as less people vote, right?
So Wyrich is like, I don't believe in the devil, but if devil had a spawn,
it would have been Paul Wyrich, okay?
And what Paul Wyrich did, abortion passes, the Roe v Wade, I should say passes,
not passes, but is decided on in 1973 for five long years.
Not just Republican politicians, but
these evangelical leaders don't say a word about it.
>> Speaker 2: In fact, there were evangelical leaders at the time who
were supportive of reproductive rights.
>> And Jimmy Carter was an evangelical, and
he won the presidency from the left, okay?
But Wyrick finds out he's doing all these different experiments on how to win
elections.
>> How to galvanize people of faith for political purposes.
>> Speaker 3: Remember what I tell you all the time.
You could look it up yourself.
In numbers 511 through 31, the Bible is actually pro abortion.
God performs an abortion through a priest.
There's no question about it.
But Wyrich does leaflets saying the Bible's against abortion and
they're killing children, etc.
And it works like a charm cuz people were worried that they were actually killing
children, right?
And Wyrich tells the Republican leaders and the evangelical leaders, that's it.
We got our issue.
Let's all pretend to care about abortion, pretend to care about kids,
cuz it's gonna help us with our greed.
>> Speaker 2: And by the way,
the reason why evangelicals said nothing to push back against the Supreme Court
ruling in Roe v Wade in 1973 is because they weren't galvanized by that.
What Wyrich wanted to galvanize religious voters around
was the issue of segregation.
He was super salty over the fact that private schools that chose
to continue segregating were gonna lose their tax benefits.
So he wanted to find a way to get religious voters together to make it
a powerful voting bloc in order to essentially get the kind of
policies he wanted passed.
Now, segregation apparently was not a popular issue for religious voters,
to their credit, to rally around.
But when he misinformed people in regard to the reality of reproductive rights,
that was enough.
Those leaflets were enough to galvanize the religious voters into a voting bloc
that actually became incredibly powerful.
And Reagan realized that, and Reagan used that to his advantage in elections.
So, look, that was really the beginning of almost like,
decoupling the people of religious faith from the teachings of Jesus Christ.
>> 100% right.
Look, now, not only do they worship the golden calf,
which is the bull on Wall Street, almost literally a golden calf, but
Trump, they will all admit, has been deeply immoral in his personal life.
And this is the party that theoretically was based on family values, but
now they love Trump more than Jesus.
So this guy explains that a lot of the pastors, their congregants,
will come up to him and say, no, we want what Trump says, okay?
So in a sense, they're picking Judas over Jesus.
>> Speaker 2: Moore is a longtime critic of former President Donald Trump and
has blasted the ex-commander in chief for both his immigration policy of
separating migrant families at the southern border and for
his actions during the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
By the way, Trump didn't like him either.
Let's go to this tweet back in 2016 where Trump wrote of Russell Moore
that Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of evangelicals and
all of the good They stand for, a nasty guy with no heart.
They've been at war for quite some time now.
But the reason why Moore is speaking out increasingly about, again,
the decoupling of people of religious faith and
the teachings of Jesus Christ is because he's genuinely concerned about it, right?
He's actually a believer.
He's someone who actually is a person of faith for the right reasons,
like he's getting the good teachings out of the religion and
he's mortified over what has happened to the evangelical church,
especially in the era of Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.
But again, I just want to reiterate,
I think that this is also a symptom of the kind of political climate that has been
manufactured by corporate interests and also by corporate media, right?
The divide and conquer strategy.
And so people increasingly reject the notion of building broad coalitions,
of working together, finding common ground even among your political opponents.
And again, that is an incredibly toxic environment to live in, to operate in,
especially because it leads to the kind of gridlock that prevents anything
positive from getting done in the federal government.
>> Speaker 3: Yeah, look, they're against almost every teaching of Jesus.
Jesus said take in immigrants.
Do evangelical leaders now say take in immigrants?
They say the exact opposite, right?
So, guys, Wyrick why did he go looking for these religious voters in the first place?
He was working on behalf of corporate interests.
And corporate interests can't get 99% of us to vote for the top 1%.
So they had to find a voting base and
they thought, Christians are good people that have faith.
We could use that against them and
we could replace the thing that they have faith in, which is Jesus and
love with hatred and greed, and that way they'll vote for us.
And unfortunately, it worked brilliantly.
And so look, I'm an atheist and I'm a thousand times better Christian than any
of these evangelical leaders at the Southern Baptist Convention.
And finally, the Southern Baptist Unsurprisingly recently
revealed a massive pedophilia controversy, right?
And so these are the guys accusing everyone else of grooming when it turns
out they'd been protecting pastors who were molesting children for decades.
Hundreds of pastors.