American Christians Find Themselves in an Awkward Dilemma of Being More Aligned with Putin than Biden on Morality | Guest Jeff Dornik

The documentary Enemies within the Church shows that similar human sins thrive in US evangelicalism and Eastern Europe

“He who is faithful in the small will also be faithful in the great, while he who is unjust on a small scale, will also be unjust on a grand scale.” So said Jesus to his disciples in the sixteenth chapter of Luke.

We should count these words among the many verses that American evangelicalism has lost sight of. Believers in Jesus Christ should understand the parallels between injustices that happen within their immediate social orbit and injustices they see writ-large on the nightly news. The little things and big things have an important and enduring relationship because people’s misconduct in one’s sphere mirrors and compounds their misconduct in the other.

Let us consider, for argument’s sake, someone who has very few resources but applies the few resources he has to abuse other people. It is safe to conjecture that such a person would probably commit war crimes if he were rich, powerful, and able to command thousands of troops to follow his bidding. If he had no regard for the damage done by his nonviolent and supposedly mild cruelties, it would not be hard to numb him to the damage done by violence.
Once he’s numb, anything becomes possible, because he no longer heeds the voice of the Holy Spirit.

So why do I bring this up?

A documentary came out about abuses of power within American evangelical churches, called Enemies within the Church. If you made it this far into the present article, you really need to go to this website (www.enemieswithinthechurch.com) and see it. I realize that most people right now are consumed with news about Ukraine. But the human concerns that drive readers to follow the Russian invasion bear upon the urgent information provided in the documentary.

What does the evangelical church have to do with the price of tea in Ukraine?

Americans are hearing leaders like Russell Moore denounce Putin for being a “murderer and tyrant” as well as “an abuser of evangelical Christians, other religious minorities, and even his own country’s orphans.” Wow, that’s rich. “Rev. Dr. Moore” has engaged in his own venal tyrannies. When he was president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, that organization didn’t just attempt to liberalize tens of thousands of American churches toward an agenda fundamentally at odds with the Bible. The ERLC minions also destroyed people’s careers, joined in campaigns of character assassination, and ruthlessly invaded institutions to get access to their resources, the most prominent example being the way the ERLC clique went savagely after Paige Patterson and his allies in order to install their friends and fellows at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Politics is as complicated in the church as it is at NATO. Russell Moore is an easy target for outrage. But as Enemies within the Church points out, like most supervillains of church life, Moore was promoted and protected by a host of people who have yet to be held accountable for the damage done to American evangelicalism. Documentary producer Judd Saul worked carefully to bring these abuses to light. If people don’t understand the stakes and scope of the problem, if they fail to defend the bride of Christ against those who are abusing her, then American churches don’t stand a chance.

Many people I respect have told me there’s no point fighting the fight of Enemies within the Church. They tell me the camp championed by the documentary—call it “the Christian right” if you wish—has already lost the war.

Since the story about Ukraine broke, I’ve had heart-to-heart conversations with my friends on both left and right, especially who have been ruthlessly canceled. I’ve called up people like Michelle Shocked and Denise McAllister to find fellowshi