“By learning to work together with “progressive” evangelicals, secular progressives will stand a better chance of achieving their goals and also learn an enormous amount from these remarkable people and their organizations that will help secular progressives strengthen their own movement. This evangelical “revolution,” as one Christian pollster has labeled it, is unquestionably the fastest growing and most surprising of American social movements today. Whichever way you measure, it probably dwarfs the secular left. From mega churches to tiny country churches, evangelical Christians are rediscovering the “gospel of the God of the oppressed.” Perhaps the most surprising among these are the suburban, white evangelicals who are stepping outside of their comfort zones to “get into relationship” with the poor, the oppressed, the homeless, prisoners.” — Zack Exley
(Pulpit & Pen) In this bombshell report by Pulpit & Pen, we will demonstrate how a Democratic financier and organizers, Zack Exley, is behind the successful attempt to change the political ideology of America’s major evangelical institutions, ministries, and seminaries through their propagation of what is known as “Social Justice.”
SUMMARY
We will explain – with a compilation of original sources, some of which have been recovered after they were deleted from the Internet – the driving political force behind the take-over America’s Reformed evangelical community, and demonstrate the money ties between a powerful Democratic financier and evangelical leaders who are steering churches into progressive ideology for the sake of political purposes.
Far from being an organic, Bible-driven movement, the ideas presented at institutions like Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 9 Marks, Together for the Gospel, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and The Gospel Coalition are driven by a game plan orchestrated by Exley, and the purpose is to keep evangelicals from voting Republican in the upcoming 2020 election cycle.
There is no doubt that Reformed evangelicalism – historically a bastion of conservative Christianity – has been overtaken by ‘woke’ Social Justice ideology over the course of the last several years. Many people have wondered why so many formerly conservative leaders and entities – especially those related to the Southern Baptist Convention and the parachurch ministry, The Gospel Coalition – have converted almost entirely to an ideology that seems sympatico with the talking points of the Democratic Party. Research conducted by Pulpit & Pen now has the answer as to how this coordinated effort to turn Reformed evangelicalism to the political left has been accomplished.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AS IT RELATES TO EVANGELICALISM
The concept known as “Social Justice” was invented by Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio – a Jesuit priest in the 1840s. D’Azeglio’s work ran in concert with his contemporary, Karl Marx, and fed off of his communitarian ideas. His ideas were largely relegated to Roman Catholic – and in particular, Jesuit-influenced – circles for more than one-hundred years. However, Jesuits who had adopted his views of Social Justice in Peru (and elsewhere throughout Communist-influenced South America during the Cold War) adapted his ideas further to create Liberation Theology, the formation of another Jesuit priest, Gustavo Guttierez.
Out of fear of that Communists would win full control of South and Central America during the Cold War, Guttierez’s band of Roman Catholics combined their efforts with the continent’s liberal Protestant minority to formulate an ideology that could embrace Marxist economic ideas while maintaining theism (Marxism was typically opposed to religion, and the South American religious community was looking for a way to appease the Communists and keep religion alive under Soviet-influenced revolutionary leadership). It’s here that ideas were put together that would be presented to the world at the First International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974. Here, Marxists found allies in the World Council of Churches and with the influence of two major ecumenical evangelical leaders who assisted them, Billy Graham and John Stott. Through this effort, Marxist principles like the redistribution of wealth were perversely wed with Bible-twisting Christian proof-texts.
Between the time that Liberation Theology was first formulated after the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1958 (when theists in South America began to panic and look for a theological way to wed their ideas with Communism) and its coming-out party at Lausanne (1974), the ideas also began to take root in America in 1966 as propagated by a heretical ‘Christian’ scholar, James Cone. It was here that a uniquely North American version of Liberation Theology would be developed that mirrored that of the South American Jesuit-led ideology, which was aptly named Black Liberation Theology.
Black Liberation Theology was also derivative of another, earlier movement in America, founded upon Marxist principles, known as the Social Gospel Movement. Developed by Washington Gladden and popularized by Walter Rauschenbusch, the turn of the 19th-century movement sought to combine Marxist principles with evangelical ideas. In fact, Rauschenbusch said that religion was the best means to promote socialism, saying, “the only power that can make socialism succeed…is religion. It cannot work in an irreligious country.” Rauschenbusch promoted this so-called “Social Religion” and was opposed vehemently by American evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, who considered the focus on social ills to be a distraction from the Gospel emphasis that belonged to American evangelicalism. These earliest American Social Religion activists sought to do things like abolish alcohol, mandate vaccinations, and create universal childcare but were largely rejected by American’s Bible-believing churches as a distraction from the church’s real mission.
These ideas – Liberation Theology, Black Liberation Theology, Social Justice, and Social Gospel – were 19th and 20th Century attempts to Christianize Marxism. While mainstream denominations like the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, Episcopalians, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the American Baptists, and the United Church of Christ all embraced these ideas, conservative denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church of America all rejected them, as well as a whole swath of smaller denominations and independent churches who generally opposed the National and World Council of Churches and their globalist agendas.
Research