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‘Evangelicals for Harris’ Is Astroturf
Politics
‘Evangelicals for Harris’ Is Astroturf
The usual suspects are behind a push to peel evangelicals away from the Republican Party.
When most people imagine how Washington, DC works, they think of the two political parties and scads of lobbyists controlling our country. What they don’t see are the legions of well-heeled, well-organized activists who wield outsize influence in the Democratic Party and, through it, the country. You know a few of them—the ACLU, AFL-CIO, or Planned Parenthood—but the complete list could fill an encyclopedia. (As the folks at InfluenceWatch have already done, as a matter of fact.)
In order to simulate grassroots efforts, though, these organizations inflate countless more pop-up websites that give the impression of a widespread, organic movement by the American people rather than what they are: cynical D.C. politics at its worst.
Case in point: Evangelicals for Harris, which claims to represent America’s 100 million Evangelical Christians while urging them to vote for a militant secularist, abortion hard-liner, pro-crime prosecutor, and transgender cultist.
“No political party or leader can ever hold our full devotion. That belongs to Jesus alone,” the group writes on its website. That said, “In this election, the choice is clear: Kamala Harris.”
What the group doesn’t make clear is who’s running it.
Evangelicals for Harris’s official founder is Jim Ball, well known to conservatives as the political con artist behind an Obama-era campaign to “green” the churches with Sierra Club–style global warming nuttiness.
Ball headed the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), perhaps the top proponent behind “creation care,” or repackaged eco-fundamentalism with an “I heart Jesus” sticker. The group’s Declaration on the Care of Creation recommended this druidic prayer for pastors: “We repent of the way we have polluted, distorted, or destroyed so much of the Creator’s work.” Here’s Ball way back in 2009 (emphasis added):
The biggest barrier preventing Christians from more fully embracing creation care, including addressing global warming, is not understanding that to do so is an important part of being a disciple of Jesus Christ today, of doing the Lord’s will.
Yet Ball and EEN’s policy recommendations are virtually indistinguishable from those of the radical, secular greens; their real objective, so far from cultivating Christian virtue, was always to break off Evangelicals from the Republican Party. In 2015, the liberal think tank New America—itself heavily funded by George Soros and the Ford Foundation—published an “autopsy report” called “Spreading the Gospel of Climate Change,” authored by Lydia Bean, a failed Democrat politician and founder of Faith in Texas, a Democratic get-out-the-vote group, and Steve Teles, an advisor to the Soros-funded Niskanen Center.
The report advised leftists on using climate change to form a “solid beachhead” within conservative Evangelical churches and drive them away from the Republican Party with a “rent-an-Evangelical” campaign. From an online panel held shortly after the report’s publication (emphases added):
You can put your resources into a 20-year campaign to change public opinion, and what both Lydia [Bean] and Jerry [Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center] are saying is that ultimately that doesn’t really matter.
You can rely on the traditional bipartisan coalition-building method which entails getting the great and the good together and then doing a sort of “rent-an-Evangelical”—as we used to call it on the national security side, “rent-a-general”—model.
Or you can pursue a purely partisan [model]: we’re going to pick a side, we’re going to decide Republicans are never going to be serious about climate change, and we’re going to fund the heck out of Democrats until, you know, they take back the House [of Representatives], which might be a 40- or 50-year project.
And then there’s the transpartisan [model]: We’re going to collect strange bedfellows, we’re going to sort of sneakily break down both coalitions from inside.
It didn’t really take off then besides earning a few platitudes from squishy “Big Eva” leaders. But even that crusade was in fact the 2.0 model of creation care, which began in the 1990s with a different strategy: redefine “pro-life” to mean opposing coal power plants, fighting income inequality, and demanding tax hikes and socialized healthcare—really anything but opposition to abortion.
Both campaigns thankfully failed. But the insider back-scratching doesn’t stop there.
Evangelicals for Harris is a front for Faith Voters for Good, a Northern Virginia–based advocacy group established in January. The Great Falls address points to a PO box shared by Public Democracy, a data firm that boasts about working with leftist Stacey Abrams’s get-out-the-vote group, Fair Fight, as well as Faith Voters and Black Lives Matter, to “successfully combat voter intimidation and misinformation” in elections and Covid-19 “vaccine hesitancy” among black Americans.
Public Democracy is run by Eric Sapp, a board member for Public Democracy America, a nonprofit in charge of a network of left-wing groups that collectively advance environmentalism and critical race theory. Its executive director is a former get-out-the-vote strategist for the Democratic National Committee and Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Public Democracy America’s board president is Rachel Johnson, the name on Faith Voters’ incorporation documents from January.
Johnson is the former communications director for New York City’s ultraliberal Riverside Church, which strongly supports “social justice.” The church is aligned with the so-called Poor People’s Campaign, which “address[es] interconnected injustices such as racism, poverty, militarism, ecological devastation, and distorted religious nationalism.”
Riverside Church is involved with a mass get-out-the-minority-vote campaign with Reclaim Our Vote, which boasts of “contact[ing] 14 million voters of color” in the 2020 election and lobbies for far-left election “reforms” designed to establish a permanent Democratic majority in Congress.
As for Faith Voters for Good, FEC filings report that the group spent $151,000 in digital advertising and other expenses in support of Joe Biden on the 2020 campaign trail. $60,000 of that pro-Democrat spending went to Eleison Group, a DC-based “leading faith and values consulting firm” headed by—surprise—Eric Sapp and Rachel Johnson.
Faith Voters says Donald Trump’s “words and actions [are] inconsistent with Christ’s teachings and biblical values” while endorsing Kamala Harris. Yet Harris’s relations to organized Christianity are fraught at best.
As the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, Harris sponsored an LGBT bill that would’ve smashed Christians’ First Amendment rights of conscience. Believing physicians, for instance, could be forced to perform abortions or transgender surgeries, whatever their moral qualms, while Christian schools could be made to fill classrooms with “married” gay teachers.
In San Francisco, Kamala’s pastor was Amos Brown, whom she considers “an inspiration to me always.” In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, Brown quickly blamed Americans, preaching at a memorial service: “America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” Those remarks were outrageous enough to drive the Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein from the crowd. Even Nancy Pelosi was embarrassed enough to apologize publicly for Brown’s remarks. In 2008, Brown wrote an op-ed defending Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for his anti-Semitic comments, later inviting Wright to preach at his church. Today, Brown is a loud voice for multi-trillion-dollar slavery reparations in California—a state where slavery was never legal—while labeling opponents of critical race theory “oppressors.” Of gay marriage, Brown says “there should be no restrictions on persons on how they express their sexuality.”
Brown was also a close friend of San Francisco’s Mayor Willie Brown (no relation), who appointed him to the San Francisco board of supervisors in 1996. Willie, of course, is well known for his years-long affair with Kamala Harris, which launched her political career in Democratic politics.
The Evangelicals for Harris group gets one thing right, though—more Christians need to vote, but vote biblically. Politics doesn’t save; Jesus does. No real Christians dispute that. But we can also learn something from the faithful men and women who forged this nation in 1776 with an oft-forgotten battle-cry: No King but Jesus. God willing, Christians today will have the courage to forge our nation anew at the ballot box in November.
The post ‘Evangelicals for Harris’ Is Astroturf appeared first on The American Conservative.
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