Why this Conservative Evangelical Pastor Changed Sides | NLP Replay

wanted to introduce you, Reverend. We found a video of you actually testifying, and I wanted to play that clip right here. It's testifying to Congress about your work influencing the Supreme Court of these United States of America. And then I got a question about Clarence Thomas on the other side. I'm just joking, go ahead, and wrote a clip.

conservative social and religious sensibilities. In this way, I aimed to show these justices that Americans supported them and thanked God for their presence on the Court and the opinions they rendered. Our overarching goals were to gain insights into the conservative justices thinking and to shore up their resolve to render solid, unapologetic opinions, particularly against abortion. I called

this our ministry of emboldenment. I believe we pushed the boundaries of Christian ethics and compromised the High Court's promise to administer equal justice. But I'm also conscious we were never admonished for the type of work our missionaries did, quite to the contrary. In one instance, Justice Thomas commended me, saying something like, keep up what you're doing. It's making a difference.

and sometimes you see a muted voice. I think it all ties in together. What can we expect, what should we expect? And what are we not seeing?

but you asked about, you know, white evangelicals. I think white males in general get a little more attention from white evangelical leader's keen sense of the obvious. They are been happening for a long time. But the reason I mention it is because, of course, the killing of Alex pretty as compared to even the killing of Renee good Renee Good was white, she would normally command attention, but discounted by the fact that she's gay, that she was gay.

So but here we go, white male of a certain age and a gun owner gets the attention that others don't get. So I think that's part of the reason, but not the whole reason. I think a fair number of white evangelical leaders are now feeling uncomfortable with the violence, the threats, with the behavior after the shootings, with the abduction of children and their imprisonment in cages. It's starting to trouble the conscience. Not enough to tip the scales,

not anywhere near, but it's changing. And I'm sorry for such a long answer to your short question, but I'll just add this. I do think it's critically important now that white male evangelical leaders start airing their conscience and their descent. And I know there are many of them, but they are silenced by fear. But they have to find their courage. And the reason they do is be because this administration will pay attention to that in a way they won't pay attention to anyone else. They'll write

everybody else off. They're black, they're socialists, they're leftists, they're communists, their nutcases. But suddenly when when white males like me start speaking, I know from my contacts in the administration, I maintain friends who are working for Trump right now in the White House, and they will say, I got a little attention here that bothered some people. Not for the right reasons, but it bothered them.

kind of work I'm now repenting from. Then I had a third conversion reading the work of church leaders in nineteen thirties Germany during the rise of Adolf Hitler and his racialized dictatorship, and that was the first crack.

that was part of it. The other substantial part of my third conversion out of that right wing cult was my wife, who made a late in life professional change from being an occupational therapist to a psychotherapist. And when you're married to a psychotherapist, you can't escape the therapy no matter how hard you try, and that was a huge huge help for me, and I would enter my own period of therapy, which helped me face myself in a way I ever had and the realities of what

was going on around me. So that was a lot of it. There was more. It was a long and complex formula equation that got me to the other side. But I'm so glad it did.

It was particularly jarring when when I attended the eightieth birthday party for the now late televangelist Pat Robertson, who's built a right winging religious empire that continues to this moment, and his guest of honor at this big banish where virtually every e white evangelical luminary in this country was in the ballroom celebrate with Pat, and his guest of honor in twenty eleven was none other than Donald Trump, and I was shocked by that. I didn't think of

Trump as part of our our culture. In fact, in Bible, yes exactly. And when I was in Bible College what we call our seminaries to prepare for ministry, way back in the early eighties, I was told that Donald Trump was the classic example of everything it meant not to live that say, Christian, and that he makes a great sermon illustration for that. And I had used him as

that over the years. But there he was at Pat's birthday party, and I asked one of my colleagues, a name well known in the white evangelical world, why is he here? And the answer was because he and Pattern now part of the same billionaire's club. Pat had just sold the Family Channel, his family became the heirs in the process, and now they were billionaire pals. And that was distressing to me. And it would be at the twenty sixteen Republican National Convention that I finally made the

break left the movement. Theoretically, it took me two more years to extract myself legally and financially.

this moment. I was afraid of donor lawsuits. I was afraid of contractors suing me. So I carefully deconstructed that operation. It took two years to do it, and to safely extract myself. Once I did, I left all of that behind. Every bit of that went for a little while I was driving Uber to pay my bills, all the cost of it.

to the High Court. So I understand that that space very well, I am. I don't understand as well the space of white evangelism, mostly because if we subscribe to the same Jesus, the same God, the same scripture, and I know scripture can be used creatively by whoever wills it, but we miss each other at that intersection of what scripture seems to say to white evangelicals and then what it says and in the black tradition of the Christian faith.

And it absolutely shows up differently in our politics, certainly in American and society and culture. I just wonder, on the other side of this of of your evolution, where you now where and how you now carry the message to other white evangelicals around how they see the lights come to evolution, come to transition. Because by and large, we're kind of we're kind of on the right track on our side, and it's still fighting to stay on

the what we believe to be the right track. Yet a lot of our brothers and sisters on in the Christian evangelical side still tolerate outrageous forms of hate and terror uh and cruelty by the administration and what their politics often produces. How do you how do you sort of theorize the best way to move other white male evangelicals closer to the truth of the faith and away I think from some of the cruelty in devastating, destructive politics of the far right.

this one thing against you. You have left your first love. So I try to remind evangelicals of their first love, Jesus, who I regularly reintroduce as the dark, complexted Middle Eastern man of the levant who had very dark skin and afro textured hair, wool hair exactly, and I put him out there and I just let them sit with him,

and then I remind them of what he said. And I do get folks numbers, but regularly who come, usually through a direct message because they're afraid to go on the page, and they'll say, you know you've got me on that, You've got me thinking, and yes, that was the reason I gave my heart to Jesus all those years ago. It's still small numbers. The other task I have, which is the larger one, is to expose this as

not just un Christian, but anti Christian. So I try to do that through my writing, through you know, on social media platforms and elsewhere, and then in conversation with leaders. I just invited a unabashed self identified Christian nationalist leader. He heads a small denomination in the United States with progressive leaders up in Boston. In two weeks. He accepted the invitation to a dialogue with them. We'll see what happens. But I want to do more and more of that.

That's part of the repair work. There's far more than that, and it's much closer to people who have suffered because of what I did. But that's some of the work that I that I try to do.

I have faced in working with white women. You know, I was one of the leaders of the Women's March. I have been on the streets of America organizing, marching with galvanizing thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of women, and oftentimes the numbers, the math doesn't math. As we say that, you know, they will say we're with you, We're with you,

We're with you. And then when we look at the numbers after an election, it is very clear that some people either weren't telling the truth or they definitely didn't go and do the work at home of organizing not just us out in the community, but being there to organize their mothers, their aunts, their sisters, their friends, their you know, their family members. So how do you see this translating to as we are approaching the midterm elections.

But maybe they'll we'll take them sit at home. Well, they can stay home, and I think that's more likely what they'll do it, and it would be a good choice. And I will be saying that to them. I'll say, if if you just can't, here's one way you can preserve your conscience in this. Sit it out. So that's hosibility. I do know of some already who in the last election voted for a Democrat for the first time in

their electoral lives. I voted for Joe Biden, first vote for a Democratic candidate in how many years, was it? Because the last time I voted for a Democrat before Biden was nineteen seventy six, So it was a long time. Is that forty four at Carters for Carter? Yeah, so it was forty four years. And there are others. I'm not unique. I am not unique. There's a lot. I didn't vote for Trump either time. By the way, I voted for other Republican for another Republican in twenty.

David Easterwood, serves as an icefield director. And I'm curious to know if you think there's ever an appropriate time to protest in church one and two, if you think that journalists should be exempt from any type of criminal indictment for covering said protests, Well, I did it.

I'm reminding people of that. You want to denounce this. You applauded me when I did it, and that was I guess about nineteen ninety six ish something like that. I have to go back and records. But in any case, and ironically, the administration is using a law that we decried and that anti abortion activists and other white evangelical champions of religious liberty regularly denounced, and that is the Face Act, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act,

which we decried. We fought it in court, we raised tens of millions of dollars to oppose it, and now they're using it against Don Lemon, against the others. It's and I'm reminding my folks of that too, and hoping it will give some pause. Say wait a minute, what when we do here and Incidentally, this is a family issue in the church, and you know, families routinely disrupt one another's Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas celebrations with their differences,

and that's what's happened here. So again it shows the hypocrisy that that I'm confronting my my family with.

sort of consider when considering their politics. So for instance, if if we, if they, if the other side wins, and in there, if I'm them, the other side would be Democrats. I guess what is is it? Is it that they're going to promote black people above us and our sons and our children. Is it that they're going to make abortion free and available everywhere?

administration has done that. They've done that before. But there's still these walls that exist that keep otherwise decent people from being able to make the leap to say Godly, that just isn't right and it is not just right because it happened to my wife. It's not right because it happened to another fellow family member of the human you know race, and it's indecent. What are I always try to think about, what's the thing that's keeping you? Is your fear of me?

you this way. In one exchange that I've thought about many times and I've written about, with one of my contracted fundraisers, he sat at a conference room table and he told me in nineteen he said, look, let me put it this way. The more fear and the more anger you'll give me, the more money I will raise for you. You give me a lot of fear and anger, I'll raise a lot of money for you. You give me a little fear and anger, I'll raise a little bit

of money for you. So you decide. But let me tell you this, he said, I want you to think of Helen. She lives on a rural road in Kansas, neighbors three miles away. Her husband's been dead for several years. She rarely ever sees her kids or her grandkids. They all live in other states. The biggest moment in her day is when she goes to her rural mailbox on the roadside, pulls out a letter from you and reads through those eleven pages with multiple underlines and exclamation points.

And when she's done reading, she is terrified of the world her children will inhabit. And you're going to tell her the only way that she can solve that problem is to send your organization one hundred dollars, and you're going to get that hundred and probably two hundred. Every single time I fired him, I canceled, but I acquiesce just enough to hire another group. Almost most at that level that's being done and has been done now for

forty or fifty years. People have been shaped and formed in that year, and now they've taken the reins of government power, and they are also afraid, but they're more cynical when they are afraid. But the people who are giving them that power and that money are terrified of the world as they imagine it. And this has to do with what I call the southernization of American evangelicalism,

who were once the leaders in the abolitionist movement. The first women's rights a conference was held at an evangelical church in Seneca Falls, New York in what was that eighteen forty But in any case, evangelicals were once the leaders of social progress and innovation. They were champions of minority rights, and they were overrun by the Southern churches that wanted to preserve the Confederacy, and they did it. Anybody wants to read some really revelatory work on that.

Charles Reagan Wilson, American Southern historian, writes on the religion of the Lost Cause in a book, his principal book, which is very readable, only about two hundred and fifty pages. Baptized in blood. It's really worth reading it. It helps you to understand the white evangelical mind as it's been formed over the last one hundred and fifty years.