Columnist Tim Alberta called it "a crisis of staggering scale," and a "serious threat to your community and mine."
His colleague David French warns the threat from it is so surreptitious, "elite right-wing Evangelicals… ignore, minimize, or don't even know [it] exists."
Confident that I am no elite, and convinced that I am more than aware and engaged with what is happening in my community, I'm left asking if this isn't yet another case of the "thinking class" taking an extreme situation and irresponsibly extrapolating outward to pretend that they are the heroic whistleblowers saving us all from some heretofore unidentified evil hiding in plain sight.
Alberta's piece, "How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church," begins by centering around one minister. Bill Bolin of FloodGate Church in Brighton, Michigan has apparently grown his congregation post-COVID lockdowns by embracing several right-wing tropes regarding the virus, the vaccine, QAnon conspiracy theories, and more. What's worse, he preaches them from the pulpit.
Alberta reports:
On this particular fall Sunday, Bolin riffs on everything from California forcing vaccines on schoolchildren to the IRS proposing more oversight of personal banking accounts. He promotes a new book that tells of ‘how the left has done a power grab to systematically dismantle religion and banish God from the lips, minds, and hearts of believers,' prompting the couple in front of me to make a one-click Amazon purchase. He suggests there is mounting evidence of a stolen election, concluding, ‘With the information that's coming out in Arizona and Georgia and other places, I think it's time for there to be a full audit of all 50 states to find out the level of cheating and the level of manipulation that actually took place.' The people around me cheer.
I haven't the slightest reservation in joining with Alberta, French, or anyone else who acknowledges that sounds like a pathetic excuse for a church service, and that Bolin is doing an extraordinary disservice to his flock. Early Christians gathered the first day of the week to celebrate Christ's resurrection and the salvation His grace brought to a hopeless humanity. They did so through fellowship, the breaking of bread in communion, the singing of hymns and praise songs, and listening to the Apostle's doctrine.
My confusion is not over whether that kind of right-wing political rally is an adequate substitute or replacement for the church's mission to make and send disciples of Jesus. If Alberta's argument was, "Evangelical churches should not go the route of Bolin's FloodGate Church," he'd get no second-guessing from me.
But that wasn't his argument. Alberta asserts that Bolin is but one spoke in a gigantic waterwheel of evangelical corruption that's churning up the peaceful waters of American society. It's that claim that I think deserves far more evidence than the author provides. There are over 380,000 evangelical churches in America. Is it Alberta's contention that I could pick one of those at random this Sunday and have a reasonable chance of hearing something similar from the pulpit?
Now, to be fair, just like the author, I haven't conducted any scientific study or properly sampled poll. But relying on my own experience, I know of no evangelical church in my community that is holding regular services similar to the one Alberta highlights.
Again, it's not that I don't think the example cited was egregious. It's that I question how widespread it is, which offers an answer to French's concern about evangelicals "ignoring" the problem. Perhaps one of the main reasons there isn't as much talk among Christians about fringe preachers like Bolin is because their influence is so muted, particularly in comparison to the left-wing's fringe that is anything but confined to the periphery.
The progressive fringe has not only overtaken the left, but they control every major institutional element of our civilization: government, bureaucracy, entertainment, academia, scientific establishment, and media.
Pragmatically and missionally, which is wiser for the culturally engaged Christian: Confront the nutty preacher whose flash-in-the-pan diatribes of the moment will soon weary his audience of 1,000, or confront the well-funded movement aggressively pushing an ideological agenda that promotes outright rebellion to God and His moral order across the breadth of the entire culture?
Call me crazy, but I think when it comes to poisonous politics, believers have bigger fish to fry than Bill Bolin's conspiracy hour.
