Christianity has been intricately intertwined with the history and development of America and greatly contributed to its strength. Judeo-Christian morality, in fact, has been the compass and one of the most powerful influences on Western society. So, the Marxists see Christianity as the main obstacle to overthrowing Westphalian principles of sovereignty. To them, the church is the most crucial institution to conquer to usher in the New World Order. They know that if the churches fail – especially in America, which represents the phenomenal success of capitalism and individualism – the entire culture, including politics, will move to the Left.
Most Americans will be surprised to learn that an unholy crusade to infiltrate the bastions of Christianity and co-opt churches in the revolution began more than a hundred years ago. It is now threatening to gain critical mass.
This danger is the subject of a new film, Enemies Within the Church, produced by Cary Gordon, Trevor Loudon, and Judd Saul. It chronicles the destructive infiltration of the churches and the injection of “wokeism” -- Marxism, social justice, Critical Race Theory, gender fluidity – into church doctrine. The choir of radical Left ideology, having targeted and gradually co-opted the media, Hollywood, Big Tech, the unions, and the political parties, set its sights on penetrating and controlling the churches, a difficult, long-term endeavor. And, as the film explains, the communists eventually succeeded in penetrating the Bible colleges, seminaries, and pulpits of many denominations to push Christianity in the direction they want.
The two-hour 12-minute movie traces this insidious attack on the churches to as far back as the days of the Bolshevik revolution, when American communists and socialists began plotting to upend the Republic. It attempts to answer the question of how America has devolved from the philosophy of the Founding Fathers – that “the individual gives the state the right to exist” – to a statist or communist Weltanschauung. It references 20 years of research by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) that determined that America’s strength lay not in its military or its government but in the churches.
In his book Civilization, Niall Ferguson mentions the words of a CASS scholar, “We have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics.” The Chinese rightly concluded that the Bible is anti-Marxist and anti-statist, and to destroy America from within, the infiltration of the church was essential.
America was founded on Mosaic Law, which G-d gave the Israelites through Moses. A key concept deriving from this is that human rights come directly from the Creator to the people, who can choose government representatives to protect these rights. As Mosaic law established the principles that the Jews could do anything not specifically denied to them, the new American government, which codified the Ten Commandments into its Constitution, applied that principle to the idea that individual states can do anything not specifically denied to them.
The film cites the first attempt to transform the church, initiated by a Communist group founded in 1907 – the Methodist Federation for Social Action, whose purpose was to redirect the focus of the church to the suffering of the working class. The organization supported labor unions, tarred capitalism as “unchristian” and advocated an economic system based on central planning. It also spoke for the erasure of privilege and discrimination based on class or group identity.
The film also exposes another influential subversive – Dr. Joseph Fletcher, a graduate of the Berkeley Divinity School and a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” who taught at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, and the Harvard Divinity School from the mid-1940s to the seventies. His work in the church centered on social justice and workers’ rights. Fletcher helped establish Planned Parenthood, the Soviet-American Friendship Society, and the Society for the Right to Die. He became a leader in the field of bioethics, which he used to justify abortion and euthanasia. In 1966, contrary to church doctrine and teachings, he wrote Situation Ethics, advancing the idea that “there is no fixed morality, morality depends on the situation or circumstances” – a justification for abandoning the Bible. He was one of the most influential pastors in the U.S. and actively supported the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) – the main Soviet front of the day. He transformed the church to accept the idea that ethics are flexible, and eventually abandoned Christianity for atheism.
The film also details another major subversion achieved by the communists – the radical transformation of the conservative Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. Through the 1970s, infiltrators succeeded in changing the institution’s focus from understanding and communicating the Bible to changing social structures supplanting the fundamentals of the Christian faith with “Neo-Evangelism” or direct engagement with the culture.
Another selling out of the Gospel documented in the film is the 1973 Chicago Declaration on Evangelical Social Concern, signed by 53 evangelicals, among them Carl F.H. Henry, Frank Gaebelein, Jim Wallis, John Perkins, Rich Mouw, and Ron Sider. The declaration attacked the “materialism of American culture and the maldistribution of the nation’s wealth and services.” It called for the rebalancing of trade and international inequities, the rethinking of American values, and the equitable redistribution of resources. If that sounds familiar, it is because it’s an early version of what the social justice warriors demand today.
Enemies Within the Church features interviews with traditional theologians who are befuddled and angered by the move away from Biblical justice, defined by G-d, to social justice, defined by man. They are taken aback by the representation of Jesus as a socialist. They say that while G-d holds us accountable for our moral choices and actions as individuals, social justice warriors demand our accountability for the actions of our government and for overall fairness and equitable outcomes in society. They note that pastors now liberally use terms like “intersectionality,” “critical race theory,” and “white privilege” and have brought BLM into the church.
Today, seminaries typically teach that what is central to understanding G-d in America is race, because racism is central to America. As one theologian put it, the Church has “swapped the Biblical vision for a just society with a humanistic, relativistic, false gospel – changing the truth into a lie.” Race reconciliation, liberation theology, the concept of a White Jesus – these were never a part of Christianity. Instead of all people being created in the image of G-d, accountable for their own sins, the social justice gospel harangues Americans that designated groups bear responsibility for the sins or actions of individuals.
The subversion of the Church has meant that religious terms have been redefined and recontextualized. The film shows how seminaries have now become places to deconstruct Christian truth, thereby leading people away from G-d and Christ. One heretical doctrine that’s gaining ground – antinomianism – claims that Christians are exempt from the obligations of the Ten Commandments and that feelings are more significant than facts. Churches are now embracing LGBTQ in contravention of Christian doctrine and pastors are even repenting for past Biblical positions that rejected homosexuality. Traditional clerics maintain that without the law of G-d to lean on, situationalism fills the void: right and wrong are decided not by ethics but by the cynical evaluation of the potential consequences of a decision.
The creators of Enemies Within the Church present a scenario in which Christianity has been deconstructed and subverted to facilitate the takeover of the nation. Shorn of its moral teachings, the Church now hardly resembles what it once was. But there is hope. Networks of pastors are organizing to contest what is happening on the nation’s pulpits and in its seminaries and religious colleges. The film is an attempt to strengthen their resolve and grow the ranks in the fightback to restore Christianity – and thus the nation – to its original and intended form.
