How Naivety Is Allowing Unbiblical Progressivism Into Evangelical Churches

Everyone is familiar with the ubiquitous pharmaceutical ads that encourage the viewer to ask their doctor about Abilify for depression, Skyrizi for plaque psoriasis, or Linzess for irritable bowel syndrome. At some point during these commercials, which show grim-faced recluses in gloomy rooms becoming confident extroverts laughing with friends over sunny al fresco lunches, there comes a disclaimer about side effects. This boilerplate, as we all know, is there to appease the FDA and head off lawsuits. If someone were to ask you the purpose of one of these commercials, its aside about weight gain, stomach pain, and tiredness would not leave you flummoxed. You would still say that the ad’s intent was to convince you to take the drug.

 

By the same token, if an acquaintance started peppering his conversation with demeaning stereotypes about black people, you would disregard any reassurance he offered that he wasn’t being racist. The balance of his words would reveal what was in his heart, and you would be foolish to ignore his bigotry simply because he finished with a perfunctory disclaimer.

Yet denying that a drug commercial is intended to sell drugs and that a man’s racist words demonstrate his racist views is exactly the approach evangelical leaders who are introducing progressive ideology into the church insist Christians must take. Under the guise of charity, these peddlers of plausible deniability and their defenders demand we set aside not just biblical discernment, but everything common sense tells us about communication when evaluating these teachers’ sermons, essays, and interviews. 

One example: In a review of my book Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, apologist Neil Shenvi insisted that author Karen Swallow Prior did not draw a moral equivalency between being pro-life and embracing COVID masks and vaccinations in her January 2022 Religion News Service column. This is despite the fact that Prior wrote, long after evidence had showed cloth masks to be ineffective, that:

It is not asking too much — in fact, it’s really the bare minimum — for those of us who believe we are justified in asking a woman to sacrifice much to preserve a life growing inside her body to inconvenience our own bodies by voluntarily (even cheerfully) wearing a piece of cloth, keeping distant or possibly even adding one more vaccine to the ones we got when we went to school.

Prior’s dilution of the term “pro-life” to include matters where Christians should have personal liberty characterized the entirety of her essay. 

Later, she implied that guilt for some COVID deaths should be laid at the feet of those who did not comply with government recommendations and mandates. More people would have lived, she asserted, had mask- and vaccine-skeptical pro-lifers been “a bit more patient” and “changed [their] lifestyles a bit more for a little longer.”

Prior finished by arguing that a Christian’s body “belong[s] to the body of Christ and should do no harm” — a clear suggestion that those who disagreed with her COVID positions were hurting others.

So why did Shenvi insist that Prior had never argued that a person could not credibly claim to be pro-life unless he agreed to mask up and get the COVID jab? For two reasons. First, because Prior denied that she was doing so in her column. Second, because Prior told him that she hadn’t.

I have no notion of the extent of Shenvi’s journalistic skills, but I wonder if he asked Prior any follow-up questions. For instance, if these were not her views, then why did she label both the pro-abortion claim “It’s just a blob of tissue” and the mandate-skeptical statement “Public health mandates are tyranny” as “Death-dealing lies”? In addition, why did she say that Christian pro-lifers “brought” the “culture of death” to Los Angeles hospitals overcrowded with COVID patients? 

Shenvi, whose review was championed by a number of the evangelical leaders I critiqued in my book, shows similar gullibility on behalf of the late Tim Keller, who was arguably the most influential pastor of the last decade.

Keller spoke out about evangelicals who voted for our forty-fifth president many times, and not in flattering terms. In an essay for the New Yorker, he asked whether evangelicalism could “survive Donald Trump.” In an interview with Premiere Christianity, he said that Trump made it “harder” for evangelicals to “share their faith.” In comments Pete Wehner relayed in the Atlantic, Keller described evangelicals who supported Trump in 2019 as being “about power” rather than faithfulness. He said that both Christian Trump voters and the Moral Majority of yesteryear were “not enough about service; they’re not enough about serving the common good.” (Shenvi illogically concluded that, because Keller was critiquing two groups he believed were ideologically similar, it was illegitimate for me to highlight his criticism of one of them.)

Further evidence of Keller’s views on Trump voters is found in the fact that he agreed to attend a private meeting of pastors to “self-reflect” on the “distortions” caused by evangelical support for Trump. In addition, in 2022, Keller authored a report that delineated a spectrum of Christians who might work together on cultural renewal projects despite having differing political outlooks. He placed Trump supporters in the category of fundamentalists whose views put them beyond the range of collaboration. Additionally, he put those who are anti-woke and “Trump-leaning without wanting to endorse Trump himself” in a category designated as less likely to be allies in a renewal movement.

Shenvi, and those affiliated with publications like the Gospel Coalition and Christianity Today who cheered him on, insist that none of this was enough for me to say that Keller found support for Trump to be uniquely discrediting. The fact that I offered broader contextual evidence — such as Keller’s decision to never chastise Biden voters in similar fashion and his support for former Obama staffer and Never-Trump PAC founder Michael Wear — was something they ignored completely.

Instead, they have insisted that it is a violation of the Ninth Commandment to write in clear terms about Keller’s stated views because he twice denied singling out Trump voters.

By the standards of Shenvi and his supporters, if Christians do not approach texts and commentary with Ned Flanders–level naivety, disregarding the overwhelming emphasis of a speaker’s message when he also tried to create wiggle room for denial, we are bearing false witness. They demand we do away with all sensible skepticism and pattern recognition if a professional communicator, once called on the carpet for what he’s been consistently communicating, hides behind claims of misunderstanding.

Bluntly, this kind of sophistry is how error, false teaching, and unbiblical progressivism have been allowed to run rampant in the Church. We are commanded to guard against such rank gullibility.

Romans 16:17–18 warns against those who introduce unsound doctrine through “smooth talk and flattery [that] deceive the minds of naive people.” We can presume that “smooth talk” includes when teachers deny that they are advancing unsound doctrine and divisive worldly ideas. Jude 1 tells us that false teachers will “secretly slip in among [us].” Inherent to this text is the commandment to discern those who disguise their views. We are to show “mercy mixed with fear” to those who have embraced questionable doctrines — mercy so that repentance may happen and fear so that we ourselves may avoid being deceived.

Ephesians 5:6 commands us not to be “deceived through empty words”; Colossians 2:8 bids us not to be taken captive by “empty deceit”; and Acts 20:27–28 warns us to “be on [our] guard” because “from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.”

How does deception happen? Does it come packaged in clear, straightforward arguments? Or are distortions advanced incrementally, with hedging and disclaimers, until error is fully embraced, like when Barack Obama insisted he believed marriage was between a man and a woman, even as his rhetoric moved the ball forward on same-sex marriage until he could finally announce his full evolution?

From the perspective of Shenvi and his supporters, Christians would have been required to ignore the obvious inference of Obama’s statements until the moment he openly admitted his position because he denied his views in the interim. There is no wisdom in this.

When Shenvi’s megachurch pastor, former Southern Baptist Convention President J. D. Greear, received pushback for his ongoing promotion of critical race theory, racial quotas, and Black Lives Matter, among other woke priorities, he, too, fell back on disclaimers.

In a long 2020 video that was almost entirely devoted to promoting the social justice positions of Black Lives Matter, and even adopted the slogan itself, Greear offered a brief aside in which he denied being ideologically aligned with the movement. “I realize that the Black Lives Matter movement and website have been hijacked by some political operatives whose worldview and policy prescriptions would be deeply at odds with my own,” he said. But the Black Lives Matter movement was not “hijacked.” It was Marxist from its inception. Greear’s argument that Americans needed to “take a deep look at our police systems and structures” was perfectly in line with the mission of BLM.

This is not to say that Christians ought to rake a pastor or leader over the coals for an ill-judged comment or two, but that is not what we’re discussing here. We are discussing pastors and leaders whose ongoing commentary consistently introduces unbiblical and/or debatable progressive ideology into the church. When they are critiqued, they fall back on insistence that they did not mean it. Why then did they feel moved to make these statements? They never explain. They only insist that the disclaimers are where the balance of attention should be directed. It is akin to the maniac of Proverbs 26:18–19 who shoots flaming arrows of discourse to deceive his neighbor and then, when the assault is acknowledged, claims to have been “only joking.”

Another passage from Proverbs 26 answers the finger-wagging claim that the Ninth Commandment requires Christians to overlook error, false teaching, and legalism where they are being denied:

Enemies disguise themselves with their lips,

but in their hearts they harbor deceit.

Though their speech is charming, do not believe them,

for seven abominations fill their hearts.

Or, as John Calvin put it, “Ambiguity is the fortress of heretics.”

Not every pastor or leader who is introducing progressivism into the church is among these disguised enemies, but they may be influenced by them. The better part of Christian love demands that we not swallow camels of meaning while straining gnats of plausible deniability. 

Megan Basham is a reporter at the Daily Wire and the author of Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.

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