'Never Trump' Evangelicals Want to Tell Your Church How to Vote

The vast majority of the electorate falls in between those two extremes, but the "Never Trump" and the "Only Trump" factions are often the loudest voices, especially when they go after each other. Members of each side generally assume that if you're not on one side, you're on the other. I brought up French earlier, and he's a good example of this phenomenon.

French has invested himself so much into the "Never Trump" narrative that he paints Christians who haven't sworn off Trump completely as everything that's wrong with the world at large. I'm oversimplifying things a bit, but French's schtick is that conservative Christians are responsible for everything negative in society. Forget a broad brush; French uses a roller in his rhetoric. 

Now French, Moore, and another "Never Trump" evangelical named Curtis Chang have launched a new small group curriculum that they're giving away to churches this election year to teach Christians to be less "divisive." If you're not familiar with the other two names, Moore is the editor of Christianity Today, and under his leadership, the magazine has continued to drift to the left theologically and politically. 

Chang hosts a podcast called "Good Faith" (implying that if you don't agree with him, your faith is "bad") and launched an initiative in 2021 to convince church leaders to push the COVID-19 vaccine to their congregations. In addition to frequent guest French, Chang has interviewed author Tim Alberta, who wrote a book accusing American Christians of bowing to "political idolatry," by which Alberta really means conservatism.

Related: Christianity Today Wades Into Dangerous Waters With Pronoun Discussion

French, Moore, and Chang have dubbed the curriculum "The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics." The trouble is that all three men clearly believe that "better Christian politics" includes attacking Trump supporters.

"All three of the creators of this curriculum are very passionate and very vocal quote-unquote 'Never Trumpers,'" Alisa Childers says on a recent episode of "Unshaken Faith," her podcast with Natasha Crain. "So they've been incredibly outspoken about their disdain for Christians who voted for Trump and frankly just lumping everybody together as one kind of monolithic group who voted for Trump. Now, ironically, they apparently don't think their own vocal critiques have been divisive in at least some way." 

The website for the curriculum — which is just a subpage on Chang's site — trumpets itself as the answer to "polarization":

We don’t have all the answers, but we know we have lost our way. As Christians, we must confront toxic polarization and heal our broken politics. As we rebuild, we have a perfect example. Jesus refused to be defined by the politics of his day, and he calls us to be salt and light for our world as well.

Our identity in Christ is far more important than any political party. But separating our Christian identity from our political one can be challenging. That’s what we’re here to explore together.

That all sounds wonderful on the surface, but French, Moore, and Chang have contributed to the "toxic polarization" in our political discourse time and time again. An archived version of the description of the curriculum from last March is downright nasty toward conservative evangelicals:

Evangelicals, which constitute 22.5% of the American population, comprise a key group in the political landscape. Unfortunately, for many evangelicals, the role of forming their political identity has been seized by partisan forces, not by true Biblical faith.

As a result, their politics have become deformed into hatred of political opponents, susceptibility to lies, and other practices that threaten the common good.

All three of them have attacked Trump-supporting Christians repeatedly, and for all the talk of evangelicals making an idol out of Trump (which is a legitimate problem), these three have bowed to the idol of "Never Trump" for years. Chang even blamed the "American church" for the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Another problematic feature of "The After Party" is who is funding it. The vast majority of reputable Christian small group curricula (and even some disreputable ones) come out of the Christian ecosystem. Denominations produce their own curricula, and Christian publishing houses release hundreds of studies every year. Crowdfunding and independent publishers are responsible for still more studies.

But you won't find any of these Christian content producers behind "The After Party." The FAQ page on the curriculum site laments, "Regrettably, many faith-based organizations are reluctant to support projects at the intersection of Christianity and politics due to political polarization and divisions within the church—even projects like The After Party which seek to heal those divisions."

Related: America's Largest Evangelical Magazine Continues to Drift to the Left

Instead, this curriculum receives much of its funding from the left. Last month, Megan Basham wrote an exposé at First Things that uncovered where "The After Party" is getting its money. She explained that the Rockefeller Foundation is bankrolling the curriculum as part of its New Pluralists project, which is spending scads of money to “address divisive forces.”

Rockefeller’s interest in bankrolling Bible studies is a red flag. In the same grant round as The After Party is a group seeking to promote the “leadership of rural LGBTQ+ people.” Another is committed to “keeping the remaining fossil fuel resources in the ground” in the name of “climate justice.” In 2019, The After Party’s benefactor gave $100 million to the Collaborative for Gender and Reproductive Equity, an initiative that funds efforts to safeguard abortion and ensure “youth” have access to “gender-affirming care.” A full accounting of all Rockefeller grantees committed to furthering hard-left causes would require a book long enough to rival Alberta’s.

But wait — there's more:

The project’s website lists One America Movement, an ecumenical group, as one of its partners. The group’s board includes the leader of an LGBTQ-affirming synagogue, as well as a co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York who excuses rioting as self-defense and has called Jesus a “black radical revolutionary.” One America has received over $2 million from some of the most powerful foundations on the left—such as the Tides Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Walton family’s Catena Foundation, and the John Pritzker Family Fund—all of which fund enterprises promoting abortion, LGBTQ issues, and other left-wing priorities. The Hewlett Foundation, which also directly funds The After Party, is the second largest private donor to Planned Parenthood.

French has admitted that he and his collaborators had no choice but to turn to the left for funding and support. Childers and Crain cite an interview French did at Holy Post, a podcast from Phil Vischer and Skye Jethani, a pair whose Trump Derangement Syndrome has metastasized into progressive Christianity.

French told Jethani that he knows conservative Christians won't touch "The After Party" because of his involvement. "He implies that if you're a dedicated supporter of Trump or even somebody who might consider voting for Trump for whatever reason, you'd have no interest in Christ-like behavior, and you're just unpersuadable," Childers says.

Childers adds that this type of mindset flies in the face of the curriculum's purported intent to combat divisiveness: "It's ridiculous to categorize those Christians who would support Trump in that way. It's just a ridiculous way to talk about them because there's such a spectrum of the way people think about how they're going to vote and maybe their attitude toward that voting."

The authors of the small group study are even framing it as a way for pastors to avoid going left from the pulpit. Crain cites a video in which Chang suggested that pastors can allow leaders to use the curriculum and then play dumb when church members call them out for the left-leaning subject matter.

"He says this: quote, 'If people get mad, they get mad at Curtis, Russell, and David, they get less mad and you can have plausible deniability,'" Crain says. "This bothers me to my core because it's such bad ecclesiology. This is bad theology of church and how we should be doing church and what our church leaders and elders should be doing. They should not be seeking to have some sort of plausible deniability. That's being a coward."

"I don't know where he was speaking when this particular video was taken, but he was clearly on a stage, and he's sitting there and he's talking to a large audience," she adds. "And he was actually kind of laughing about it when he says, 'You can have plausible deniability,' and then he said something like — he called it a classic pastor move to say, 'Oh, well, I don't agree with everything they say. But you know, I thought it was worthwhile.'"

What a dim view of hardworking pastors who care about their congregation and want to make sure they're learning and studying proper theology. But it's more important to French, Moore, and Chang that churches follow an anti-Trump narrative than it is for the pastor to look like he knows what's going on.

Related: Rejecting the Narrative of 'Christian Nationalism'

Last month, I wrote that "what most Christians want instead of a Christian nation is for civilization in general to return to Judeo-Christian principles," and that's true for churches as well. Many pastors don't want to deliver overtly political sermons, and I would guess that small group leaders want to keep political opinions out of Bible study. 

I had breakfast with my pastor earlier this week, and one of the things we talked about was how difficult it is to preach about important issues like the sanctity of life and biblical sexuality without sounding like a political statement. Americans are more divided than ever, even though there are issues on which we need to take a stand. And we can do that as church members without denigrating each other for our political beliefs or telling others how to vote — or both, as "The After Party" creators are trying to do.

It's rich that French, Moore, and Chang have spent the last three years (or more) trashing conservative Christians, and now they want to give them a small group study that tells them how to conduct themselves politically. I can't help but think that "The After Party" is an experiment that will fall flat on its face.