Religious Right radio host Janet Mefferd hosted staunch anti-LGBTQ pastor Tom Littleton yesterday to discuss the possibility that an “evangelical deep state” may be shifting the church away from anti-LGBTQ positions.
During yesterday’s episode of “Janet Mefferd Live,” Littleton spoke about an article he wrote about a suspected “evangelical deep state” that he believes is working to make the church more tolerant of LGBTQ people and “aid Obama’s dangerous policies.” Littleton has previously warned that “sodomites” are taking over the public education system. From the article:
It shocks no one that the administration which has done more to undermine Constitutional Freedoms in the U.S. would wage a covert war to protect the radical policies it fought to put in place. What is shocking to many Christians are the radical renovations in and by evangelical leadership touted as a conservative response to Obama era challenges. In most cases the evangelical responses have proven to aid Obama’s dangerous polices rather than bolster defenses against them. The talking points in America have suddenly changed. Clarity over marriage and sexuality has been lost and language obscured in the face of Obergefell and nationwide attempts to open public school bathrooms to the sexually deviant at our children’s expense.
These Obama era policies have also impacted the doctrine of the Christian Church. The mission of the Church to preach the gospel of eternal salvation has given way to social justice /liberation theology and the Church itself is all but renamed as a “Faith Based Organization.” But who made these decisions for the Church? Who has written this new language and why? Whose unseen hand has orchestrated this overhaul of Christianity?
Later in the article, Littleton goes on to name faith leaders who have expressed sympathies for LGBTQ people and worked to make their churches more inclusive. These leaders, he believes, are part of a larger conspiracy to detach the church from its anti-LGBTQ stance. Mefferd seemed to buy into Littleton’s assertions.
“The question becomes, where is this all headed? One of the biggest things that came up a couple of years ago, which you allude to in your article,” Mefferd told Littleton, “is the fact that you had Dr. Al Mohler and Dr. Russell Moore as part of this [Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission] effort to talk about marriage, reach out to gay activists, and all the rest. Then we’ve seen this kind of softening of language and outreach kind of stuff.”
Mefferd said that it was suspect that members of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission met with the Human Rights Campaign in private. She asked Littleton to explain “what is going on specifically with LGBT ideology and what they are beginning to push on evangelicals in terms of how we think we ought to think about the gay issue.”
Littleton went on to explain that some religious leaders have pushed for “the idea of orientation, which would reinforce the idea of ‘born this way,’ which was never proven with the approach to find the gay gene.” Those spiritual leaders, who claim to be faithful to scripture, Littleton claimed, are “getting the talking points from what would be very fair to conclude is a very suspect source.”
“We only have one chance to get this right in our culture, at our time, in this juncture on the issue of LGBT and these other progressive issues in the church and we’re getting it wrong. This mixed messaging, this liberation theology that’s creeping through, this human dignity argument that undermines the Bill of Rights and redefines human rights, all these things are being played right into and the orientation issue is a big part of that,” Littleton said.
He went on to lament that spiritual leaders are abandoning conversion therapy for LGBTQ teens, which he believes could “completely eliminate the ability of any Christian or Christian parent to call homosexuality a sin.”
