Evangelical author and pundit Eric Metaxas is among those promoting an attack on progressive philanthropist George Soros and progressive religious groups by the American Association of Evangelicals. The group describes its three minute video, promoted via email on Thursday, as an expose of “the Soros network infiltration of the Church.” The AAE says Soros network funding for progressive religious activists is an effort to “confuse and divide the Christian vote,” which the AAE believes should be directed toward the “pro-faith, pro-life Republican party.”
“Imagine the evil of using a Christian front to de-Christianize a culture and nation,” the video states.
In a press release distributed last week to promote the video, AAE co-founder spokesperson Kelly Monroe Kullberg spouted the kind of conspiratorial rhetoric that has been embraced by far-right extremists, with sometimes deadly results:
Americans hate manipulation. Most now realize that the demoralization of America is not inevitable; it is being purchased. Anti-American globalists like Soros are funding a growth industry of paid anarchists and political activists to divide and weaken America, including the church. This brief video is a powerful tool and wake-up call to the church and nation.
AAE’s website also includes a 15-minute version of the video released in 2016 called “Soros’s Formula for Killing America: A Brief Guide, for Americans.”
That version includes extensive attacks on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and fearmongering about Muslims registering to vote. “This is now our fight for the faith, for our nation, and for the human race, against a godless, dehumanizing machine,” the narrator intones over visuals from the good-vs.-evil epic “Lord of the Rings.”
The AAE was launched in the fall of 2016 with a similarly scathing attack—that one in the form of an open letter—on progressive evangelicals, Soros, and the Open Society Foundation.
The letter, which was updated this year, portrays Soros as a global schemer whose goal may be “the imposition of a global monoculture” but is “at least the destruction of our national identity through demoralization, open borders, drugs, crime, law-fare and media propaganda — the ‘fundamental transformation’ (weakening) of American civil society for the leveraged power of global 'elites.'”
Among the letter’s more than 4,500 signers, in addition to Kullberg and Metaxas, are Jim Garlow, Jerry Boykin and Alveda King.
The letter calls on progressive Christian leaders “to resist collaboration with persons and organizations that receive money from Soros and related globalist social engineers. We must not give control of America's future to this radical, anti-Christian political and social agenda. … Turning our nation over to the enemies of biblical faith does not honor Christ, promote love of neighbor, or advance God’s kingdom in the world.”
The letter blames political activism on behalf of “a Progressive political agenda that is clearly anti-Christian” for trafficking in human body parts, the “abandonment of a biblical view of marriage,” transgender activism, socialism, racial tensions, crime, terrorism and more. It decries “Amnesty efforts that attempt to give voting rights to millions of non-citizens” and claims that refugee settlements “mandated by the Obama-era federal government in partnership with the United Nations” brought in refugees that were “primarily non-assimilating Muslims.”
We ask those who have intentionally or unwittingly aided the Progressive agenda in the past to look at the actual consequences of their policies. Please stop inviting fellow believers to assist global profiteers and political activists who are determined to de-Christianize America. Please repent, refuse funding and turn away from those who attack the Church and injure the nation.
The letter also warns about “a ‘Deep State’ within our government, including ideological bureaucrats embedded in our DOJ, IRS, FBI and Department of State, that intimidates and seeks to subvert conservative, patriotic and Christian groups that disagree with the 'Progressive' political establishment."
Kullberg has made something of a habit of criticizing Christians who are not sufficiently devoted to the right-wing political agenda. Several years ago she organized “Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration” as a counterweight to the Evangelical Immigration Table, which was backing a bipartisan push for comprehensive immigration reform. “Kindness to foreigners should not be theft or injustice to citizens,” she said at the Heritage Foundation in 2013. She also argued that nowhere in scripture do we see “blanket amnesty or asylum.” That same year she told American Family Association radio host Sandy Rios that an immigration reform bill would cause people of “other faiths” and “incompatible worldviews” to flood into the U.S.
Kullberg was also a founder of Christians for a Sustainable Economy, which criticized Christians who opposed cuts to federal programs that serve the poor. In a letter to then-President Obama and congressional leaders, CASE declared, “The Good Samaritan did not use a government credit card.”
