Religious-right leader Jim Garlow appeared on Tony Perkins’ “Pray Vote Stand” podcast Wednesday night, where Garlow said that the possibility that Senate Democrats might do away with filibuster rules that allow a minority to block legislation is a question of “good versus evil, of the struggle of angelic beings against the demonic forces.” He warned that conservative Christians in the United States have to begin thinking of themselves as a “resistance underground movement.”
Perkins was similarly apocalyptic in his rhetoric about the Democratic legislative agenda that Republicans plan to block with current filibuster rules.
In a Wednesday email promoting the podcast, Perkins included Medicare for All and D.C. statehood on a list of “the Left’s most evil policies,” along with the Equality Act, the For the People Act, “permanent and unlimited abortion, gun control, open borders, amnesty,” and “every other horrible idea on Joe Biden’s wish list.” Perkins urged readers to join him, Garlow, and Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) on Wednesday evening to ask God “to intervene and protect us from the Left’s wicked scheme.”
On the podcast, Perkins claimed that the filibuster is “the one thing standing between the radical left and the end of America as we know it.”
“I’m not gonna sugarcoat this,” Perkins said. “If the filibuster goes, our country is at the mercy of the most evil legislation we’ve ever seen.”
Garlow agreed, calling the Equality Act and the For the People Act “radical legislation” that would have been “inconceivable” a few years ago. He discussed the debate over the future of the filibuster in terms of spiritual warfare:
This is not an issue any longer of Republican versus Democrat. This is not an issue of Trump versus Biden. This is not an issue of right versus left. We are at a place—this is an issue of right versus wrong, of good versus evil, of the struggle of angelic beings against the demonic forces. That’s not hyperbole. It’s not melodramatic. It’s the reality of where we are.
Garlow warned that a “ferocious” enemy is being “unleashed” against American Christians, who he said should be thinking of themselves as “a resistance underground movement” and switching to encrypted communications systems. He told listeners of being in another unnamed country three years ago while a former supreme court president was assassinated and people were arrested for being biblically minded conservatives. “We’re there now as a nation,” he claimed.
Garlow prayed that God would touch the hearts of “dictators and despots” and those in our capital cities who are “planning and plotting evil.”
Perkins followed with his own prayer for God to intervene and change senators’ hearts, adding that if they continue to “move toward this evil of eliminating the filibuster,” God should “let gridlock descend on our nation’s capital.”
Perkins is president of the Family Research Council, a lobbying and political advocacy group that hosts the annual Values Voter Summit of religious-right activists, which former president Donald Trump has repeatedly attended.
Garlow, a pastor from San Diego, made a splash when he organized churches to oppose marriage equality in California more than a dozen years ago, and has since become a fixture on the national religious-right scene.
Both Perkins and Garlow actively promoted Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
