This is the article that appeared in the November 2024 edition of Catalyst, our monthly journal. The date that prints out reflects
the day that it was uploaded to our website. For a more accurate date of when the article was first published, check out the news release, here.
There are constant cries from the Left warning that democracy is under assault. They are right about that, but they are wrong about the enemy: it’s not Christians we should fear—it’s people like them who are imperiling democracy. Here are a few examples of how they operate.
Christians are busy in the courts these days pursuing religious liberty claims. For defending their rights, they are being castigated by CNN. “Religious interest groups are queuing up a series of high-profile appeals at the Supreme Court this fall that could further tear down the wall separating church and state, seeking to take advantage of a friendly 6-3 conservative majority that has rapidly pushed the law in their favor in recent years.”
In other words, because religious liberty is under assault by militant secularists, allies of religious liberty have had to go to the courts seeking justice from these bullies. For this, they are accused of subverting the First Amendment. This is what white racists said in the 1960s when blacks were seeking justice in the courts—they blamed the plaintiffs. Fair-minded people know who the real threat to democracy is in both instances.
Similarly, because Republicans are filing a record number of lawsuits in the states ensuring election fairness, they are being blamed for undermining democracy, not those engaged in voter fraud. Reuters reports that the reason for the court challenges is “to sow doubts about election integrity,” and the New York Times says that “experts” believe that many of the suits “are based on unfounded, or outright false, claims.”
These stories are appearing at the same time that the Biden-Harris administration is suing Alabama for removing more than 3,000 noncitizens from the voter rolls. Why would they want to do that?
Why is it that this administration’s Department of Justice refuses to make public a plan it adopted in March 2021, two months after the election, to increase voter turnout? Who were they looking to register? Milkmen or migrants? Given that they sought the advice of left-wing advocacy groups (they are currently working with the Southern Poverty Law Center in the Alabama case), we know it wasn’t the milkman.
Hillary Clinton recently said that those who engage in speech that sounds like Russian propaganda should be “criminally charged” for exercising their freedom of speech. But apparently she is not a threat to democracy anymore than John Kerry is. He is now complaining that the First Amendment right to free speech “stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence.”
Meanwhile, religious left-wing activists recently held a conference at Georgetown University decrying attempts to destroy democracy. It is not Muslim extremists who bother them, or Iran interfering in our elections, it’s “the tenets of Christian Nationalism” that we need to guard against.
The meeting was led by Jim Wallis, the self-described “radical” who was removed from his post as editor-in-chief of Sojourners, the far-left Protestant publication which he founded and headed, for making a lousy editorial judgment. A year after he was dumped from the magazine, Georgetown rewarded him with a new post—one that he founded—as the head of the Center on Faith and Justice.
Psychologists call this phenomenon “projection,” that is, the tendency to project onto others one’s own foibles. It might also be called “gaslighting,” the manipulation of others designed to cause them to doubt their own thoughts and perception of reality. The Left is very good at that.
This is more than hypocrisy—this is propaganda at its worst.
