The Blind Watchdog: Failures in Modern Journalism

Last week, Fox News Digital reported on a Christian minister who was described by one interviewee as somebody who “views the pulpit as a political weapon to advance [a] radical agenda,” bewailing that there is not an existing political cause this minister supports and “hasn’t [also] claimed to have found in the Bible and attempted to force on” the local public. Sounds like exactly the type of behavior I have decried ad nauseum, but it is with a peculiar blend of hilarity and disgust that I see these complaints attributed, in a colossal display of hypocrisy, to RNC spokesman Zach Kraft against State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott (D-Iowa), a U.S. congressional candidate from Iowa, whom Kraft refers to as the “Wicked Witch of Woke.”

The hypocrisy itself is not entirely shocking, given that American politics has long ago degenerated into unprincipled bids for party supremacy, dividing the public into cheerleaders for teams that care little for their prosperity and well-being, much less the common good. But it is somewhat perplexing that Kraft decided to criticize the typically Republican sport of using “the pulpit as a political weapon” instead of arguing, as Republicans often do, that “conservative values” (as meaningless and endlessly flexible as this phrase has become) have a strong basis in scripture.

The article makes much of a 2018 book in which Garriott contributed a chapter, and which consists of “30 sermons under titles that include ‘Transgressing the Gender Binary,’ ‘Encountering Pharaoh — and Climate Change’ and ‘Wake Up and Stay Woke!’” Again, one could make endless comparisons between this and Christian Nationalist books that take a polarized opposite view. The report goes on to inform us that this book also contains a chapter called “When to Break the Law,” in which “a minister urges sanctuary cities to defy the federal government and harbor illegal aliens to avoid deportation.” Further, in “’Take a Knee,’ the author rails against the ‘militarized border.’ In ‘Overcome Evil with Good,’ police departments are associated with White supremacy. In ‘Beloved Resistance,’ the president is described as an ‘unrepentant sexual predator,’” Fox reports. All of this appears fairly benign if contrasted against decades of apocalyptic Protestant propaganda that has warned of Democrat antichrists coming to steal the guns of red-blooded Americans who must be prepared to take up arms at any moment.