FRISCO, Texas—A new faith-based coalition is training pastors across the country to get politically involved and mobilize their congregations to elect leaders with Christian values.
Remnant Alliance, a partnership of Christian groups, held a conference from July 31 to Aug. 2 to train 170 pastors from across the country on how to lead their churches to become a force for good in government.
The alliance includes the conservative government watchdog group Citizens Defending Freedom (CDF); the biblical citizenship group Patriot Academy; the Salt and Light Council, which teaches constitutional and religious liberties; and Liberty Pastors, which teaches pastors a biblical worldview.
The stated hope of these organizations is to train pastors to lead their congregations in taking a stand against communism and use their political might to elect leaders with Christian values. They encourage churches to stake out their territory in the community and harness their congregation’s voting power to turn America back toward God, both locally and nationally.
Speakers at the training conference said God spared former President Donald Trump’s life during the recent assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania, giving Christians a second chance to make a difference at a critical juncture in the nation’s history.
“We’re at war, and the battle begins in the mind, in the thought process,” Steve Maxwell, cofounder of CDF, said during the event.
About 36 percent said churches should express views on day-to-day social and political issues. But nearly two-thirds of Americans in the survey believe churches and other houses of worship should avoid politics. The survey also found that people believe religion is losing its influence on American life.
That trend worries many Christians.
Often, those who object to churches becoming involved in politics maintain that the U.S. Constitution mandates a “separation of church and state.”
If 1 percent of the 300,000 churches in the United States got involved in determining who’s elected locally, then they could block issues such as transgender ideologies in schools and critical race theory in the community, Maxwell told The Epoch Times.
“We’ve never been trained to fight in this kind of war,” he said. “We’ve hidden behind the church walls while kids were being indoctrinated, and we should have been involved in the culture.”
To assist participants, CDF has a group of attorneys available to pastors who are worried about whether getting involved in politics could cause legal problems or threaten the nonprofit status of their churches, Maxwell said.
The 1954 Johnson Amendment, and its 1987 update, prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one “which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.”
While the idea of harnessing the organizational power of the church might seem unfamiliar to some Baptist and evangelical Christians, it has long been a tool to get out the vote in black communities that have traditionally voted for Democrats.
National bodies such as the Conference of National Black Churches have partnered with civil rights organizations like the NAACP to boost voter turnout among black Americans.
Culture Wars
As part of the training, the coalition urges pastors to stand up against ideologies that they deem immoral and harmful to their communities, such as critical race theory (CRT) and gender ideology.Ibram X. Kendi, a leading architect of CRT, has said that the only way to fight racism is by discriminating against “oppressors,” such as white males. Transgender ideology is the idea that each person has a gender identity, which may not align with his or her biological sex.
Those ideas conflict with traditional values, Remnant Alliance speakers said.
CDF already has achieved goals in partnership with Christian groups in Florida and Texas.
Starting in 2022, members of HighPoint Church in the town of Lake Wales, Florida, filled 13 elected or appointed positions in the city and county government, including the church’s pastor, Jack Hilligoss, who was elected mayor.
Hilligoss wasn’t much interested in politics when he went through Liberty Pastor training. But what he learned showed him the reasons to get involved in local government.
What resulted was a Christian revolution in Polk County, Florida, he said.
In 18 months, his church’s activism led to a surge in voter turnout in the precinct—up from 14 percent to 67 percent.
The sex education course included explicit activities for the children, said Colby Wiltse, CDF’s Texas state director. He told conference participants that children were encouraged to role-play negotiations on whether to use a condom with both homosexual and heterosexual partners.
With the backing of 18 churches in Corpus Christi and the participation of concerned parents, the program was voted down by a committee appointed by the school board.
The lawsuit was filed after Gonzalez allegedly decided not to prosecute high-profile cases of murder and rape.
President Joe Biden and his administration have heralded the rule change as inclusive and a matter of fairness for all students.
Pastors Tackling Politics
Ed Sample, an associate pastor at Rising Star Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, said the conference gave him a sense of urgency.“I believe I’ve come to the realization that time is shorter than I thought for the need to speak out against these social issues,” he told The Epoch Times. “The one thing I learned here was to talk about values.”
Fellow pastor Glenn Holland already has battle scars from fighting against the controversial sex education course in his city. He’s lead pastor at The Net Fellowship church in Corpus Christi, where Wiltse attends church.
His church is already engaged politically and socially. It supports a pro-life pregnancy center and helps with voter registration drives, he told The Epoch Times.
Rick Green of Patriot Academy said that America has been so blessed and comfortable for so long that its citizens have forgotten what it takes to remain free. If America becomes a failed democracy, the entire world will suffer, he said.
“[If] you think communism killed a lot of people in the last 100 years, you let it get a hold of America. You let evil take over this nation, and it will be the worst thing the planet has ever known, the world has ever known.”
Paul Blair is the founder of the Liberty Pastors, another group participating in the Remnant Alliance. He pastors Fairview Baptist Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, and its satellite Liberty Church of Orlando.
He told conference participants that many pastors have self-censored, sticking to only spiritual issues within the church.
Pastors affiliated with his group learn about political awareness and patriotism.
Training covers government, economics, nonprofit status, the idea of the separation of church and state, as well as addressing cultural issues such as climate change. Participants learn about LGBT activism, Black Lives Matter, the World Economic Forum, and what organizers call the globalist agenda.
Since 2016, Liberty Pastors has trained thousands of clergy and helped churches partner with homeschool groups.
Bill Rogers, a pastor from Liberty Road Baptist Church in Jefferson City, Missouri, told The Epoch Times he was motivated at the conference to go on a fact-finding mission in his community to measure the prevalence of left-wing ideologies.
Pastors sometimes fear that engaging in politics will drive people away. Now, he sees it could do just the opposite.
The conference opened his eyes to the idea that the gospel should be an integral part of life, from the church to the voting booth.
“We can’t represent God if we’re not willing to be holy Monday to Saturday—not just on Sunday,” he said.
