How The Battle Over Wokeness Has Infiltrated The Church

On November 17, Adam Greenway, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Dallas-Fort Worth did something rarely seen in the world of evangelical leadership. He publicly criticized another Baptist institution, tweeting out a letter he’d sent to Michael Spradlin, president of Memphis’ Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary (MABTS).

“I write to you with extreme disappointment that the institution you lead has plans to host a ‘film premiere’ of Enemies Within the Church, Greenway began, placing scare quotes around film premiere as if to suggest there was some doubt over whether the movie in question was actually a film.

“The film’s trailer,” he went on, “contains campus footage of the institution I am privileged to lead overlaid with narrative insinuations of ‘Marxism’ … I take strong umbrage to such scandalous and scurrilous slander, particularly when it is apparently condoned by an institution such as yours.”

Greenway finished by asking Spradlin to reconsider his decision to show the movie.

This post was shared and cheered by hundreds of Christian leaders, journalists, and authors — many with blue-checks by their names and Washington Post bylines in their bios. But Spradlin was not to be deterred.

His office fired back with a statement saying that the school was “very concerned” about the evidence of creeping liberalism the film presents. “We believe Southern Baptists, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are wise and able to arrive at the conclusion that glorifies our Lord and advances the gospel. Documented information and concerns should be considered instead of suppressed.”

Spradlin finished by quoting the pastor and author Adrian Rogers: “It is better to be divided by truth than united in error.” The film screening went on as planned.

Neither Greenway nor anyone else applauding his calls to cancel the showing of Enemies Within The Church (EWTC) offered counter explanations to the detailed and extensive evidence the film presents that individuals motivated to promote a leftist agenda have taken up influential posts within evangelical institutions.

From the outset, it must be noted that this is a documentary that wears its agenda on its sleeve. It doesn’t pretend to be a neutral, journalistic investigation, but rather, is something more like a carefully argued court case that comes complete with a detailed bibliography. And the case, in the words of one of the interview subjects, is that some of America’s foremost evangelical leaders have gone from “communicating the Bible to souls to transforming social structures.”

Nothing New Under the Sun

The best service “Enemies Within The Church” renders viewers is the historical context it offers for the ideological shifts people in the pews are seeing today. It broadens the scope of the discussion beyond current headlines on Critical Race Theory and white privilege to their foundational philosophies of socialism and communism, of which these buzzwords are only the latest costume.

The film persuasively traces how, in the 1930s, communists like labor union activist Bella Dodd subverted Catholic ministries, particularly among the more education-oriented Jesuits, and turned them from teaching the gospel to teaching social engineering. Dodd described bringing 1100 young communists into the Catholic church over decades. “By the time she got out [of communism] 20 or 30 years later,” Michael Hichborn, president of the Catholic Levanto Institute explains, “she had seen many of those young men raised to the rank of bishop and even cardinal.”

From there, the film moves on to the 1970s and how a who’s who of progressive Christian intellectuals and professors came together to draft the Chicago Declaration, a document that argues for “attacking” American “materialism” and “the maldistribution of the nation’s wealth and services.” In full, the declaration reads like a primer for the social justice lingo we hear from so many pulpits today, particularly its assertion that “[Christians] must rethink our values regarding our present standard of living and promote a more just acquisition and distribution of the world’s resources.”

The same playbook, the film argues, is playing out now in evangelical educational institutions under the guise of identity politics. We see how deeply seminaries like Fuller and Wheaton have already been compromised by the priorities of social justice over biblical justice and how leaders educated at those institutions are carrying what they learned to once-conservative institutions like Baylor and Biola. There, we see invited speakers discuss how white people need to abstain from their privilege like “vegetarians” abstain from meat.

The message today, narrator Cary Gordon, a pastor himself, explains, “is not that you need to receive Christ and repent of your sins, it’s that you’re under the weight of sexism, racism, and homophobia.”

Real Victims

If you follow the various evangelical camps on Twitter or other social media, it’s easy to come away thinking that all of this is just so much academic infighting that has little impact on regular folks in real churches. EWTC illustrates how mistaken this assumption is.

Its most disturbing example is how