With less than nine months until the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, political operatives of all stripes are hard at work using all means of persuasion to push the electorate to vote for their candidate. In early 2023, Protestia reported on the launch of The After Party, a left-wing political indoctrination campaign produced under the guise of a church small group curriculum. The After Party is the initiative of Redeeming Babel and its leftist founder Curtis Chang, who produced the material in partnership with Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief Russell Moore and New York Times Columnist David French.
The curriculum is designed to make conservative Christians doubt their political convictions and cast aspersions on anyone who would say that the truth on issues like abortion can be readily ascertained through scripture.
Chang, French, and Moore would rather have Christians believe that all political issues are so complex and convoluted, that a faithful Christian must seek to find common ground with political opponents and leave the complex and controversial issues of politics to “experts”, like French, Moore, Chang, and their secular-leftist counterparts.
Attempts to gain political power and enact laws that reflect Biblical values by Christian conservatives like U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson are rhetorically slapped down with the labels of “Political Idolatry” and “Christian Nationalism.” Chang, French, and Moore preach a brand of religious pluralism that seems to trust secularists and leftists over Christian leadership in what would best be described as an ill-conceived left-wing pluralist pietistic caricature of Biblical Christianity.
The After Party was recently placed under renewed scrutiny, as investigative reporting by Megan Basham uncovered that production of the curriculum was funded by secular leftist organizations, including Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ New Pluralists Project, One America Movement, and the Hewlett Foundation. These organizations that funded The After Party simultaneously funded numerous leftist causes, including LGBTQ awareness, efforts to expand access to abortion, and “gender-affirming care” for youth.
The After Party released a statement attacking Basham’s report as containing “inaccuracies and misleading insinuations”. The organization was especially concerned that Basham described the curriculum as “a Bible study” when they viewed their material as a “six-part digital course designed for individuals and small groups to experience, within or outside of a local church.”
While Basham’s reporting focused on the secular progressive organizations that bankrolled the propaganda in The After Party, many conservative Christians, pastors, and elders are unaware that their churches are currently paying for subscription services that pipe leftist political propaganda like The After Party into the homes of their entire congregation. Right Now Media advertises itself as “the world’s largest video-streaming library of Biblical Resources.” The Christian media giant has partnered with more than 25,000 churches to provide what they describe as a “library of over 20,000 Biblically-based videos.”
Right Now Media Subscribing Churches pay monthly subscription fees ranging from $154.99 for a church of 101 average attendees, to $1,509.99 for a church of 5,000 attendees. A large portion of Right Now Media content is targeted at church small groups, which also happens to be the explicitly self-stated target audience of The After Party:
“The After Party does the heavy lifting to support local leaders. By presenting national trusted evangelical voices, local leaders do not have to take all the fire by themselves. They only need to sponsor this curriculum into their small group communities, and let us make the case….. The curriculum does the complex – but absolutely necessary – theological work of reframing Christian political identity from today’s divisive partisan options….In today’s political environment, faithfulness to this Biblical ‘how’ of political engagement will shine as a radical alternative to both the Right and the Left.”
While The After Party criticized Megan Basham for characterizing its curriculum as a “Bible study”, Right Now media markets the curriculum as part of its package of “Biblically-based videos” for church small groups, and describes the course as “advancing a Christ-centered political identity”. How can one accurately describe what it means to be Christ-centered without delving into the scriptures?
Right Now Media’s 2023 For the Health of the Nation curriculum partnered He Gets Us Campaign apologist Ed Stetzer with National Association of Evangelical’s President Walter Kim to produce another piece of leftist political propaganda. ‘For the Health of the Nation’ functions as an ideological companion piece to The After Party. Stetzer and Kim label anything deemed politically divisive as “political idolatry”, lean heavily on the same ideology of political surrender found in The After Party, and equivocate on social issues by labeling them “complex”.
For Black History Month 2024, Right Now Media partnered with The And Campaign, a leftist political organization led by democratic political strategist and slavery reparations advocate Justin Giboney to present How I Got Over, a documentary on the origins of the Black Church. How I Got Over purports to “debunk the misconception that orthodoxy is a white western construct.” Promotional material for the series features Marxist theologian and leftist politician Cornel West and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who denied various foundational truths of the Christian faith, including the virgin birth, resurrection, the trinity, and substitutionary atonement.
The Right Now Media landing page for the series includes direct links to the And Campaign website, where Christians are urged to “become advocates against political violence”, by politically advocating for The And Campaign platform of social welfare programs, the end of voter ID laws, the implementation of civil rights laws that protect LGBTQ identifying people as a protected class, and a commitment to religious and ideological pluralism. The organization’s platform is aligned with much of the Democratic party platform.
Right Now Media’s content on politics in a presidential election year has a demonstrable left-wing bias, and political operatives like Curtis Chang, David French, Russell Moore, Ed Stetzer, Walter Kim, and Justin Giboney are actively exploiting the content pipeline, in an effort to convince conservative Christians that they must compromise their political convictions and give power over to secular progressives for the sake of “principled pluralism.” Many conservative churches unknowingly support this effort by paying subscription fees that support this content. The most concerning aspect of Right Now Media’s political influence is the fact that many congregants will receive the messages from these propaganda campaigns as a form of “Biblical truth”, since they are tagged as “Biblically-based videos” with a tacit stamp of approval from the church that provides access to the subscription.
Sources:
Follow the Money to the After Party | Megan Basham | First Things
The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics – Redeeming Babel
Frequently Asked Questions – Redeeming Babel
An Open Letter to the Editor of First Things: Correcting the Record – Redeeming Babel
How I Got Over: The Resilience of the Black Church | RightNow Media
The Means and Methods of Christian Political Engagement | RightNow Media
The After Party: Towards Better Christian Politics :: RightNow Media
