Yeah, That Really Happened.

Do you feel dazed? Like somehow the conversation changed without your knowledge? Does it feel like you thought everyone was having one conversation but you just realized they’ve been talking about something else entirely this whole time and you don’t like it?

The church changed. You aren’t crazy. That did happen. 

When I was little, I was told “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in His sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Every church I went to: the two churches my parents rotated through based on how much gas money we had that week, one Mennonite, one PCA, my grandparent’s church (which was a charismatic Baptist church), my cousin’s non-denom Baptist church, my uncle’s Episcopal church, my friend’s AOG church - all of them; in Sunday Schools and VBSs had us sing this song. 

Now, is the song a little cringy and a lot paternalistic? Absolutely. I’m not saying we bring back this exact song, because we've got much better ways of saying the same thing. But MOST of the folks in those churches believed the essential truth underneath it - that Jesus’ love is for all. And they made sure their children knew it. 

(We’re talking about the racial paternalism in other places; moving on for now.)

That song was everywhere in my Christian, publicly religious life - until I entered the cult and was told, “You can’t sing that! That song teaches lies. Jesus does not love all of the children of the world. He only loves the elect children of the world. Singing this song will teach children they are chosen by God when many of them are not.”

Now, of course that guy was in the wrong. Right? 

Like, even if you believe in election as he’s describing, the song doesn’t say every single child will be saved, but at least representatives of each race will be there. And you know what? Random guys just saying random bad, stupid stuff is part of life. It's gonna happen to all of us. And the idea that Jesus actually doesn't love all children is so dumb it wouldn’t even be worth talking about, right?

Except -

Over the next fifteen years I saw that idea, that response to that exact song, go everywhere. Everywhere that Reformed theology made headway, the death of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” seemed to follow. 

Now, at first, I was only in Reformed churches. Then, I was a pastor’s wife in my early 20s, in my “safe” SBC church replant that partially helped me heal from my cult experience, and we were prepping for VBS. The pastor came up to the (female) VBS director saying that he needed to approve all of the songs, and that we should remove certain ones, including "Jesus Loves the Little Children." Why? Because in his interpretation, 1 John says that people who aren’t Christians are “children of the devil,” and we can’t go around telling people that Jesus loves all children in light of that now, can we?

It was an out-of-body experience. It was one of the first times I had that disorienting, “Oh no, the cult is here and I’m in the cult again,” feeling. The conversation that ensued was almost verbatim conversations I overheard growing up in the cult. The VBS director tried to stand her ground on the basis of scripture, but the pastor whipped out his Spiritual Authority card, and made the call unilaterally.

How?! How did this idea get here? 

In my body, I knew it was the cult. But in my mind, I couldn’t see how. I couldn’t see how my super fringe, teeny-tiny, intentionally and obnoxiously counter-cultural little world that so many I knew had left - How could they possibly have any connection with the recently converted seminary-trained pastor standing in front of me 1500 miles away?

If I had known then what I know now, maybe I could have done more to stop its spread. But I didn’t. 

And so, while I asked questions and told my story and gave my warnings until I was blue in the face, I never did so with authority or confidence. It was pleading, soft, submissive, appealing to others’ empathy to get a hearing. But the problem is that by the time people are doing things like taking away “Jesus Loves the Little Children” because they don’t think He actually does, they have already lost their empathy. They have already lost Jesus.

But, in that particular church, most folks had not lost their empathy.  

The older women in particular were shocked, horrified, and outraged by the pastor’s decision here (among others). They railed and ranted and campaigned and tried to leverage the church bylaws to keep this idea from spreading, though it was sometimes clumsy and roughly communicated. 

These older women were called “stick-in-the-muds.” “Old fashioned.” “Not real Christians.” “Liberal.” They were “gossips” and “using the church like a corporation” because they weren’t as “serious” about the Bible. That is, they weren’t as ‘serious about the Bible’ as the people who felt it necessary to teach that Jesus doesn’t actually love all children, lest the little tykes get uppity.

The fight lasted for about 2 years. In that time, we took away the hymnals. We ripped out the pews. We redecorated the church to make it more appealing to a younger crowd - that is, a more credulous and easily-controlled crowd. And a crowd with money that could grow the institution. 

It was a complete and total takeover. A coup. Happening in plain sight but no one knew it because both sides were “Christian.” 

And all across the country this happened. A sort of religious colonization. Books changing seminaries, seminaries changing pastors, pastors changing churches, churches changing people, people changing the US government, the US government changing the world. 

Just as I heard them planning to do in the cult settings I was in growing up. 

When this happened in that particular church, the Greatest Generation folks went quiet. The church members who we personally knew well felt shamed and heartbroken, and they ended up not really knowing or understanding what happened. Boomers still had enough fire left in them to get mad and hurt, and they made many angry, sweeping judgments in their very justified frustration and grief. 

“These schools and their education,” they said.

The education wasn’t the problem. It was who was doing the education, and why. The pastor they were mad at had been intellectually captured in seminary, yes, but it wasn’t the seminary education that had done it. It was the “we take theology seriously” podcasts that he listened to and the popular-level Christian books he read while in seminary that did the damage.

“These young folks.”

It wasn’t the young folks. It was the criminally-poor discipleship they’d gotten that caused them to be easy marks for these “Jesus doesn’t really love all children” people. The church had tolerated varying degrees of racial hatred and gender discrimination in its midst for too long, so that was a little too easy to believe. The kids raised in evangelicalism had already seen that, well, some of us were a little more equal than others. So why wouldn’t Jesus be the same way?

And then the Boomers turned to their TVs. There was one source that also saw the schools and young folks as a big problem. Fox News. Except Fox News had a slightly different problem with the schools and young people: they were too liberal. They wanted to honor a person’s chosen pronouns, they wanted to legalize marijuana, they wanted to take all of the religious stuff out of public schools and government buildings. 

This sounded just like what the Boomers had just gone through. The young people came into their church and said, “Actually alcohol is okay and you’re stupid if you don’t think so,” and “All your sacred items and rituals and everything are stupid and we’re taking them away.”

This is the same thing, right? 

No. It wasn’t. One was an ideologically driven movement to capture churches. The other was culture change.

But all of this chaos was caused by the same people. 

The same people who wrote the books that turned pastors against their members and converted whole congregations to their cause, are also the same people who claimed that taking down statues honoring southern, slave-owning, Presbyterians who fought in the Civil War was the same thing as “taking God out of the Pledge.”

It wasn’t. And yet - it worked. That simple, silly little lie worked. And they knew it would, because they’d been preparing evangelicals to receive it for decades.

They have been sowing disunity and chaos everywhere they go. Turning brother against brother. Parents against children. Children against their parents. Husband against wife. So much cruelty and violence. 

Most of the YRR (Young, Restless, Reformed) pastors who attempted these little coups all over the country were Gen X and Millennials. Some of them fared really well, and others were absolute disasters. But it actually didn’t matter to the Reconstructionist cult that set it all up.

Even the failures helped them infiltrate into evangelicalism, because the failures just deepened the disunity in evangelicalism. Reconstructionism was now in power in the political wing of evangelicalism, and it was identifying ambitious, dedicated young destroyers from among this effort. It selected the most ruthless, effective, efficient ones, and they now operate in positions of power and influence within Reconstructionism. Joel Webbon is a great example; Al Mohler is another. 

But in fact, now the cult owed them. Would cover for them. They started looking around and eating their sheep, knowing they could with impunity because the cult had their back. And they weren’t nearly as cautious as their predatory forebearers. So the scandals began to break around 2015. And they just began to come faster and faster and faster as the poison worked its way through evangelicalism and seminary professors, pastors, and Christian speakers began to experience moral failure after moral failure.

The evidence is in the fruit. 

But again, we fell for their lies. They told us the victims were lying. That they were angry with God and were waging war on the church.

They taught us to ignore sin.

And so sin grew.

And now, here we are.