'Woke' Christians Are Eroding Donald Trump's Base and Dividing the Evangelical Church

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We need to talk about race," Phil Vischer says in a video posted June 14 on YouTube. The evangelical creator of VeggieTales, a children's show that tells Bible stories using animated vegetables with names like Junior Asparagus and Pa Grape, tells viewers in his 17-minute video that Black households have one-tenth the wealth as white ones and delves into the history of Jim Crow laws, the "war on drugs" and "militarized police." He talks about a TV news media that scares Americans with images of Black criminals and teachers who favor white kids due to their "unconscious bias."

Call Vischer the tip of the spear of what critics call a "woke" Christian movement whose members have not only embraced the language of the left but also its chief goal of defeating Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election. They'll do so, some say, if they can convince as little as 2 percent of the evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016 to vote for Joe Biden in November. After all, he won in swing state Pennsylvania, for example, by just 44,000 votes, courtesy of white evangelicals. Pew Research indicates that Trump got 81 percent of the vote nationwide from white evangelicals in 2016 and his support in that group as of three months ago was at 82 percent.

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While some practitioners of woke Christianity reject the term as a pejorative, some actually embrace it, like Eric Mason, the pastor of Epiphany Fellowship in Philadelphia and author of Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice. At his website, he urges Christians to "learn the history of racism" and to "move beyond polite, safe conversations about reconciliation and begin to set things aright for our soon-coming King, who will be looking for a woke church."


To detractors, though, woke refers to Christians who embrace the pro-choice position on abortion as well as gay marriage and, especially, Black Lives Matter. Christians, of course, were instrumental in ending segregation (Martin Luther King Jr., began his Letter From a Birmingham Jail with "My Dear Fellow Clergymen"), while many white slavery abolitionists, such as William Wilberforce, were passionate about their Christianity. But critics of being woke don't object to the sentiment that Black lives matter but to the BLM organization, which they say promotes Marxism and critical race theory, a political position that argues racism is ingrained in American society.

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