The Fifth Column

Behold the Rise of the Evangelical Quislings

January 8, 2020

In the tumultuous decades of the 1930s and 40s, as the world entered another set of military and political pangs that became known as World War II, it was introduced to the term “Fifth Column.” It is a short-hand way of describing citizens of a country that will be shortly invaded, but who secretly help the enemy invading force (and soon to be enemy occupying force) by preparing the country for its invasion.

The Fifth Column is not quite a Coup d’état. A coup has a slightly different connotation— a violent overthrow by people in military uniforms, tanks in the streets, and generals directing armed forces. The Fifth Column is not front line work. Its more quiet, hidden, and often unwitting. Its sympathy for the enemy has plausible deniability. It is revolutionary not always in what it says outright but in what it omits.

The example of Vidkun Quisling, the Pro-Nazi Prime Minister of Norway who practically welcomed the advancing German army in 1940 and was allowed to remain the head of Norway’s puppet government, is tragicomical. For a gruesome example from the movies, you can do no better than the character of Harry Ellis from the first Die Hard film.

The Fifth Column engages in this subversive work in the hope of receiving money, influence, or better placement at the head of the line from the enemy when its forces arrive. But perhaps it’s because, let’s be honest, its sensibilities are often more in line with the enemy’s than with the homeland’s.

The modern quislings in our society are active at work. China is a problem, for sure, but China would have no power to overthrow the institutions of our country unless the Fifth Column at work were busy doing so. Our Fifth Column despises the political and religious foundations of this country. They have called, through propagandist expression, for open revolution. They are emphatically rejecting an America of judicial fairness and impartiality before the law, of hard work and self-responsibility, of private property and self-defense, of a limited federal government that stays within its lanes (is anyone still living who remembers when the federal government didn’t deficit spend?), and of the Church’s intrinsic religious liberties. Before China became the enemy from without, our own Fifth Column proved adept at destroying this country from within: Big corporations, Big Tech, academia, the media, entertainment, Big Pharma, Democrats, and Republicans. (The news media still does not understand Trump’s dictum, that they are “the enemy of the people,” nor how much they are loathed by millions of Americans.) Try to raise a Christian family in this country. Not only do you have to contend with your sinful heart and that of your spouse and children. You have every conceivable political, economic, and societal force raging against you.

But it gets worse. The Church, always struggling against worldliness (which means it is always imitating the values and system of the world) has its own Fifth Column.

When God establishes His Word, there are those who offer an Anti-Word of opposition. The first anti-christ was the serpent in the Garden: “has God really said?” Satan is the original and abiding Fifth Column that all other real Fifth Columns approximate. The Counterfeit-words found in redemptive history arise most often from within, not without, the Church. The Anti-Word is the language of the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Note what the Apostle Paul says in his farewell address to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:29-30:

“I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.”

The wolves come from within. Paul is warning them: it’s gonna happen so be prepared. Look out for those who will sell out the church for a pot of stew, or to gain a following, or to be on the payroll of the powerful, or all of the above.

Note what the Apostle Peter says in his concluding letter to the churches,
2 Peter 1:16-2:3:

“For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.”

Peter states that the more certain word of the Church is the inscripturated Word of God. This Word does not originate in the bowels of man’s wisdom or will but from God Himself. But just as the Word was established by God Himself in times past, there came false prophets with an anti-Word to twist it and deceive God’s people. That was the case then, Peter says, but it is also the case now. And it’s all done secretly, because these false prophets are enslaved to their sensuality, and their false words lead to blasphemy and the exploitation of God’s people.

These false prophets are the Fifth Column of the modern, evangelical church. These are the evangelical quislings.

The evangelical quisling seeks to take the fight out of the Church. He wants to neuter the Church by forcing it to put its guard down. He wants to re-direct the Church to aim its firepower in the wrong direction, to pick the wrong enemies at the wrong time. This is what CS Lewis would call fighting a flood with a fire extinguisher.

Not every evangelical is a quisling because not every evangelical has cultural influence and “100k followers” on Twitter. But quislings have substantial leverage in the Church and use it to soften the Church to embrace heterodox anthropologies. They tell the Church to stand down when it should be on the front lines of the war for the heart and soul of this nation, bringing the claims of King Jesus and the hope of the Gospel to bear on the issues of the day. They condition the Church to its new overlords.

The Fifth Column told us, when Obergefell was decided in 2015, to love our “gay” neighbor, instead of lamenting the civilizational suicide we had embarked upon. The evangelical quislings were bold to plan the Revoice conference in St Louis with the wink-and-nod-approval of the PCA, and supported all sorts of faithless compromises. My friends at Warhorn have extensively documented Revoice’s Fifth Column work.

The Fifth Column clubbed the evangelical church into embracing the “Gay Christian,” “Spiritual Friendship,” and “Heterosexuality is not Christianity” sub-movements within its own precincts.

The Fifth Column preached the Church about a “more humane immigration policy” when our national borders were rightly being closed by Trump (which nation hasn’t enforced its border and remained a nation for long?).

The Fifth Column instructed the Church to preach about the sins of structural racism while remaining silent about the black community’s pandemic of abortion, victimhood, and absent fatherhood.

The Fifth Column preaches silence on real sins and virtue signals on fake sins.

Increasingly, the evangelical quislings seek to condition the Church to accept the wrecking of this country. The Fifth Column of the Church is, for all intents and purposes, in line with the Fifth Column in our country. It’s the same house, just a different floor. Birds of a feather flock together.

Was the January 6 trespassing on federal property a problem? Yes, and all those who engaged in that lawlessness should be arrested and tried.

But let’s be real. Where were all the self-righteous pontificating pundits of our hedge-fund class this past summer when American cities were literally burning? No outcry, just full-fledged support for the riots “as the voice of an oppressed people.” What irrational partiality!

After the trespassing on the Capitol on January 6 had been quelled, our media were glad to report that all the “insurrectionist thugs” had left the Capitol building. They were complicitly blind to the fact that the most powerful thugs in this country actually don’t have riot gear but wear suits and have million dollar homes in their constituent states. The most powerful mafia in this country are the elected officials and unelected bureaucratic lifers. They do time in the private sector only to walk through the revolving doors of government whenever their services are needed. They have names like Mitch, Nancy, and Chuck. Most of them, though, we’ve never met. As Michael Corleone said, “Who’s being naive, Kay?”

Now consider the response of the Evangelical Fifth Column. The evangelical quislings, too, were quiet about the hundreds of Black Lives Matter riots of Summer 2020 that decimated entire urban centers and their businesses. Yet, when “Trump supporters” trespassed unto federal property by climbing over the barricades of the Capital building on January 6, the evangelical quislings couldn’t wait to write about the “seditious” breaching of the Capitol building. Exhibit A: Russell Moore.

The evangelical quisling will not be outdone by the memory holing and gaslighting of the nation’s Fifth Column. With irony only a quisling is capable of having, Moore wrote: “Any leader can have a peaceful life if he or she just pretends to be outraged by the ‘right’ things, and remains silent about things that are truly outrageous.” No kidding.

Moore couldn’t be bothered all throughout the BLM riots to comment on how destructive this anarchy was. Moore, the head of the Southern Baptist ministry, The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (what a name, eh?), couldn’t be bothered to support John MacArthur’s church when it defied local and state lockdown measures and when MacArthur was punitively threatened by California officials. But supporters of “Orange Man” engage in an “attempted coup” on the capitol (ever see a bloodless coup without guns?), and out come the evangelical laments. These evangelical quislings always seem to have an opinion piece ready to published in the Washington Post at the drop of a crisis. They lust for the respectability of the New York Times. Their life long dream is to be published in the Atlantic or interviewed by the New Yorker. Maybe one day they will be speed dialed by a CNN producer for an evening segment? They can be relied upon to soft-pedal sin or to castigate their own evangelical churchmen for their wrong-think. Is it any surprise that what the evangelical quislings say perfectly conforms to the elite’s ideology on any given issue?

What should this tell you? The Fifth Column of the Church is ready, willing, and happy to serve as useful idiots for those who want to destroy the good things this country has stood for. The Left does not need to club the Church into submission. It can depend on its trustworthy sympathizers in the Church to do the job for them.

So, here’s your homework. The next time there is some “civil unrest” or some “political controversy,” note what articles are written on the TGC website. Consider the “evangelical leader” trotted out on the Opinion page of the national newspapers and what the religious reporters in them are reporting. Then consider what these evangelical quislings are emphasizing. Yet, what are they overlooking or omitting? What do they consider to be the problem? What do they consider to be the solution? And are their solutions worse than the problem they’ve outlined?