Evangelicals for Harris

Over the weekend, the group known as Evangelicals for Harris released an announcement about an online confab of Christians who are coming together for a singular purpose: “to help elect Vice President Kamala Harris president of the United States and Gov. Tim Walz vice president.” The organization bills the gathering as an opportunity for Christians to participate in the “community service” of getting the Democratic ticket elected, calling it “a Matthew 25 witness of love of neighbor as our response to the unifying vision of the Harris-Walz ticket. That is what we want Evangelicals for Harris to be known for first.” The group has scheduled an online event, “inviting all Christians and people of good will to please join us for a Zoom call to be encouraged and engaged.”

Who are these Evangelicals for Harris? The founder is the Rev. Jim Ball, who previously presided over an Evangelicals for Biden group. There are 19 speakers set to participate in the upcoming event, some of whom are more well-known than others:

• Bishop Claude Alexander, pastor of The Park Church in Charlotte, N.C., who serves on the board of trustees for Gordon-Conwell Seminary and as chairman of the board of directors at Christianity Today.
• Jerushah Duford, Billy Graham’s granddaughter and an “LGBTQ friendly” family therapist.
• Rev. Dwight McKissic, the pastor of a Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and a well-known activist for women pastors within the Southern Baptist Convention.
• Jemar Tisby, an author and activist who previously served as an assistant director at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research.
• Ekemini Uwan, a speaker and activist who spoke on the floor of the United Nations in Geneva two years ago, condemning the Church’s complicity in the transatlantic slave trade and demanding reparations from churches.

The list goes on, but none of the names are top-tier influencers within the evangelical movement. Nevertheless, the group aims to convince evangelicals of the Christian bona fides of Kamala Harris, but they have to distort orthodox Christianity to do so. The group’s website features a page devoted to “Kamala’s Faith Story,” which is, in fact, a story, although not a Christian one. It includes no mention at all of Jesus Christ or of His death and resurrection for sinners. It does, however, include this claim:

“While a deeply committed and faithful Christian, Vice President Harris has great respect for other faith traditions. Her mother Shyamala Gopalan and relatives in India took her to Hindu temples. She joins her husband, Doug Emhoff, in Jewish traditions and celebrations.”

Elsewhere, Harris says that she has learned “from all these traditions and teachings”—in particular she claims that Hindu, Jewish, and Christian influence have helped her “to see that all faiths teach us to pursue justice.”

What are her views on justice? When it comes to the unborn, no justice at all. As Ryan Anderson wrote for First Things last week, Harris is one of the most radical proponents of abortion rights who has ever run for high office. She supports the legal right to kill a child through all nine months of pregnancy. She has even opposed bills that would protect the lives of babies who survive abortions, which of course is infanticide.

In her remarks to the National Baptist Convention two years ago, Harris even made a religious case for her extremist views on abortion:

“As extremists work to take away the freedom of women to make decisions about their own bodies, faith leaders are taking a stand, knowing one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held religious beliefs to agree that a woman should have the ability to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do.”

And yet nowhere on the Evangelicals for Harris website can you find any evangelical raising a concern about any of this. Instead, you find supporters praising her wisdom in holding these views. The group’s site quotes one female pastor from an LGBTQ-affirming church saying:

“Harris honored my religious voice as I intended for her to hear it, a deep valuing of American religious liberty and reproductive freedoms. … The vice president made clear her own support for reproductive health for all Americans alongside her ongoing commitments to religious liberty.”

Many readers will no doubt be concerned about how all this affects the presidential race this November. While that is an important question in its own right, my concerns are primarily theological. It would be a shame for Evangelicals for Harris to no longer be for Christ as a result of the messaging of this group.

What this website describes is not the faith “once for all committed to the saints” (Jude 3). It’s barbarism and syncretism in the service of partisan politics. It is wrong for any Christian to portray this kind of message as if it were in any way faithful to the Christian gospel. It is, in fact, a betrayal of the gospel. This isn’t evangelical. It’s not even Christian. Don’t fall for it.