When a mob broke into a church and disrupted Christian worship, some of evangelicalism’s most prominent leaders said nothing. But when a brief, accidental clip in a Trump video triggered progressive outrage because it broke a racial taboo, those same leaders rushed to condemn POTUS. And that contrast says a lot about what’s wrong with the old class of evangelical leadership.
This article is not about memes or media hysteria. It is about moral authority. Selective outrage, false accusations, and enforced taboos have become tools for policing Christians while real evils go unchallenged. When leaders fear progressive sensibilities more than God, they forfeit the right to lead.
A few weeks ago, a mob kicked down the doors of Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. You might have heard about it (just kidding, you definitely have heard about it). It was kind of a big deal. Actual rioters physically broke into an actual church building, and not in the Islamic Third World somewhere, but in America, of all places. It left many believers shaken, wondering what the world has come to, and how vulnerable they would be if the same thing happened in their own sanctuary on Sunday morning.
You might recall, especially if you’ve followed my writing since back in the Pulpit & Pen days, that John Piper once famously wrote in a blog post about gun control that he “didn’t know what he’d do” if an assailant broke into his own home, implying that he wasn’t sure that defending his home or protecting his wife was biblical if it required violence. Piper has always been adverse to self-defense.
It was more than ten years ago that I wrote, “A Response to John Piper: Why Gun Ownership is Biblical and Good.” That article was a response to his rebukes of Liberty University for letting their students carry concealed firearms. On that occasion, Piper sent off emails to Liberty’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., and had a phone call with him to express his grave concern that the institution had taken a posture of self-defense. He then wrote an article with nine sub-points for why Christians should happily embrace being victims (that’s my paraphrase).
We again witnessed Piper’s moral unclarity when it came to protecting the flock of God just a few weeks ago. That’s because the church that was accosted by Don Lemon’s gay mob was affiliated with Piper’s own church and was just down the street. How did Piper respond?
Piper didn’t issue an emergency tweet. He gave no kind of serious statement. No call for Christians to defend themselves, their buildings, or their congregations. He offered no theological reflection on the persecution of the church. He gave no demand that authorities protect houses of worship. He offered not a word about the sanctity of the assembly or the physical space where God’s people gather. The mob came for a church in his own backyard, and America’s most famous Calvinist found nothing to say about it.
Fast forward a few weeks. Donald Trump’s social media team posted a video, the last minute of which was a few seconds of leftover content of a scroll vid, mocking various politicians as animals. The Obamas were briefly depicted in a jungle edit as baboons, or monkeys, gorillas, or some kind of primates (I’m not sure of my zoological accuracy). Within hours, Piper found his voice. He quoted Russell Moore’s condemnation of Trump approvingly. Piper proudly and loudly signaled that the video represented a serious moral violation requiring Christian response and condemnation. All of a sudden, the man who wasn’t sure he’d protect his wife in an armed home invasion was able to find his voice and strongly condemn a “racist” tweet.
THE HOAX ITSELF: BEARING FALSE WITNESS
Let’s be clear about what actually happened with the video, because the facts matter and the lies matter more (read more at Protestia).
Trump’s Truth Social account posted a one-minute video about election integrity. Because Truth Social auto-queues the next video, the clip accidentally captured one or two seconds of an entirely different AI-generated meme at the end. That meme showed multiple Democratic politicians as various animals, with Trump as a lion. Biden appeared as a baboon. Hillary as a warthog. The Obamas briefly in jungle imagery.
That’s it. It was a clipping error. A trivial technical mistake where the platform’s autoplay feature captured the beginning of the next video. The fact is, Trump did not share a “racist video of the Obamas as apes.” He did not promote it. He did not select it. He didn’t even know it was there.
Left-wing outlets and “Republicans Against Trump” accounts ripped out that final second, removed all context, and lied to the world: “Trump posted a racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.”
It was a hoax from the first moment. And Russell Moore, John Piper, and every other evangelical leader who rushed to condemn knew it was a hoax. They saw the evidence. They knew it was a clipping error. They knew the same video showed white Democrats as animals. They knew the context. And they lied anyway.
This is not a minor mistake. This is not “oops, I got it wrong.” This is willful bearing of false witness (Exodus 20:16). When someone repeatedly lies in public, refuses correction, and doubles down, Scripture gives us a category for that behavior: unrepentant sin.
Watch what happened next, because this reveals everything about how these men operate. When Megan Basham got part of the story wrong, she immediately said, “I was mistaken. I apologize.”
But when John Piper’s account amplified Russell Moore’s lie with the comment, “One not to be so afraid of sounding ‘quasi-woke’ that one cannot agree with Russell Moore on this,” did he retract? Did he apologize? Did he acknowledge the false accusation?
No. Instead, Piper’s account flooded the timeline with generic Bible verses, strategically deployed to avoid accountability.
False teachers often cloak error in a sea of truth. That’s how they disarm discernment.
David Morrill, who basically made this story what it is and got to the truth waaaaaay before everyone else, broke it down at Protestia this way, explaining the different levels of bad actors in evangelicalism’s leadership queue:
The Liars (Russell Moore, Phil Vischer, Sho Baraka): They knew the truth and lied anyway. They saw the evidence, understood the context, and still pushed the false narrative. This is bearing false witness. This is 1 Corinthians 5 territory. Mark and avoid.
The Cowards (Jack Graham and the “third-way platform pastors”): They didn’t affirm the hoax, but they refused to expose it. Instead, they posted vapid boilerplate about how “racism is bad” and “we should love everyone” without once acknowledging that Trump didn’t post the video in question. What does this signal to the Left? That all you have to do is yell “racism” and these men will fold like a cheap suit. They function as useful idiots for progressive activists.
The Careerists (John Piper): They amplified the lie, got exposed, and then buried the controversy under a flood of safe content rather than repent publicly. They will never acknowledge error. They will never correct the record. They’ll just wait for the news cycle to move on while maintaining their institutional credibility.
As Morrill pointed out, you do not get to lie in order to twerk your virtue. You do not get to manufacture racism. You do not get to bear false witness against your neighbor and call it “discernment.” You do not get to condemn a man based on a hoax and then refuse to repent when exposed.
This ape video fiasco is not a trivial culture war spat. It’s a mirror revealing who among evangelical leadership loves truth, who loves their reputation, and who loves their political tribe more than Christ.
THE PATTERN OF SILENCE AND SPEECH
Barack Obama spent eight years promoting abortion, celebrating Obergefell from the White House, forcing nuns to pay for contraceptives, weaponizing federal agencies against conservatives, lighting up the White House in rainbow colors, and fundamentally transforming American government into a progressive enforcement mechanism. They found nothing urgent during that administration to seriously complain about. They issued no criticisms that would cost them access to evangelical institutions or mainstream platforms.
Meanwhile, Trump’s team posted a video where politicians appear as various animals, the exact same video that showed white Democrats as a warthog, a baboon, and a giraffe, and suddenly it’s time for prophetic denunciation. Immediate response. Public condemnation. Clear moral stakes. No nuance about context or intent. Just alignment with progressive activists in declaring this beyond the pale.
Apparently, when mobs attack churches in their own cities, evangelical leaders find sophisticated reasons for silence. But when conservative politicians violate progressive taboos about racial imagery, those same leaders find their prophetic voice immediately. What grieves them? What provokes urgent response? It’s not the persecution of Christians, not the murder of children, and not the celebration of sexual chaos. No, it was depicting black people as primates.
JESUS AND THE PHARISEES
Christ had a specific phrase for this phenomenon: “You blind guides, straining out gnats and swallowing camels” (Matthew 23:24). The religious leaders of His day obsessed over minutiae while ignoring massive evils. They ensured ritual hand washing while devouring widows’ houses. They meticulously tithed garden herbs while plotting murder. They maintained ceremonial purity while rejecting the Messiah standing smack dab in front of them.
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What all that revealed is that their actual religion has nothing to do with God’s law and everything to do with maintaining their position within a system that rewarded compliance and punished resistance.
Moore and Piper can tolerate abortion on demand, state persecution of Christians, chemical castration of confused children, and the systematic corruption of every institution they claim to care about. But they cannot tolerate a violation of progressive taboos about monkey imagery, even when accidental, even when contextually defensible, and even when the same video depicted white politicians as animals too.
So let’s talk about what God’s law actually condemns, shall we? Here’s a list: murder, sexual immorality, idolatry, bearing false witness, blasphemy, homosexuality, coveting. These all carry clear biblical prohibitions with explicit penalties. But what does God’s law say about depicting politicians as animals in political satire? Nothing. Zero. Zilch. Check Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy. It’s not there. I can’t find a single prohibition like, “Thou shalt not depict this particular race as this particular animal.”
Watch what grieves evangelical leaders. Watch what provokes their immediate response. It’s not the things God actually condemns. No, it’s the things progressive academics decided were taboo sometime between the Civil Rights Act and the invention of Twitter. These taboos materialized out of the post-war consensus, got workshopped in critical race theory seminars, and now get enforced by evangelical leaders with more zeal than Charlton Heston with the two tables in his arms and lightning bolts behind him.
THE AUXILIARY PRIESTHOOD
The modern progressive movement isn’t just a political coalition. It’s a complete religious system. It has sacred doctrines, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion; original sin, such as whiteness and Western civilization; paths to salvation, such as DEI training and “doing the work”; unforgivable sins, such as racism and transphobia; and a priestly class of activists, journalists, academics, and HR departments to enforce those rituals and rebuke taboos. It even has excommunication rites like cancellation, deplatforming, and economic destruction.
Russell Moore doesn’t maintain his position at Christianity Today by defending biblical orthodoxy against progressive encroachment. He maintains it by reliably enforcing progressive moral categories on Christians who step out of line. He’s the controlled opposition that makes secular elites comfortable keeping evangelicals around. He proves they can be managed.
When Moore or Piper rushes to condemn violations of progressive taboos, they’re not exercising biblical discernment. They are demonstrating their utility to the system, despite the system barely hanging on by a thread. Moore and Piper, along with every other leader who condemned POTUS over the tweet, prove they recognize the progressive establishment’s authority to define moral categories of right and wrong. They are showing the elite that they can be trusted to keep the dangerous Christians in check with a good rebuke or two. Obviously, they can’t. No one listens to them anymore. But a rare moment like this puts them back into the sphere of relevance for a few news cycles. They might even get quoted in the Washington Post or the New York Times if they can craft the correct Trump rebuke. These are moments they live for.
When progressive outrage machines manufacture a controversy, these evangelicals increasingly validate it by treating their concerns as legitimate Christian issues requiring a response. “Aren’t you going to rebuke the monkey thing, too?” They treat these “racist” taboos as binding on Christians. At some point, society determined that depicting black people as monkeys was racist, probably because of a certain physical resemblance that we are supposed to awkwardly deny and recognize at the same time.
When a Christian leader with Piper’s credentials says the monkey video matters enough to publicly condemn POTUS, he’s not just expressing personal offense. He’s teaching other Christians that progressive racial categories are real and binding. He’s training believers that violations of these taboos constitute serious moral failures requiring repentance. They are functioning as priests of their religion, baptizing their secular sin categories in Christian vocabulary.
WE DID NOT AGREE TO THESE RULES
Here’s what needs to be said clearly: we never agreed to play by these rules. We don’t have to start now.
The entire progressive moral framework rests on a choice we supposedly made to accept their definitions, validate their categories, and submit to their enforcement. But we never made that choice. They just started acting like we did, and evangelical leaders went along with it.
When did Christians vote to make depicting people as primates an unforgivable sin? When did we covenant together that violations of post-war academic consensus about racial imagery constitute serious moral failures requiring public repentance? When did we decide that progressive definitions of racism, equity, and inclusion would bind our consciences?
We didn’t. They invented the rules, evangelical leaders adopted them, and now they’re demanding we comply.
But here’s the thing about rules you never agreed to follow: you’re not bound by them. You can simply refuse. Not by being deliberately offensive for its own sake, but by calmly, clearly denying that these categories have any authority over Christian conscience. Go head and say it, “I recognize no monkey-depiction rule in the Holy Bible. I reject this as a sin category.”
God defines sin through Scripture. God sets moral priorities through His revealed law. Christians answer to Him, not to academic consensus that emerged from critical race theory seminars and got enforced by HR departments. When evangelical leaders rush to condemn violations of progressive taboos, they’re not defending biblical truth. They’re enforcing foreign law on God’s people.
The correct response is jurisdictional refusal: “I don’t recognize your authority to declare new sins or demand ritual repentance. Your selective outrage is transparent. I’m not participating.”
This isn’t about whether depicting people as animals is kind, wise, or helpful. It’s about who gets to define sin and virtue, who sets moral priorities, and who binds the conscience of believers. Answer that question wrong and you’ve surrendered everything that matters. Answer it right and you’re free to ignore their entire enforcement apparatus.
We never chose their rules. We can choose not to follow them.
EGYPT-HEARTED LEADERS
After the Exodus, an entire generation died in the wilderness before Israel could enter the Promised Land. Why? Because they couldn’t stop looking back to Egypt. They’d internalized slavery so completely that they kept romanticizing their captivity. When faced with challenges in the wilderness, their instinct was to retreat to what they knew, even though what they knew was bondage.
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