CNN wasn’t the problem for once — but its viewers sure were.
When a Christian church opened its doors to the liberal network for a report posted to YouTube on Friday, the church’s leaders were so ready for a “hit piece” that they’d insisted on recording the segment being recorded, just in case anything important was left on the cutting room floor.
The “hit piece” never materialized, but the “hate pieces” sure did.
In a video published Tuesday, Doug Wilson, pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, expressed gratitude for the CNN production, but described a tide of antagonism that deluged the church when the report went public.
“The CNN crew labored to be fair to both sides,” Wilson said. “A fair amount of their audience felt no such restraint.
“They filled up comment threads with vitriol. They swarmed the phone lines to give our church secretary a boatload of obscene messages to delete.
“They subscribed us to porn sites.”
Even while describing the outrageous behavior, Wilson still managed to take the harassment in stride.
“The letters section of this blog received a bunch of mini-screeds and uncalled-for comments about my tummy.”
The church has views on biblical ethics in the modern world and relations between the sexes that are considerably out of the mainstream of current American culture. For instance, some leaders in the church oppose an individual right to vote for women in favor of a household-based system of voting.
CNN’s report highlighted the most sensational aspects, no doubt with the intention of painting the church in freakish colors. It even trotted out a liberal theologian — a woman in a clerical collar, no less — to offer an opposing point of view. (Nothing gives liberals a fleeting thrill of religious passion more than the sight of a woman in a clerical collar. It pushes buttons they didn’t even know they had.)
But the report overall wasn’t half bad — by CNN standards at least. Conservatives understand that left-wing bias is baked into the network’s DNA.
But from Wilson’s description, CNN’s viewers reacted as though the network had just broadcast a revival of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of Will,” with Moscow, Idaho, filling for Nuremberg, Germany, circa 1935.
Check out his complete video here:
CNN viewers “had their serene bubble of universal tolerance and love interrupted with this report from outside,” Wilson said.
“The world witnessed the eruption of hundreds of little hate geysers.”
But he noted that the lesson was useful.
“This is the kind of venom that reveals the true nature of what is going on,” he said.
Americans don’t need to subscribe to the views of Wilson’s church to see his point. They don’t even need to share conservative politics, though that would help.
Because what he described is mob rule attacking a belief the mob finds unacceptable — the same ignorant, self-justifying kind of mobs that stoned Christians in the early days of the church or toppled statues of American military heroes during the Black Lives Matter madness of 2020.
And as the founding fathers of the United States understood, mob rule is as dangerous an enemy to liberty as any English king could be. (That’s beyond CNN’s comprehension.)
Do you trust CNN?
In his video, Wilson perfectly summarized the position of CNN viewers who attacked his church, and in doing so, he perfectly summarized the position of the progressive left as a whole.
“When they say ‘democracy,’ they mean ‘tyranny.’ When they say ‘love,’ they mean ‘coercion.’ When they say ‘liberty,’ we can hear the clanking of the chains.
“When they say ‘dialogue,’ they mean for us to shut up. When they say ‘free your spirit,’ what they really mean is ‘obey the demons.’”
And that, in a nutshell, is what conservative Christians are up against when it comes to the modern left and its stranglehold over cultural, media, and academic institutions.
CNN and its fellow propagandists hardly even have to do the work anymore.
Their audiences are doing it for them.
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