Filmmaker Judd Saul has worked on a number of vital documentary projects. But his latest, Enemies Within the Church, investigates something he discovered almost by accident: Leftists have purposefully invaded the church to promote communist and Marxist views via propaganda.
In 2017, Saul had just finished directorial work on a documentary called The Enemies Within, a film based on a book by Trevor Loudon profiling 20 U.S. senators and more than 100 representatives and their ties to the Communist Party USA, the Democratic Socialists of America and the Workers’ World Party. The filmmaker had also just completed two other short documentaries about antifa, a far left-wing organization that teamed up with Islam and the far-left political agenda in America.
Exhausted and longing for a break from work, Saul returned to his hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, for some rest and relaxation. But what he discovered there shocked him to the core of his soul.
It also led to his next big film project, one he admits he would have preferred there had been no need for.
When Saul walked into the Southern Baptist church he had previously attended, the pastor preached what the filmmaker calls a “pro-Black Lives Matter social justice sermon.”
“Naturally, being experienced in how the left operates, their talking points and how they work, all of these red flags started going up with me,” Saul says.
“I thought, You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says. “Where is this guy getting this garbage? Where is he getting his information? That is what really spawned my digging. I said, ‘If my Southern Baptist church that everyone once thought was conservative is now teaching this garbage, wow.’ I couldn’t understand where it was coming from.”
Targeting the Church
From his work on The Enemies Within, Saul says he quickly picked up on how to discern the catch phrases and the lingo of the socialist, Marxist, left-leaning agenda and its methods of indoctrination. And what he saw in his little Southern Baptist church stunned him.
“I’m looking around the room, and everyone is nodding their heads, and they were applauding,” Saul says. “They’re agreeing with everything that the pastor said just because the pastor was saying it. That just didn’t sit right with me.
“I went through a long process of talking to the leadership, saying, ‘Hey, this is my experience,'” he explains. “‘I just got off the road documenting this.’ We had interviewed KGB agents, we had interviewed former CIA agents, and I gave them a long list of explanations and things of the roots of Black Lives Matter, where the organization comes from and the roots of socialism.
“So essentially, this young pastor told me to my face that Marxism isn’t all bad; [Karl] Marx had some really good ideas,” Saul says. “I knew right then that this was much deeper than just one pastor who’s just misunderstanding things and wants to try to address a relevant cultural situation. This guy had been indoctrinated from the beginning. It was very shocking. It was very disheartening.
“After you hear that, you ask yourself, ‘Who is this guy reading? Where is he getting his information from?’ That’s when we started doing our digging.”
Shortly after, Saul prompted Loudon, who had done vast amounts of research into leftist, communist organizations and activity, to investigate “known leftists who had infiltrated the church” to promote their Marxist, communist agenda.
As they continued to dig, Saul, Loudon and a team of others noticed a “blending of far left-wing activists into conservative Christian institutions”—actual leftist activists preaching and teaching in conservative Christian institutions.
As the trailer for Enemies Within the Church proclaims, the mission of the Marxist and socialist advocates, especially in the United States, is to “completely demolish Western civilization and rebuild it in a ‘just’ society.”
And what better place to target than the church, which helped spark the foundation of America in its early years and build it into a free democratic society?
The pro-choice abortion agenda, the LGBTQ agenda, critical race theory and racism to divide the country have become huge cogs in Satan’s plan to destroy America from within. All of these messages, Saul says, are infecting the church and its ability to effectively do what it is supposed to do: preach Christ and the gospel.
“A theme in the film is when you go to put the puzzle together, you have to look at the box top, correct?” Saul asks. “But what if you’re putting together a puzzle, and they switched the box top? What we’re saying is that the far left—and I don’t even call them ‘brothers and sisters in Christ,’ I call them ‘subversives’—has gone in and have deliberately switched the box top of Christianity and what authentic Christianity needs to look like. Right now, it’s not that. It’s something else.”
Exposing the Truth
Through overwhelming evidence, Enemies Within the Church exposes these shocking truths (as shared by the film’s narrator):
- “Churches today have become where universities were 10 years ago—heavily Marxist. Many are not quite there yet, but they are well on their way. Many of the seminaries and Bible colleges are definitely already there.”
- “Pastors are being brainwashed. The message they should be preaching about going out and taking the world and repenting of your sin and receiving Christ has been replaced by the weight of racism or sexism or homophobia.”
- “The future damage of what we are doing right now will be enormous.”
- “The entire fabric of family, personal wealth, private property, all of
- those things are out the door. Everything is the state, and the state is God.”
- They [the left] don’t define justice the same way as in the Scriptures. There is going to be equality all right, and it’s going to be a totalitarian, Marxist justice.”
What film principals Saul, Loudon and Cary Gordon, a charismatic pastor, discovered during the course of making Enemies Within the Church is that the themes of social justice and the LGBTQ agenda have taken over not only the secular classrooms of university-level education in America but also Christian institutions. Those ideas have now trickled into not only churches but entire denominations as well.
The documentary explains that Harry Hay, a Communist who founded the modern LGBTQ movement, was instrumental in the homosexual revolution that has taken place and is now not only accepted but glorified in American society today.
“How do you break down the American family and American Christianity?” the film asks. “One of the best ways to do it is to turn homosexuals into an accepted minority that must be atoned to; that must be both accepted into your society and also be made above normal. They must have more rights than anyone else.”
“The LGBTQ movement, as they call it, has made huge inroads in churches in this country,” Loudon says. “Many churches have gone from holding homosexuality as a sin to welcoming homosexuals into their church and apologizing for their past, unaccepting behavior.”
Sin, no matter how serious or menial it is perceived to be, is still sin, is it not? Not according to former Southern Baptist Convention President J.D. Greear, who, in the following statement, claimed to know the mind of God: “It would appear that quite a few other sins are more egregious sins in God’s eyes than homosexuality,” Greear once said. “Jen Wilkins, one of our favorite Bible teachers … said we ought to whisper what the Bible whispers about and we ought to shout about what the Bible shouts about. The Bible appears to whisper more when it comes to sexual sin compared to things like materialism and pride.”
Albert Mohler, the current president of Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, repented—yes, repented—for denouncing same-sex orientation and for having taken a biblical stance on homosexual behavior.
“One of the embarrassments that I have to reveal, and I have written about these things for 30 years, is that I have to say that I got it wrong,” Mohler said in an article he wrote in 2014 called “Sexual Orientation and the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
“I had previously denied the existence of sexual orientation,” Mohler wrote. “I, along with many other evangelicals, did so because we did not want to accept the sexual identity structure that so often goes with sexual orientation. I still reject that notion of sexual identity. But I repented of denying the existence of sexual orientation because denying it was deeply confusing to people struggling with same-sex attraction. Biblical Christians properly resist any suggestion that our will can be totally separated from sexual desire, but we really do understand that the will is not a sufficient explanation for a pattern of sexual attraction. Put simply, most people experiencing a same-sex attraction tell of discovering it within themselves at a very early age, certainly within early puberty. As they experience it, a sexual attraction or interest simply ‘happens,’ and they come to know it.”
Jon Harris, author and host of the Conversations That Matter podcast, says he is dumbfounded at how Mohler could flip-flop his stance on the subject.
“In 2005, he [Mohler] said the notion of sexual orientation was a key thing in promoting the homosexual agenda in America,” he says. “The idea that people are born gay: Mohler said that if you accept this, you’re giving up the farm. Now he charges the church with a form of homophobia, that the church lied about homosexuality. He completely changed his views on homosexuality.
“The old Al Mohler would fire the new Al Mohler,” says E. Ray Moore, executive director of Exodus Mandate. “He was somebody I did look up to. It’s shocking to a high degree that he had a real involvement in this.”
Strengthening the Remnant
Saul says not only have professors at Christian institutions taught the victimization of members of the LGBTQ community but also the victimization of minorities in America through ideas such as critical race theory.
It has become a divisive issue in the U.S., and Saul says the division is getting worse in American churches because critical race theory has infected many churches, Bible colleges and seminaries. In fact, it’s become an accepted and welcome part of theology taught at these institutions. Rachel Dozier, a student pastor at Central Christian Church in Arizona, has embraced the “woke” position that many in the church are worshipping a “white” Jesus, and she does so with passion.
“If you follow a white Jesus, man, I think God wants to do something in your heart today,” Dozier says in a clip from Enemies Within the Church. “Let Jesus rob you of what you always thought to be true. Let Him rob you of your privilege. Let Him rob you so you can see clearly the kingdom of heaven and what it’s supposed to look like as we embrace our Black brothers and sisters and those that are suffering from oppression every single day. Jesus is for everyone. Jesus is for justice.”
But Micah Sample, a former student at Indiana Wesleyan University, says he would not have attended that school had he known what it stood for.
“This was not a place that was teaching Christian truth,” Sample says in the film. “This was a place that was meant to deconstruct Christian truth. Those people want to see the Wesleyan Church changed into something it is not. They want it to be a place where the dogma of wokeness is supreme.
“My peers at Indiana Wesleyan University who were taught this Marxism are going to spread it throughout their churches, and they are going to have this widespread impact,” Sample says. “But it’s not going to be for the glory of Christ. It’s not going to be as a witness to the truth. It’s going to be as a detriment to the truth and they are going to lead people away from Christ. That is potentially the most heartbreaking thing in all of this. They are going to be the blind leading the blind.”
“I don’t think it’s possible in a Christian context to talk about reconciliation without likewise talking about justice,” Jarvis Williams, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says in another clip from Enemies Within the Church. “We are working together, living together in love and Spirit-empowered love. That means we care about things like economic inequality. It doesn’t mean that you are justified by economic equality, but that does mean the gospel transforms holistically.”
Dr. Russell Fuller, a former professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says Williams is contaminating biblical principles with his own ideas.
“Jarvis Williams basically teaches a critical race theory-infused gospel where he takes critical race theory principles, and he takes the Bible and finds parallels, and he creates his own racial reconciliation,” Fuller says. “That’s what he calls it. ‘It’s part of the gospel,’ he says, but it’s not. What he is actually saying is to take down white Jesus and platform minorities because they are not being platformed. If you are white, you have to shut up and listen to other perspectives because you are not able to ascertain the truth the same way. He incorporates all of this into his reconciliation doctrine.”
Saul says professors like Williams are overlooking a huge issue.
“The problem is that we are all wretched sinners, deserving of hell,” he explains. “But because Jesus Christ came down and died on the cross for our sins, we have an opportunity to go to heaven. The ultimate victim is Jesus, who bore all of our sins.
“But what the social justice gospel is teaching is that we are the victims. Everyone’s a victim. … they’re teaching everybody to identify themselves according to their victimhood, their victim status. It promotes a constant circular division, a constant endless circle of tension.”
More than that, the film states, “when you preach victimization, it always leads to vengeance and violence.” An attitude of “us against them” or “I want my pound of flesh” develops.
Those who enjoy a full and vital relationship with Jesus Christ have daunting circumstances to face. But with God’s help, Saul says, there’s nothing His remnant can’t overcome.
“Buckle up; it’s going to be a tough ride,” Saul says. “What I believe God said to me with this film is to put it out there, and the people who are going to listen will listen. Others simply won’t.
“This is a last call to either change things in the U.S., or it’s going to wake up the remnant to deal with the ensuing culture and the chaos that is happening in our country,” he says. “But it’s going to strengthen the remnant. I think we’re seeing the separating of the wheat from the chaff. And we are certainly seeing it right now in the church.”
WATCH: Visit enemies.charismamag.com to watch Enemies Within the Church.
Shawn A. Akers is the online editor for Charisma Media.
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