Every now and then, legacy media outlets predict that the Religious Left is rising in opposition to the Religious Right, suggesting that a movement for big-government “compassion” will redefine the face of faith-based politics in America.

Yet these movements fizzle out, while conservative Christianity remains steadfast.

The nonprofit Faith in Public Life has become the latest example of this trend. Launched in 2005 and envisioned as “a sort of organizational anchor for the Religious Left,” Faith and Public Life will be closing its doors at the end of October, because fundraising opportunites have become “inconsistent.”

Faith in Public Life organized a Compassion Forum featuring Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008, and helped organize support for Obamacare as the “Affordable Care Act” passed through Congress.

The organization also launched the political career of Jennifer Butler, a minister in the left-leaning Presbyterian Church (USA), who founded the group in 2005 and served as its executive director until July 2023. Obama named Butler to an advisory council in 2015, and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign hired her as its national faith engagement director.

Faith in Public… Astroturf?

Faith in Public Life didn’t grow out of a grassroots religious revival. Powerful organizations on the Left helped launch and sustain this alternative to the Religious Right.

John Podesta, who served as White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, founded the Center for American Progress in 2003, aiming to create a Democrat version of the Heritage Foundation.

“The Center for American Progress was proud to participate in the creation of Faith in Public Life in 2005 and to support the organization and its important work,” Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, a senior fellow at the center, told the Daily Signal last week.

Why would Podesta want to found a Religious Left organization in 2005? President George W. Bush had just defeated John Kerry, buoyed in large part by conservative Christians.

The Center for American Progress reportedly envisioned Faith in Public Life as “a sort of organizational anchor for the Religious Left, a strategy hub that would coordinate disparate groups and develop overarching media strategies for campaigns.”

Hungarian American billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations gave more than $2 million to the group from 2017 to 2021.

A Catholic Spring?

Podesta had also suggested that he helped to found another left-leaning Christian organization in order to launch a “Catholic Spring” similar to the Arab Spring.

Sandy Newman, president and founder of the nonprofit Voices for Progress, wrote to Podesta in February 2012 that “there needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church.”

“We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a movement like this,” he replied. Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which reportedly received at least $450,000 from Soros’ Open Society Institute from 2006 to 2010, dissolved in 2017.

“We remember the previous scandal that was revealed 10 years ago—when John Podesta wanted to create a ‘Catholic spring’ in which Catholics would revolt against the priests and bishops of their own Church,” Josh Mercer, co-founder and vice president of advocacy at CatholicVote, told the Daily Signal. “Groups like these are not authentically Catholic but explicitly created to manipulate believers.”

“While news that Faith in Public Life is finally folding is welcome, there are still plenty of other deceitful operators out there,” he warned. “They pose as Christians to push decidedly un-Christian agendas on a well-meaning and unsuspecting faithful.”

“There is still a lot of work to do before this cottage industry posts a ‘going out of business’ sign,” Mercer concluded.

Faith in Public Life is folding, but the organization’s founder, Jennifer Butler, has founded another organization. Faith in Democracy seems a clear echo of Butler’s previous nonprofit, as the group aims to “resist the religious right, confront religious nationalism, and defend democracy against authoritarianism.”

What About the Religious Right?

Meanwhile, organizations on the Religious Right have persisted for decades, and show little sign of closing. Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council remain active after decades, and even the Southern Poverty Law Center’s decision to put them on a “hate map” hasn’t led them to throw in the towel.

Why this mismatch?

Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council were not conceived in Washington think tanks as efforts to replicate an existing political movement. They emerged more organically from pre-existing constituencies: churches, pastors, homeschooling families, pro-life advocates, and religious conservatives.

The Religious Left arguably has at least one more organic nonprofit: Sojourners. Unlike Faith in Public Life or Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, Sojourners started when a group of students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School formed an intentional Christian community in the early 1970s around concerns about the Vietnam War and social justice. Unlike Faith in Public Life, Sojourners shows no signs of closing anytime soon.

As a conservative Christian, I tend to think that the Religious Right has an edge on the Religious Left because the Left has drifted away from orthodox Christianity and toward ideologies that align with Secular Humanism.

As a journalist, however, I see Faith in Public Life and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good as fundamentally different from Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and even Sojourners.

More than two decades after Democratic strategists set out to build an institutional counterpart to the Religious Right, Faith in Public Life is closing its doors and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good is gone.

John Podesta’s failed experiments don’t illustrate that there is no constituency on the Religious Left, but they do suggest that authentic religious movements are difficult to engineer from the top down.

The Left can pour money into its nonprofit apparatus. It can select charismatic leaders. It can organize activists who are sympathetic to its message.

But it can’t build a Religious Left out of thin air.

Enduring faith movements don’t begin in boardrooms. They begin with true believers.

This article is a commentary on news initially published on The Daily Signal.

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As Artificial Intelligence shapes more aspects of Americans’ private lives, a prominent activist group is seeking to influence what Large Language Models can and cannot say to their users.

Americans agree that AI should not encourage users to harm themselves, but what if, in the name of preventing self-harm, activist groups seek to embed their truth claims into AI systems?

That’s exactly what the LGBTQ activist group GLAAD has done with its framework for “LGBTQ representation and safety in AI,” released in June.

The report raises important questions about data privacy and the potential for AI to enable discrimination, but it goes far beyond merely calling for AI systems to be more inclusive. GLAAD seeks to influence the “foundation” of AI systems, to “ensure their core architectures do not produce fundamentally flawed or harmful data.” The report includes recommendations for developers, targeting “training data” and “alignment protocols.”

“AI companies must continually update training data sets and fine-tune models to reflect how hate and misinformation evolve online,” the group recommends. “To better protect marginalized communities, models must have regular context updates as new terms, language, and social and cultural tensions emerge.”

Of course, keeping up to date on fighting “hate” and “misinformation” requires “collaborative partnerships” with “LGBTQ subject-matter experts” and “civil society organizations.” Who better than GLAAD to help these AI companies implement GLAAD’s recommendations?

It seems GLAAD wasn’t referring to conservative Christian organizations that might disagree with its approach, however.

A Revealing Case Study

The report offers a “case study” about “misinformation” on “conversion therapy.”

The report faults Meta for moving toward AI that could “articulate both sides of a contentious issue” and “respond to a variety of different viewpoints without passing judgment.” When GLAAD filled in a prompt asking about “unwanted same-sex attraction,” Meta’s Llama AI recommended “conversion therapy.” (Meta has shifted from Llama to the model Muse Spark, which the Center for AI Safety rated highly for its lack of political bias.)

Critics often define “conversion therapy” broadly, while therapists and patients draw distinctions between coercive practices and voluntary talk therapy sought by adults. The key point isn’t which definition prevails, but whether AI systems should be permitted to discuss competing perspectives on a contested issue.

“Both-sidesism that equates anti-LGBTQ junk-science with well-established facts and research is not only misleading — it legitimizes harmful falsehoods,” the GLAAD report states. “Following established medical consensus and international human rights standards is not a matter of political or ideological bias, but a requirement for AI product safety, data integrity, and basic accuracy and faithfulness.”

GLAAD is doing more than just condemning a therapeutic approach here. The activist group is drawing a line in the sand, saying that no AI model should be allowed to recommend certain forms of therapy, even if a user might be seeking that option. In other words, Meta was wrong to program AI to “articulate both sides of a contentious issue,” at least in this case.

The problem is, how broadly does GLAAD define “conversion therapy?” I’ve seen cogent arguments from radical feminists that “affirmation” of a transgender identity is itself a form of “conversion therapy” because many who identify as transgender would otherwise have likely identified as gay or lesbian. I’ve also seen LGBTQ activist groups define as “conversion therapy” mainstream talk therapy intended to affirm a person’s biological sex in opposition to a discordant gender identity.

GLAAD may seek to protect vulnerable people, but insisting that AI censor therapeutic options in one particular direction amounts to declaring “what shall be orthodox” in the language model.

When GLAAD condemns “both-sidesism” here, it stops recommending safety protections and starts dictating what AI can and cannot say.

‘A Recipe for Censorship’

Ryan Bangert, senior vice president at Alliance Defending Freedom, told me that he shares some of the concerns highlighted in the GLAAD report, but he argued the group is demanding “social control of large language models.”

“We don’t want LLMs to be designed with disputed notions of various contested issues baked into the training,” he said. “That’s a recipe for censorship.”

Bangert argued that GLAAD’s recommendations amount to an effort to ensure that “their preferred view of reality is baked into the training in such a way that access to alternative viewpoints is simply unavailable.”

GLAAD has affirmatively cited the Southern Poverty Law Center in condemning ADF, for example. “The Alliance Defending Freedom is a so-called ‘legal alliance of Christian attorneys’ with a history of funding and representing cases targeting LGBTQ people, youth and protections,” the GLAAD page states.

Longtime readers will be quite familiar with the way the SPLC has weaponized its history in suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy, smearing mainstream conservatives and Christians by putting them on a “hate map” with the Klan. The SPLC has repeatedly suggested that any disagreement with its LGBTQ commitments is hate, and GLAAD seems more than happy to echo this message.

Embedding Its Ideology in AI

GLAAD’s criticism of Meta suggests a desire not just to protect people but to build a particular understanding of sexuality and gender into the operation of AI systems.

Unions and other activist groups have sought to shape AI in schools, workplaces, and government agencies, but GLAAD’s ambition is more far-reaching. It seeks influence over the training data, alignment protocols, and assumptions that determine the way AI systems process information.

If AI platforms adopt GLAAD’s recommendations, they won’t just be protecting a minority—they’ll be taking a side in the culture war.

Once GLAAD’s orthodoxy is written into the code, the possibility for debate is already over.

This article is a commentary on news initially published on The Daily Signal.

Disclosure: This newsletter may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

Many socialists don’t reject Christianity. They rewrite it.

Rather than denying Jesus’ teaching, they twist it into a mandate for government action and wealth redistribution.

That’s why socialism often functions less as a rival religion than as a Christian heresy: it begins with Christian truth and distorts it into something fundamentally different.

James Talarico, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, recently provided a nearly perfect illustration of this process.

He began by discussing a basic teaching of Jesus and ended up demanding that the government take care of people’s basic needs.

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James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, has condemned political violence, but he hasn’t yet addressed the news that members of his church reportedly wish that Thomas Matthew Crooks had been “more successful” when he opened fire at Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, two years ago.

Rev. Babs Miller, a chaplain at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin, told an undercover investigator that “we still have people in this church that wish that that young man had not just nicked [Trump’s] ear, but been more successful.”

What the Video Does Not Show

To be clear, the video does not suggest that Miller is endorsing this view. Judging by the undercover investigator’s reaction, Miller noted it as a negative fact about the church’s membership.

Talarico himself has condemned political violence. After the attempt on Trump’s life at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in April, he said, “Political violence is unacceptable in every form, and we must continue to call it out wherever it rears its ugly head.”

Yet he appears not to have called it out in response to the Babs Miller video.

A News Blindspot

The fact that Talarico’s fellow churchmembers have expressed such a sentiment seems newsworthy.

Yet the story received very little attention outside of conservative journalism. I only found it by checking the news “blindspots” revealed by Ground News.

This lack of coverage seems rather notable.

Had a prominent Republican candidate been associated with a church where members reportedly wished Barack Obama’s would-be assassin had been “more successful,” it is difficult to imagine the story receiving so little attention.

Sure, left-leaning outlets would be the major sources to cover it, but news outlets in the center would also run the story. The church would have to respond, as would the Republican candidate. Conservative outlets would also ultimately cover the story, focusing on the Republican candidate’s rightful condemnation of political violence.

Yet the Talarico story has had all the impact of a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear. Without Ground News, even I would never have stumbled upon it, and when I tried to search to find the story again, it was legitimately hard to track it down.

I found this story using Ground News, the sponsor of today’s post.

Ground News is a website and app that aims to make reading the news easier and more data-driven. It analyzes thousands of news articles daily, revealing the bias, reliability, and ownership of the outlets that cover each story.

Ground News’s blindspot feed, which shows stories disproportionately covered or ignored by one side of the political spectrum, highlighted this story.

Despite the relevance of remarks from a pastor at James Talarico’s church, most legacy media sources ignored the story. Ground News’s highlighting the stories that fall into ideological blindspots helped me discover news that hadn’t gotten the traction it deserved.

I am partnering with Ground News because of its dedication to exposing bias and educating readers and subscribers.

Subscribe to get 40% off the unlimited access Vantage Plan today using my link groundnews.com/woke or by clicking the button below.

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The Woketopus reached out to Talarico’s campaign and to St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, but neither responded to a request for comment. It doesn’t seem Talarico or the church has felt much pressure to respond to this news.

Americans should not normalize talk about political assassination, whether the target is Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Biden, or anyone else. The Butler assassination attempt rightly shocked the country, in large part because Americans instinctively reject the idea that violence is the way to handle political disagreements.

The peaceful transition of power to a fairly elected representative is the beating heart of our republican form of government.

That’s why these remarks are newsworthy: not because they can be attributed to Talarico or because they prove anything about the church as a whole, but because they reveal the temptation of political violence, and present an opportunity for both sides of the political spectrum to emphatically reject it.

If Talarico truly believes Americans must condemn political violence “wherever it rears its ugly head,” then this seems like an obvious moment for him to do so.

Disclosure: This newsletter may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

A climate alarmist group with ties to the Biden administration pledged to sue the Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump, on the same day the EPA announced it was rescinding Biden-era rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions at power plants.

“The Trump EPA is tearing down our national limits on the exten…

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How does the Left justify political violence?

Americans got a revealing clue earlier this year when agitators disrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul. The church invasion proved distrubing enough—but the aftermath has proven quite revealing, as agitators and their allies defend the attack by reframing it as an act of peaceful protest.

On Sunday, …

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Americans were rightly outraged to see the FBI publish a memo claiming a nexus between racially-motivated violent extremists and “radical traditional Catholics,” but that memo merely represented one piece of an anti-Christian group’s influence on the bureau.

The anti-Catholic memo wasn’t just a scandal because it attacked Catholics—it also reveals a long…

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If the pro-abortion agitators styling themselves “Jane’s Revenge” received critical support from an international network supporting leftist terrorism, why are Americans only learning this four years later?

The answer to this key question has a great deal to do with the left-wing groups that influenced the Biden administration, ensuring…

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The LGBTQ movement is cracking up.

Activists have insisted that the homosexual side of the movement is inseparable from advocacy for transgender ideology, but Log Cabin Republicans has challenged that assumption and the Human Right’s campaign’s response revealed just how fragile the coalition has become.

This news item is no is…

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Does freedom of the press only apply to one side of the aisle?

A large group of press freedom groups, news outlets, and watchdog organizations have raised the alarm about criminal charges against former CNN host Don Lemon for his alleged role in a church invasion. Th…

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The first arrest in the case against the Southern Poverty Law Center highlights a deeper problem in America’s “anti-hate” industry.

Federal authorities arrested former SPLC leader Heidi Beirich last week, charging her with conspiring to fraudulently funnel cash to white supremacist groups and financing her romantic relationship with a neo-Nazi leader. Th…

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A leftist lawsuit seeking to silence President Donald Trump’s commission investigating threats to religious freedom actually proved the commission’s point, and the leftist groups’ ties to the Woketopus highlight just how established this threat truly is.

The lawsuit faults the members of Trump’s commission for expressing the view that “…

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Surprise! Leftist groups are suddenly concerned about debanking—but only when it affects one of their own.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has routinely pressured financial institutions to block mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits (more on that below), while fatuously claiming that conservative fears of debanking are a “conspiracy theory.”

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When a person becomes a bureaucrat, does he then cease to be a human being?

Is a technocratic expert still subject to political passion, partisan bias, and personal conceit, or does he gain, through the arcane ministrations of “Science,” the ability to trans…

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The Left’s enforcer of diversity, equity, and inclusion is bleeding support in corporate America.

Even Microsoft, the Big Tech company with the fourth-largest market capitalization in the world and the engine behind Bill Gates’ fabulous wealth, has stopped using the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate map” to screen nonprofits for its employee matching …

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Democrats know they have a problem on transgender issues, but they’re unwilling to solve it.

A few months back, the Democratic National Committee released an “autopsy” of the 2024 presidential election. That effort acknowledged what we all understand: Donald Trump’s ad warning that Kamala Harris is for “they/them” while Trump is for “you” resonated with…

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What if I told you that an immigration group in California not only provides services for immigrants but has an affiliate in Mexico that trains them to come to the U.S., an action arm that endorses Democrats, and an “Immigrant Political Power Project” that claims to “build a voter base from scratch?”

What if I told you this nonprofit gets so much taxpaye…

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Republicans are condemning as “lawfare” the efforts of Democrat New Orleans officials to arrest Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill amid a dispute about a new law’s interpretation.

“Targeting a sitting attorney general for carrying out her official duti…

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tried to pull a fast one on the American people Tuesday.

The court upheld West Virginia’s law preventing men from competing in women’s sports, finding that the law does not constitute discrimination on the basis of sex in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

The court split along familiar i…

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“The question before the Court is: Under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, may schools maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females? In other words, may schools determine eligibility fo…

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