Matt Chandler says Christians easily 'manipulated,' 'controlled' by GOP for votes
Megachurch pastor also slams political Left as 'morally reprehensible and demonic'
Are Christians being exploited by the Republican Party?
Pastor Matt Chandler of The Village Church made that assertion in an Oct. 6 sermon titled "Thrones & Thorns – Week 1," in which he urged Christians to critically assess the Republican Party's approach to their values.
Chandler, 50, criticized the GOP for what he says was a strategic co-opting of the Christian community. "In 1972, go read their Charter, not a single word about God or abortion in there,” he said. “They were losing elections, they developed a strategy in the '70s to co-opt us and make us their people.”
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The executive chairman of the Acts 29 church planting network also emphasized that while many within the Republican Party do not genuinely represent Christian beliefs, they’re more than willing to represent Evangelical voters.
“They know we're easily manipulated, we are easily worked into a frenzy, we can be controlled by them,” said Chandler. “They are not for us. They do not all believe what we believe.”
Chandler was careful to also criticize the legislative policies of the political Left, which he characterized as "morally reprehensible and demonic,” in an apparent reference to pro-abortion Democrats.
“I'm not talking about conspiracy theories, I'm talking about legislative action of a worldview that goes back to the gods of the Old Testament,” he explained, comparing today’s climate of sexual promiscuity with “feeding children” to Moloch, the god of the Canaanites described in the Old Testament.
“There was a whole pattern of worship with the Baal and all these other gods where there was all this sexual promiscuity that ended up in all sorts of terrible things,” Chandler added. “But then that's OK, because you could just feed the god, you could feed your kid to Moloch, you could just go sacrifice your kid on his altar.
“So be as perverse and dirty and gross as you want and then whatever comes of that you don't have to bear that responsibility just throw it into the fires of Moloch. Is that not what's happening right now?”
Chandler proceeded to condemn such a worldview as anathema to orthodox Christianity.
"This is a worldview that's incompatible with what we believe as Christians," he asserted.
Despite the intense political landscape, Chandler stressed the importance of not allowing emotions to dictate faith-driven responses, saying, "They're trying to appeal to our emotions and whip us into a fear/anger frenzy. This is a manipulative game that has been used by tyrannical governments across history — ‘make them angry, make them afraid, they'll do what we want.’
"Don't buy it," he added. “Don't buy it.”
The message was as political as any Chandler has delivered since he returned to the pulpit following a tumultuous period in 2022 after he announced that he would be taking a temporary “leave of absence” due to his use of inappropriate language in Instagram messages to a woman who is not his wife.
Though the messages were not sexual or romantic, Chandler said their conversations were "unguarded and unwise." He added that the familiarity and joking in the messages also revealed "some unhealth" in him.
Village Church elders said in a statement at the time that the messages exchanged over Instagram had "crossed a line."
“We are strong proponents of brothers and sisters in Christ being friends, but there are boundaries around what’s appropriate in these kinds of friendships. A pastoral role requires a greater awareness of those boundaries,” the elders said.
The messages, they added, "revealed that Matt did not use language appropriate for a pastor, and he did not model a behavior that we expect from him.”
Chandler returned to the pulpit of Village Church, a Dallas-area multi-campus Southern Baptist megachurch, in December 2022.
