In 1950, a minister named Bob Pierce founded an organization called World Vision to minister to the needs of children in Korea, and in doing so provide an opportunity to share the Gospel of Christ. Today, the organization is massive, bringing in more than $3 billion dollars and having partnerships with the US government, the European Union, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and more.
I worked in the IT department of World Vision USA from 2015-2018, and even then I could see the mission creep at work. Before my time there, the organization had attempted to change its rules to allow hiring same-sex couples, but reversed course after a loud outcry from the conservative Christians whose donations make World Vision’s work possible. From what I could see from leadership, however, that reversal was very grudging. Then-president Rich Stearns was clearly more concerned about the charity side than anything related to doctrine or moral values.
I stopped attending weekly chapel services in the office when they presented a video about racial justice that presented the myth that Michael Brown was shot with his hands up as fact. In the wake of the 2020 Summer of Love, World Vision USA doubled down on DEI. Yesterday evening I was served a sponsored tweet in which World Vision quoted Greta Thunberg about climate change.
I posted my own tweet, calling it not only an example of mission creep, but also Conquest’s 2nd Law of Politics (which is actually O’Sullivan’s 1st Law, misquoted by John Derbyshire and now by me): “All organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left wing.”
You can see this phenomenon everywhere, from churches (mainline Protestant churches flying rainbow flags), sports (the NFL playing the black national anthem at the Super Bowl), schools (DEI, CRT, and radical gender ideology are taught from kindergarten), and more. Our culture pushes us leftward, and it takes all our energy just to hold our ground.
This is not to say that World Vision has not done some important work, and continues to do so, just as my article about Idaho Chooses Life was not meant to denigrate the important work that organization has done. Nevertheless, we cannot judge organizations, politicians, or causes solely by the past. We have to look at what is happening now.
Former Idaho GOP chairman Trent Clark surely agrees. Even though he vehemently disagreed with my take on ICL in the comments on Substack, the very next day he wrote an article about why he stopped supporting the Idaho Freedom Foundation. He contends that IFF was once doing good work for the cause of freedom but at some point lost its way, getting distracted into supporting drugs and pornography. I’m not here to debate that claim, rather just to point out that one man’s sacred cow is another’s meat loaf.
Conservatives need to be brutally honest about the state of our culture and the institutions we once implicitly trusted. Is the US government a defender of life, liberty, and property? Most of us agree it has strayed from that mission to the point where it is now the greatest threat to those things. What about news media? Entertainment? Public schools? Churches? The military? The Republican Party?
I believe many conservatives, especially from the older generations, look at these institutions through rose colored nostalgia. Rather than seeing them for what they are today, they see the good things they did in the past. If that’s the case, then watching people from my generation and younger attack these institutions is surely maddening.
It’s a conversation we need to have, though. Is the thing you are defending really worth it? Is there still value there, something that does more good than harm? Or have you become Colonel Nicholson, defending the work of your hands, having forgotten that it has become a tool of your enemies?
The most important thing for conservatives in 2024 is to recognize what time it is. This is not 1950, 1972, 1984, or even 2014. The institutions we have long trusted have been co-opted. Our government has conspired to import a new class of voters who will support its socialist and totalitarian programs. While our principles might still be sound, the old ways of implementing them have clearly failed. Conservatives failed to conserve the republic we were given, so how then shall we live?
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