I’ve dealt with people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders before

The religious right would have you believe that Donald Trump is not only making America great again, but making America Christian again. Anyone who’s been paying attention over the last three-plus years knows this is an alternative fact.
The latest evidence of this came on Thursday. In response to a bombshell New York Times op-ed from an anonymous White House staffer detailing the efforts to rein in Trump’s worst excesses, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saw fit to urge Trump supporters to crash the Old Grey Lady’s switchboard.
Sanders has helped defend Trump during some of his more outrageous moments before. But this may be the most egregious case where she has been complicit in them.
Telling an angry mob of pro-Trump sansculottes to flood the Times — excuse me, “the failing New York Times” — with demands to out someone who wanted to remain anonymous would be merely unseemly in and of itself. But Sanders did this from her official Twitter account. This wasn’t just unseemly. This was unethical, and potentially amounted to government intimidation of the press.
And yet, Sanders probably saw it as just part of doing her job. After all, two weeks ago, she told her dad, Mike Huckabee, that her primary duty is to “give his (Trump’s) message and explain his policies.” See for yourself.
So apparently part of giving Trump’s message entails using your official Twitter account to stir up an angry mob. But then again, she works for a guy who had no qualms about plastering a private cell phone number on social media.
I’ve seen this before. As many of my longtime readers know, during my days at the University of North Carolina, I was suckered into joining a hypercharismatic and borderline cultish campus ministry, Waymaker Christian Fellowship. That outfit was an outreach of King’s Park International Church in Durham, which was once the Carolina chapter of Maranatha Campus Ministries, one of the more notorious campus cults of the 1980s. I’m chronicling my dealings with them, as well as my efforts to expose them, at Child for the Truth.
One thing that still burns my bacon 20 years later is that I told my brothers and sisters that KPIC’s founder and longtime pastor, Ron Lewis, had not only been part and parcel of Maranatha, but lied about it — and yet, were still willing to do his bidding.
Indeed, they were actually complicit in his deceit. They deliberately hid who they really were in order to rope in people who would otherwise never set foot in such an outfit — including yours truly. I got pulled into this bunch early in my freshman year, and stayed in it for six months — in large part because they tried to make me think that my anxiety about them was the devil screwing with my mind. While they were outwardly welcoming to me, I got the impression that they weren’t willing to accept me for the Darrell that I was — and to a large extent, still am. However, I got a sneak preview of the Darrell they wanted me to be — and I didn’t like him very much.
When I saw Sanders tweet out her call to arms to the Trump diehards, I immediately thought back to the moment that proved beyond any doubt that I was not and could not be one of them. It happened on National Coming Out Day 1997. Several members of the campus LGBT group — known back then as B-GLAD — had held a pride march that started at the Pit and looped around campus before coming back to the Pit.
As I was watching the proceedings, I happened to run into three of my former “sisters” in Waymaker — Barbara Dean, Adena Cooper and a third girl I’ll call Allison. They recalled how someone chalked anti-gay messages around campus to counter the run-up to Pride Week and National Coming Out Day. When I wondered what the big deal was, Barbara whipped out her Bible and peddled the usual verses about homosexuality being a sin. Adena and Allison chimed in, and warned me against condoning the gay lifestyle.
As I sat there, it was all I could do to keep my composure. I know, I should have expected that reaction. But I was trying to make myself believe that Barbara, Adena and Allison were wagging their fingers at me about being supportive of LGBT rights when they had no problem deceiving people into joining Waymaker. And they didn’t want me to condone the gay lifestyle, but were willing to condone Pastor Ron out-and-out lying to them about his past in a borderline cult. Moreover, they were actually complicit in that deceit.
I knew that Pastor Ron had fundamentally warped the Waymakers’ sense of right and wrong. But this was staggering. I knew then that I had dodged a dumdum bullet — and that I could not, and would not, ever be like them. After all, I could not and would not be part of an organization where condoning this kind of despicable behavior was standard operating procedure.
Unfortunately, that mentality still lives on both at KPIC and in Every Nation, the network of charismatic churches of which KPIC is a key member. A number of my former friends in Waymaker have gone fast and far in KPIC and Every Nation.
Adena, for instance, is now married to Eric Syfrett, another one of my former “brothers” in Waymaker who is currently KPIC’s executive pastor. Before then, Adena and Eric spent part of the early 2000s as KPIC’s children’s pastors. They serve alongside another former Waymaker, Reggie Roberson, who is now KPIC’s senior pastor (though Pastor Ron, as “bishop,” still holds the real power). Barbara is now married to Rollan Fisher, a member of my covenant group when I was in Waymaker. They currently pastor Second City Church in Chicago, and before then served as youth pastors at KPIC. Waymaker itself has changed names several times, and is now known as Every Nation Campus at UNC. The name may have changed, but the mentality remains the same — all is fair when winning people to Jesus.
No cause is so important that basic standards of decency have to be thrown out the window in order to further it. The same mentality I saw with Waymaker is now in Washington. That’s about the only conclusion you can draw from the White House press secretary finding it even remotely acceptable to use her official Twitter account to stir up the modern-day equivalent of an angry mob.