How does deception happen? Does it come packaged in clear, straightforward arguments? Or are distortions advanced incrementally, with hedging and disclaimers, until error is fully embraced, like when Barack Obama insisted he believed marriage was between a man and a woman, even as his rhetoric moved the ball forward on same-sex marriage until he could finally announce his full evolution?

Everyone is familiar with the ubiquitous pharmaceutical ads that encourage the viewer to ask their doctor about Abilify for depression, Skyrizi for plaque psoriasis, or Linzess for irritable bowel syndrome. At some point during these commercials, which show grim-faced recluses in gloomy rooms becoming confident extroverts laughing with friends over sunny al fresco lunches, there comes a disclaimer about side effects. This boilerplate, as we all know, is there to appease the FDA and head off lawsuits. If someone were to ask you the purpose of one of these commercials, its aside about weight gain, stomach pain, and tiredness would not leave you flummoxed. You would still say that the ad’s intent was to convince you to take the drug.

By the same token, if an acquaintance started peppering his conversation with demeaning stereotypes about black people, you would disregard any reassurance he offered that he wasn’t being racist. The balance of his words would reveal what was in his heart, and you would be foolish to ignore his bigotry simply because he finished with a perfunctory disclaimer.

Yet denying that a drug commercial is intended to sell drugs and that a man’s racist words demonstrate his racist views is exactly the approach evangelical leaders who are introducing progressive ideology into the church insist Christians must take. Under the guise of charity, these peddlers of plausible deniability and their defenders demand we set aside not just biblical discernment, but everything common sense tells us about communication when evaluating these teachers’ sermons, essays, and interviews.

One example: In a review of my book Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, apologist Neil Shenvi insisted that author Karen Swallow Prior did not draw a moral equivalency between being pro-life and embracing COVID masks and vaccinations in her January 2022 Religion News Service column. This is despite the fact that Prior wrote, long after evidence had showed cloth masks to be ineffective, that:

It is not asking too much — in fact, it’s really the bare minimum — for those of us who believe we are justified in asking a woman to sacrifice much to preserve a life growing inside her body to inconvenience our own bodies by voluntarily (even cheerfully) wearing a piece of cloth, keeping distant or possibly even adding one more vaccine to the ones we got when we went to school.

Prior’s dilution of the term “pro-life” to include matters where Christians should have personal liberty characterized the entirety of her essay.

Later, she implied that guilt for some COVID deaths should be laid at the feet of those who did not comply with government recommendations and mandates. More people would have lived, she asserted, had mask- and vaccine-skeptical pro-lifers been “a bit more patient” and “changed [their] lifestyles a bit more for a little longer.”

Prior finished by arguing that a Christian’s body “belong[s] to the body of Christ and should do no harm” — a clear suggestion that those who disagreed with her COVID positions were hurting others.

So why did Shenvi insist that Prior had never argued that a person could not credibly claim to be pro-life unless he agreed to mask up and get the COVID jab? For two reasons. First, because Prior denied that she was doing so in her column. Second, because Prior told him that she hadn’t.

I have no notion of the extent of Shenvi’s journalistic skills, but I wonder if he asked Prior any follow-up questions. For instance, if these were not her views, then why did she label both the pro-abortion claim “It’s just a blob of tissue” and the mandate-skeptical statement “Public health mandates are tyranny” as “Death-dealing lies”? In addition, why did she say that Christian pro-lifers “brought” the “culture of death” to Los Angeles hospitals overcrowded with COVID patients?

Shenvi, whose review was championed by a number of the evangelical leaders I critiqued in my book, shows similar gullibility on behalf of the late Tim Keller, who was arguably the most influential pastor of the last decade.

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