VICE (2013) s06e20 Episode Script

1 SHANE SMITH: This week on Vice: the evangelical vote in Trump's America.
ETHRIDGE: The Southern Baptist Convention aligns itself with no political party.
Our loyalty is to King Jesus.
(CHEERING) GIANNA TOBONI: What cultural changes in our country concern you? The violence.
The vagina hats.
The nastiness.
SHANE: And then, a threat in eastern Congo.
BEN ANDERSON: The local people call everything to the east of this road the Triangle of Death because there are so many ADF fighters hidden there.
(MAN SPEAKING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (THEME MUSIC PLAYING) (CROWD SHOUTING) They're saying that right now, it's time for change.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING) Evangelical Christians have been a powerful, reliable voting block for the Republican party over the past three decades.
Their strong support for Donald Trump helped propel him to office in 2016.
I would like to thank the evangelical and religious community (SCATTERED CHEERS) because, I'll tell you what, the support that they've given me and I'm not sure I totally deserve it (LAUGHTER) SHANE: While scandals surrounding the president have challenged their unwavering support, this voting block remains part of the GOP plan to win in 2020.
So, we sent Gianna Toboni to see how evangelicals are mobilizing and reconciling their faith with their politics.
CHOIR: My country 'tis of thee Sweet land of liberty Of thee I sing Land where my fathers died Land of the pilgrims' pride GIANNA: This is one of the biggest Christian right conventions in the lead up to the midterms.
There are powerful religious leaders, politicians like Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, who are here speaking, but also strategizing how to mobilize best in the lead up to the 2018 midterms.
(APPLAUSE) The last 16 months have been the single best period for conservative values since I came to Washington back in 1985.
He is on track to be the most pro-life president in American history.
We must continue to defend religious liberty.
That's why this year's midterm elections are so important.
And we're just getting going.
GIANNA: The Faith and Freedom Coalition is the brainchild of Ralph Reed.
He was the head of the Christian Coalition in the '90s, which helped shape evangelicals into a formidable voting block.
They led the Christian right in mobilizing around four million faith-based voters.
Despite making up just 17 percent of the US population today, white evangelical voters are 26 percent of the electorate.
We met up with Virginia Galloway, who leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition's voter outreach across the South.
Well, you look like a very nice, church-going lady, but I know that you're a killer when it comes to mobilizing voters.
Well, we Yes.
(LAUGHS) That's what we do.
GIANNA: As regional field director in Georgia, what exactly do you do to get people to vote? Okay, well, we have these great voter guides that I really love.
We take this, we hang it on doors.
It's got a little handy-dandy door hanger.
The interesting thing is you can give these away in churches because they don't tell you who to vote for.
They're education only.
GIANNA: It seems like everybody, media included, focus on President Trump's morality.
What are they missing about what evangelicals want? Policy, good policy.
GIANNA: What are, sort of, the top areas that evangelicals care about? VIRGINIA: Well, certainly pro-life is one of those things, and he's been strong on pro-life.
Jerusalem was huge.
Yeah, that was great.
- How about the appointment of some conservative judges? - Right.
Supreme court justice and maybe one more before long.
We don't know.
People that are here are very enthusiastic and excited about what they're hearing.
It helps them see that the way they vote makes a difference.
GIANNA: White evangelicals account for a third of Republican voters, and the Faith and Freedom Coalition is targeting them in the 2018 midterms, nearly doubling what they spent in the 2016 elections.
A key part of that funding goes towards training volunteers in small towns.
We're right outside of Atlanta, at a little bakery here.
We're meeting back up with Virginia Galloway.
She's training a group of volunteers on how to mobilize voters in the lead up to the midterms.
- What do you want!? - (PEOPLE CHUCKLING) Oh, excuse me, ma'am.
Do you live here? Yeah, I live here! What're you doing on my porch? This voter guide might be very useful to you.
If you notice Who are you for? Who are you for? - That's what I wanna know.
- Well, ma'am, I I can't support any individual candidate.
But we want you to support who you want, and this just, basically, tells you Well, I will.
I will.
All right.
- I won't cut your tires.
- (LAUGHING) Good job, Fred.
Let's give Fred a hand.
- He handled that very well.
- (APPLAUSE) He kept doing his job, didn't he? But very, like, he was very conciliatory.
He wasn't scared off.
Every time I knock on a door, I take a step back.
Why? It's intimidating to them - if you're, like, right up in your face.
- Strange guy knocking GIANNA: What cultural changes that you're seeing in our country concern you? Oh, the violence.
The vagina hats.
The nastiness.
The threats on an open, public stage.
People are frightened.
And it's very challenging when you're coming at it from a Christian's perspective to show the love of Christ in that environment, and yet it's necessary.
VIRGINIA: I bet all of you here don't go to the same church, right? That's a great thing because that gives your chapter outreach to different churches, that then can go to the pastor and say, "Can we give out voter guides that are perfectly sized to fit inside your bulletin?" (INDISTINCT CHATTER) GIANNA: Evangelicals may have voted for Trump in strong numbers, but at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, his administration's close ties to the evangelical community came into question.
The 161st session of the Southern Baptist Convention - is now in order.
- (APPLAUSE) GIANNI: During the meeting, representatives of the 15 million-member denomination vote on a variety of issues.
Before this year's meeting, leaders unexpectedly announced that Vice President Mike Pence would be speaking, which was controversial.
Several church representatives even tried to block Pence by bringing up motions for a vote.
We send a mixed message to our members suggesting that to be faithful to the Gospel, we ought to align with a particular administration.
Brothers and sisters, right now, there is a world filled with people who are going to Hell, and what we need to be about is the Gospel, and anything that can distort that is a step backward and not a step forward.
- Thank you.
- (APPLAUSE) Let me be clear, the Southern Baptist Convention aligns itself with no political party.
Our loyalty is to King Jesus, the king of kings, and lord of lords.
(APPLAUSE) We strongly urge the messengers to extend a biblical, Christ-like welcome to the vice president of the United States.
Thank you.
(APPLAUSE) If you favor this amendment, please raise your ballot.
If you're opposed to this amendment, please raise your ballot.
The negative has it, and the amendment fails.
GARRETT KELL: God doesn't require us to be a part of political agendas and movements.
There's an administration right now where there's lots of heat, and associating with it, right now, I think can be confusing about what we're all really about.
GIANNA: As the first day of the conference came to an end, we talked to a member of Donald Trump's evangelical advisory board, Richard Land.
Frankly, Mr.
Trump has done better than I thought he would.
Mrs.
Clinton said that the right to abortion was sacred.
It was sacrosanct.
People who disagreed with that were going to have to be forced to change their minds.
Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.
At least 50 percent of those weren't voting for Donald Trump.
They were voting against Hillary Clinton.
In a fallen, sinful world, sometimes I'm forced to choose between the lesser of two evils.
And if I don't choose the lesser evil, then I become morally responsible for helping the greater evil to prevail.
When Trump's team asked me to join his evangelical advisory board, I said, now, you do understand he was my last choice in the primaries? And they said, what is your first piece of advice? I said, pick Mike Pence.
Mike is the 24-karat gold model of what evangelicals believe an evangelical politician should be.
GIANNA: Around a third of the representatives voted against Pence addressing the SBC, leaving some pastors to sit out of his speech altogether.
MAN: Southern Baptists, would you give a warm, Southern Baptist welcome, Vice President Mike Pence.
(CHEERING) PENCE: Your more than 47,000 churches minister to more than 15 million people, and millions more beyond your walls.
And as I stand before you today, I believe that our nation is in the midst of a new beginning of greatness in America.
It's been 500 days of promises made and promises kept.
(CHEERING) While evangelicals here felt pretty divided about the vice president coming to speak, They're giving him big applause and standing ovations for all the success the conservatives have had in the last year, namely, defunding Planned Parenthood and establishing the embassy in Jerusalem.
PENCE: And I'll make you a promise, this president, this vice president and our administration, will always stand with you.
(APPLAUSE) I think this should be a time of lament and repentance and hope for what God might do in our future.
Personally, I thought it was a bad move, but that's not what the majority thought.
GIANNA: Matt Chandler is the lead pastor at a mega-church outside of Dallas and is considered a rising star among young evangelical leaders.
Can we agree that President Trump isn't of the utmost moral character? Like, are people arguing other than that? To me, evangelicals prioritize morality, and yet, they played a huge part in getting him elected.
- Yeah.
- How did that happen? I think people are frightened.
Um I think they're frightened at the speed at which things are changing culturally.
The Obama presidency, great man, some of his policies, and some of the ways he rolled out his policies, really, really scared evangelicals.
And the news media just whipped us into a frenzy - Yeah.
- and made people feel desperate.
GIANNA: The Southern Baptist Convention lost a million members in the last decade alone.
But some churches are trying to engage this changing culture, rather than combat it.
Chandler has seen his weekly attendance grow by nearly a thousand people a year over the past decade.
He invited us to visit his church's less-than-traditional location.
Not what I expected the Village Church to look like.
We are not in a village or a town square.
We are in a shopping center.
Kind of looks more like a Costco or a Target, sandwiched between a Starbucks and Wendy's.
But there are more than 10,000 congregants that come to the Village Church.
Praise the King 'Cause he is risen Praise the King He's alive Praise the King 'Cause death's defeated Hallelujah GIANNA: How do you think Democrats and media have isolated evangelicals, and where could they do better to be more inclusive? I think some of the blind spots on the left is that the left, specifically city left, feels like the country is more progressive - than it actually is.
- Mmm.
And the more it presses, the more it makes conservatives dig in their heels.
When the bathroom bill passed, people were terrified.
That made them go, whoever the opposition is to that, I'm voting for.
GIANNA: How do you think the evangelical community will be different in 10 years versus 10 years ago.
For some people, evangelicalism now is like a political party divorced, from its, you know, theological roots.
You're gonna see what we've already seen, probably three or four times, in Christian history.
There are going to be those that try to reach the world by becoming like the world.
And then there are gonna be those that try to, by the grace of God, hold fast to orthodox Christian faith.
And that kind of rigid, non-compassionate, angry group, I hope, dies out and just goes home.
You know? You can certainly see that evangelicalism is fracturing.
I'm not sure what it'll look like when it all settles down, but evangelicalism in its current form will vanish.
I have no doubt about it.
I don't think it can survive.
Eastern Congo is effectively lawless.
Warlords and armed groups have spent decades raping, looting, and inflaming a crisis that's killed more people than any conflict since World War II.
Now, while groups like Boko Haram and ISIS have garnered international condemnation for their brutality, a little known group called the ADF continues to grow, taking advantage of this power vacuum and becoming one of the most dangerous and vicious entities in the region.
(GUNFIRE) Now, despite the size and scope of this conflict, it remains dramatically underreported.
So, we sent Ben Anderson to find out more.
(CHILDREN SINGING) (SINGING CONTINUING) This? BEN: Over the last few years, a wave of mass murders along the Democratic Republic of Congo's border with Uganda have devastated entire communities.
Schools like these have become camps for the victims.
(CHILDREN SINGING) BEN: So, everyone here fled from their village, after it was attacked.
And they sleep on the floor of these classrooms, where every morning, before 7:00 a.
m.
, they have to move everything outside so the kids can come and study.
(INDISTINCT CHATTER) And none of their kids can study here because they can't afford the school fees.
Children of the displaced have to look on as the other kids get an education.
(MAN SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) BEN: Fear of returning home is well-founded.
A little known terrorist group, known as the ADF, or Allied Democratic Forces, has been ambushing villages across the region, burning them to the ground and killing thousands of men, women, and children.
One of the few groups documenting the violence is the CRDH, a heroic local human rights organization, with a staff of just two, few resources and no protection.
(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) BEN: They failed to overthrow the government of Uganda and were pushed into Eastern Congo in the late '90s.
I can understand their original goal became impossible, and they were stuck here, and to survive, they had to commit crimes just to make money.
I don't understand why the acts they committed were so hideous.
Do you have any idea how they morphed into an organization that were capable of committing such crimes? (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) BEN: We went to Kampala, where we met with a founding member who was captured by the Ugandan military and who then worked for them as an intelligence agent.
He joined when the group was first formed and knew its leader, Jamil Mukulu, well.
But Muslims are just a minority in Uganda.
But you still thought you might be able to overthrow the government? The Ugandan military pushed you into Congo, across the border.
Did you think then that, you know, it was over? Why were people willing to join you? You dedicated your life to this? And you were willing to die for this? Today, the ADF is notorious - for massacres against civilians - Yeah.
- killing women and children.
- Yeah.
BEN: The group's founder, Jamil Mukulu, was captured in 2015, but their violence has only worsened since then.
(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) BEN: We spoke with former senator Russ Feingold, who was President Obama's special envoy to the Great Lakes region and knows the plight of eastern Congo well.
FEINGOLD: The human tragedy is unspeakable, with over six million people being killed.
The greatest sexual violence against women that's ever been recorded.
The exploitation of minerals and forests and others for everybody but the people in the region.
I was the person that first really raised this question within the US government, saying we need to think about the possibility that this is an area that is so ungoverned that it may be attractive to international terrorist networks.
Since President Trump was elected, there is no special envoy, there's not even an ambassador to Congo.
What's the danger of having no one there? Well, first of all, there's just absolutely no excuse, two years into administration almost and not having an ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
It is extraordinary.
It's unforgivable.
So, the US is doing literally nothing.
We don't have a plan.
We don't have a plan for this region, and, frankly, we don't have much of a plan for the world.
And this is a crisis in American foreign policy.
Congo is the size of the entire eastern United States, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic.
It is bordered by nine countries.
Its instability destabilizes that entire part of Africa and, essentially, the whole continent.
- It could be an international destabilizer.
- But what do you think it is? Do you think it's a lack of interest, a lack of awareness, incompetence? I don't think they care about Africa.
The president's made it real clear what his attitude is toward Africa.
I remember we had a very major moment in our negotiations, where we got a group called the M-23 to drop their arms, and this was noted as a very significant success.
And I remember, just days after, on Christmas Day, ADF went in, and beheaded little girls on Christmas Day.
And so, they go in, and they just take advantage of villages.
There's nobody to really stop them.
That's exactly what parts of the eastern Congo are, and it can become a very strong hotbed of people that wanna do us harm if we don't pay attention.
(THUNDER RUMBLES) BEN: We went back to the ADF stronghold in Beni, eastern Congo, where we met the CRDH's other member.
As soon as a massacre occurs, he borrows a motorbike and heads to the scene with nothing but a camera and tape recorder.
(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) BEN: They didn't have a reason to kill this family? So these are One, two, three, four, five, six.
So, the adults, they use a machete, and with the children, they just club them to death with a stick.
So, this man's taking us into what was his village, now completely deserted because it was attacked last summer by the ADF.
There's not a soul anywhere.
(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) BEN: The ADF just appeared from the bush, and then disappeared back into the bush after the attack? And there are lots of government soldiers in this area, and lots of UN Peacekeepers as well.
Why were they not able to protect you? BEN: Over the last four years, the ADF have ambushed more than 30 villages.
In not one of these cases, did the Peacekeepers intervene to stop the violence.
We joined the UN troops on a routine patrol at a local village.
So, the Peacekeepers call everything to the east of this road the Triangle.
The local people call it the Triangle of Death because there are so many ADF fighters hidden there.
Estimates vary, but between 700 and 2,000 ADF fighters, who've been living here for years, so they know the area really well.
(SOLDIERS YELL) The Peacekeepers here, as in many other places they're deployed, have an awful reputation for not doing enough, and sometimes even colluding with groups they're supposed to be fighting, so locals are largely afraid of them.
But just months after we left Congo, 15 Peacekeepers were killed, and 50 injured when their base was ambushed by the ADF.
It was the single deadliest assault on a UN mission in nearly a quarter of a century.
We spoke with former members of the ADF, most of whom were forcibly recruited when they were still children.
(GUNSHOT ECHOES) (INDISTINCT CHATTER) (SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (WOMAN SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (INDISTINCT) (GUNFIRE) (CHILDREN SINGING) (MAN SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (WOMAN SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (GUNFIRE) BEN: So, today, the ADF are attacking many civilians, have killed hundreds of civilians.
(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (WOMAN SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (JEAN PAUL SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE) (MAN SHOUTS ORDERS) (CHILDREN CHANTING) (APPLAUSE)