USAID Promoted Anti-Christian Morality by Funding LGBT Advocacy and Abortion Worldwide
Flagship evangelical magazine was financially coaxed into supporting Kamala Harris’s bid for presidency
Christianity Today Editor in Chief Russell Moore was formerly president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2013 to 2021. The U.S. Department of Government Efficiency just revealed that CT took $1.8 million from USAID in 2023 to promote leftist principles.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), tasked with administering civilian foreign aid and development, instead pursued a radical strategy of undermining Christian ethics globally by funding LGBTQ+ advocacy, abortion services, and atheistic ideologies.
Fresh evidence from a trove of documents shows how USAID also funneled taxpayer dollars to progressive-leaning evangelical organizations, including the flagship magazine Christianity Today, in a bid to bolster pro-abortion Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.
The revelations emerged after the Trump administration took sweeping steps against USAID this week by suspending vast swathes of its employees, repatriating its overseas staff, sidelining its mega corps of contractors, and shutting down the agency’s website.
“Criminal Organization”
In a scathing tweet posted on February 2, Elon Musk, who is heading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said that “USAID is a criminal organization” and it was “time for it to die.”
Employing more than 10,000 workers, the agency had a budget of around $44.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2024, which is approximately 0.4% of the federal budget, according to USAspending.gov.
On Tuesday, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast released a video refuting what he called the “misinformation” spread by Democrats claiming that “people are going to die” if the Trump administration suspended USAID funding.
In it, Mast listed some of the most egregious examples of USAID funding, including $1 million to boost French-speaking LGBTQ groups in West and Central Africa; $20,600 for a drag show in Ecuador; and $47,020 for a transgender opera in Colombia.
USAID also funneled $32,000 to pay for an LGBTQ-centered comic book in Peru; $3,315,446 for “being LGBTQ in the Caribbean”; $80,000 for an LGBTQ community center in Bratislava, Slovakia; $1.5 million to promote job opportunities for LGBTQ people in Serbia; and $16,500 to foster a “united and equal queer-feminist discourse in Albanian society,” Mast revealed.
Subverting Christianity
In 2016, USAID funded a “LGBTI Inclusion” program in the Republic of Macedonia to the tune of $300,000 in an attempt to subvert the predominant Eastern Orthodox Christian morality of the tiny Balkan nation. The project’s goals included “increasing awareness of LGBTI rights and advocacy” and aiding LGBTI+ groups “to combat hate speech and exclusionary narratives.”
“The American people, through USAID, have invested more than $580 million in Macedonia since 1993,” the agency’s press release bragged.
“It’s pretty clear that US taxpayer dollars are being used to hire culture-war mercenaries to go into a Christian country, in complete disrespect for its religious belief and traditions, and destabilize them,” noted Rod Dreher, bestselling author of The Benedict Option.
And if Washington finds traditional Christianity so threatening abroad that it’s willing to spend taxpayer dollars to hire Social Justice Warriors to fight it, what do you think the future holds for traditional Christianity in our own country? You had better start preparing yourself, your family, and your community for the resistance.
USAID’s LGBTQ Agenda
In a USAID “fact sheet” obtained by The Stream (which has now been deleted from the USAID website), the agency hailed then-President Joe Biden for his January 2021 executive order championing LGBTQ+ advocacy, noting that it “proudly joins this government-wide effort with its own commitment to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ people around the world.”
Among its multiple LGBTQ+ sponsorships, the agency included its role in funding the recognition of the “Third Gender” in Bangladesh by mobilizing “the National Human Rights Commission to include a third gender option in the 2021 National Census for the first time.”
USAID said it had also influenced the amendment of the Civil Status Law in Kosovo, which resulted in Kosovo’s Court of Appeals ruling in 2019 that transgender citizens have the right to change their sex marker in official documents.
The agency also provided transgender services in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Burma, and South Africa and supported “advocacy to address discriminatory and punitive laws and policies that affect the human rights of LGBTQI+ people, including the criminalization of same-sex relations, gender identity, and gender expression.”
Funding Abortion
Abortion giant Marie Stopes International (MSI) reported that USAID was funding 17% of its annual income to the tune of nearly $80 million.
On January 23, 2017, Trump cut USAID’s funding to MSI under the terms of the Mexico City Policy, first implemented by the Reagan administration in 1984 to ensure healthcare organizations would not promote abortion. Biden rescinded the policy in January 2021, directly reinstating USAID’s disbursement to pro-abortion outfits.
In August 2022, a coalition of 100 leftist organizations — including the abortion giant International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and its sister organization Planned Parenthood Federation of America — wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging him to “authorize USAID reproductive health funding to the full extent of the law” after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
“We are glad to see those in USAID and the State Department recognizing and calling out the devastation that this decision will bring worldwide,” the signatories noted, adding that “[under current law, U.S. foreign assistance may not be used for abortion services as a means of family planning,” but USAID could still “provide funding for abortion services in cases of rape, incest, and life endangerment” as well as “abortion service information and counseling.”
Biden’s Blessings
In November 2023, IPPF announced that “it was awarded the USAID-funded, five-year, $45 million Expand Family Planning and Sexual and Reproductive Health (ExpandPF) Activity following a competitive process.”
According to the International Journal of Health Services, USAID has been funding IPPF, the Population Council, and the Pathfinder Fund since 1966-67.
In fiscal years 2018 through 2020, USAID committed nearly $1.7 billion for family planning and abortion assistance, with approximately half of the funding spent in Africa. “As the world’s largest donor of bilateral family planning assistance, USAID supports voluntary family planning and reproductive health programs in more than 30 countries,” the agency said.
In October 2024, USAID awarded $89.8 million to EngenderHealth, an international nonprofit organization promoting sexual and reproductive health and rights. As soon as Trump was reelected, EngenderHealth warned that his administration would “almost certainly roll back reproductive rights.”
“This stark reality is especially sobering when juxtaposed with what could have been — a historic moment of leadership under Vice President Kamala Harris, who represents the promise of advancing reproductive rights on a global scale,” the outfit declared.
Sponsoring Atheism
Hindus are blasting USAID for spending $446,700 to fund atheism programs in Nepal, the only Hindu nation in the world.
“How did America get to the point where we’re sending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars abroad to NGOs that are dedicated to spreading atheism all over the globe?” Vice President J. D. Vance asked in his address to the International Religious Freedom Summit on Wednesday.
“Now, our administration believes we must stand for religious freedom,” Vance said, “not just as a legal principle, as important as that is, but as a lived reality, both within our own borders and especially outside our borders.”
U.S. engagement on religious liberty issues abroad has “been corrupted and distorted to the point of concern,” Vance argued. “That is not what leadership on protecting the rights of the faithful looks like, and it ends with this administration.”
Bribing Evangelicals
Meanwhile, the flagship evangelical publication Christianity Today complained that Ukraine would suffer the most after the Trump administration halted over $30 billion in USAID funding. The country has been the agency’s top recipient of cash since 2022.
CT, which was founded by evangelist Billy Graham, has in recent decades been taken over by leftwing activists and used theological reasoning to push the COVID-19 vaccines and lockdowns on believers, investigative journalist Megan Basham writes in her recent bestseller Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.
According to its IRS 990 form, “Christianity Today received $1.8 million in USAID grants in 2023. Yet they received nothing from the government in 2022. Why the huge shift??” Basham asked.
Professor Robert Gagnon, a New Testament scholar at Houston Baptist University, agreed. “Regardless, this is undoubtedly money coming from the Biden government to promote a ‘progressive,’ Democrat-promoting, Trump-hating version of ‘Evangelical Christian’ faith, just in time for the coming election,” he remarked. “They even published an article during the campaign extolling Kamala Harris’s so-called ‘faith.’ Yeah, a ‘faith’ whose two great idols were abortion and ‘LGBTQ’ immorality—evil pagan faith.
In another tweet, he added, “It is not ‘Christian’ to spend beyond our means, borrowing at the expense of future generations. It is time to take away the national credit card and stay within our means.”
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.