Nikalie Monroe did a social test which she posted on TikTok. She called dozens of churches across the United States pretending to be a mother in desperate need of baby formula. Sometimes she would play a recording of a crying baby in the background. She would say she had no money and that the baby hadn’t eaten several meals.

Despite all this, most of the institutions, that incidentally boasted they were “prolife,” refused to help her, citing such reasons as “You don’t attend the church,” “We stopped doing that,” suggesting she contact “local government,” or simply saying “no.”

It was the smaller, predominantly Black churches, a Buddhist Temple, and several mosques and Islamic Centre’s that assured her that they would help. One pastor, an elderly grandfather, said he would go out and buy the formula himself. Others, including the late Charlie Kirk’s church or the toothy charlatan Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, turned her down. Osteen”s estimated net worth is anywhere from $40 million to $100 million.

And did these churches apologize for their stunning hypocrisy? Or for their glaring lack of compassion and care for a starving baby? Well, no. In fact, the pastor of the Living Faith Baton Rouge Baptist Church said he “doesn’t apologize to Satan.” He then called Monroe a “evil witch” and that his bible didn’t allow such people “to live.” The pastor of Germantown Baptist Church in Kentucky accused Monroe of being a woman of “folly, seductive and knowing nothing” who was trying to catch the church in some “woke liberal” trap.

American Christianity was poisoned a very long time ago by capitalism. The ones who gulped down most of that brew were white, evangelical churches. This is where the noxious “prosperity gospel” was born, which elevated wealth to a virtue and that celebrates slick televangelists who sport gold watches and climb aboard private jets. The one that blames the poor for their plight because they didn’t pray hard enough, they weren’t “trusting Jesus,” or because they didn’t tithe enough money to be blessed. The ones who delight in raining fire and brimstone down on the vulnerable and marginalized in society, yet seldom, if ever, preach about Jesus warnings to the wealthy.

That these churches are prolife is of little surprise. Their piety is policy, not compassion. And that policy is about social control and oppression, not enlightenment or liberation. This is how they have absolutely no problem with Israel’s starvation of babies and children in Gaza or even the suffering of Palestinian Christians.

These Christians delight in punishment and otherizing because, like the early American Puritans, their twisted sense of sanctified beatification is a source of sadistic pleasure. There is no mystery that they deify nakedly cruel despots like Donald Trump either. He echoes their hollowed out humanity. A narcissistic bully who revels in punching down on who Jesus referred to as “the least of these.”

Nikalie Monroe’s little social experiment held up a mirror, and these churches had to look at themselves for one, long, uncomfortable minute. But it isn’t really shocking that they lack any capacity for insight. The poison they drank years ago deadened whatever soul they once had. The tragic irony is that they could not see they were the very “white-washed sepulchers” that Jesus once warned about.

Kenn Orfanos, November 2025