LAST SATURDAY, I received a letter from Patrick Henry College, the small Christian liberal arts school where I studied journalism as an undergraduate. I nearly tossed it into the wastebasket unopened, as it bore signs of being one of those too-soon fundraising mailers that alumni still saddled in college debt find particularly distasteful.

I wish I hadn’t opened it. In a letter ostensibly about funding private higher education, the word “homosexual” appeared in the very first sentence: “A Christian court clerk in England was recently disciplined by her government employer for refusing to perform a civil union for a homosexual couple.” Over the next few paragraphs, similar stories of Christians being badgered by speech police in the United Kingdom for expressing anti-gay views were laid out in sparse, breathless prose.

If you are still confused about what this has to do with balancing the budget at a Christian institution, welcome to the depressing world of evangelical fundraising. The letter I received, signed by the school’s chancellor, quickly extrapolated that England’s draconian infringements on religious speech will be hopping the Atlantic any day now, necessitating the recipient’s generous donation to Patrick Henry for the training of “scholar-warriors.” It concluded with a repudiation of Western higher education in favor of a more radical system that gives students “a plan of boldness and courage rather than one of secrecy and silence.”

To make things worse, that was the second letter I read last week that managed through a series of spectacular demagogic acrobatics to hold up encroaching, government-mandated gayness as the impetus for eager donation. Family Research Council president Tony Perkins spammed members with a 6-page letter (PDF) falsely warning that the Employment Non-Discrimination Act would “empower Washington to silence your faith.” Perkins urged his readers to “try imagining the federal government as a full partner in the homosexual rights movement,” an exercise that presumably leads any realistic person to envision gay men indoctrinating babies in church nurseries and cross-dressing trannies working government-protected jobs at LifeWay Christian Stores.

Rest assured that I have no interest in tearing down my alma mater, which provided me a rigorous education in spite of its fundamentalist leanings, nor do I mean to lump together all those who more or less share the faith I grew up in. I would like to believe that a minority of Patrick Henry students are interested in becoming “scholar-warriors,” and that a minority of the faculty and staff are interested in producing them. I hope that a minority of Christians would ever bother to read a Family Research Council action alert. But the shameless political hackery on display in these and other similar evangelical missives is too high-profile and too un-Christian for it not to be addressed thoroughly and publicly.

First, there is the basic issue of honesty. Advocacy and activism groups exist to raise their particular issue out of the chaos of political discourse, often by labeling opponents and only telling half of the truth. Washington works that way. But the statements of Christian advocacy groups are closely scrutinized by political actors and curious individuals alike, and, if they are to wear the faith badge, must at very least meet minimal standards of honesty. That wouldn’t seem to be so much to ask of an organization that purports to defend a faith that abhors lying.

The PHC letter commits the same crime as Focus on the Family’s “letter from 2012”—presenting a technically possible but politically implausible hypothetical designed to stoke fear, in this case centered around homosexuals. It makes-believe that Christians quietly practicing their piety have been dragged into the streets in the name of tolerance. The FRC letter lies brazenly about ENDA, claiming that the sweeping religious exemptions in the bill are “meaningless.” (In fact, the bill protects religious employers and non-religious organizations that have a religious objection.) Both indicate the continued willingness of evangelicals to drag religious moral issues into the public square as long as the religious ethical issues stay out of the way.

More disturbing is the willingness to take a bristling, irrational stance toward homosexuality, an issue that the church—with a few notable exceptions—has already failed to address with any sort of grace. I have resisted the bullying characterization of all gay marriage opponents as bigoted yahoos, but to take a religiously conservative stand on the issue requires almost superhuman amounts of love, humility and nuance. The firebrand tone of these fundraising letters is exactly the opposite; it is openly comfortable with capitalizing financially on unfounded fear of the men and women next door. Regardless of where you stand on the politics of gay marriage, we can all agree that making up wild tales of a government-assisted invasion by people God has commanded you to love is an egregious perversion of the Christian gospel.

The first argument the letter-writers are likely to hurl back at me will insist that this is about America, about its future as a moral nation. This is politics, not our personal lives. Yes it is, and that’s the problem. It is why, on my darker days, I hardly want anything to do with the American church: as a national political force, it is about a highly politicized view of the United States, and not about God, people, or love. It assumes that the church can be a political force apart from the very principles it supposedly exists to defend—that it can preach institutional hate in the political arena and expect individuals to believe it really wants to love them. (This double-mindedness is apparent throughout the PHC letter, which one moment assures that Christians just want to be left alone to “remain faithful,” then pooh-poohs “small, behind-the-scenes actions” in favor of combative politics the next.)

America is about as culturally religious as it gets, and that's not changing anytime soon. The doomsday scenarios—threats of fading religious freedom and crusades against free speech—are so improbable as to render them completely dishonest. If someone is telling you the gays are coming to destroy your marriage and take your children, they probably want your your money.