My new series, “The Great Evangelical Schism,” will be released over there. As always, everything is free.

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The Great Evangelical Schism: Prologue

A marquee for an evangelical conference I had never heard of came into my purview yesterday. Rather than immediately try to break it down to its individual, mind-boggling elements, I’ll first place it below this paragraph and allow you to ponder its mysteries and, as I did, spend a few minutes in a state of wondering confusion…

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6 months ago · 1 like · Blake Callens

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The Great Evangelical Schism: Prologue

A marquee for an evangelical conference I had never heard of came into my purview yesterday. Rather than immediately try to break it down to its individual, mind-boggling elements, I’ll first place it below this paragraph and allow you to ponder its mysteries and, as I did, spend a few minutes in a state of wondering confusion…

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6 months ago · Blake Callens

A marquee for an evangelical conference I had never heard of came into my purview yesterday. Rather than immediately try to break it down to its individual, mind-boggling elements, I’ll first place it below this paragraph and allow you to ponder its mysteries and, as I did, spend a few minutes in a state of wondering confusion.

If you aren’t an evangelical Protestant, familiar with its micro-celebrity culture, you probably know who Dennis Quaid is—I would have preferred Randy—but you likely have no clue who the rest of these people are, nor why they’re important enough to have their headshot emanating from the neon glow of a vessel that appears to be travelling at the speed of light. Rest assured, no evangelical Protestant, regardless of what sub-culture he comes from, can tell you who more than half a dozen people in this marquee are, and we are just as confused. Googling names doesn’t make it any better. Why are a respected Reformed Baptist preacher (until his allies attempted to cancel him) and a founding member of the Calvary Chapel movement doing a “Christian” conference alongside a professional ninja/public speaker and the star of the movie Selfie Dad? Why is the daughter of celebrity pastor Tony Evans billed above the creator of The Chosen, himself born into the business? Why is a nineteen year-old political activist who travels in a private jet for his Turning Point USA events booked closer to the center than a much-better-known, culture-warring podcaster, who charged $5,000 for a “Premium All Access Package” at her own conference that is most associated with the evangelical media tribe that tried to cancel the Reformed Baptist and TV show producer? Why is this happening in Spokane, Washington, of all places? To get lost in these weeds, as fascinating as they are, is to miss the larger takeaway.

This is a conference for the religion of Evangelicalism, not the religion of Protestant Christianity. We are in the middle of a great schism that I believe will end with two competing modes of Christianity that are as different to each other as Eastern Orthodoxy is from Roman Catholicism, or even as different as Lutheranism is from Roman Catholicism.

This is not just vibes from a poster, there are hard metrics behind this schism. Only 16% of American Christians have an orthodox understanding of the Trinity. Nearly one third of self-described evangelicals deny the divinity of Christ, though 98% of them will tell you that marriage is between one man and one woman. The “Be Bold for Jesus” conference is a touch-point into this mode of religion, where, among other factors, theology and doctrine take a quantifiable back seat to culture.

Take the metric on orthodox Trinitarianism; what would we see if it was stratified into different modes of Protestantism? Could we not expect confessional, denominational Christians, who catechize their children and sit under a pastor who is licensed by a presbytery or synod, to score better than someone who goes to a church with a verb like “thrive” or “believe” for a name and a pastor/CEO with no training, but who “felt the call to ministry”? This is not a hypothetical. People are being taught absolutely broken, Nicene-Creed-violating theology in American megachurches with exponentially more members than most conservative Presbyterian or Lutheran churches. Books that create utter Trinitarian confusion are being marketed for church studies by major Christian publishers.1

What do these two types of Christians really have in common, beyond a shared verbal assent to the Five Solas? What are the clear lines of schism and where does it get muddy? These are the questions I will attempt to answer over the course of this series of essays.

The duties required in the sixth commandment are, all careful studies, and lawful endeavors, to preserve the life of ourselves and others by resisting all thoughts and purposes, subduing all passions, and avoiding all occasions, temptations, and practices, which tend to the unjust taking away the life of any; by just defense thereof against violence, patient bearing of the hand of God, quietness of mind, cheerfulness of spirit; a sober use of meat, drink, physic, sleep, labor, and recreation; by charitable thoughts, love, compassion, meekness, gentleness, kindness; peaceable, mild, and courteous speeches and behavior: forbearance, readiness to be reconciled, patient bearing and forgiving of injuries, and requiting good for evil; comforting and succoring the distressed, and protecting and defending the innocent.

Words are not violence, only violence is violence. I have dedicated the last three years of my writing to countering those who, in one way or another, have advocated that harm be done to people who say things that they disagree with, most arguing for state violence towards those who profess beliefs contrary to their interpretation of Scripture, some for outright vigilantism. I now watch as their polar opposite on the horseshoed political spectrum cheer the murder of a professing brother in Christ whom I vigorously disagreed with on multiple issues, but who never committed violence against his opponents.

Both of these phenomena are a sickness caused by experiencing the world through screens, and I think it has escalated to such a degree in our nation that one can no longer truthfully write about that sickness without, in some way, contributing to it. I could have dedicated a whole post to how the Christian Nationalist figures I’ve previously detailed are now calling “the left,” a nebulous term that could be anywhere up to half of their neighbors, “an existential threat.” Yet, I think continuing to document such things, at this point, will only feed the online madness that I desperately wish had not infiltrated the American church.

I think Christ would rather have me turn off the devices and give my whole being to showing His love to those whom He’s given me a heart for, people whom the church in our place and time tends to overlook. I want to find “the least of these” and give them real, tangible comfort in a world that would rather rage on. I pray that the Spirit similarly moves you.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”
—Matthew 5:9

The above is URC deacon Ethan Holden (The Jolly Brawler on X). Ethan is followed, and favorably interacted with, by pretty much every single mainstream “Reformed” Christian Nationalist. Until late last year, when his brother made a video with spliced in 1930s Nazi propaganda, which was positively shared by many name-brand Christian Nationalists, including Eric Conn, Jeff Wright and “Wesley Todd,” many mainstream Reformed pastors and theologians favorably interacted with him as well. By the time they had begun to make a name for themselves on Reformed social media, there was already copious evidence that Holden and his brother, Samuel, were full-blown white nationalists, but, again, it has to go ludicrously far before many mainstream Reformed voices will admit what is obvious to everyone else. Even now, a large portion of the Reformed media world is still trying to talk of “Reformed Christian Nationalism” as if it’s primarily a discussion on magisterial Protestantism, even though every single one of the best-known “Reformed” Christian Nationalists engages in at least the type of talk that the Holden brothers were engaged in a year ago, and some even to the above degree. What this results in is the average, unplugged Reformed pastor believing that we’re dealing with an overzealous group of “Christian reconstructionists,” instead of the truth, that there is a white-nationalist movement that has successfully laundered its way into the Reformed world.

In February of last year, Holden wrote a libelous thread about me on X, which received over 130,000 views. It was shared so much by Reformed figures that it attained exit velocity from that microcosm, so much so that a non-Christian friend texted me, asking what it was about. All I had to do was show my (very MAGA) friend the already existent evidence that Holden was a bonkers, Holocaust-denying white nationalist, and that was that, because—and I need you to ingest this—the only remotely mainstream space that guys like Ethan and Samuel Holden (or Eric Conn, Joel Webbon, Stephen Wolfe, Andrew Isker, CJay Engel, Thomas Achord and Michael Spangler) can travel is within the world of Reformed media and the churches mass consuming its product. Why?

There is a commonly-used word for personality-driven religious sects whose devotees will deny prima facie evidence damaging to the sect or its personalities. Until we are willing to look inward and honestly search ourselves for what it is about our culture that permits such obvious evil to travel so freely among us, we will continue to not only have to deal with it, but find ourselves increasingly marginalized among our neighbors, damaging that which should be most important to us, our gospel witness.

Janet Mefferd

Tribe Over Truth in Evangelicalism, Or How I Learned to Stop Making Friends

The Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry posted a throwback meme on X the other day, a picture of a man grinning into a camera under this headline: “Incredible: This Man is 100% Ideologically Consistent and Also He Doesn’t Have Any Friends…

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8 months ago · 16 likes · 3 comments · Janet Mefferd

One of the facts that Mefferd revealed was that, in February of 2024, Buck sent her a social media post from a neo-Nazi libeling me as a pervert, and tried to use it to get her to denounce me, after she had endorsed my book. To say that Buck’s source, URC deacon Ethan Holden (The Jolly Brawler on X), is a neo-Nazi, is in no way an overstatement. He openly supports his brother, when he splices Nazi propaganda into his Christian Nationalist videos, defends George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, and, last weekend, posted this:

The libel had been written, because, the week before, I exposed that there was an open white-nationalist church in Doug Wilson’s denomination, housing the primary compatriots of Michael Spangler and Stephen Wolfe1 (to my knowledge, at the time of this writing, it still is housing them and no public action has been taken against the church by the CREC). Wilson’s response was to write a blog post denouncing me, but admitting there was smoke—which means he also stared into a camera and read out his denouncement, a surreal experience, if you’ve never been on the receiving end. This was not enough for the kinists he still very much publicly courted at the time, including the disfellowshipped white-nationalist pastor, Bret McAtee, who wrote a post (that I will not link to) denouncing Wilson for stopping short of explicitly naming me antichrist. Wilson caved to the pressure, and wrote a second post accusing me of slandering the church as white nationalist and called me a “messed up dude” in response to a letter to the editor. The man who gave Wilson the church’s “Statement on Ethnic Balance” that he used as “evidence” that I was guilty of slander was Shane Anderson, Spangler’s compatriot in the church, who has since gone on to, among many other things, promote Spangler’s essay series for the kinist Pactum Institute, in which Spangler, like Holden, calls for the resegregation of America.

Like the many, many people who have been publicly calumniated by Doug Wilson, I’m smart enough to not hold my breath waiting for a very well-earned apology. I’m certain I will have to take the same stance with Buck, who didn’t address a single one of Mefferd’s factual claims—I’ve had the screenshots of his texts about me for quite some time, and alluded to them in a previous post. Instead, Buck decided to engage in ad hominem character assasination, which was joined in by his media allies, Tom Ascol, James White, Chris Holnholz and Megan Basham. It seems these people are so self-centered and oblivious to the point Mefferd made in her article, that the supposedly “conservative” Christian media class has abandoned truth for pure tribalism, that they’re determined to prove her correct.

Ultimately, this should be your takeaway from this tale of ridiculously unethical behavior: The industry driving “Reformed” discipleship is chock full of clout-chasers sacrificing their dignity, and actively bearing false witness, to maintain alliances with the most malignant people imaginable, in hopes of building and maintaining tiny, inconsequential, earthly empires. Why would any self-respecting Christian want to be shaped, in any way, by such an ecosystem?

1

For references to Spangler, Wolfe and Thomas Achord directly promoting white-nationalist ideology, see this post. Last Friday, Achord posted the following on X:

Christian Nationalism likes to present itself as a masculine movement of strong manly men regaining Christian manliness, but, in reality, its mascot is a keyboard warrior sitting in the back of an empty conference room, with his face buried in his phone, reviling a reporter with a mode of effeminate bullying one normally only sees from teenage mean girls, instead of having the actual manliness to simply stand up, turn around and say something to his face. Revilers will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel. But I have made no use of any of these rights, nor am I writing this to secure any such provision. For I would rather die than have any one deprive me of my ground for boasting. For if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! For if I do this of my own will, I have a reward; but if not of my own will, I am entrusted with a commission. What then is my reward? Just this: that in my preaching I may make the gospel free of charge, not making full use of my right in the gospel.
—1 Corinthians 9:13-19

If a layman insisted that he be paid for running an eight-week, Sunday-evening study series, his church would consider him a crook. On the other hand, if a pastor abandons his salaried job, several times a year, to be paid a handsome sum for an hour-long speech and a meet-and-greet at a $250 per head, two-day “conference” put on by another church (which he spent his salaried hours preparing for), American evangelical culture considers it normal.

If someone working in the secular sphere spent half of his work hours prepping for and recording a podcast—recruiting guests, researching subjects, finding sponsors—going as far as to turn the empty office down the hall into a makeshift recording studio, his employer would be none too pleased when he found out. In American evangelicalism, though, a pastor treating his commission as a financial safety-net, while turning himself into a media brand, is “reaching the culture.”

If the social media manager at a secular company used the official Facebook account to draw eyeballs to his personal blog, from which he linked people to his online store, where one could buy all manner of print-on-demand products, he wouldn’t make it to the end of the week. Yet, in American evangelical culture, the members of the church, who pay the pastor’s salary, are often expected to condone, and even act as brand ambassadors for, whatever side-hustle he’s involved in.

Thankfully, this is not the modus operandi of the average American Protestant pastor, but it’s the public evangelical culture that he, and we, are steeped in. We have become accustomed to drawing our theology and doctrine, especially our teaching materials, from a system of “Christianity” that has normalized going far beyond what Scripture allots for preachers and teachers, to turn Jesus into a billion-dollar industry that takes much of its cues from the world. Though this system is far from historic practice, is mostly limited to the American market, and has been dominant for barely half a century, it has become so normalized that to be an evangelical Christian who openly rejects all its forms is to risk being labeled an extremist among your own peers.

I’m a guy who was born and raised in Los Angeles, the home of the sketchy, media-driven side-hustle, and I refuse to take part in any flavor of that grift at all, let alone when it’s being done in the name of God. The American Christian media industry exists to turn a buck on convincing you that you need to continually pay for an ever-rotating selection of content that, more often than not, is nowhere near as good as the two millennia of Christian teaching that you can get for free. Though we have normalized it, it is not normal, and it is contra to the instructions of Scripture.

• Stephen Wolfe (and his sidekick, Thomas Achord)

• Joel Webbon (and his sidekick, “Wesley Todd”)

• Eric Conn and Brian Sauvé

• Andrew Torba

• Andrew Isker (and his sidekick, CJay Engel)

• William Wolfe

• More recently, Michael Spangler (and his sidekick, Cody Justice)

To be sure, there are a host of lesser-known characters openly allied with the above men (Zachary Garris, J. Chase Davis and Jon Harris serve as more notable examples), but ask just about anyone remotely in the know to name a “Reformed Christian Nationalist” and they will likely give you someone on this list. Every single one of these men has directly promoted racist and/or antisemitic beliefs and/or tropes.

Both Wolfes, Achord, Webbon, Todd, Conn, Sauvé, Isker and Engel have explicitly promoted eugenics, usually by referencing the pseudoscience of physiognomy or by calling people “dysgenic.”

Both Wolfes, Achord, Webbon, Todd, Conn, Sauvé, Torba, Isker, Engel, and Spangler have directly spread antisemitic views and/or tropes.

Achord, Conn, Torba, Engel,1 Spangler and Justice have promoted neo-Nazi slogans or outright promoted Nazism.

I could go on, but the above should be more than enough evidence for anyone with a modicum of discernment. All of these men also, of course, talk about the “Christian magistrate” and establismentarianism, but it’s a ridiculously thin cover for what they’re mainly trying to launder into “Reformed” discourse. Those within Christian academia who continue to research, and publicly address, “Reformed Christian Nationalism” firstly and primarily from the position of magisterial Protestantism are not seeing the forest for the trees and are ultimately providing cover for what has, from the beginning, been a white-nationalist movement.

1

“By God, we’ll have our home again” is the anthem of the explicitly white-nationalist offshoot of the Proud Boys, Männerbund (men’s club, which is what the Brown Shirts were originally classified as).

Though, if we’re being honest, this marketing strategy is also pretty weird and kind of creepy. I wonder what type of person is so bought-in that they’re buying an $11 bar of soap that would be just like any other hand-made soap if it wasn’t branded after an insanely antisemitic priest and founder of a pro-Nazi organization. People are actually buying an overpriced bar of “Made in the USA” soap named in honor of a man whose associates were charged with plotting to overthrow the U.S. government, and who remained so virulent in his rhetoric after Pearl Harbor that his own diocese threatened to defrock him if he didn’t cease all public speaking and writing. We know these products have a notable fan base among “Reformed” Christian Nationalists.

To be fair, we shouldn’t knock the Christian Nationalists for being party to this game; the entire Reformed ecosystem is fueled by these types of strange companies. There’s an inverse correlation between the nicheness of a Reformed conference and the prevalence of vendors hawking “Reformed” tchotchkes. You’ll find conference sponsors selling “Christian” everything, from Moscow-aligned financial planning to postmillenial theonomist body armor, which brings me to my ultimate point: If you’re a lifelong Christian who reads the above and is rightfully weirded out, you now have an inkling of what it’s like to be someone not raised in the church, who came to Christ, and now has to function within American evangelicalism.

So much of everyday evangelical culture seems weird, self-unaware and cringey to us.

And we still love you, very much. You have no idea how much we’re leaning on the Spirit when we’re forced to smile and nod through normative cultural expressions, foreign to us and that we find nowhere in Scripture, but which we know you find integral to your identity. You have no idea how much some of us wish, for your own spiritual growth, you could have sympathy for black evangelicals when they express their discomfort in trying to bridge the “most segregated hour,” only to receive an emotional, and often angry, response that we’re all supposed to gather as one body—that always belligerently follows your normative cultural expressions that we find nowhere in Scripture. Though we may not want them officially formed, we don’t begrudge the desire for “affinity groups,” because we converts often naturally form our own “church within the church,” where we feel safe to express how awkward it was to sit through whatever weird, culturally evangelical thing happened in the service this week, which you were probably oblivious to. We know that, whenever we bring up such things to you, you visibly, and often verbally, bristle. We still love you through all of it and want to fellowship with you. Like the Greek speaking Christians in Jerusalem felt neglected by Hebrew Christians unwilling to step outside of their cultural norms (Acts 6:1), we just wish that you could have some appreciation for our position too.

In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts… True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.1

Or take John Piper’s legalistic and creepy views on physically fit women from his book with the founder of the Center for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Wayne Grudem, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, released by a premier Reformed publishing house, Crossway. It would be hilarious if Piper wasn’t dead serious:

Consider what is lost when women attempt to assume a more masculine role by appearing physically muscular and aggressive. It is true that there is something sexually stimulating about a muscular, scantily clad young woman pumping iron in a health club. But no woman should be encouraged by this fact. For it probably means the sexual encounter that such an image would lead to is something very hasty and volatile, and in the long run unsatisfying. The image of a masculine musculature may beget arousal in a man, but it does not beget several hours of moonlight walking with significant, caring conversation. The more women can arouse men by doing typically masculine things, the less they can count on receiving from men a sensitivity to typically feminine needs.2

Rejection of purity culture is not solely the domain of the deconstructed; some of its most vocal opponents are theologically conservative outlets, such as Every Woman a Theologian, which offers multiple resources to scripturally counter the purity culture narrative, without compromising on Christian ethics. Such realities are not convenient for those whose bread and butter was the movement, though, so it’s much easier for them to stick their fingers in their ears and continue full steam ahead. This is what Grudem’s successor at CBMW, Denny Burk, did in a recent opinion piece for WORLD, in which he recounts how the former evangelical influencer Jen Hatmaker has now rebranded herself as a deconstruction influencer.

This is not a defense of Hatmaker, who is selling the equally destructive ends of unfettered self-actualization for a profit, after years of selling cultural evangelicalism for a profit (there’s a Venn diagram of an issue there that neither Hatmaker nor Burk want to address, and that I’ll leave for another day). What I take issue with is Burk’s statement, “Hatmaker sneers at the so-called ‘purity culture’ that she was raised in and has now left behind.” The last person who has room to use this dismissive framing is the head of an organization that was one of the most pervasive promoters of purity culture at its height. The quote from Hatmaker that Burk describes as “sneering” is not just an unwarranted, sinful rejection of the Christian sexual ethic, but contains a sentiment that I have heard from multiple conservative Christian women harmed by purity culture:

We were taught there’s zero sex before marriage. Our dads would give us what were called purity rings. They went on our left hands and that was the placeholder for our purity until some man put a wedding ring on it. We all went through this curriculum called True Love Waits. It was abstinence-only, and that instruction was baked in with fear and shame. It was scary to imagine getting on not just the wrong side of our parents, of our faith communities, but on the wrong side of God. ... We were scared to death. A whole generation of us came into marriage absolutely freaked out around sex. We had no idea what the hell we were doing, or what we were supposed to be doing once we could finally have it.

Compare this to conservative Christian writer Phylicia Masonheimer’s description of her short book, Freedom from Legalism:

I too lived in the shadows of purity culture, adhering to rules and judging deviations. But when doubt cast its shadows, I left legalism behind. I know the pain it inflicts, the false sense of security it offers, and the tantalizing temptation of its shortcuts. But in Christ, there is a path to purity and holiness that nurtures relationship over rules.

It’s far easier for personalities from organizations like CBMW to hold up people like Hatmaker as supposed proof that rejection of their legalistic views is solely the domain of Progressive Christians and the deconstructed, rather than have to deal with the messy truth of the hurt their movement continues to leave in its wake. It’s not just people like Hatmaker pulling people towards deconstruction, it’s a loud and aggressive, reactionary and legalistic view of the faith being portrayed as far more normative than it really is pushing people away from healthy Christianity towards deconstruction. A true Christian response to the phenomenon of deconstruction, one that is concerned with showing love for the lost over protecting cultural and institutional comfort, is to genuinely seek to understand where the fallible human beings of American cultural evangelicalism went wrong and to course correct.

What does one do when presented with such an insane bastardization of the faith? I’ve watched this video at least two dozen times, growing in my awe of it after each viewing. It’s so stupidly over the top that when I showed my wife the video she was certain that it was an elaborate troll, but Gomez is very much for real. How can one even begin to form a meaningful response to, “We’re done turning the other cheek. Remember, David didn’t pray for Goliath, he killed him,” followed by telling people of an entire competing religious demographic to “f*** off,” then finishing with the tagline “powered by Jesus Christ”? At this point, I think the only warranted reaction is:

In all seriousness, I can’t help but see that, for our generation, Paul’s appeal of, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2), needs to start with not giving in to the sheer stupidity of our age. I’m sure most reading this think they’re succeeding in that, but allow me to prod a little. Consider how our perpetually online church culture finds an outrage of the week, every week, to make the topic of heated debate. This week’s outrage, participated in by just about every Christian with an X account, comes from an apparent friend of American Reformer1 who was recently kicked out of his church,2 Josh Haywood, with this whopper of an antichrist statement:

Again, attempting to form an intellectual response to such insane bastardization of the faith is a fool’s errand. The proper thing to do when confronted with this level of ridiculousness from characters like Gomez and Haywood comes straight from Scripture: “As for a man who is factious, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful; he is self-condemned” (Titus 3:10-11). Haywood is one of those minor characters in the Christian Nationalist movement who has already put himself well into “mark and avoid” territory, especially after he promoted the “fourteen words” of white nationalism as uncontroversial and claimed that the resolution against kinism (Christianized white supremacy) recently passed by the PCA could preclude him from joining that denomination:

But we don’t mark and avoid people like Gomez and Haywood anymore, no matter how deep into blasphemy they go. Instead, we use them as punching bags for our daily social media dopamine hit. Public Christian discourse in the 21st-century West is not proactively for Christ, but mostly comprised of reactive, pithy, two-to-three-sentence “take-downs” of mentally-unwell heretics.3 The result is that we drag ourselves down to their level, failing at our task to not be conformed to this world. This is why I abandoned Christian social media and will only write in the long form anymore. I no longer want to play that losing game, as much as I know I have to find a way to function in an American church whose thought-leaders have centered their brand on not only casting their pearls before swine, but rolling in the mud with them.

1

2

I’m not going to hand-wave away my sins during the time of apostasy that followed; I fell in and out of the partying lifestyle for several years after that. I’m not here to discuss the fine grain details of what is and isn’t sin, but how the evangelical church, on the whole, avoids taking responsibility for how it drives many people away. While I will not begrudge God’s providence, the truth is that, if I had been in a healthy church that followed Scripture, engaged in real discipleship, and wasn’t focused on getting as many potential tithers in the door as possible, I may have stuck with the faith. Yet, I almost never see anyone in ministry speak to the reality that the behavior of the church often causes people to reject the faith. Just as we can be the ordinary means of grace that God uses to draw people to Him, we can be the ordinary means that the enemy uses to push people away from God.

Acknowledging this is often taboo in conservative evangelical circles; “once saved always saved” we’re told, and, if someone leaves the church, they were never of us in the first place. Therefore, questioning, and even rejecting, how one’s congregation fellowships, how it communicates the faith and how it treats dissent, which can cause people to see the church as more of a business defending its bottom line or a system of hierarchy protecting its power, is labeled “divisiveness.” As someone who, twenty years after leaving that Foursquare church, has just as much disdain for its way of “doing church,” but who has more faith in Christ than ever, I don’t care to entertain such rationalizations. Is there an element of rejection of certain aspects of Christian ethics among the “deconstructed”? Of course, but there’s just as much, if not more, of an exasperation with watching the Christians in their lives reject other aspects of Christian ethics, and shaming anyone who pushes back.

This is what I can’t help but think of in a season where a generation of controversial Christian media figures are passing; those who never found themselves on the wrong side of their ministries lionize them while shaming those who find catharsis in detailing how the figures’ teachings hurt them. For the deconstructed, it’s very similar to what a child of a parent with a personality disorder experiences, where they are chastised by the parent’s peers for not appreciating everything the parent has done for them (which is the narrative of victimization the parent has sold). When a Christian figure who left a large wake of controversy behind him passes, the notion that those caught in that wake should keep their mouths shut as the figure’s fans all but canonize him is near-sociopathic. It’s also terribly disingenuous, because the same people who demand this reverence of their celebrities are often the first, for example, to talk about how prominent Catholic figures are probably in hell, the second they pass.

My wife and I have come to see reaching our deconstructed friends and family as a key part of the Great Commission God has given us, and nothing is a greater roadblock to showing those people whom we love the truth of the gospel than other Christians.

Webbon is not the first person to shoot to stardom in the conservative Christian world, only to crash and burn on his own malignancy, especially within the Reformed subculture (Mark Driscoll serves as a prominent example). Last week I wrote about one reason I think that is, namely that a fear of being labeled a “liberal” in conservative Reformed circles drives personalities to allow, and even embrace, far-right extremists who bring far more of a political agenda than a theological one. In this post, though, I want to challenge my readers who still imbibe Reformed media to question why they are still following such a system.

That’s not a looking down of the nose; I used to be one of those people. If you are a genuine Christ follower, though—if you truly seek to follow Him above all else and to clear any and all distractions to that necessary primary purpose—it’s very hard to justify taking direction from an industry that regularly condones people like Webbon and never seems to learn from its mistakes. He always behaved in this malignant manner, and was cheered on for it as long as he only pointed it at the approved intra-industry rivals, like supposed “liberal” Gavin Ortlund, whom he called one of his “favorite race hustlers” in a 2023 episode with the Daily Wire’s Megan Basham (who appeared to agree with him).

“These are the fringes of the Reformed world, those crazy Reformed Baptists,” I’m sure some will push back. I must admit that it’s easier for me to come to the conclusion that this malignancy is most certainly not just at the fringes, when the Presbyterian theologian Carl Trueman, whose writing I’ve greatly benefited from, is still listed as visiting faculty at the new boutique seminary of Tom Ascol, who put me, along with several Reformed elders and pastors, on a social media list, named “Malakoi bois.”

Take a second to think about the above. The President of Founders Ministries and Chancellor of Founders Seminary, whose founding faculty includes Voddie Baucham and Tom Nettles, took the time to photoshop me and an editor at Christianity Today next to Pee Wee Herman and post it on social media. This is, of course, acceptable in the Reformed world, because, as people who have publicly criticized the malignant behavior of Reformed micro-celebrities, those of us on this list are acceptable targets, just like Ortlund.

This is the modus operandi of the reactionary ends of conservative Christian media, actively embraced by the more “respectable” personalities. If you are a consumer of pop-Reformed books, podcasts and conferences, this is how the people you are getting your theology, doctrine and ecclesiology from, and/or their associates, behave.

Would you accept an elder in your church acting like Ascol, if he was doing this on Facebook to another member of your congregation? Would you accept your pastor publicly working with such a person, if he was the lead pastor of a church down the road? Of course not! Why do you accept it from the people online whom you are effectively treating as your secondary teaching elders? Why would you have your walk with Christ shaped by this ecosystem, by either those committing the offense or those who condone it, because they’ve staked their income on playing nice with such people?

You can just walk away from it. You have two millennia of Christian thought to draw from, most of it at no cost to you. Your spiritual formation does not need to be constantly up to date with whatever the latest political battle is. None of that has anything to do with how the people in your immediate vicinity need to hear the good news of Jesus Christ.

• I have no biases towards evangelical cultural norms over scriptural fidelity. “This is just the way we’ve always done it,” has no effect on me, when the way they’ve always done it rubs against clear scriptural mandate.

• I have no skin in the game when it comes to the sociopolitical battles that have become the defining characteristic of evangelical culture over the last half century. I’m here for Jesus, not forcibly making evangelical cultural and political preferences the American way.

What this means is that emotionally manipulative arguments of “If you don’t get on board with what we’re doing, if you stand on your principles, you’ll be alone,” hold no water with me either. I have Jesus, so I’m never alone, regardless of what cultural evangelicalism wants to be obsessed with for the ends of political power or increased revenue. What sets someone like me apart from the average evangelical Christian is that I’ve already paid the social price of losing friends for choosing Christ as an adult, and I retain many good friends who don’t share my religious or political views, so my social life is not wholly dependent on being part of the cultural evangelical in-crowd. Having one foot in each world, I can see how so much of the evangelical end is caught in a feedback loop of overestimating its influence.

Which leads me to CNN’s extended interview with the supposedly “Reformed” pastor, who has had one of his theological concoctions specifically anathematized by the nation’s largest conservative Reformed denomination, Doug Wilson. I’ll spare you a full analysis, but here’s the video:

What CNN has done over the last week is successfully brand Doug Wilson as the next Fred Phelps (of Westboro Baptist Church infamy). While the rest of the nation who finally became acquainted with Wilson this week, including the majority of professing Christians, are horrified by how he represented himself, the Reformed world is mostly oblivious, because this has become business as usual for them. Wilson has embedded himself in that world over the last few decades, in no small part thanks to other Reformed celebrities of his generation, like John Piper and R.C. Sproul, and because of his early stake within the world of Classical Christian homeschooling; outside of those two small worlds, he’s relatively unheard of. The Reformed world, in particular, has become so used to fringe figures like Wilson in its midst, and has been successfully nudged to much of their political outlook, that it can no longer see how freaking bonkers he looks to everyone not in their bubble. Wilson’s publishing house, Canon Press, even published the full interview on their X account, as if it made him and them look good.

There is also no understanding of what an extreme minority us conservative Reformed Christians are in this country; we make up at most 1-2% of the populace, while theologically and socially conservative Christians make up, at best, 5-6%.1 When figures like Wilson jockey themselves into a “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” position for their own financial benefit, and mainstream Reformed figures treat his insane positions, such as the Mosaic Law being raised with Christ, the “mutual affection” in chattel slavery, and justifying marrying a fixated pedophile to a female member of his church, as just another set of normal debate topics, our numbers will assuredly shrink even further. Just like people outside of American cultural evangelicalism look at the celebrity pastor worship, the insider lingo and the over-the-top musical productions and rightly see a cringy, emotionally manipulative system, they look at that same culture’s social action and see a dwindling subculture that’s out to lunch.

All the while, the cause of Christ, the real reason we’re supposed to be here, suffers.

Firstly, congregationalist polity simply doesn’t work. Any church, especially in our modern evangelical culture, can quickly become a cult of personality, but having each church be an island to itself, where the pastor has no accountability outside of the internal power-structure he personally oversees, is asking for trouble. Any bad-acting pastor will simply surround himself with yes men elders, or, as is more often the case nowadays, he will simply set up a corporate structure where he’s unassailable, and foster a mindset among the laity that keeps him in his position. Associations become little more than social clubs for pastors looking to increase their status, and, on the national level, mostly political and money-making organizations masquerading as ecclesial bodies. Nothing demonstrates this more than the Southern Baptist Convention, where, despite yearly grandstanding, nobody dependent on its conglomeration of multi-million dollar businesses will step forward for the cause of Christ to a degree that puts his meal-ticket at risk. Pastors can openly behave in ways that would have them surely defrocked under denominational polity, and yet they are allowed to continue as members in good standing in the SBC, because having no standards for pastoral conduct is baked into the congregationalist system. Denominational polity isn’t perfect, and has its own mechanisms that provide bad-acting pastors and elders cover, but, within the liberty of conscience area of church polity, I must conclude that it is objectively better.

Secondly, it’s not okay to turn Jesus into a business model. In fact, it’s disgustingly impious and directly contrary to the model for overseers in 1 Timothy 3—or do you not know that the main reason nonbelievers in America think Christianity is fake is because they see our thought-leaders as being lovers of money? American evangelical culture has so normalized pastors and theologians becoming relatively wealthy through the multi-million-dollar Christian book, podcast and conference racket that one can expect to be shamed for openly rejecting it. But I am not ashamed, I am a deconstructed Christian reconstructed by Jesus Christ, and I am still repulsed by the same for-profit angles that caused me to walk away from the church for over a decade. Now a Christian of the Reformed persuasion, I continue to reject those mechanisms that utterly pervade the Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist world, no matter how much it tries to pretend that its media apparatus is anything other than TBN with TULIP.

Which leads to my third conclusion, that the Reformed church is obsessed with its celebrity pastors and theologians, who have overwhelmingly syncretized the predominant American religion of politics to an untenable degree. I don’t know a single Reformed teaching or ruling elder who doesn’t have a series of podcasts from Reformed personalities that they devotedly listen to, meaning that their political theology and ecclesiology is being shaped by people beholden to:

• Podcast sponsorships from companies selling an obsessive audience on products like “Christian” beef jerky and soap.

• Five-figure speaker’s fees from what seems to be an endless parade of unnecessary conferences.

• Royalties for their bi-annual book of the month instructing Christians on how to address this year’s political crisis or which professing believers they need to denounce for holding different liberty of conscience opinions.

• Annual checks for the number of students watching the video lectures they recorded for another conference-hopper’s boutique, unaccredited seminary.

It’s the very same racket driving the political obsessions in our country and, more often than not, is comprised of the exact same talking points, but with a thin “Christian” veneer. The for-profit Reformed media industry is making us and our ecclesial leadership obsessed with everything but the One whom we are to be obsessed with. It is, in our place and time, the primary obstacle inside the church to denying ourselves, picking up our cross, and following Christ (Luke 9:23), and, to paraphrase Dietrich Bonhoeffer, any immediacy before Christ is hatred of Christ.

Fourthly, and lastly, the evangelical church has all but abandoned the requirement of personal sanctification. I recently committed myself to reading all thirty-eight volumes of The Early Church Fathers, up to the Seventh Eccumenical Council (I’m currently in volume two). The only conclusion I can draw from reading almost everything from the first and second centuries (I only have Clement of Alexandria left) is that I see nothing at all contradicting that justification is by faith, but our works of faith matter, and there will be an accounting (1 Corinthians 3:12-13, Matthew 25:14-30). Those discipled by the Apostles, and the men discipled by those men, were very concerned with how their works would be received at the judgement, and we should also be concerned. Yet, the evangelical church in America has become so obsessed with defending Sola Fide (which I affirm), that it often ignores the requirements of progressive sanctification, especially how so much of the Epistles are dedicated to instructing us on how to be cognizant of not only our own spiritual fruit, but that of those we fellowship with. The result is that the church often allows incredibly destructive wolves in its midst, as long as those wolves give a verbal assent to the gospel.

Ultimately what this means for my praxis is that I no longer see myself as a Particular Baptist, and my family and I will likely return to the Presbyterian Church in America. I’ve always been a bit of a fence-sitter on baptism, but very partial to Covenant Theology. While congregationalist polity and credobaptism are not explicitly intertwined, there exists a closer intertwining of paedobaptism and Covenant Theology, so I’m reexamining my position. I cannot ignore the end result of laissez-faire theological and doctrinal insanity from four centuries of credobaptist congregationalism, and I consider baptism to be a liberty of conscience matter.

This really doesn’t matter for my likely PCA membership, because, being disillusioned with the American evangelical church, I have no desire to hold an ordained position, now or ever. One does not have to give full assent to the Westminster Confession of Faith to be a member of an orthodox Presbyterian church. Besides, I still prefer the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith’s stance on church and state, which is “no thanks.” I’m perfectly happy to once again become a regular member of a church, whom other members can count on, but who has no major ministry obligations.

In the long run, I think closely following Christ is to do what He did, and dedicate yourself to individuals over institutions.

“Surely that’s not the case!” some will protest, so allow me to use one of the most notable, now-open racists and his sponsors as an example. The now admitted “race realist” Joel Webbon had practically every Reformed Baptist social media personality on his podcast over the last few years, and had James White, Doug Wilson and Stephen Wolfe headline his personal conference for the last three years, respectively. As late as last year, even after Webbon and his podcast co-hosts had begun descending into outright racism and antisemitism, (then) G3’s Virgil Walker and Tom Buck defended him. Buck went as far as to accuse those who rightly raised the alarm on Webbon of slander (and has yet to recant his now obviously libelous statement about other Christians). To my knowledge, not a single Reformed personality who helped to put Webbon on the map over the last four years has explicitly named him as a racist false teacher, even as he now publicly aligns himself with the head of the white-nationalist “groypers,” Nick Fuentes.

“So this is a Reformed Baptist problem!” the Presbyterians will protest, and, in some respects, they’re correct. Congregationalist polity has certainly allowed this evil to run wild in those quarters, but the Presbyterians have their hands full as well, and are not publicly addressing the problem head on, something they have no issue doing when the problem is to their political left. Along with all of the other scandals that surround Doug Wilson, Kevin DeYoung purposefully sidestepped how Wilson had been courting this element for years, choosing to instead focus on the much less destructive problem of “the Moscow Mood”—not only was Wilson the headliner of Webbon’s conference, he was on a panel at Moscow’s Fight Laugh Feast conference with Webbon and Canon Press’ most popular author, Wolfe.

That pattern continues, as mainstream voices in the Reformed world near-exclusively address Wolfe’s writings on his preferred terms of “Protestant political resourcement,” conspicuously avoiding the obvious, as he defends and works with his friends who have come out as explicit white-nationalists, as he pushes eugenics and antisemitic tropes himself, and even antagonistically challenged the statement against racial supremacy passed by three Presbyterian denominations, positing that there is a “mild” position of “immutable” “superiority of race” that one can hold.

It doesn’t get more obvious than the above, yet I have seen not one mainstream Presbyterian personality directly challenge Wolfe, who is a member of a NAPARC church, on these statements or the many others that preceded them for years, even as Wilson’s own fans are now pressing him to stop profiting from Wolfe’s book. We are left to ask why that is. Why have these characters been given such runway in our one particular corner of the American church, even as members of the movement are proactively embedding themselves in Presbyterian churches and seminaries?

I believe the answer to be that conservative Reformed media in America has courted most of the Christian Nationalist worldview for years, including antagonistic arguments around “race,” and doesn’t know how to criticize the movement without undercutting their own culture-warring arguments, losing much of their audience. The more hardcore corner of that world has been treating “liberals” as subhuman for many years, and sold their audience on the frightening prospect of a godless horde coming for the church. They have built their brand on never apologizing, no matter what, and on attacking anyone who would question them as inauthentically Christian. Now they have no way to recant their years of support of a new generation of men who have spent the last year very much pulling the mask off, to a ridiculous degree. Those on the more moderate end of Presbyterianism have spent years being attacked as “liberals” by that hardcore corner—DeYoung’s The Gospel Coalition is one of their prime targets, right behind Christianity Today—and I believe they’re scared of the resulting backlash from saying the obvious. The lunatics are running the social media asylum and are at the helm of a false consensus that is given undue sway among the online Reformed.

The sad truth of the Reformed world is that it’s more damaging to a personality’s reputation to be wrongly accused of being a liberal than to rightly be accused of being a racist, and fear of that has a death-grip on that world’s thought-leaders.

I was right.

Though, within that predictable conversation, beyond the normal back and forth between parties who see Wilson as either the church’s greatest threat or greatest vanguard, there was a notable aspect of the discussion that, when placed in its proper context, gives a clear view of how ridiculous the bubble of conservative Reformed media is. In the interview, Wilson and his associates, Toby Sumpter and Jared Longshore, promoted the notion of repealing the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote. If it’s not obvious to you, that will never happen. Even proposing it, one hundred years into female enfranchisement, is evidence of how out to lunch the “patriarchalist” world is.

Yet, nothing shows how detached from reality all of Christian media is, and why extremists like Wilson get as far as they do within it, than how that online bubble treated his view not as the absolutely laughable notion that it is, but as a serious point of debate. It seemed as if nearly every pastor and theologian with a podcast or book to promote weighed in, trying to put forth some “biblical” argument for or against the proposal, as if it has any more realistic merit than arguing over who would win in a fight between Batman and Iron Man.

Conservative Christianity (especially the Reformed end), as it is represented in media, is not a serious movement; it’s a pathetic political front riding the gravitas of the real faith. I have grown to have nothing but contempt for it, especially as I have come to see that its most prominent personalities reach their theological conclusions via the same lack of intellectual rigor that they give to their endless political obsessions.

• The conversation centers almost entirely around politics (and Wilson and co. are happy to oblige).

• The journalist treats standard conservative ecclesiology and Wilson’s views that are at odds with most conservative Christians as equally regressive.

• The journalist brings in figures from the opposite, extreme end of the church and treats their assessments as normative.

• The journalist doesn’t interview the many middle-of-the-bell-curve conservative Christians who openly reject Wilson, leaving her mostly uninformed audience to assume that Wilson represents the common worldview of conservative evangelicals.

This will surely spark another forty-eight hour debate cycle, where people will yet again litigate all things Moscow, missing the obvious truth staring them in the face. Take a look at these two frames, and see if you can figure it out.

Wilson’s brand new church, the centerpiece of his empire, is smaller than the average Bible-Belt church. It’s around the size of an established orthodox Presbyterian church, and much smaller than the average Southern Baptist or non-denominational church. Doug Wilson is considered the figurehead of the “theobro” movement; he has been trying to get people to move to Moscow, Idaho, for decades, selling them on a utopian vision, and yet his brand new church is about the same size as the Church of God in Christ assembly in my small suburb of Greenville, South Carolina, that has no internet presence beyond a web page. To put this all into perspective, here’s the interior of the most popular church within a couple miles of my house. It’s one of dozens of similar, or larger, size in my city.

To compound this, consider that conservative Presbyterians, the tradition Wilson claims to be a part of, make up roughly 1% of the United States population, and roughly 26% of them lean Democrat. On top of this, the majority of conservative, orthodox Presbyterians, including most pastors, elders and theologians in the Presbyterian Church in America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, consider Wilson to be a schismatic or outright heretic.

Treating the theobro movement as anything more than an ideological threat to the minds of malleable young men within the church is to play into the online theatrics and chest-puffing of Wilson and his copycats. Pete Hegseth got his position in the Trump administration in the green room of Fox News, not in the fellowship hall of a church in Wilson’s boutique denomination that he created to cater to his heterodox views. The new White House “faith office” is run by a female pastor and self-proclaimed prophet, two things at direct opposition to the theobro movement. The politics of Wilson and friends are useful as a “Christian” niche to a mostly secular “National Conservative” conference and political-appointment grift that will never adopt anything resembling Wilson’s theonomic vision, and he is more than happy to play his part, collect a speaker’s fee, and get more publicity for his “Christian” business endeavors.

I recently came across a list of Christian Nationalist social media influencers who follow a famous Holocaust denier. On the list was a pastor who had a fair amount of interaction and influence with some of the better-known theobros I’ve been tracking for years, whom I’d never done research on. When I looked up his church, I found an old, dingy, roughly eight hundred square foot stucco building, in the middle of an old neighborhood in the Great Plains. It couldn’t house more than eighty people, if you packed them in like sardines. Yet, this person has thousands of followers on social media and is considered a medium-level personality in the “Reformed” Christian Nationalist movement, which he’s playing for a profit.

Doug Wilson is playing the same, for-profit game, just at a moderately higher level. He is so disliked, even in his home town, that his associates cannot win local elections. His brand of “Christianity” has no chance of becoming the predominant religion in America, now or ever. His (and his imitators’) online theatrics merely serve as a useful foil for people at the opposite end of the political horseshoe, who vastly outnumber his tribe, and he only has minute influence in the Reformed church because of how much undue weight political polemics have been given in the pulpit.

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, gutted the staff, and changed one of the most recognizable brand names in the world to the name of a little-known company he founded in the 90s, he promised to usher in a new era of free speech on the internet. He lied.

In many ways X is less of a free speech platform than Twitter was; Musk has been credibly accused of silencing his critics on the platform, as, more than once, multiple journalists unfavorable to him have had their accounts suspended, with either a flimsy excuse or no explanation at all. But, beyond that obvious hypocrisy, Musk has molded the former Twitter into something far more dangerous, a gamified pay-to-play libertarian digital dystopia, selling itself as a “free speech” platform.

In the real world, healthy free speech has a significant limiting factor, in that, while one has the freedom to say whatever he believes without fear of being imprisoned, he’s not free from the social consequences of his words. The Ku Klux Klan is free to march down main street, but the local Exalted Cyclops, when his picture is published in his hometown newspaper, is not free to keep working for an employer who doesn’t want to lose his life savings, because most people don’t want to work with, or buy products from, a Klan member. When a social network allows for anonymity, it removes this important social factor. Most platforms implement content moderation around hateful speech as a shim for this, but, as pre-Musk Twitter showed, that format is easily abused; what constitutes “hateful” speech can very easily be determined by a small group of ideologues.

Yet, what Musk has done is far worse. Not only has he removed most of the content moderation (except for journalists who criticize him), he’s created perhaps the most fertile ground for the propaganda of stupid since the creation of the internet. Here are the parameters:

• Unfettered anonymous account creation. One person can create infinite identities.

• Next to no content moderation. Only actions such as posting the real name of an anonymous user or threats of violence might get an account suspended.

• No serious management of bot accounts, despite promises to crack down.

• Shifting the algorithm to a pay-to-play model.

  • Anyone can buy “verification” (also known as a “blue check”) including anonymous users, something that used to be limited to well-known personalities.

  • Buying a blue check for $84 a year ensures that one’s posts will be seen by more people. For $395 a year, users will be “boosted” even more.

• Blue check users can opt into a “revenue sharing” model and be paid for how many eyeballs they drive to their content.

• Any post which links to content outside of X, including news media, is purposefully limited in its reach.

What this combination of policies has attracted are three particular subcultures:

• (Bot?) accounts posting mindless video engagement, in an attempt to game the system and get paid more than they’re paying for verification and boosting.

• Outrage merchants posting controversial statements (also known as “rage bait”) that they know will get angry interaction that will result in them getting paid.

• Far-rightists, including open white nationalists, who can register infinite, anonymous “alt” accounts, and create a false consensus for their ideas.

The result of this is that X has become a platform primarily for the type of dangerous stupidity that Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned about. Banned from all of the other major platforms, it seems that every white nationalist on the internet now calls X home, to the point that one cannot even peruse an uncurated feed without immediately coming across a post blaming black people or Jews for society’s ills. Smart, thoughtful right-wingers have abandoned the platform in droves, leaving rightoid lunatics to run the asylum, including major personalities who feel a new sense of confidence to pull off the mask. Most leftists, who would at least be a limiting factor, have jumped ship to Bluesky, an alternative platform founded by Twitter’s creator, Jack Dorsey, which is itself a bubble. Even worse, the owner of the asylum is, at best, one of the outrage merchants, but he also regularly interacts with, and promotes, the far-right element. Musk is snorting his own supply.

The situation is so ridiculously untenable that, a few weeks ago, X’s AI chatbot, Grok, which derives much of its learning model from posts on the platform, began praising Hitler and even renamed itself “MechaHitler.” X has become the place where Darryl Cooper, the podcaster who infamously claimed that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain” of World War II, can point his roughly 350,000 followers, many of whom are explicit neo-Nazis, at anyone who should question him. It’s where Turning Point USA personality Jack Posobiec, who has posted multiple Nazi codes, and who regularly makes “Franco Friday” posts, where he praises the mass-murdering ally of Hitler, can do the same with his 3.1 million followers. I know, because I’ve been on the receiving end of revilement from both of them. Both are blue checks and are likely being paid by Musk’s company for this behavior.

Bonhoeffer was right about the futility of trying to battle stupidity with reason, you can only walk away and leave stupidity to itself. Musk has turned the platform where one used to be able to interact with the world’s most interesting figures into a festering cesspool of the type of stupidity that used to be mostly relegated to the dark corners of the internet.

Two years ago, when I launched my book, which proves that Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism is a manifesto of secular ethno-nationalist and authoritarian political theory shoehorned into Calvinist Two-Kingdoms theology, bolstered by a Kantian use of “natural law,” someone who had been in the Christian media business for years gave me a warning. I was told that my theory would ultimately be proven correct, but, as soon as it was, and going after Christian Nationalism was considered politically safe in conservative Christian media circles, people from the very camps who derided me for claiming it was a white-nationalist movement would swoop in to make a name for themselves as the spokespeople of anti-Christian-Nationalism. Even worse, I was told that the Christian media junkies would buy it, hook, line and sinker.

This person was absolutely correct.

In the last few months, a whole host of people whom nobody had ever heard of or, even worse, were known quantities that were openly friendly to the worst elements of Christian Nationalism for the last few years, have decided to build their brand on “exposing” the evil of the movement. It couldn’t be more obvious that their aim is to make a name for themselves, now that being a conservative (or even reactionary) Christian podcaster against a Christian Nationalism that is now publishing books on “race realism” is politically safe, in a way that it wasn’t just less than a year ago. Every one of these men is constantly pumping their latest podcast appearance or gotcha article for a Christian publication. Every move is nakedly designed to help them break into the business, or maintain their position, as much as it’s meant to criticize Christian Nationalists.

Even worse, most of these characters still hold to the overwhelming majority of the Christian Nationalist belief set! One, while making an entire brand around publicly fighting Stephen Wolfe on Twitter, continues to praise Doug Wilson, Wolfe’s publisher, who pumped Wolfe’s book on Tucker Calson’s show and who is still slated to put out an abridged version. Others stand against the racism and antisemitism of the movement—all well and good—but advocate for practically all of the authoritarian political concepts. Prominent pundit James White will choose to debate an open neo-Nazi on the subject of whether certain ethnic groups can be fully sanctified—because that’s how stupid the space is now—but will refuse to call Joel Webbon, whose conference he headlined just two years ago, a false teacher, even though he’s been caught on camera saying the exact same thing. An anti-abuse advocacy podcaster who just came on the scene last year, quickly becoming popular in that space, posted the personal contact information of a female children’s ministry director, opening her up to hate mail, for no other reason than she works with a Christian Nationalist whom he was trying to egg into a public Twitter fight. These are not men of principle, they are narcissists jockeying for attention from a limited media market, while selectively choosing whom to attack, in order to maintain political alliances.

On one end, I guess I should be happy; there’s at least a little bit of house-cleaning happening within the reactionary “Reformed” media space. Yet, I’m not happy, I’m disgusted. I’m fed up with the faith I know to be unfathomably beautiful, built on that Law written on everyone’s heart that seeks peace, love, and everything good, be publicly represented in our media-saturated culture by malignant charlatans. I am sickened by how the Christian media industry works—not just in the reactionary quarters, but all around—and how it’s populated by the most self-serving and intellectually dishonest people imaginable, tainting the discipleship of countless Christians. I have been struggling with being seen as even on the edges of it for the last few years. I’m tired of bad actors accusing me of trying to break into the industry, because they cannot perceive anyone in this arena having motivations other than theirs. I just want the truth to prevail, but that’s not going to happen in the areas of the church where most Americans, believers and unbelievers alike, get their conception of Christianity.

I pray for the people doing this to the faith, but I hate what they do with a righteous anger. I refuse to play by their rules. There is no advancement against Christian Nationalism that is worth compromising my integrity. God owns the ends and a disciple must only be concerned with maintaining honorable means. The only way I could ever prove that the last two years of my writing and advocacy was genuine, and that I’m not like these horribly behaving people, is to disappear from relative obscurity back into the total obscurity I had two years ago, so I shall.

May God bless you all, and may His peace be upon you.