Dallas, We Have a Problem

Discourse on X (formerly Twitter) has become so insanely malignant over the last few months—not only in the promulgation of racism and antisemitism, but also in an overall spirit of enmity—that I’m unsure of how to describe it in a way that would accurately convey the situation to readers who are not on the platform. Meanwhile, those on X are certainly aware of the devolution that has taken place, but have also likely become desensitized to it, in varying degrees. What’s happening online, that has most found a home on the social network that Elon Musk has turned into a digitized libertarian cyberpunk dystopian hellscape, is the very undoing of our societal norms among users, and it has taken firm root in Christian spaces.

Ever since Musk opened the floodgates, there has been an increasing stream of anonymous white-nationalist accounts spewing anger-fueled accusations at anyone who won’t join them in their reviling, but it hockey-sticked a few months ago. The worst actors in “Reformed” Christian Nationalism, who openly acknowledge that the “anon army” is their base, had a public falling out with the more established side of the pop-postmillennial theonomy set, namely Doug Wilson and James White. Some thought that this would result in the worst actors among the worst actors, like Joel Webbon and Eric Conn, being relegated to relative obscurity, but that’s not what happened. Wilson, White and their allies pulled their punches and stopped short of directly labeling these men as the false teachers many, if not most, outside of the theonomists’ circle of influence already knew them to be.

The result was that they became emboldened. Webbon descended into outright eugenic racism, while Conn stopped using code phrases and went directly into open antisemitism… and nothing happened. Neither of these men pastor a church with denominational oversight, the platform they’re on has removed all restrictions on speech short of direct threats and Musk’s changes have allowed their behavior to attain a false consensus, via the “anon army.”

That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of voices within conservative, and even reactionary, Christian media properly rebuking these men as antichrist, such as The Babylon Bee’s Joel Berry, as seen above, but that call is not coming from within any circles that could put real ecclesial or economic pressure on them. To make matters worse, some mainstream reactionary voices, like Southern Baptist pastor and “advisory board” member of American Reformer (doing business as The Center for Baptist Leadership) Tom Ascol, rather than calling these men to repentance as they increased their rhetoric, embraced them as “brothers” in need of gentle direction.

Again, nothing happened. Nobody within leadership at the SBC had the courage to step forward to correct or rebuke Ascol, and so he descended into the madness of outright public revilement himself. Southern Baptist pastors who are open allies of Webbon and Conn, such as Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers, speaking at Webbon’s Trashworld conference next month, and Colorado pastor J. Chase Davis, who spoke at Conn’s New Christendom conference last year, are free to continue their more than friendly associations with these men, with no censure. We are now at a point where multiple Southern Baptist pastors feel free to be openly malignant in ways that would have been rightly anathematized just a year ago.

Florida pastor Adam Page, who formerly worked under Conn at a secular job, was nominated to the Committee on Committees for this year’s Southern Baptist Convention by SBC President Clint Pressley. Here he responds to pastor Matt Carr’s denouncement of racism with open derision.

I could spend all day posting screenshots of pastors displaying shockingly malignant behavior—I could do an entire thousand-word post on Southern Baptist pastor Jeff Wright alone, but I’ll instead leave you with one example that will more than suffice. There is a gangrenous wound in American conservative Christianity, especially within the SBC, and it has found a home on the social network that everyone who wants to be a player in the convention uses on a regular basis. We have to amputate.