A sizable portion, if not the majority, of my readers are Reformed Christians. It’s to you that I pose the following question: Why does it have to go this far before our media and ecclesial class acknowledges what it has allowed into its midst?
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.
"Why does it have to go this far before our media and ecclesial class acknowledges what it has allowed into its midst?"
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but support for values like racial and gender equality has always been a mile wide and an inch deep. Joe Sixpack never was on board; he's just as racist, misogynistic, and Archie Bunkeresque as he's always been. For fifty years he was cowed into silence by social constraints on freely saying so, but Trump's biggest accomplishment (if that's the right word) is that those constraints are no longer in place. Trump made overt racism publicly acceptable again. So all these racists have simply crawled back out from under the rocks where they've been hidden.
This really is your country; those really are your friends, neighbors and relatives.
It's almost as if he who is the restrainer of evil has been taken out of the world.