Never Meet Your Heroes

I’ve long stopped watching documentaries about my musical idols, because, practically every single time, it turns out that they were horrible people, which irreparably renders their music less enjoyable for me. After finding out that one of my favorite songwriters, whose first hit was about his father abandoning him, ended up abandoning his own son, I can’t enjoy that song anymore. Ignorance is genuine bliss, or as the teacher put it:

For with great wisdom comes great frustration; whoever increases his knowledge merely increases his heartache.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18

This is what social media hath wrought on a much larger level. Spend enough time on X, the social network that public figures most use to post their regular thoughts, and, chances are, you’ll learn that they are not people you would want to befriend. It’s the democratization and hockey-stick scaling of “never meet your heroes.” Nowhere have I more found this rank hypocrisy than in the realm of conservative Christian media personalities.

I used to be quite the consumer of “Reformed” media content. I’d watch hours of G3 and Grace To You conference speeches, discernment videos from guys like Justin Peters and Gabe Hughes, and even the occasional video of Doug Wilson reading his latest Blog & Mablog post into a camera. Then I created an X (then Twitter) account and saw how all of these people daily conducted themselves, especially towards regular people who disagreed with them in the slightest or other Christian personalities whom their compatriots had labeled a “liberal,” making them a politically safe target.

I watched as those who put on entire conferences dedicated to claiming they had the correct hermeneutic and that everyone else was a false teacher—speeches that were examined and edited by their compatriots to make them less prone to error—regularly and heinously eisegeted Scripture, or just plainly reviled, to “own the libs” on the internet. When I corrected or rebuked them, they responded with anything from calling me a “godless liberal,” to privately reaching out to mutual acquaintances and pressuring them to publicly denounce me.

It's a humbling thing to learn that a large portion of the men you were getting your theology from for years are, in reality, morally decrepit and hiding behind a veneer of faux piety. I apologize to anyone to whom I was far too theologically rigid and unforgiving, during the time I followed these men. The gate is narrow, and few are those who find it, but they look nothing like the men of pop-Reformed media.