The Bubble

I was not raised in cultural evangelicalism—quite the opposite. Los Angeles is not a place where one encounters evangelical culture in the wild, outside of fire-and-brimstone street preachers, who are usually advertising a cult (see, Tony Alamo). Nobody told me the actual, full gospel until I was in my twenties. Consequently, I’m a cultural outsider in my own religion, which, though it has its downsides, I believe also gives me two key advantages:

• 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.

1. George Barna, “What Does It Mean When People Say They Are ‘Christian’?,” Cultural Research Center, Arizona Christian University, American Worldview Inventory 2021, no. 6 (August 31, 2021): 9