The Definition of Insanity

Last Friday, Doug Wilson entered the Christian social media debate of the week in the only way he knows how, by positing something in the middle of his comments that is objectively reprehensible, knowing that nobody in his extended circles will have the courage to rebuke him.

Wilson doesn’t hold ubiquitous influence among American evangelicals—most have never heard of him—but he holds notable influence within the microcosm of Reformed theology. There are few conservative Presbyterian and Reformed Baptist churches in the country that don’t have at least one politically-obsessed member who’s a fan of what Wilson terms his “serrated edge.” Beyond this, Wilson has spent decades building small empires in the industries of Classical Christian education and alternative media distribution. He wields enough economic force in those areas that, when his private college, New Saint Andrews, and his publishing house, Canon Press, explicitly promoted vulgarity as proper Christian social engagement, the most push back they received from name-brand Reformed media personalities was that he and his crew were “good brothers” who had made a misstep. Never mind that Wilson and company are quite open that such things are a deliberate marketing strategy.

This leads me to something that the Christian apologist Gavin Ortlund said in his response to the same social media debate of the week. I’m a fan of Ortlund’s work, particularly of how he takes the time to present holistic views of hotly debated subjects, something he is quite often misrepresented and attacked over by pop-Reformed personalities. In this aspect, he didn’t disappoint in his coverage of the ordo amoris (order of affections), but he dedicated the final third of his video to something I’ve given quite a bit of thought to: how disagreements within the Christian body play out on social media, particularly how we deal with “bad faith voices.”

In an appeal to the better nature of his viewers, Orlund said, “I’ve been thinking about—maybe we just need to ignore. How do we do this? How do we ignore the bad faith voices more and focus on the good faith voices?” He then went on to acknowledge that this isn’t always possible, especially within churches that have fans of these men, while making a general plea for more amicable disagreements within the church, something that I can generally get behind.

Yet, overall, I believe that Ortlund isn’t accurately portraying the current situation and how we arrived at it. There is a notable contingent of bad actors within the Reformed microcosm, specifically because men of Ortlund’s clout have spent years trying to ignore the problem away. There is an entire sub-genre of pop-Reformed media, made up of little Doug Wilsons, specifically because they are the only ones willing to be perceived as pugnacious, speaking directly to the angst felt by their target demographic, disaffected young men in our churches. When mainstream evangelical personalities constantly fall over themselves to seem agreeable, rather than give a firm, public rebuke to behavior that clearly deserves it, they play directly into the narrative of Wilson and his ilk, that everyone but them are squishy, effeminate “evangellyfish.” We are losing young men to genuine wolves within our midst, because shepherds are afraid to use their staff.

One of the key reasons that social media discourse over these subjects is so “toxic” is that one side is full of podcasting pastors taking subjects like the ordo amoris and twisting them into calls to love one’s “kin” above other ethnicities, while the podcasting pastors on the other end leave them unchallenged—Ortlund explicitly avoided addressing such abuses in his video. The average Christian on social media is left to be the voice of reason against a genuinely evil philosophy steadily creeping into the church, while our theological tradition’s media personalities continue to try to ignore the problem away.