The Question No One Wants to Ask

For nearly three years, I’ve been studying and chronicling the radical fringe of the online Reformed world, as a member of that broader theological tradition and as a longtime student of the authoritarian political ideologies being secretly laundered through those extreme ends. Or so I originally thought. The truth is that every touchpoint of extremism I’ve seen, all the way up to and including the Malthusian ends of eugenic racism, has been tolerated by the public figureheads of mainstream Reformed media. I have yet to come across a “respectable” mainstream Reformed personality (Presbyterian or Reformed Baptist) who wants to ask the question, Why is the American Reformed church the only tradition where extremists of this sort find such quarter?

“Surely that’s not the case!” some will protest, so allow me to use one of the most notable, now-open racists and his sponsors as an example. The now admitted “race realist” Joel Webbon had practically every Reformed Baptist social media personality on his podcast over the last few years, and had James White, Doug Wilson and Stephen Wolfe headline his personal conference for the last three years, respectively. As late as last year, even after Webbon and his podcast co-hosts had begun descending into outright racism and antisemitism, (then) G3’s Virgil Walker and Tom Buck defended him. Buck went as far as to accuse those who rightly raised the alarm on Webbon of slander (and has yet to recant his now obviously libelous statement about other Christians). To my knowledge, not a single Reformed personality who helped to put Webbon on the map over the last four years has explicitly named him as a racist false teacher, even as he now publicly aligns himself with the head of the white-nationalist “groypers,” Nick Fuentes.

“So this is a Reformed Baptist problem!” the Presbyterians will protest, and, in some respects, they’re correct. Congregationalist polity has certainly allowed this evil to run wild in those quarters, but the Presbyterians have their hands full as well, and are not publicly addressing the problem head on, something they have no issue doing when the problem is to their political left. Along with all of the other scandals that surround Doug Wilson, Kevin DeYoung purposefully sidestepped how Wilson had been courting this element for years, choosing to instead focus on the much less destructive problem of “the Moscow Mood”—not only was Wilson the headliner of Webbon’s conference, he was on a panel at Moscow’s Fight Laugh Feast conference with Webbon and Canon Press’ most popular author, Wolfe.

That pattern continues, as mainstream voices in the Reformed world near-exclusively address Wolfe’s writings on his preferred terms of “Protestant political resourcement,” conspicuously avoiding the obvious, as he defends and works with his friends who have come out as explicit white-nationalists, as he pushes eugenics and antisemitic tropes himself, and even antagonistically challenged the statement against racial supremacy passed by three Presbyterian denominations, positing that there is a “mild” position of “immutable” “superiority of race” that one can hold.

It doesn’t get more obvious than the above, yet I have seen not one mainstream Presbyterian personality directly challenge Wolfe, who is a member of a NAPARC church, on these statements or the many others that preceded them for years, even as Wilson’s own fans are now pressing him to stop profiting from Wolfe’s book. We are left to ask why that is. Why have these characters been given such runway in our one particular corner of the American church, even as members of the movement are proactively embedding themselves in Presbyterian churches and seminaries?

I believe the answer to be that conservative Reformed media in America has courted most of the Christian Nationalist worldview for years, including antagonistic arguments around “race,” and doesn’t know how to criticize the movement without undercutting their own culture-warring arguments, losing much of their audience. The more hardcore corner of that world has been treating “liberals” as subhuman for many years, and sold their audience on the frightening prospect of a godless horde coming for the church. They have built their brand on never apologizing, no matter what, and on attacking anyone who would question them as inauthentically Christian. Now they have no way to recant their years of support of a new generation of men who have spent the last year very much pulling the mask off, to a ridiculous degree. Those on the more moderate end of Presbyterianism have spent years being attacked as “liberals” by that hardcore corner—DeYoung’s The Gospel Coalition is one of their prime targets, right behind Christianity Today—and I believe they’re scared of the resulting backlash from saying the obvious. The lunatics are running the social media asylum and are at the helm of a false consensus that is given undue sway among the online Reformed.

The sad truth of the Reformed world is that it’s more damaging to a personality’s reputation to be wrongly accused of being a liberal than to rightly be accused of being a racist, and fear of that has a death-grip on that world’s thought-leaders.