The Stupidity of Our Age

It takes a lot for me, three years into chronicling Christian Nationalism, to be genuinely shocked by someone claiming to stand for Christ while pushing banality that is wholly antithetical to His teachings. Enter MAGA social media grifter Valentina Gomez, with her latest video (language and offensive content warning):

What does one do when presented with such an insane bastardization of the faith? I’ve watched this video at least two dozen times, growing in my awe of it after each viewing. It’s so stupidly over the top that when I showed my wife the video she was certain that it was an elaborate troll, but Gomez is very much for real. How can one even begin to form a meaningful response to, “We’re done turning the other cheek. Remember, David didn’t pray for Goliath, he killed him,” followed by telling people of an entire competing religious demographic to “f*** off,” then finishing with the tagline “powered by Jesus Christ”? At this point, I think the only warranted reaction is:

In all seriousness, I can’t help but see that, for our generation, Paul’s appeal of, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2), needs to start with not giving in to the sheer stupidity of our age. I’m sure most reading this think they’re succeeding in that, but allow me to prod a little. Consider how our perpetually online church culture finds an outrage of the week, every week, to make the topic of heated debate. This week’s outrage, participated in by just about every Christian with an X account, comes from an apparent friend of American Reformer¹ who was recently kicked out of his church,² Josh Haywood, with this whopper of an antichrist statement:

Again, attempting to form an intellectual response to such insane bastardization of the faith is a fool’s errand. The proper thing to do when confronted with this level of ridiculousness from characters like Gomez and Haywood comes straight from Scripture: “As for a man who is factious, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him, knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful; he is self-condemned” (Titus 3:10-11). Haywood is one of those minor characters in the Christian Nationalist movement who has already put himself well into “mark and avoid” territory, especially after he promoted the “fourteen words” of white nationalism as uncontroversial and claimed that the resolution against kinism (Christianized white supremacy) recently passed by the PCA could preclude him from joining that denomination:

The fourteen words are the most popular white-nationalist slogan, coined by a violent neo-Nazi who died in prison.

The statement Haywood takes issue with.

But we don’t mark and avoid people like Gomez and Haywood anymore, no matter how deep into blasphemy they go. Instead, we use them as punching bags for our daily social media dopamine hit. Public Christian discourse in the 21st-century West is not proactively for Christ, but mostly comprised of reactive, pithy, two-to-three-sentence “take-downs” of mentally-unwell heretics.³ The result is that we drag ourselves down to their level, failing at our task to not be conformed to this world. This is why I abandoned Christian social media and will only write in the long form anymore. I no longer want to play that losing game, as much as I know I have to find a way to function in an American church whose thought-leaders have centered their brand on not only casting their pearls before swine, but rolling in the mud with them.

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3. I understand the irony of dedicating a post to these two’s antics, so, barring something truly newsworthy, this is the last I’ll write of them—they just happen to be the target of this week’s outrage, as I write this.