These Are Not Serious Men

Evangelical media is driven by outrage. In this way it’s no different than its secular political counterpart, which is unsurprising, considering that “Christian” in the medium, more often than not, signifies one’s political predilections more than theological. Look at the most popular films, books and podcasts of the genre and you will see doctrine regularly taking a back seat to pronouncement or denouncement of political positions as the ultimate test of Christian orthodoxy and fidelity. It’s rare to see a purely theological work receive anything resembling a mainstream release—conflict sells, and there is nothing driving more conflict currently between Evangelicals and the world than the Culture War.

While there is always room for relating Scriptural directive to how we should interact with the current cultural climate, obsessing over such things, to the point that our discourse can rarely, if ever, consist of anything but politics, is itself antithetical to Scriptural directive (2 Timothy 2:4). Yet, this is the situation American Evangelical media has put itself in. Its most prominent media personalities are seemingly unable to discuss anything if it doesn’t dovetail with secular politics, but here’s something they don’t want you to know: Any idiot can share his biased political opinions.

Not only can any idiot share his biased political opinions, it requires even less competence to stake out an extreme political position, to deny any and all dissent with that position as “unchristian,” and to designate dissenters as enemies whose protestations need not even be intellectually grappled with. Evangelical media has always been somewhat justly criticized as intellectually lazy, but the descent into political outrage has rendered it regularly intellectually bereft, and at the absolute bottom of the barrel, at this moment, is the pop-Reformed sub-genre.

It’s very difficult to find a popular personality in that particular corner of Evangelical media dedicating more time to the gospel than binary political opinions, using that to denounce whole other schools of Protestant political theology as inauthentically Christian. It shouldn’t surprise you that this type of political belligerence has most found a home among the pop-Reformed. Here is where, beyond joining in the usual political extremism, one has long been able to defend everything from chattel slavery to marital rape and retain his status as a “good brother.” Some of the best known pop-Reformed personalities openly admit that drumming up outrage, usually around politics and the Culture War, is an integral part of their marketing strategy.

Can it be any wonder that, under decades of such direction, these men now find themselves internally battling over what degree of Holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda should be accepted within their circles? Can it be any wonder that the result of the bar being progressively lowered for so long is that standing against Nazism is celebrated in Reformed media as an achievement and not the most minimal of standards? Can it be any wonder that the level of discourse in these circles has devolved to such a degree that a man who cannot write about any subject seriously—to the point that his latest response to this most egregious of evils infiltrating his circles is titled Laced With Poo—is treated as one of their greatest intellectual forces?

These are not serious men leading a serious movement, they are ridiculous men taking advantage of the devolution of Evangelical media to lead those obsessed with the medium into even greater error. We do the church a disservice when we give them undeserved intellectual gravitas. Doing so only helps to ensure that the rest of Evangelical media will soon become just as intellectually impoverished as it is in Ogden and Moscow.