The alarm was in no way hyperbole. Representatives of a nebulous group of businesses, run from the same Dallas office, known, for years, to be partnered with personalities promoting exactly what the ARP had just anathematized, had set up shop. Announcing their own off-site event at a location that would not be disclosed to prospective attendees until they registered and were vetted, they had invited not only the PCA elders they are publicly allied with—one currently under investigation by his presbytery for, among other things, liking explicitly racist tweets and publishing an openly racist associate of Spangler—but a whole host of other personalities they work with, who by then or by now, have explicitly endorsed eugenic racism. They had also invited then OPC church member Stephen Wolfe, their movement’s most prominent political theorist, then an open compatriot of Spangler who had publicly rebuffed the ARP statement and antagonized its author, pastor Benjamin Glaser.

This did not fly under the radar. The presbytery hosting the assembly, knowing of “their continued platforming and networking with open racists,” barred American Reformer, the journal front of the group, from tabling in the vendor area. Since then, sources within the PCA have told me there is considerable movement to make the ban permanent. All of this controversy led to ruling and teaching elders at the assembly overwhelmingly passing both the ARP resolution and an overture to begin a study commission on Christian Nationalism, the moniker of the movement American Reformer’s allies had given themselves. For this task, moderator Kevin DeYoung chose as an advisor Scott R. Swain, President of the Systematic Theology department at Reformed Theological Seminary Orlando, a school that currently has a seminarian who was the first of several American Reformer contributors to justify the political theology of an unrepentant Nazi jurist in its pages.

Sources within the PCA tell me they have personally spoken to Swain about not only who and what American Reformer promotes, but how their figureheads libel and send an internet mob after those who publicly criticize them. This is no secret, anyway; many of their critics who have received this treatment are well-known Presbyterian theologians, such as R. Scott Clark and Brad Isbell. PCA church member, Cofounder of American Reformer and CEO of New Founding, the group’s investment arm, Nate Fischer, has made a name for himself for reviling people, both publicly and privately, when they criticize his businesses. Their most vocal and antagonistic front-man, William Wolfe, has spent the last few months repeatedly delving into open racism, even going on the podcast of an open eugenic racist and Klan apologist, to lament being called racist himself. It’s really become that stupidly overt.

Regardless of whether or not he was previously briefed, it’s been nearly a year since Swain was made an advisor on the committee specifically formed to holistically investigate the Christian Nationalist movement, which is most prominently expressed within the PCA by American Reformer and its allies. The committee has reached its primary conclusions; much, if not most, of the report has been written and is likely being passed around to members and advisors alike. To think that he isn’t fully aware of who and what American Reformer is beggars belief. This is why there is no excuse for what he did yesterday, when he promoted an article from American Reformer.

Again, Swain, a highly-regarded elder in the PCA, was given a task so important overtures were modified to form his committee, because pastors were begging for help with young men becoming lost, and, before his committee has released their conclusions, he tipped his hat to the group of racists everyone knows are the instigators. Now, anything in the report short of a full-throated denouncement of American Reformer and its allies for promoting eugenic racists, something that, at this point, is ubiquitously recognized by anyone not friendly to them, and the more liberal voices in the PCA can dismiss the report, saying, “Well, Scott R. Swain promotes their work.” This is a disaster. The perceived objectivity of the PCA’s study committee, the best hope for landing a major blow to this antichrist movement, is now shot, due to a glaring conflict of interest caused by its most notable advisor.

Some of these books prove exceedingly useful, such as ’s The Vanishing Church, which is a well-formulated gold mine of data, especially around a foundational piece of my thesis, that the religion of Cultural Evangelicalism finds greater consensus on politics than theology. Others, which will remain nameless, are little more than vanity projects for pastors looking to justify why they’ve abandoned fundamentalism for syncretizing cable news talking points into the faith. Thankfully, though these books are nearly useless to me as analytical resources on Cultural Evangelicalism, they serve well as examples of the left-wing end of the problem. All is not lost in my overpriced purchase. That being said, I still find myself greatly frustrated by these purchases, because, with the exception of the one written by a professional poet and novelist, I’m spending upwards of $30 for books purporting to disseminate essential information for adults, which are purposefully written, at best, to a middle-school reading level.

The book of cable-news rationalization I just finished, which, again, will remain nameless, was less complicatedly worded than many late-elementary-school text books. It was printed in large, well-spaced type, so it could come in at over two-hundred pages. The minor imprint of a major publisher had it on a promotional “sale” for $24; it took me less than five hours to finish it, and I’m one of those slow-reading weirdos who “hears” the words in his head. I don’t want to wholly blame the book’s well-credentialed author for this, because, chances are, he would have never gotten his work published if he hadn’t shaped his language in this way. Yet, I will assign blame to the whole lot of authors and publishers who downgrade nonfiction, especially my beloved genre of the history of American religion, because the language isn’t the only aspect of these works that winds up getting dumbed down.

Deliberately targeting a reader who would struggle to pass eighth-grade English requires assuming they’d have difficulty with every other eighth-grade subject as well. I cannot fully communicate how frustrating it is to see a complex historical event you’ve read multiple academic treatises on, written by people who dedicated their entire careers to understanding the minutiae of, reduced to two paragraphs of the most lop-sided, propagandistic explanation, meant to tee up a narrative of “conservative evangelicals bad, progressive Christians good.” I cannot fully communicate how frustrating it is to see a multi-faceted, and generally forgotten, figure like Billy Sunday, who will get his own section in my planned book, reduced to a two-paragraph blurb that gives little more information on him than he was a xenophobe. You don’t say? He reached his peak at a time just before one out of ten American men would join the Second Klan, and when one of the best selling books in America was Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Perhaps there was more to fundamentalism in the 1910s than the few, par for the course, statements Sunday made about immigrants. I cannot fully communicate how frustrating this is for someone who has not only read multiple Ivy-League-level books on American fundamentalism and revivalism, but who, to better understand his subject, spent $40 of his own, hard-earned money on a 1955 biography of Sunday, which only got one printing, written by a professor who would become a well-recognized expert on the phenomenon of “revitalization movements.”

For all the talk about how AI is making us dumber—and it is—the mainstream nonfiction publishing industry, most especially in the realm of cultural commentary, has been doing a great job on its own, for some time. Its end result, through the reduction of complex figures and groups—contemporary and historical—into caricatures, is to blind the reader to the complexities of the human condition and to cut us off from empathy with those who reach different conclusions than us. It’s a Dunning-Kruger machine, and, no, I’m not going to explain what that is. I want to be slightly obtuse in my writing. I want the average reader to have to Google a few terms, to consider buying a physical dictionary and expanding his lexical topography. I want to be intellectually beneficent, not just ideologically convincing. I want to leave the world, however microscopically, with more good and beautiful words and ideas than I found in it. If you’re a Christian author, you should desire that too, well above the prestige of having a mainstream publisher put out a book of the month with your name on it.

This phrase will get almost no push back from Christian mediaites, who are more than happy to have their “teams.” Name any moderately known personality whose brand is denouncing other professing Christians as unethical and, chances are, I can respond with someone whom they’re a perpetual cheerleader of, who is publicly up to something as much, if not more, at odds with Christian ethics. When someone in one Christian media camp has a feud with someone in another, and they both delve into the most childish ad hominem attacks, sometimes for weeks or months on end, you can count on their allies bouncing between rationalizing or railing against the same category of attack, based on nothing but which side is engaging in it today. To have no tribe, to be willing to criticize those whom you’ve previously found common cause with, is the unforgivable sin of 21st-century public evangelicalism. This leads to the most truth-filled sentence from someone in Christian media I’ve read in quite some time:

“You know as well as I that this will divide our movement.”

This is what divested neo-Nazi pastor Michael Spangler wrote to Stephen Wolfe, sensing an impending public distancing from his longtime friend and compatriot, which came yesterday afternoon. Despite what Wolfe said in his post—which, though it cites Spangler’s reference to Hitler as a “Christian prince” as the bridge too far, noticeably never actually denounces Nazism as anything but “unnecessary to critique the ‘post-war consensus’”—he has very much been courting the exact same element as Spangler for quite some time. Most of the people railing against Wolfe’s supposed betrayal in the comments were his fans until two days ago, and how could they not be? He publicly challenged the author of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church’s statement against racial superiority. He decried that same denomination’s excommunication of Spangler’s kinist compatriot, Michael Hunter. He brought back his openly white-nationalist podcast co-host who posts longingly about the Nazi SS and calls for “war” to form a “more ethnically and politically united U.S.”

But we have new teams now, so none of that matters anymore. Spangler, who has been praising Hitler for some time, has been kicked out of the coalition—even though he was being praised by the coalition just a few days ago—giving the Wolfian camp enough plausible deniability (if you’re the kind of denominational apparatchik who prefers to look the other way) to be commended for their principled stance against the Nazi element of Christian Nationalism. Those in the new in-group will continue to be lauded, those in the new out-group anathematized, and few will say anything about the obvious ridiculousness of the situation, because they play the same game. On my end, even if I can come off as a “jerk” sometimes, I’m perfectly happy knowing I’ll never be put in the same position as Wolfe, because none of my friends are Nazi pastors.

I remember a pre-social-media age, when the most prominent response to such rank bigotry would be institutional rebuke, not equal banality from someone possessing twenty times the followers of the congressman, based off nothing but nearly two decades of on-camera degeneracy.

I remember when the public presence of the conservative evangelical church in America, despite all of its issues, would, along with the rest of the nation, rebuke both of these men, as opposed to its current embroilment over which one of the two is correct. I could, as I have for years, write a long essay detailing how Congressman Andy Ogles has many allies within white-nationalist “Christian” spaces. A most prominent example is American Reformer, whose personalities he was slated to appear with next month in an event, titled Christians in Politics: Reclaiming Our Future, until pulling out due to a “scheduling conflict.” What would be the point in chronicling such things outside of book form, though? The leaders of conservative evangelical denominations—such as the Southern Baptist Convention and Presbyterian Church in America—many of whom privately disagree with both of these forms of bigotry, have no fear rebuking Dan Bilzerian, simply because he’s not “a Christian.” On the other hand, they will overwhelmingly ignore the demonstrably antichrist statements of the faux-Christian Ogles, because to have those open convictions would not only mean causing strife within their denominations, but likely within their own congregations. Such is the end result of a quarter century of eschatologically-blind evangelical rhetoric around the existential threat of Islam and the continued, ridiculously-false insistence that this is “a Christian country,” when only 16% of self-proclaimed American Christians, quickly becoming a minority overall, believe in the Trinity. I expect the PCA’s Christian Nationalist study committee to come back with a report that makes it just uncomfortable enough for the very worst of that lot to no longer participate, while allowing all of their denominational allies who would affirm Ogles’s bigotry to operate unabated.

The only answer I can see is to stop answering fools according to their folly (Proverbs 26:4). Any church at large that has, despite years of warnings, lost the ability to police its own ranks of, again, demonstrably antichrist behavior, is no longer a church at large worth engaging, beyond aloof documentation. The only sane response of Christians still tethered to the core of Christian ethics laid out in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is to find a good local church full of real disciples, who share those convictions, and to do life together with them. We must do this knowing we are small gospel islands in a sea of unreached people tearing themselves apart, and where the larger institutions our local churches are tied to are collectively joining them in the madness.

This is in no way hyperbole. There are still a few relatively well-balanced Christians using the platform, but, when it comes to daily interaction, they are wholly overwhelmed by users with the sort of unhinged, and consistently inhuman, opinions that would get you uninvited from polite society. One cannot write a simple post about how Christ (and all of Scripture) commands us to love our neighbor, no matter their ideology or background, without being overrun with accusations that he’s a tool of the Jews looking to usher in the demographic replacement of whites in America. Chances are, the original post will get “ratioed,” meaning the racist posts will get more likes than the quotation of Scripture. It’s really gotten that bad.

Even worse, it’s shifting the Overton window for mainstream evangelical personalities, who have long used the platform as their primary public engagement tool. Sure, the average conservative evangelical “Twitter pastor” won’t explicitly decry the “Great Replacement,” nor will he say there’s a plot to destroy America from the international Jewish cabal. Yet, he’ll validate all of the immigration policy propositions of those who do, while calling the pastor who posted the verse about loving your neighbor “woke.” If he’s not still close public allies with pastors who have devolved to explicitly saying such horrendous things, he has no issue doing podcasts, conferences and books with his peers who maintain such ties.

You would be hard pressed to find someone on X fancying himself a Christian academic who hasn’t read one, or all, of Jonathan Haidt’s books, The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind and The Anxious Generation, all of which describe aspects of the very echo-chambers and propagandizing they have fallen prey to. They have become the proverbial frogs in the increasingly hot pot of water, now treating the complete inversion of Christian morality on Christian Twitter as a normative worldview among evangelicals in America. They have, consciously or not, shifted their own messaging, not in accordance with some new understanding of theology or doctrine, but to play to an arena of psychopathy that is the nexus of unfettered speech and the unaccountability of anonymity, within the digital public square. Consiquently, the evangelical literati is more out of touch with the average citizen than ever.

Why is it that the Reformed church seems to be the only Christian tradition in America where it is socially acceptable for ministers to associate with someone who gives speeches that, five years ago, would be relegated to a Klan meeting, to an organization whose leadership is so notably racist and antisemitic that state GOP lawmakers have denounced them?

Why is it acceptable for Reformed pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention and those in the Presbyterian Church in America and Orthodox Presbyterian Church to publicly defend and work with the speaker’s employer, who, beyond supporting many other racist activists, has sponsored multiple events for this organization?

Why is the leadership of Reformed denominations, who are quick on the draw to condemn anything on social media an inch to their left, too cowardly to stand up and say the obvious, “This is antichrist. Do not even eat with such a one”?

I will eat my hat if the forthcoming Christian Nationalist report in the PCA even begins to ask these questions, because the answer is that William Wolfe and American Reformer represent the natural outgrowth of a mode of religion that, for decades, has centered its public “witness” around celebrity pastors obsessed with fighting the culture war.

In response, an apparently AI-driven account with 20,000 followers, dedicated to finding the tools in videos and posting links to purchase them (with an affiliate code, of course), posted this:

Grok then delivered on the ask.

Another, seemingly real, person took the AI-generated affiliate link and swapped in his own affiliate code.

Grok then did what it’s built for.

Another person switched the tool to a Skil. Perhaps he has a deal where he gets a bigger kickback from that brand.

Meanwhile, the comments are full of statements like this:

Though, one man is not buying that this level of precision is humanly possible.

This video is very much real, and you don’t need years of practice to have the worker’s mind-boggling precision, but you won’t pull it off with the jigsaw the experts of X are selling. This is because the man in the video is using a router.

A teenager with a few hours of training would give you this amazing, blind precision as well, because the router is using a bit with a bearing, which is following a template under the uncut plywood.

I won’t belabor the point, but this type of feedback loop of something easily explainable or debatable being treated as groundbreaking or existential, boosted by anonymous, engagement-farming accounts who regularly compound the conversation with misinformation, resulting in people who are too lazy to do real research having wholly wrong notions, is how much of Christian social media works too. Take the recent crop of reactionary social media church history “experts” who cherry-pick a sentence or two from a long-dead theologian’s essay and post it as proof he held a slew of beliefs on an esoteric subject, beyond what the quote implies. The quote is then capitalized upon by the “expert’s” mostly anonymous followers, who respond with tired catch-phrases, such as, “We’re only stating what everyone used to believe,” and “People who don’t think this worship the postwar consensus.” Other wannabe Christian media personalities chime in with a link to their blog post or podcast episode echoing the original post’s sentiment. The “expert,” who often leans on credentials, positively interacts with accounts that laud him and paints those who disagree with him as bad-faith actors. All when the long-dead theologian, in reality, believed something completely different than the cherry-picked quote implied.

It’s right and good to look at this and develop a posture of questioning sources, but I would ask the reader, If you’re not willing to dedicate significant time to holistically studying these esoteric subjects, why allow social media and its infotainment methodologies to drive you towards strong opinions? Why spend your days “doom-scrolling” Christian social media looking for insights on God’s will, knowing it’s a minefield of lowbrow ideology, when you could be spending your time in good and beautiful content? Once an “expert” proves himself to be playing to this environment, why use his blog posts, podcast or book of the month as reference material? How would your response to the primitivism of online “classical-Protestant resourcement” change if you had read the first few centuries of Christian writing, which is free online? Think about how much better informed, and how more emotionally and mentally balanced, you will be if your to-read book stack exceeds the amount of “Christian” social media posts you engage with daily.

In other words, instead of watching power-tool videos all day, check out a book on power-tools from your local library.

If you’ve read Carl’s book, then you know that he possesses (what some see as) coherent answers to these questions. The issue isn’t that he lacks a fully fleshed-out theory, it’s that his book, which attempts to paint the eugenics-based Johnson-Reed immigration act of 1924 as good policy and its 1965 overturn as negative, treats 1960s school segregationists as the victims, and regards the H1-B system as a form of white-collar cultural genocide, is so historically and sociologically fallacious that it cannot stand up to rudimentary scrutiny, as Senator Tim Kaine easily proved.

Again, this didn’t stop these clearly indefensible ideas from getting a very positive airing throughout the supposedly “conservative Christian” podcast scene over the last few years. Here are some notable samplings.

• Blaze Media’s Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey, in an episode titled White People Are America’s Unprotected Class.

• Canon Press’ Doug Wilson and Friends, What Should Be Done About the Whits (referring to the misspelled “Kill All Whits” graffiti on the cover of Carl’s book).

• The Will Spencer Podcast, Jeremy Carl - Erasing White America.

• Method Ministries (hosted by Methodist pastor Lucas Curcio), How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.

Most notably, Spencer and Curcio have very loudly positioned themselves against the so-called “Reformed” Christian Nationalists—one could say they’ve made it a part of their brand—even though Carl finds much, if not the majority, of his online support among the movement. After all, no organization more prominently supports “Reformed” Christian Nationalism than American Reformer; its board and ranks are so full of Carl’s fellow Claremont fellows that it can be considered an unofficial lobbying arm of the organization.

The reason white-nationalist Christian Nationalism got as far as it did in the Christian media ecosystem is because online “conservative” Christian media, in its obsession with becoming anti-woke, has embraced white grievance politics, and, therefore, endorses the majority of white nationalism’s propositions, often only stopping short of espousing an eugenics-based racial superiority. The average, politically-obsessed Christian podcaster has more in common with the “race-realist” Christian Nationalist than with the average American, the average Republican, or even the average theologically conservative Christian. The average denominational apparatchik, increasingly taking his cues from the Church of the Podcast, is beholden to its cultish enforcement of a political orthodoxy far more narrow than any theological demands, and which the Christian Nationalists are only shifting moderately to the right.

Moments like Carl being easily exposed by Senators given a cursory glance of his years of despicable statements, which reportedly will result in him not being confirmed to a position in the State Department, prove just how intellectually bereft, how politically extreme, how mediocre Christian discourse has become.

Baird: So you’re saying that [John] Witherspoon’s wrong, because you don’t need religion in society for people to be virtuous?

Hart: Yes.

Baird: So, if society had no religion at all, you would still have virtuous people?

Hart: It’s conceivable. Yes.

Baird: What’s an example?

Hart: The characters in The Wire.

Baird: That’s a fiction show.

Hart: Yeah, but still.

Firstly, in principle, Hart is correct. The entire basis of natural law—which, until Baird made this argument, was an ubiquitously postulated foundational argument of “Reformed” Christian Nationalist theory (see Stephen Wolfe’s book)—is that universal moral principles are discernible from nature and reason, and, therefore, it is possible for an atheistic society to be at least somewhat virtuous. After all, the law is written on everyone’s heart (Romans 2:15). This is the entire basis for Reformed scholastics’ use of Greek philosophy. That Baird would take umbrage with Hart’s position, in the first place, is evidence of how myopic his own position is.

That being said, Hart’s example of characters in a HBO show is ridiculous, especially considering Scripture and historical Christian thought are replete with examples that bolster his point; the parable of the Good Samaritan, Babylonian and Persian kings behaving honorably and Romans 13 serve as notable examples. Once again, we are shown, from all angles, how the Church of the Podcast has rendered Christian discourse mediocre, to put it mildly. I won’t bore you with the details of how Hart and Baird (but mostly Hart) have been childishly going back and forth on X for the last few months, only making this exchange even less serious.

I maintain that Christians will be better off in their walk if they put social media, podcasts and books of the month out of sight and mind, and focus on time-tested, responsible texts.

Of course, I believe the cadre of talking heads who want to be arbiters of supposed Christian ethics very much know that. It’s not that they don’t understand one of the most recognizable, centuries-old racist tropes of depicting black people as sub-human primates, its direct ties to Darwinian eugenic racism, nor that the current crop of racists within their own ranks genuinely believe black people are genetically inferior. It’s that “Christianity” in the realm of American media has almost nothing to do with Jesus anymore, and everything to do with defending an increasingly indefensible political stake, at any cost to the spread of the gospel.

The American church—and in this I include the local church—has ceded its branding, and ultimately its authority, to people who daily prove they do not actually care about the gospel. If they did, they would show some concern for how they are portraying what it means to be a Christian to, what I think at this point is, the majority of their neighbors who want nothing to do with their behavior. It’s personal to me, because most of the people whom I love, friends and family alike, are not believers. It fills me with a righteous anger to know that this grift fuels my loved ones’ primary perception of my faith, and that the people who push themselves to the front of the line to claim the mantle of Christianity mostly put stumbling blocks in front of them that I have to overcome in my conversations with them. In my view, they are earning their millstones (Luke 17:2).

This false representation of Christ has become so ridiculously commonplace, so accepted within denominations, that nobody but individual Christians, with no ecclesial job to protect, have the courage to take the clergy of the Church of the Podcast to task for their defamation of the gospel. Nobody but individual Christians will rebuke the flailing of the Christian media class to find any excuse imaginable for the President of the United States and his staff, at very best, not possessing the attention span to watch a one-minute-long video to see that it portrays two black people who are Ivy League graduates as apes, nor having the decency to apologize for posting it. They are, in their desperation to prove their side is always right, no matter what, even claiming it wasn’t racist, and denouncing the few Christian media figures, like Russell Moore and John Piper, who unapologetically told the truth.

I’m here to tell you, if you are a genuine believer, it’s okay to reject the American folk religion of politics posing as Christian media. It’s okay to reject that false religion being syncretized into the praxis of the church. It’s okay to reject the disdainful peer-pressure of those who have given themselves to it. It’s okay to walk away from institutions that coddle it, and to seek people and institutions who won’t. It’s not going to get better any time soon, and sometimes the best thing you can do for an addict is to refuse to play along with the excuses they make for their addiction.

To recap:

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President, Albert Mohler: “It's not so much that I think empathy is wrongly defined. It is the fact that I don't think empathy is a thing. I don't think it's real.”

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Ethics Professor (and, depending on whom you’re talking to, Mohler’s heir apparent and/or his preferred choice to take the reins of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission), Andrew Walker: “Spot-on.”

Christian author and former research professor of English and Christianity and culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, : “What a difference a decade (and a change in the political winds) can make:” [sharing a 2014 post from Mohler, titled Lead with Empathy…

Andrew Walker: “Dr. Mohler hasn’t moved. The definition of empathy has.”

(emphases mine, read them again)

There are so many aspects of this exchange I could speak to, but there is one thing in particular I want to get across to the reader: This exchange is a result of decades of Christian discourse being geared to the lowest common denominator, folding back upon itself, to where an ethics professor at a flagship seminary cannot even keep his boss’ mediocre, podcast-level talking points straight. In my experience, Christian ethics professors on X are some of the most consistently willing to say anything to justify extremist political stances syncretized into the faith. Walker often presents himself as a double-minded man, one day writing against the white-nationalist element of self-described Christian Nationalism, and the next presenting at a conference put on by the movement’s most notable benefactor, alongside some of its most extreme personalities.

Ultimately, there are no supposedly immutable ethics at SBTS that cannot and will not take a back seat to denominational and Christian media industry politics, ecosystems now beholden to the religion of Cultural Evangelicalism. Again, we are reaching a phase where the lowest common denominator “reasoning” of the podcast world, its mediocrity, is becoming the dogma of a nearly two-century old, flagship evangelical seminary. There will surely come a schism over it.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
— 1 Corinthians 13

A cold, loveless, legalistic “Christianity” has always been a temptation in reactionary churches, but Lord help us if it is to become a commonly contested point of doctrine.

I’ve read Joe Rigney’s essay on the supposed conjoined evils of empathy and feminism in American Reformer, the journal that serves as Christian academia’s top source of Carl Schmitt apologia, so I’m in no rush to read his new book, The Sin of Empathy, his second in this vein. I also have a standing rule to not give a dime to Doug Wilson’s Canon Press, something that takes concerted effort when your family homeschools. I did check out the Amazon listing for the book, and the final sentence of the description struck me as a perfect encapsulation of Rigney’s argument, as I’ve seen him express it.

When you reject the sin of empathy, you reject the manipulation of the media, the manipulation of family and friends, and most importantly, the manipulation of your own heart.

Take this sentence and put any virtue you can think of in place of “empathy,” and you’ll find that it’s altogether plastic; it serves no real purpose other than to demonize a virtue.

“When you reject the sin of charity, you reject the manipulation of the media…”

“When you reject the sin of kindness, you reject the manipulation of the media…”

“When you reject the sin of mercy, you reject the manipulation of the media…”

This leads one to ask, Why empathy? Much like his mentor, Wilson, and the far fringe of Christian Nationalist dominionists he’s been known to hang out with, Rigney is obsessed with political victory for those who share his reactionary view of the faith. Take a look at his copious work for WORLD (edited by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Andrew T. Walker), and you’ll find politics and the culture war to be his overwhelming concern. He wrote of how Christians, when voting, need to break free of “the progressive gaze.” He wrote of “stewarding your vote,” in an essay that couldn’t have been more obvious in its attempt to equate voting Democrat or third party with unfaithfulness. His latest, “Fulfilling promises from the start,” is a naked puff piece on Trump’s executive orders, especially his anti-immigration policy. He even wrote on the ethics of deception and, at the very end, left the door open for Christians to potentially deceive in order to expose “false ideologies” and possibly define the people who push them as “open enemies,” a sentiment of his friends at American Reformer.

For the politically obsessed theonomic dominionist, empathy is a sin, because, by definition, it’s a conscious acknowledgement of συμπαθέω (sumpatheó, same feeling, sympathy), and nobody has ever won a Schmittian political battle by examining his common humanity with people whom he has labeled the enemy. συμπαθέω is what Christ has for us, even as we are in open rebellion against Him (Hebrews 4:15). It’s the driving force behind the second greatest commandment (Mark 12:31). We are explicitly told, by Christ Himself, that in order to be like our Father in heaven we must show empathy toward those who call themselves our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48).

“But it’s the abuse of empathy Rigney is criticizing,” I’m sure would be the response. Indeed it is, but any virtue imaginable can be abused. Again, the reason that politically-obsessed, reactionary Christians hyper-focus on empathy is because doing so serves Schmittian ends. They want you to shut off a part of your brain that works against their carnal goals. Instead of thinking, “This person is a human being who needs my compassion. How can I give them that in a way that shows I love them, but without compromising my principles?”, they want you thinking that everyone who makes left-coded demands of you is a political enemy to crush.

The history of our faith is that of the Person of Jesus Christ repeatedly revealing Himself to people while they’re “open enemies” of Him, embracing them in their weakness, and turning them into a new creation. Our ultimate goal in this life isn’t political victory to bring about ideal worldly conditions, nor is it protecting ourselves from the “manipulation of our heart.” We are here to be Jesus Christ’s physical presence in the world. We are to get up every single day and ask Him to imbue us with His συμπαθέω for all of humanity, even those who proactively hate us and try to manipulate us for their worldly ends, including a spokesman for a false church in Moscow, Idaho.

I cannot let it pass, because I find something ethereal, almost spiritual, about this image; it evokes unutterable emotions of what it’s like to be a dissenting voice inside a Cultural Evangelical church, something that caused me to walk away from the faith for over a decade. Be that as it may, I will do my best to break down this disorienting display and describe the larger issues it speaks to. First, let’s begin with the obvious.

• This is a group of women who all attend the same Southern Baptist church, quite probably members of an official women’s group.

• The dress they’re mimicking was custom made for Melania Trump by designer Hervé Pierre. You cannot buy it, meaning they all likely had it custom made themselves, just to go see the movie at a local theater and take a group photo, adding to the ostentatiousness of the act.

• If it had stopped there, it would have just been another instance of MAGA-church weirdness. Yet, their pastor, the man who, in 2008, took to the convention podium to nominate Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President, Albert Mohler, for SBC President, believed it was such a good representation of the spirit of his church, that he posted it on social media.

Jeffress’ church, First Baptist Dallas, reportedly has roughly 16,000 members. Statistically, there have to be people in the church who don’t want this type of gross political syncretization from their pastor, who has been a very vocal Trump supporter for some time. Even if that number was one in one-hundred members, that is one hundred sixty members, close to the Sunday attendance of the average Southern Baptist church. I’m sure some in Jeffress’ corner would respond, “If they don’t like it, they should find another church,” but this is the flippancy of a 21st-century, buffet-style view of the church, where it is meant to serve the attendee’s perceived needs more than being a mutually-beneficial relationship. Jeffress has been the lead pastor of FBC Dallas since 2007, but the church was founded in 1868. As a former member of an over-century-old Baptist church, I guarantee there are octogenarians who have been attending this one church their whole lives, whose children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren may also attend.

In this lays the deeper betrayal of the body that is Jeffress’ political obsession, and which speaks to how the religion of Cultural Evangelicalism regularly marginalizes devout saints who seek a faith that transcends politics, or any other worldly pursuit. When your entire social circle is contained within a church, when you’ve been attending for decades—so long that you predate the pastor—is it safe to publicly express dissent with the above behavior? Can you do so and not expect to instantly become an outsider in your own church? Something that’s rarely spoken of is the pain of having attended a church long enough to remember how it was before someone new came in and radically changed its culture; the pain of seeing people whom you love embrace this new culture at significant odds with the one that brought you to the church; the pain of seeing the changed culture shift the demographics, as it brings in new people specifically looking for it.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship, “For every immediacy [before Christ], whether we realize it or not, means hatred of Christ, and this is especially true where such relationships claim the sanction of Christian principles.” Jeffress has put the immediacy of signaling loyalty to MAGA ahead of welcoming people into his congregation (and those already there) who, in their God-given liberty of conscience, don’t like the current President, but who need Jesus just as much as anyone. He is not alone in this, nor is the only immediacy before Christ in the religion of Cultural Evangelicalism politics, but, make no mistake, he displays a hatred of Christ. There will be no sanity in 21st-century American Protestantism at large until we are willing to state this truth.

There are, of course, good churches and good churchmen, but they’re not driving the culture of the church at large. In my experience, while they run their individual domains with honor, they publicly defer to denominational apparatchiks playing a cynical game of political expediency. Take Presbyterian Church in America pastor Kevin DeYoung’s latest article, 6 Questions for Christian Nationalists, which laughably commends pastor Doug Wilson for his recent attempt to distance himself from ethnonationalists. There is no way DeYoung, who reviewed Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism is unaware that Wilson’s Canon Press continues to profit from a book he even says in the piece contains “a blurring of nation and ethnicity.” There is no way he doesn’t know Wilson’s long history of dubious statements on ethnicity and his deliberate, continual winks to ethnonationalists, including affirming the Curse of Ham trope and encouraging people to “have white babies,” which the open white nationalists—once his fans, now his adversaries—took at face value. DeYoung sidesteps all of this, like he admittedly sidestepped Wilson’s laundry list of scandals to complain about “the Moscow mood.” He, once again, gave undue deference to one of the most thoroughly disqualified pastors in the Reformed world, a man who would not pass the examination of any credible presbytery, and created his own boutique denomination, yet has still been at the center of most of its internal scandals. Why, but for the fact that Wilson has also amassed considerable influence (and a sizable social media mob) in the Reformed media industry DeYoung does considerable business in?

Meanwhile, the very people Wilson and his lackeys have been encouraging for the last several years are the figureheads of a wing of Christian Nationalism that has descended into open white supremacy. When I exposed a kinist church in Wilson’s denomination in February of 2024, he called me a slanderer for it. His “evidence” that I slandered the kinist church was a dubiously titled “Statement on Ethnic Balance” given to him by Shane Anderson, member of the church and one of the closest compatriots of divested neo-Nazi pastor Michael Spangler—a statement which Wilson said he would “gladly sign.” Wilson continues to profit from Wolfe’s book, even after Wolfe brought his openly white-nationalist cohost, Thomas Achord, also a member of the kinist church, back on his podcast. Again, I am a member of a broader society that sees this nonsense and has no issue recognizing it for what it is. Why can’t DeYoung?

Why should I give deference to this ridiculous political dance? I’m too old and have too much self-respect for that.

There are specific examples I would draw from, but we have become so polarized as a people that there is nothing I can show, no matter how obviously repugnant and regardless of what tribe it comes from, that would not result in a significant portion of readership tuning out. There is no doubt that, after reading the above paragraph, you made a mental list of personalities whom you believe fit the bill, but I want you to self-examine. I want you to question your own intentions and your natural inclination to assume your own innate goodness, and ask yourself, “Have I allowed the machinations of a medium serving the collective brain-rot of an increasingly dysfunctional society to draw me away from the narrow gate?” There is no personal judgement in that question; even I, someone who has spent years writing about this degradation of Evangelical communication, cannot answer the question in the negative, wretched man that I am.

The answer is quite simple, though painful in application, as most effective treatments are. What would you tell someone addicted to cigarettes? Would you tell them they’ll be fine if they cut down from two packs a day to one, or would you tell them to develop healthy habits that counteract the addiction? Online media has a measurable negative cognitive impact. This analogy is not a stretch by any means.

The fresh air and exercise of the mind is good books—not books that have been dumbed down to our nation’s eighth-grade reading level, nor books of highly-selective resourcing to convince you of the author’s heavily biased agenda, both of which are part and parcel of the Evangelical publishing industry. If you’ve been a chain-smoking couch potato for years, you wouldn’t be fool enough to try to run a marathon tomorrow, or even a 5k. Likewise, the brain is a muscle that needs training. If you care enough about the state of Christianity in America to embroil yourself in the weekly drama of social media and podcasts—if you’ve made it through this piece, thus far—buy a real academic book on Christianity and slog your way through it. I don’t mean the Evangelical book of the month, which is little more than a podcast in print. Read a real academic book, the kind written by someone who has spent years studying a very particular subject, and proves it to you by his copious footnotes. Then pick up another one, and another. Over time, you will find you can not only run a mental 5k, but that you’re inching closer to the marathon.

I guarantee you that a side-effect of your treatment will be an increasing disdain for, and distrust of, the commentators serving a diet of mental junk food, comprised of subjective political beliefs rebranded as soteriological imperatives. Here are a few books I recommend as a starting point:

In previous installments I described how a degradation of the doctrine of sanctification, in favor of a hyper-focus on justification, left a hole in Evangelical praxis that was filled by syncretizing the American folk religion of politics. This shift to political orthodoxy acting as the primary test of fidelity resulted in a further degradation of theology, to where now even Nicene orthodoxy can no longer be assumed among members of the demographic. We are already at a point where it can be said that those who have unquestioningly followed this tangent are members of a different sect of Evangelicalism than orthodox Protestants, but the time is rapidly approaching where “sect” will no longer be a sufficient term. What will this impending great schism, in which the religion of Cultural Evangelicalism steps out, possibly look like?

An easy epicenter of the schism to pinpoint is hyper-political megachurches. A key value proposition for many megachurch attendees is the ability to remain a fairly anonymous attendee. You can show up on Sunday mornings, receive an emotional boost from the concert experience and motivational sermon, then go back home for the week without ever having been accosted by members who recognize you as a regular attendee and want you to get more involved; I have spoken to people who said this lack of accountability is what they look for in a church. This environment is the epicenter of doctrinal deterioration, because these churches need this class of nominal attendee to survive. Sermons in these churches are often geared to attract and retain such attendees, which means that the overall membership is eventually dominated by such nominal Christians. Megachurches bring so much money to the table that they become prevalent within denominational politics. Hickory Grove Baptist Church, at which the current Southern Baptist Convention President, Clint Pressley, serves, has over 18,000 members. Compare this to the average SBC church, which only has 233 members. As megachurches, such as the SBC’s 20,000 attendee Lakepointe church and its pastor, Josh Howerton, delve deeper and deeper into making politics the center of their “Christianity,” doctrine will continue to devolve within the low church. How can it not, when it takes nearly one hundred average SBC churches to match the influence on individuals of one Lakepointe? How can it not when those average churches get their discipleship material from a media apparatus that favors megachurch pastors who have all the time in the world to speak at conferences, write books and make video series, because they have staff who handle hospital visits?

Interestingly, the other easy epicenter of the schism to track is reactionary Christian podcasting, heavily populated by an inverse world of pastors with such small congregations that they also have spare time to build little media empires with an outsized influence in denominational politics. The self-ordained pastor Joel Webbon is a key example. Fleeing pending discipline from his San Diego Acts 29 church, Webbon set up shop outside of Austin, Texas, where he preaches every Sunday in the event space of a local food hall. From his small podcasting set made up to look like a humidor, he makes insane proclamations, such as naming “anti-Zionism” and “race-realism” as prerequisites to “save America.” Unlike the megachurch, this fault line doesn’t run through the nominal church attendee, but the most obsessive members, and even pastors, of reactionary churches.

What is a cascading problem begins with the most extreme podcasting voices, like Webbon, Stephen Wolfe, Eric Conn and Doug Wilson, whose ridiculously over-the-top rhetoric is red meat for progressive outlets. Being the target of organizations that are often explicitly anti-conservative-Christian, such as Right Wing Watch, gives these bombasts a sort of folk hero status among the most reactionary Christians. Though these podcasting pastors have little direct influence in other churches, most conservative churches in America, especially of the Reformed variety, have at least one or two dedicated fans, who are often instigators of internal division. Throughout the rest of online Christian media, more mainstream reactionary, and even conservative, podcasters have to deal with a much larger portion of their audience being comprised of fans of the extremists, resulting in a wariness to publicly rebuke or distance themselves, especially to name names, for fear of losing market share—the most patriarchal voices in the mainstream even maintain friendly ties with the extremists. This trickles down into denominational politics, as this more mainstream tier of online media pastors regularly injects itself into hot-button issues, such as female “deaconesses” in the Presbyterian Church in America. Therefore, an issue that was already being addressed in the normal Presbyterian manner becomes one fought in the court of online opinion, where patriarchalist and race-realist podcasters (who often overlap) declare that the average ruling elder has “gone woke,” simply for not proactively “saving the PCA from feminism.”

Increasingly, dedicated orthodox Protestants are becoming fed up with incursions into the faith from these two fronts, and a breaking point of full-blown schism will eventually be reached. One question that remains is which side will win in these two prominent, conservative denominations. In the SBC, the Reformed extremists have already made too many enemies among the power-brokers to ever attain power. I expect them to break away and create their own association, while the Arminian, megachurch-level political syncretizers are likely to continue to push the SBC in their direction, if for no other reason, based purely upon their numbers-based influence. The PCA, being doctrinally sound and on the cusp of releasing a report that will likely be a huge blow to Christian Nationalism, is likely to rebuff the current advances of Cultural Evangelicalism. Yet, the political aspects of the emerging religion has a very strong hold on many of its up-and-coming, Gen-Z and millennial ministers. I suspect that the real Presbyterian battle will take place in the next ten to twenty years.

Perhaps all of this is, on a national scale, inconsequential, since Nondenominationalism seems to be the future of Protestant Christianity in America; one can even make the case that the most influential megachurches in the SBC are functionally Nondenominational. Here, there is little to no care for the historic interpretation and application of Scripture, little to no care for a progressive sanctification towards demonstrable piety and little to no care to keep secular political strife at arm’s length. Those of us who do care about those imperatives of our tradition, our religion, will have our work cut out for us, but if there’s anything I’m sure of it’s that we who care about essentials like the ontology of Father, Son and Spirit will have Their support.

I have been to more than one Evangelical church where the pastor, lacking any formal training, had no understanding of the very real history of Israel in the Old Testament passage he was preaching from—let alone the Christology within. Consequently, I had to bite my tongue while the entire congregation nodded along, as he turned everything into an allusion to 21st-century American culture-warring. I have seen, time and time again, the doctrine and knowledge of God and the duties of the disciple take a back seat in Evangelical preaching and teaching, in favor of some sort of “life application,” where the infinite Creator is reduced to fulfilling the role of an emotional support animal for whatever the target audience is currently doing that is unquestionably correct. Is there any doubt why I have even met people who describe themselves as Evangelical, and yet cannot give a basic explanation of the gospel?

The theological state of Evangelicalism is in shambles. Look at the numbers coming out of this year’s State of Theology survey:

• Half of Evangelicals think God accepts the worship of other religions.

• A third think Jesus isn’t God.

• Half deny the Holy Spirit is a Person of the Trinity.

• One in seven think the Holy Spirit can tell them to disobey Scripture.

• Over half ascribe to some form of Pelagianism.

• Over half think there are sins God overlooks, to some degree.

• One in six deny Sola Fide.

• One quarter deny Biblical inerrancy.

• One in five believe that science disproves the Bible.

• Half forsake the gathering of the saints.

• One third deny objective truth drives their faith.

There is next to nothing that Evangelical leadership is doing to fix this issue. The one person in the Southern Baptist Convention actively trying to stem the tide, theologian Malcolm Yarnell, who is attempting to make the Nicene Creed official doctrine of the convention, is treated antagonistically by politics-obsessed power-brokers for his efforts. As discussed in the last installment, Evangelical gatekeepers are too busy doubling down on politics, which is reflected in the survey by Evangelicals’ near unanimity on points of the culture war. This is the key fault line of the schism, an irreconcilable abandonment of the defense of foundational truths that have been the only points of agreement for Christians of all stripes through every other schism over the last millennia. Even core distinctives of the Protestant tradition are being abandoned in favor of the American folk religion of politics.

The doctrine and theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter Day Saints, most notably their heretical views of the Trinity, causes orthodox Christians to rightly consider their beliefs a wholly different religion. We now have undeniable proof that whole swaths of self-described Evangelicals hold beliefs that are more inline with those other religions than with the one they claim. This should be the greatest single crisis in all of Christendom, but, again, Evangelicalism’s leaders are too busy jockeying for notoriety as the vanguards of the losing side of a political war. It’s a losing side, because these leaders, for generations, have created a cultural environment where it is considered uncouth, even against the spirit of “unity,” to enforce the fundamentals of the religion. What “Christianity” are they trying to center the politics of the nation around? In their culture war obsession, they will go to the ends of the earth to anathematize a woman teaching orthodoxy, in the name of “Scriptural faithfulness,” while ignoring the open heresies, and even the objectively disqualifying behavior, of male pastors they find politically useful.

This is unsustainable; as this trend continues unabated, there will come a breaking point where the remnant of faithful Protestant Christians in America will overwhelmingly recognize that they do not share not only the same political immediacies with Evangelicals, but that they do not share the same religion. As our nation itself is polarizing over politics, these divides will likely be as large as that which split the European church five centuries ago. Yet, as there are plenty of pastors and theologians who have orthodox theology, but are unwilling to relinquish their political prioritization, the lines of this impending schism are not as clear as the cause. The next installment will be one of speculation on this subject.

If you desire to see the religion of Evangelicalism spring into full action, log on to social media and post the following: “A faithful Christian can vote for Democrats.” Chances are, your post will be flooded by comments from people informing you that you support demons and/or are a demon yourself. There is, of course, no explicit commandment in Scripture precluding a Christian in 21st-century America from voting for a Democrat over a Republican; neither party is free from the promotion of policies that a Christian, in their liberty of conscience, can consider beyond the pale. Yet, conservative Evangelicalism’s media class, which functions as its presbytery, tells a wholly different story of a binary battle of good versus evil, passing not through every man’s heart, as the dissident Russian author and Orthodox Christian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, would say, but directly through the voting booth. Every election cycle, “conservative” Evangelical media erupts with pastors and theologians posting on social media, writing think pieces for journals, and releasing podcast episodes to let Christians know they have no choice but to vote for whomever the Republicans are running this year, even if both parties are now functionally pro-choice.

In response to this exaggerated thesis, an antithesis that equally syncretizes political counter-narratives into Evangelicalism has emerged in the last decade. This side is most prominently represented by the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russell Moore, who has very publicly expressed opposition to Evangelical support of Donald Trump, which has taken on its own aspect of religious imperative. New York Times columnist David French is another notable provider of antithesis, with regular anti-Trump appeals to his largely Evangelical audience, including an op-ed from last year that stated we must vote for Kamala Harris to “save conservatism from itself.” Veggie Tales creator Phil Vischer’s Holy Post podcast is known for its friendly interviews with authors and pundits who equate the faith to more left-leaning political stances. On both ends of the spectrum, outside of books and video series that present adults with simplified, youth-group-level theology, there is little more that mass-consumed Evangelical media speaks of than politics.

At the more reactionary ends of the religion of Evangelicalism, one can find entire articles justifying antichrist concepts, run by supposedly “Christian” journals, such as American Reformer, which is obsessed with political victory for their tribe at practically any cost. There are books of the month dedicated to shifting the Evangelical mind to a negative conception of Biblical concepts like “empathy,” for purely political ends. Evangelicalism’s internal enforcement of orthodoxy is also drawn more along political lines than theological. Reformed Baptist pastor Alistair Begg was roundly rejected by his peers as out of communion for stating that a woman could attend her grandchild’s LGBT wedding, when everyone knew she was personally convicted against the marriage, to show her Christian love. On the other hand, “Presbyterian” Douglas Wilson has several points of heretical doctrine, including one that was officially anathematized by multiple Presbyterian denominations, and yet he is still welcome in much of Evangelicalism, primarily because of his political belligerence. This political syncretization is not just found among lesser known characters. SBC megachurch pastor and Lifeway author Josh Howerton, who used to be seen as a relative moderate in that world, has recently begun to regularly echo some of the more reactionary political talking points on his podcast and social media.

In many ways, this is nothing new. Jerry Falwell famously blamed 9/11 on the rise of secularism, as did Pat Robertson with Hurricane Katrina. What we are seeing now are the fruits of half a century of the “Moral Majority” putting Evangelical focus on immediate political victory over gospel preaching, antagonistically treating non-Christians as the other and doubling down on politics when non-Christians understandably reject such framing. Evangelicalism’s most dedicated pundits see the ebbs and flows of conservative politics as representative of the American church, on the whole. This has been so generationally ingrained in Evangelical culture that Pew Research now treats “evangelical” as more of a political category than a religious one, and whole generations of Christians cannot fathom their faith being separated from political action—in many instances they cannot even answer basic questions of theology as readily as they can give their political imperatives. This widespread degradation of doctrine will be covered in the next installment.

The question of whether we are justified by our faith, by our works, or by a melding of the two is at the very heart of what separates Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Yet, regardless of where one lands in that theological battle, the orthodox expressions of all three traditions agree on one thing: After one professes a true faith in Jesus Christ, he will, over time, be gradually conformed to His image (Romans 8:29, 1 Corinthians 11:1) and live a life of increasing sanctification; he will become more holy, set apart as a facsimile of how God Himself is uniquely set apart. As a Baptist mentor of mine puts it, “Christians aren’t sinless, we just sin less.”

The “revivalist” tradition in American Christianity, and the weekly altar calls that characterize many of the churches that sprung from it, have a running joke of a man who weepingly walks to the front of the congregation every week to “rededicate his life to Jesus,” only to go right back to his modus operandi of drunken debauchery until next Sunday comes around. Despite this, something wholly destructive to the universally acknowledged doctrine of progressive sanctification has crept into American Christian discourse over the last half century. Unlike the three great traditions, the religion of Evangelicalism, in no small part due to its megachurch-driven obsession with attendee growth, pushes the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone to such a degree that it rarely, if ever, speaks of progressive sanctification.

In 2011, a controversy erupted in the nation’s largest conservative Presbyterian denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, over this very topic. Some ministers had begun teaching a radical view of the Reformed doctrines of Total Depravity and Limited Atonement, giving such focus to justification that conservative ruling and teaching elders regarded it as contrary to progressive sanctification. The side that became known as the “Grace Boys” argued that God’s forgiveness is so boundless, His election so sure, that all the Christian need do in his walk is focus on that justification. Critics rightly claimed that this view resulted in the abandonment of progressive sanctification as a major aspect of the Christian life. As PCA pastor Terry Johnson rebuffed:

What about the countless exhortations to do and go and be (not just “realize” [what Christ has done]), but actually get off our duffs and mortify, even crucify the flesh, die to self, put on the new man, and be filled with Christ’s Spirit (Rom 6:12ff; 8:12ff; Gal 5:24; 2:20; Eph 4:22f; 5:18ff; etc.)? Certainly we are exhorted in light of who Christ is and what Christ has done (e.g. Rom 12ff follow Rom 1:1-11; Eph 3-6 follows Eph 1 & 2). However, the facts of redemption are not endlessly repeated (as though the problem were, oops, I forgot again! Please remind me. What has Jesus done for me?), or worse, used to nullify the threats, warnings, and exhortations of Scripture.

What Johnson and others, including noted Presbyterians such as Carl Trueman, Kevin DeYoung and R. Scott Clark, were butting up against with the “Grace Boys” was the religion of Evangelicalism creeping into the “high church,” and taking on a Reformed character. It was the proverbial weekly altar call attendee in TULIP form.

This is an easily recognizable pattern in Evangelical discourse. When the religion does speak of the moral obligations of believers, it usually chooses from a limited selection of sins that dovetail with hot-button political topics. It, more often than not, points a finger at the sins of the world that are found less in the church’s internal culture, and, rather than calling upon the congregation to mortify their flesh over their own sinful predilections, affirms their special status as those who are good-to-go as-is, just for knowing what Jesus did. The most celebrated preacher in all of Evangelicalism, the model nearly all of its pastors aspire to, Billy Graham, died with a reported net worth of $25 million, not counting what was in his ministry’s coffers. The result is that generations of his proteges will rarely speak of the sin of greed, though it is listed, right next to their favorite topic of sexual sin, as something that precludes a man from inheriting the kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). The story of the Good Samaritan, which is one many have emulated, becomes a tale of Christ’s work that we can never live up to. The story of the rich young ruler (Matthew 19:16–30) becomes an instruction on getting rid of that one thing that keeps you from fully focusing on Jesus’ work—wealth just happened to be this man’s blocker, like your blocker is watching too much television instead of reading your Bible. It never asks the attendee, “Is hoarding wealth itself a sin?” (James 5:1-7)

The result of this myopic view of the faith are Christians who rarely, if ever, ponder whether their work will stand the test (1 Corinthians 3:13-15), focusing so much on the free gift of God’s grace and not the expectations put upon those who accept it. This bleeds into how the average Evangelical speaks of himself and society at large, syncretizing political talking points into the faith and treating the non-Christian as an enemy to be conquered more than a potential sibling still separated from God, as they once were themselves (1 Corinthians 6:11). This will be the topic of the next installment.

If you aren’t an evangelical Protestant, familiar with its micro-celebrity culture, you probably know who Dennis Quaid is—I would have preferred Randy—but you likely have no clue who the rest of these people are, nor why they’re important enough to have their headshot emanating from the neon glow of a vessel that appears to be travelling at the speed of light. Rest assured, no evangelical Protestant, regardless of what sub-culture he comes from, can tell you who more than half a dozen people in this marquee are, and we are just as confused. Googling names doesn’t make it any better. Why are a respected Reformed Baptist preacher (until his allies attempted to cancel him) and a founding member of the Calvary Chapel movement doing a “Christian” conference alongside a professional ninja/public speaker and the star of the movie Selfie Dad? Why is the daughter of celebrity pastor Tony Evans billed above the creator of The Chosen, himself born into the business? Why is a nineteen year-old political activist who travels in a private jet for his Turning Point USA events booked closer to the center than a much-better-known, culture-warring podcaster, who charged $5,000 for a “Premium All Access Package” at her own conference that is most associated with the evangelical media tribe that tried to cancel the Reformed Baptist and TV show producer? Why is this happening in Spokane, Washington, of all places? To get lost in these weeds, as fascinating as they are, is to miss the larger takeaway.

This is a conference for the religion of Evangelicalism, not the religion of Protestant Christianity. We are in the middle of a great schism that I believe will end with two competing modes of Christianity that are as different to each other as Eastern Orthodoxy is from Roman Catholicism, or even as different as Lutheranism is from Roman Catholicism.

This is not just vibes from a poster, there are hard metrics behind this schism. Only 16% of American Christians have an orthodox understanding of the Trinity. Nearly one third of self-described evangelicals deny the divinity of Christ, though 98% of them will tell you that marriage is between one man and one woman. The “Be Bold for Jesus” conference is a touch-point into this mode of religion, where, among other factors, theology and doctrine take a quantifiable back seat to culture.

Take the metric on orthodox Trinitarianism; what would we see if it was stratified into different modes of Protestantism? Could we not expect confessional, denominational Christians, who catechize their children and sit under a pastor who is licensed by a presbytery or synod, to score better than someone who goes to a church with a verb like “thrive” or “believe” for a name and a pastor/CEO with no training, but who “felt the call to ministry”? This is not a hypothetical. People are being taught absolutely broken, Nicene-Creed-violating theology in American megachurches with exponentially more members than most conservative Presbyterian or Lutheran churches. Books that create utter Trinitarian confusion are being marketed for church studies by major Christian publishers.1

What do these two types of Christians really have in common, beyond a shared verbal assent to the Five Solas? What are the clear lines of schism and where does it get muddy? These are the questions I will attempt to answer over the course of this series of essays.