No, the PCA suspended Garris for saying mean things on the internet to another PCA elder who is known himself for saying even meaner things to people on the internet. Here are the charges that stuck, as presented by his ally, pastor Sean McGowan. There is the chance there are worse statements not shared by McGowan, but given specification one and two are not in chronological order, I find that unlikely.

Perhaps you read these and consider them worthy of suspension; a minister should not speak like this to others, especially his peers and doubly so when the topic is racism. I agree, but, unfortunately for the legitimacy of the charge, this pales in comparison to how the person Garris wrote these two statements to, PCA theologian Anthony Bradley, writes to others himself. To show this, I will only need one example: the legitimate complaint of someone readers will know I hold no favor towards, who is herself well-known for unchristian online conduct, Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham.

We could parse the minutiae of the boundaries of acceptable online speech for Christians, but that would be beside the point. There is no question that, if Garris deserves to have his license to preach suspended solely over the above comments, then so does Bradley. The unequal weights and measures of this decision are front and center, for everyone to see; the emperor has no clothes.

The hypocrisy itself is not the worst of this decision, it’s the fallout. Young, culture-warring Presbyterian seminarians were already highly predisposed towards Christian Nationalism. As one theologian recently said to me, “All of the momentum among young Presbyterians is with Christian Nationalism.” Garris is one of the vanguards of the movement, one of the co-authors, along with McGowan and Stephen Wolfe, of a contra-report to the one expected soon from the PCA’s Christian Nationalism study committee. For the PCA to suspend Garris on a process offense, one that barely makes sense, given the context of whom he was arguing with, is the greatest of parliamentary and political blunders.

They have made Garris a folk hero to these young men.

Everybody loves an underdog, and everyone has a sense of justice written on their hearts. These young men, already buying into the white-grievance persecution complex put forth as a key component of the Christian Nationalist message, now have a concrete injustice within their denomination to point to as evidence. If the Rio Grande Presbytery had done their job and thrown a highly-evidenced, legitimate book at Garris for the years of unacceptable behavior around the subject of ethnicity he’s very publicly guilty of, it would have sent a message that these grievance politics are a sure-fire way to ruin your career as a minister. Instead, they did the very opposite and validated the core grievance narrative, that if you speak “uncomfortable truths,” you will be persecuted by the “boomers” running the denomination. The PCA, in its inability to run a professional trial, has solidified this generation’s New School and has set the stage for rebellion and schism.

This particular letter was written while Ignatius was in Smyrna, then still overseen by the bishop Polycarp, who studied directly under the Apostle John, and who would himself disciple Irenæus. It is written to a church founded by Paul and pastored by Timothy, and which, quite likely, still contained members who personally sat under their teaching. As church tradition holds, this church saw both of their founders martyred as well. Reading this letter, I could not help but have a guttural feeling, a sinking in my stomach, over how rare this type of exhortation has become in our place and time. Who among American Christianity’s notable figures is exhorting the church to follow Christ’s meekness, to suffer insult and injury in peace, to make its priority preserving essential doctrine and, truly and completely, to love those who work against the gospel as we love ourselves? These things are true religion.

This is why I commend it to you.

Chapter I

Ignatius, who is also called Theophorus, to the church which is at Ephesus in Asia; most deservedly happy: being blessed through the greatness and fullness of God the Father, and predestinated before the world began; that it should be always unto an enduring and unchangeable glory; united and chosen through his true passion, according to the will of the Father, and Jesus Christ our God; all happiness, by Jesus Christ, and his undefiled grace.

I have heard of your name much beloved in God; which ye have very justly attained by a habit of righteousness, according to the faith and love which is in Jesus Christ our Saviour. How that being followers of God, and stirring up yourselves by the blood of Christ ye have perfectly accomplished the work that was connatural unto you. For hearing that I came bound from Syria, for the common name and hope, trusting through your prayers to fight with beasts at home; so that by suffering I may become indeed the disciple of him who gave himself to God, an offering and sacrifice for us; ye hastened to see me. I received, therefore, in the name of God, your whole multitude in Onesimus; Who by: inexpressible love is ours, but according to the flesh is our bishop; whom I beseech you, pray Jesus Christ, to love: and that you would all strive to be like unto him. And blessed be God, who has granted unto you, who are so worthy of him, to enjoy such an excellent bishop.

For what concerns my fellow servant Burrhus, and your most blessed deacon in things pertaining to God; I entreat you that he may tarry longer, both for yours, and your bishop’s honour. And Crocus also worthy of both our God and you, whom I have received as the pattern of your love, has in all things refreshed me, as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ shall also refresh him; together with Onesimus, and Burrhus, and Euplus, and Fronto, in whom I have, as to your charity, seen all of you, And may always, have joy of you, if I shall be worthy of it. It is therefore fitting that you should by all means glorify Jesus Christ, who hath glorified you that by a uniform obedience ye may be perfectly joined together in the same mind, and in the same judgment; and may all speak the same things concerning everything: And that being, subject to your bishop, and the presbytery, ye may be wholly and thoroughly sanctified.

These things I prescribe to you, not as if I were somebody extraordinary: for though I am bound for his name, I am not yet perfect in Christ Jesus. But now I begin to learn, and I speak to you as fellow disciples together with me. For I ought to have been stirred up by you, in faith: in admonition; in patience; in long-suffering; but forasmuch as charity suffers me not to be silent towards you, I have first taken upon me to exhort you, that ye would all run together, according to the will of God.

For even Jesus Christ, our inseparable life, is sent by the will of the Father; as the bishops, appointed unto the utmost bounds of the earth, are by the will of Jesus Christ. Wherefore it will become you to run together according to the will of your bishop, as also ye do, For your famous presbytery, worthy of God, is fitted as exactly to the bishop, as the strings are to the harp. Therefore in your concord and agreeing charity, Jesus Christ is sung; and every single person among you makes up the chorus: That so being all consonant in love, and taking up the song of God, ye may in a perfect unity with one voice, sing to the Father by Jesus Christ; to the end that he may both hear you, and perceive by your works, that ye are indeed the members of his son. Wherefore it is profitable for you to live in an unblameable unity, that so ye may always have a fellowship with God.

Chapter II

For if I in this little time have had such a familiarity with your bishop, I mean not a carnal, but spiritual acquaintance with him; how much more must I think you happy who are so joined to him, as the church is to Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ to the Father; so that all things may agree in the same unity. Let no man deceive himself; if a man be not within the altar, he is deprived of the bread of God. For if the prayer of one or two be of such force, as we are told; how much more powerful shall that of the bishop and the whole church be? He therefore that does not come together in the same place with it, is proud, and has already condemned himself; for it is written, God resisteth the proud. Let us take heed therefore, that we do not set ourselves against the bishop, that we may be subject to God.

The more any one sees his bishop silent, the more let him revere him. For whomsoever the master of the house sends to be over his own household, we ought in like manner to receive him, as we do him that sent him. It is therefore evident that we ought to look upon the bishop, even as we do upon the Lord himself. And indeed Onesimus himself does greatly commend your good order in God: that you all live according to the truth, and that no heresy dwells among you. For neither do ye hearken to anyone more than to Jesus Christ speaking to you in truth.

For some there are who carry about the name of Christ in deceitfulness, but do things unworthy of God; whom ye must flee, as ye would do so many wild beasts. For they are raving dogs, who bite secretly; against whom ye must guard yourselves, as men hardly to be cured. There is one Physician, both fleshy and spiritual; made and not made; God incarnate; true life in death; both of Mary and of God: first passible, then impassible; even Jesus Christ our Lord.

Wherefore let no man deceive you; as indeed neither are ye deceived, being wholly the servants of God. For inasmuch as there is no contention nor strife among you, to trouble you, ye must needs live according to God’s will. My soul be for yours; and I myself, the expiatory offering for your church of Ephesus; so famous throughout the world. They that are of the flesh cannot do the works of the spirit; neither they that are of the spirit the works of the flesh; as he that has faith cannot be an infidel; nor he that is an infidel have faith. But even those things which ye do according to the flesh are spiritual; forasmuch as ye do all things in Jesus Christ.

Nevertheless I have heard of some who have passed by you, having perverse doctrine; whom ye did not suffer to sow among you; but stopped your ears, that ye might not receive those things that were sown by them: because being the stones of the temple of the Father, prepared for his building; and drawn up on high by the Cross of Christ, as by an engine; Using the Holy Ghost as the rope: your faith being your support; and your charity the way that leads unto God. Ye are therefore, with all your companions in the same journey full of God; his spiritual temples, full of Christ, and of holiness: adorned in all things with the commands of Christ. In whom also I rejoice that I have been thought worthy by this present epistle to converse, and joy together with you; that with respect to the other life, ye love nothing but God only.

Chapter III

Pray also without ceasing for other men; for there is hope of repentance in them, that they may attain unto God. Let them therefore at least be instructed by your works, if they will be no other way. Be ye mild at their anger; humble at their boasting; to their blasphemies return your prayers to their error, your firmness in the faith; when they are cruel, be ye gentle; not endeavouring to imitate their ways. Let us be their brethren in all kindness and moderation, but let us be followers of the Lord; for who was ever more unjustly used? More destitute? More despised?. That so no herb of the devil may be found in you: but ye may remain in all holiness and sobriety both of body and spirit, in Christ Jesus.

The last times are come upon us: let us therefore be very reverent, and fear the long-suffering of God, that it be not to us unto condemnation. For let us either fear the wrath that is to come, or let us love the grace that we at present enjoy; that by the one or other of these, we may be found in Christ Jesus, unto true life. Besides him, let nothing be worthy of you; for whom also I bear about these bonds; those spiritual jewels, in which I would to God that I might arise through your prayers. Of which I entreat you to make me always partaker, that I may be found in the lot of the Christians of Ephesus, who have always agreed with the Apostles, through the power of Jesus Christ.

I know both who I am, and to whom I write: I, a person condemned; ye, such as have obtained mercy; I, exposed to danger; ye confirmed against danger. Ye are the passage of those that are killed for God; the companions of Paul in the mysteries of the Gospel; the holy, the martyr, the deservedly most happy Paul: at whose feet may I be found, when I shall have attained unto God; who throughout all his epistles, makes mention of you in Christ Jesus.

Let it be your care therefore to come more fully together, to the praise and glory of God; for when ye meet fully together in the same place, the powers of the devil are destroyed, and his mischief is dissolved by the unity of your faith. And indeed, nothing is better than peace, by which all war both spiritual and earthly is abolished.

Of all which, nothing is hid from you, if ye have perfect faith and charity in Christ Jesus, which are the beginning and end of life. For the beginning is faith; the end is charity. And these two joined together, are of God; but all other things which concern a holy life, are the consequences of these. No man professing a true faith, sinneth; neither does he who has charity hate any. The tree is made manifest by its fruit; so they who profess themselves to be Christians are known by what they do. For Christianity is not the work of an outward profession; but shows itself in the power of faith, if a man be found faithful unto the end.

It is better for a man to hold his peace, and be; than to say, he is a Christian, and not to be. It is good to teach; if what he says he does likewise. There is therefore one master who spake, and it was done; and even those things which he did without speaking, are worthy of the Father. He that possesses the word of Jesus, is truly able to bear his very silence. That he may be perfect, be will do according to what he speaks, and be known by those things of which he is silent. There is nothing hid from God, but even our secrets are nigh unto him. Let us therefore do all things, as becomes those who have God dwelling in them; that we maybe his temples; and he may be our God as also he is, and will manifest himself before our faces, by those things for which we justly love him.

Chapter IV

Be not deceived, my brethren: those that corrupt families by adultery, shall not inherit the kingdom of God. If therefore they who do this according to the flesh, have suffered death; how much more shall he die, who by his wicked doctrine corrupts the faith of God, for which Christ was crucified? He that is thus defiled, shall depart into unquenchable fire, and so also shall he that hearkens to him.

For this cause did the Lord suffer the ointment to be poured on his head; that he might breathe the breath of immortality unto his church. Be not ye therefore anointed with the evil savour of the doctrine of the prince of this world: let him not take you captive from the life that is set before you. And why are we not all wise, seeing we have received the knowledge of God, which is Jesus Christ? Why do we suffer ourselves foolishly to perish; not considering the gift which the Lord has truly sent to us?

Let my life be sacrificed for the doctrine of the cross; which is indeed a scandal to the unbelievers, but to us is salvation and life eternal. Where is the wise man? Where is the disputer? Where is the boasting of those who are called wise? For our Lord Jesus Christ was according to the dispensation of God, conceived in the womb of Mary, of the seed of David, by the Holy Ghost. He was born and baptized, that through his passion he might purify water, to the washing away of sin.

Now the Virginity of Mary, and he who was born of her, was kept in secret from the prince of this world; as was also the death of our Lord: three of the mysteries the most spoken of throughout the world, yet done in secret by God. How then was our Saviour manifested to the world? A star shone in heaven beyond all the other stars, and its light was inexpressible, and its novelty struck terror into men’s minds. All the rest of the stars, together with the sun and moon, were the chorus to this star; but that sent out its light exceedingly above them all. And men began to be troubled to think whence this new star came so unlike to all the others. Hence all the power of magic became dissolved; and every bond of wickedness was destroyed: men’s ignorance was taken away; and the old kingdom abolished; God himself appearing in the form of a man, for the renewal of eternal life. From thence began what God had prepared: from thenceforth things were disturbed; forasmuch as he designed to abolish death.

But if Jesus Christ shall give me grace through your prayers, and if it be his will, I purpose in a second epistle which I will suddenly write unto you, to manifest to you more fully the dispensation of which I have now begun to speak, about the new man, which is Jesus Christ; both in his faith, and charity; in his suffering, and in his resurrection. Especially if the Lord shall make known unto me, that ye all by name come together united in one faith, and in Jesus Christ; who was of the race of David according to the flesh; the Son of man, and son of God; obeying your bishop and the presbytery with an entire affection; breaking one and the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality; our antidote that we should not die, but live for ever in Christ Jesus.

My soul be for yours, and theirs whom ye have sent, to the glory of God; even unto Smyrna, from whence also I write to you; giving thanks unto the Lord and loving Polycarp even as I do you. Remember me, as Jesus Christ does remember you. Pray for the church which is in Syria from whence I am carried bound to Rome; being the least of all the faithful which are there, as I have been thought worthy to be found, to the glory of God. Fare ye well in God the Father, and in Jesus Christ, our common hope. Amen.

I’ve worked with a pastor/theologian on his written rejection of ethno-nationalism within Christian Nationalism, only for him to publicly endorse that movement’s worst, openly “race-realist” characters a few years later. I’ve seen multiple personalities build entire for-profit media brands around anathematizing a particular extremist movement, while going out of their way to avoid, or even laud, central players in that movement whom they’re still doing gigs with. I’ve spoken behind the scenes with high-ranking members of “Reformed” parachurch organizations for years, listening to them lament how the organizations they joined, or founded, were still playing nice with, or have even been wholly infiltrated by, an element dedicated to Christian institutional capture for the purposes of literal fascist political action. Some of those high-ranking members are held economically hostage by the situation and are trying to thread an ethical needle, while others have capitulated.

Left to right, soup to nuts, Christian media is one of the most self-serving and corrupt industries I’ve ever witnessed, but what most disgusts me about it is how, while it behaves this way, its whole business model, its key value proposition, is being the arbiter of Christian morality. Through this, Christian media applies a peer pressure to most of the Protestant world, which, in one form or another, is drawing from its well. If one of its personalities writes “edifying” books or gives “helpful” speeches, the industry’s heaviest consumers, which include most denominational leaders, will brand anyone who raises a legitimate red flag about that personality’s public actions as anything from uncharitable to working for the enemy.

As if writing a good book is empirical evidence of upright character.

As if there isn’t a regular cadence of “edifying” Christian personalities exposed for all manner of despicable, often criminal, behavior.

In this way Christian media functions exactly like a cult. Utilize your Christian liberty of conscience to reject the religiopolitical conclusions of anyone from Megan Basham to Russell Moore on social media, and watch as their fans pour into your comments to declare you anything from a “godless liberal” to a “fascist misogynist”—and often not in such nice terms. Building a cult of personality full of adoring fans who will calumniate anyone in disagreement with the personality is the bread and butter of brand-formation in all corners of Christian media. I believe the personalities are held hostage by their vitriolic fans, as much or more than they court them. Who else is going to buy the next book or pay hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to attend the next annual conference? If that type of behavior happened inside your church, on the occasion you disagreed with the pastor on a point he made in a sermon, you’d find another place to worship, and would probably warn anyone who asked you about the church. There are good people trying to do the right thing in any false church, but that doesn’t make it any less of a false church; if Christian media was a church, it would be a false one.

I’m currently six months into what will be over a year of research for what I expect to be a very long history book. My plan is to draw a line from William Brewster, through Cotton Mather, George Whitefield, Charles Finney, Henry Ward Beecher, Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham and Jerry Fallwell, to our current predicament, where “evangelical” is more of a political category than a theological one. I have no doubt, if it was miraculously picked up by a Christian publisher, while in editing, I would be told I have to remove a section about a contemporary figure—be it Doug Wilson or David French, Al Mohler or Phil Vischer, Allie Beth Stuckey or Kristen DuMez—because “they’re on our team.” I’ve heard those four words so many times in the last few years, when writing about Christian media personalities engaged in anything from labeling every Christian who votes Republican a quasi-fascist to supporting white-nationalist pastors, from dehumanizing and reviling anyone with a differing opinion to downplaying the cover-up of child abuse.

The active participants of an industry that survives on such behavior, which requires of its consumers such a lack of discernment, will never be on my team. I’m on team spirit and truth. I’m on team salt and light. I’m on team Jesus. Join me.

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.