An Unreached People
I am old enough to remember being an adult in a nascent internet age, when indignation towards the following statement from a sitting United States congressman would be mainstream national news, on every nightly network news broadcast and on the front page of every newspaper.
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.