Christianity is Not That Kind of a Team Sport
An evangelical podcaster and writer, who spends more time defending MAGA and disparaging its enemies than talking about Jesus, complained about me the other day, “He’s a massive jerk, even to people on his own team.” Put aside that my “being a jerk” to this podcaster includes insisting his attacking ideological opponents by responding to them with a reviling meme of a mentally-disabled person is beyond the pale for a Christian. And, sure, I can be fairly intense in my, often private, critiques of behavior like that from professing Christians; I’m perfectly willing to concede that point. I’m more caught up in “his own team.”
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.