Hypernormalization
Not just as a Christian, but as a software engineer who has been online since one had to dial into a local bulletin board system in order to pipe into text-only “internet relay chat,” I am riveted by the slow, but predictable, ideological descent of “Christian Twitter,” now X, since Elon Musk has been at the helm of the company. There is an entire sub-genre of software development philosophy focused on how the human use of platforms evolves under various forms of corporate management, and I suspect many future case studies will include the last few years of X, in which the lunatics were intentionally invited to run the asylum.
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.
Many of those people talk about the importance of biblical law all the time, but seem to have contempt for the eleventh commandment. (John 13:34) "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another." It's like Paul talked about in 2 Corinthians 3, the law without love brings darkness and death.
What is this polite society you speak of?
I generally agree with every concern you have raised over the past three years about the condition of both society and the church. I don't think it's a new thing, though. I think people have always been racist, xenophobic, small minded and narrow in their concept of who is their neighbor. Jim Crow was a real thing, as was McCarthyism, the violent resistance to the civil rights era, the race riots in Tulsa and elsewhere, the military's opposition to racial integration, systemic anti-Semitism, the John Birch Society. Going back before that we had the Know Nothings, the nativists, and the horrible things done to the Indians.
After the civil rights era those attitudes went into the closet because it was no longer socially acceptable in many circles to openly espouse them, but they never really went away. They were always just below the surface, and Donald Trump's contribution (if contribution is the right word) to American politics is that he made it acceptable to be bigot again.
To me, the most painful thing about his election, and the Christian church's falling in line behind him, was that all he really did was rip off the mask. This really is who we are.