The Mediocrity of Christian Discourse (Part 4)
Christian social media has devolved to such a degree in the last few years that the current outrage du jour is now over whether it’s a sin to belong to the nation’s largest conservative Presbyterian denomination.
It’s easy to get lost in the ridiculousness of this statement, one of many of this type from popular online Reformed commentator Richard Ackerman, aka “Redeemed Zoomer.” Getting lost in the weeds and arguing over his statement is what most will do after reading the above, playing directly into the primary purpose of his monetized X account. Look a little further down, though, and you’ll see his post itself is a response to Reformed Theological Seminary’s Chancellor, Ligon Duncan, who saw “a little chatter going on on X” (spurred on by previous outrage posting from Ackerman) and decided he should jump into the fray on the controversy that’s not a real controversy.
If you look below Duncan’s post, you’ll find Ackerman posted a second ridiculous, purposefully-outrage-inducing response:
Look in that post’s comments, and you’ll find Duncan’s brother, Melton, ruling elder and administrator of the prestigious Second Presbyterian church in my town of Greenville, South Carolina, and moderator of this year’s PCA general assembly, giving Ackerman the invective version of a common Southern catchphrase.
Look below that, and you’ll find the director of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Land Center for Cultural Engagement, Daniel Darling, cheering it all on.
Not to be outdone, here’s PCA pastor and noted Christian Nationalist James Baird ironically responding to Ackerman’s claim that “the founders of the PCA were not godly” by reviling him. It’s worth once again pointing out that this type of behavior, if it continues unrepentantly, is a sign that someone is not a true believer (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).
There is nothing in the above examples (just a few of many) worthy of introspection from serious Christians. Instead, what you should reflect on is how men who pretend to be above the fray, who claim to have higher standards than the online rabble, are just as “terminally-online” as the “zoomers.” The bog-bottom dumb state of American Christian media is not only of their own making, via years of immediate-gratification-, attention- and profit-seeking behavior, but they will be more than happy to jump into the very types of outrage-fueled exchanges they decry in their conference speeches, should they be presented with the correct prompt. In this day and age, “Christian intellectualism” is often just an aristocratic and slightly-better-worded version of the same outrage machine feeding the masses.
As a religious tradition obsessed with its celebrity pastors and theologians (perhaps more than any other, save the Neo-Apostolic Reformation), “Redeemed Zoomer” is a character of the Reformed world’s own making—he used to be one of their darlings. In the last two years, in order to continue to garner the eyeballs that pay him in a rapidly devolving media climate, he has become a caricature of their own online behavior; he has built his own following, as large or larger than any of theirs, and has merely created his own parameters for Reformed social media’s favorite game: anathematizing the other. Is his primary plank of a conservative Reconquista of the PCUSA any more of a pipe dream than the Christian Nationalist plank of an officially “Christian” United States? Is it any more of a pipe dream than the common notion among supposedly respectable, conservative Presbyterian leaders that their tradition, which makes up a fraction of a percent of the United States population, is capable of having meaningful political impact, here and now?
I could write about this for hours—and if you’re a regular reader, you know I have—but I will leave you with two important questions:
Don’t you want your discipleship to be more than “the Christian response” to whatever social media and/or cable news is outraged about this week?
What will happen, for good or bad, if you resolve to stop listening to all of these people, and, to at least some degree, discount the opinions of anyone who gets their worldview from them?