Keepers Without a Gate
The Populist Social Revival has come to evangelicalism, and the doors are off the hinges.
One of the purposes of Insight to Incite is to provide, well, insight to those still engage in the glorious battles of evangelicalism while I'm off collecting eggs and attempting to eek out a living raising sheep. What little I can do from perpetual exile on my iMac, I’ll be glad to do.
That said, exile has its advantages, and one of those is perspective, which is bound to be different from the outside looking in than from the inside looking up. And that perspective has given me an HD vision of clarity on what’s happening right now within evangelicalism, that I’ve come to call the Populist Social Revival (PSR).
I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I also don’t want to beat a living one. The point is, unless evangelicals come to grips with things having fundamentally changed, they’ll be ineffective in their efforts to cast sail with shifting winds. Just as the printing press changed the world, or the way the Internet changed media, and AI is changing the Internet, the democratization of everything is changing the world around us. And one of those things is theological.
Now, I’m not saying that democratization is good. I’m just saying that democratization is. The notion of individualism is found in primarily two different sources, the first of which is the Holy Bible, and the second is the Enlightenment. We are, first and foremost, autonomous living creatures who will answer to God for ourselves irrespective of class or social belonging. Of course, neither the Bible nor the Enlightenment paint us as entirely individual, with the former classifying us as members of a corporate church body, and the latter warning us that “if a clod be washed away to see, Europe is the less.”
The total democratization of the nation-state is total chaos, with the majority class of idiots running over the rest. And the total democratization of the church is also chaotic, with a casting-off of collective structure that Jesus gave the church. Regardless of what is wise, reality is what reality is, and our world has been almost completely democratized.
There would have been no 2024 Red Wave if media had not become democratized. Elon is quite right, in his proclamation after the election, that “you are the media.” No matter who opens that fortune cookie, it applies to everybody. Anyone with a smart phone and Internet connection, which thanks to Elon could be anybody with a view of the stars, can launch a competing news network to MSNBC, which is why as of this week it’s been offered for sale by Comcast…cheap.
Anyone with an X account is a de facto political pundit, and if they seem unqualified, just be reminded that Joy Reid is a pundit for MSNBC, so qualifications stopped mattering a long time ago. Anybody can be a financial analyst, no matter their ineptitude, as Jim Cramer shows us at CNBC. You get the point.
Without a gate that can be kept, nobody is a gatekeeper. The democratization of all things has taken the gate down like Samson removed the gates of Gaza. For that matter, the walls have come down, too.
It was only a matter of time before the democratization of all things came to evangelicalism, which already had weak gates thanks to the lack of a strong centralized church government (which is exactly how God designed it). And although the evangelical church never had pontiffs, and we never had a Rome, we do have John MacArthur and Geneva. Our centralized authorities have mostly been unofficial and without the pomp.
Only in evangelicalism, for example, could someone with nothing but a brilliant mind and a dusty, rented studio crafted out of a borrowed church office in Phoenix and degrees from an unaccredited seminary be self-exalted - quite credibly - as a theological gatekeeper. Collecting together a posse of #ProsApologian IRC ‘channel rats’ of early-Internet theo-nerds, James White arose to a position of overseer of the Internet with little more than persistence at opining. This is not a complaint; it is a compliment. We Protestants don’t need a Holy See, and this is how we roll.
Only in evangelicalism, for example, could someone roundly rejected as heretical by almost every Presbyterian government for a deviant idea like Federal Vision, can continue to ascend as an authority in Presbyterianism, despite not being a Presbyterian. It’s crazy when you think about someone ordaining themselves, creating their own church of their own authority, and convincing almost everyone that authority is inviolable. And the fact that what I’ve just described resulted in something that’s not a cult, but very much a legitimate church, is uniquely evangelical.
With these two examples in view, you can see that evangelicalism was very much already the Wild West. But with the democratization of doctrine, as White and Wilson are finding out, it is now even Wilder and Wester.
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The Antioch Statement, which I’ve written about here at Insight to Incite and David Morrill wrote about at Protestia, was the Waterloo for evangelical gatekeeping. The gist is, Douglas Wilson penned the statement (we found out a few days ago) in order to help stave off criticism related to Pete Hegseth’s upcoming senate confirmation hearings. I’m not sure why James White was so quick to go all-in, but I presume it had something to do with digging-in in his defense of Tobias Reimsheinheimmer (or whatever), or more like, to distract from the fact no substantive defense has yet been given.
If you’re unaware of that controversy, good. It’s boring and stupid.
There are two points that could be made from this. The first of which, is that intentionally creating ecclesiastical schism for political purposes is grotesque, which I’ll go into later at Protestia. The second of which, is that White and Wilson both (probably) presumed they could twist and turn the thought-flow of Reformed evangelicalism by a well-worded declaration.
Never mind the declaration was not well worded. It’s that they thought they would be able to open and shut a gate that no longer exists. They thought they could, by the virtue of a declaration, triangulate discontent against their opponents and steer Reformed evangelicals away from ideas they thought problematic without making anything but a meager attempt at persuasion.
In case you’ve not figured it out yet, what I choose to write about at Insight to Incite is related to my Polemicist’s Manifesto, which you can find here. This post relates to Manifesto #5 and #6:
Polemics must be utterly unconcerned with being gate-kept by any parachurch ministry or any celebrity aligned with a man-made institution, polemicists only being governed by local churches whose head is Christ.
Polemics must immediately brace for push-back by current theological gatekeepers who will view us as unbridled, or feel as they are losing us as their weapon or protection.
No longer, with the democratization concurrent with the Populist Social Revival (PSR), can self-appointed gate keepers keep what is no longer there. The doors are down, and the walls are crumbling. But this does present a unique challenge. And that challenge is how to keep the Indians from leaving the reservation and sacking Phoenix.
It’s a metaphor, obviously. But this change in the evangelical ecosystem really does present a legitimate problem. James White, love him or hate him, has indeed swatted many a bad idea. Douglas Wilson, for the most part, has had as many bad ideas as he’s stopped, but his colloquial whit is so dang endearing anyway.
Who will stop bad ideas from taking over, if no one any longer needs a shout-out on The Dividing Line or the hat-tip of approval from Moscow? Or more conventionally, Albert Mohler’s seal of approval?
The answer to that is widespread polemics. Just as nobody any longer needs James White or Douglas Wilson - and the response to The Antioch Statement demonstrates they no longer want it, either - no one needs Protestia, Dissenter, Pirate Christian, Wretched, or Clouds Without Water.
We are going to have to pull the plough of democratized polemics, with each man training the powers of his discernment with constant practice.
Hold up. That’s actually in the Bible. That has always been the goal of polemics. Polemics has always been democratized.
Huh. Imagine that. God’s solution to this problem has been here all along.
Appreciate your thoughts brother
Lots of unity and lots of division at the same time
Curious on how the next few months play out