Steve Lawson and Our Conservative Evangelical Gatekeepers

The Populist Social Revival will soon consume the conservative evangelical leadership apparatus, just as it will liberal establishment. And that's a good thing.

I’m neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but you don’t need to be either to predict the impending demise of influence facing the conservative evangelical machine. You just have be present, in the moment, noticing things.

Most of what I’ve written at Insight to Incite centers on what I call the Populist Social Revival and its consequences for evangelicalism in America. Populism is the movement birthed from a belief that the concerns of average, ordinary people have gone unnoticed or unaddressed by an elite group that runs society. A social revival is a movement that fundamentally changes society, much in the same way that the Great Awakening, the Haystack Prayer Meeting, the Toronto Blessing, Azusa, Brownsville, or the Lakeland Revivals changed religion in America (the first for the better, the others for the worse).

Just as I intentionally used the term polemics to describe Christian Discernment Ministry until it caught on, I pray God blesses me just one more time to make a term stick. Whether or not the term itself sticks, the Populist Social Revival is going to.

The Populist Social Revival is what is occurring now. There is an ineptitude of America’s evangelical leaders for failing note that something of major significance is currently happening, and they’re blissfully unaware the Holy Spirit is currently stirring the waters. It’s to our shame that this warm front of spiritual wind blowing across America has largely gone unnoticed. But, the signs are everywhere.

Leftist evangelicals have not noticed that God seems to be saying, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing (Isaiah 43:18)!” That’s probably because spiritual things are spiritually discerned (1st Corinthians 2:14-15) and they’re as lost as a goose in a snow storm.

Conservative evangelicals have not noticed that God the Spirit is doing something because their heads are collectively gathered to address mundane doctrinal disputes relevant ten years ago. Well, that and it seems that they’ve used Cessationism as an excuse to completely tune out anything the Holy Ghost seems to be doing. Most of them would stone Ravenhill for being too dramatically charismatic, and consider dying churches to be evidence of their commitment to doctrine and not a repudiation of it.

Before I deal with the conservatives, let me deal with the leftists.

As you know (or probably do not know, which furthers my point), Neil Shenvi is a sycophant apologist for JD Greear or anyone else who has furthered the cause of Leftism taking captive the church and leading away weak women (2 Timothy 3:6). Like what happens if you say Beetlejuice three times, if someone criticizes our leftist evangelical overlords, Neil Shenvi will magically appear, explaining why they are both wrong and bad for saying so.

There are two types of angry liberal women who have manifested after the defeat of Kamala Harris. The first type are those who look like Bebop and Rocksteady from the Ninja Turtles, purple-haired, mohawked, fat women with rings in their snout, screaming that they’ve deleted their Tinder accounts to punish men for electing Donald Trump.

The other type of angry liberal women are evangelical leaders like Mike Cosper, David French, and Neil Shenvi who are likewise trying to shame conservatives for “Trump worship” and “idolatry” and for us allegedly tolerating whoever the neo-Nazis are that they’re referring to.

I responded to Neil, here. I told him…

I think you are upset, because you “mushy, third-way, brain-dead compromisers” have very clearly been kicked out of *our* movement. And now, you have no movement at all. Your side, that of the establishment, has lost all influence. The young men have all abandoned you. The old men were never with you. Only the women, of both genders, remain with you.

You’re leaders without followers. You’re columnists without readers. And now that your leftist political power has been made clearly neutered, your dark money financial backers will no longer consider you worth the investment. You impress no one but the shrinking number of the impressionable.

Your day is over. The disguise, unmasked. The rouse, uncovered. The veil, lifted. You are the past. The establishment will soon be un-established. The faithful have moved on from your influence. You will now, all of you, be irrelevant. You sold your church for relevance and influence in the culture, and now you have neither relevance nor influence in the culture nor the church.

All that remains is your social media, dying publications, and failing parachurch propaganda organizations, echo chambers that cannot breach the containment of your irrelevancy. God has given the future to those you have shown nothing but contempt, and now there is nothing for you to do, but complain about them.

In case you couldn’t tell, I truly believe their day is done. Now that their funding from leftwing sources will dry up, with it being evident they command precisely 0% of the evangelical vote, they will attempt to go back into the denominational roles they abandoned to become “public theologians” for George Soros, so they might again earn a paycheck. I would advise the denominations to not let them.

Either way, it’s clear that no one cares about the evangelical leftist establishment. But they are not the only ones with waning influence.

Each election since the death of Kennedy, candidates from both political parties have vied for the position of political outsider, except perhaps for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, who were the only general election non-incumbent presidential candidates in 70 years to run on being insiders. But as history has told the tale, no president since Kennedy has truly been an outsider except for Donald Trump.

What Trump represented, for the first time successfully since Andrew Jacskon (although unsuccessful attempts were made by William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and George Wallace in 1968), was a populist candidate who cared nothing for “the system” and promised to do what the people wanted over and against the concerns of the Washington establishment.

And Trump’s opponents, on both the left and the right, have insisted that he would destroy the federal government, woefully unaware that’s exactly why we elected him. Paleo-conservatives, in particular, seem shocked that we don’t understand he’s not a conservative. In fact, we do know he doesn’t perfectly fit the bill. But that’s okay, because he’s a wrecking ball in a government that needs wrecked, and that’s what we’re looking for.

I hope you appreciate my work. I’m really ‘going for broke’ here, and hope to help steer the polemical theological world with my writings. If you could support that with a monthly subscription, and to get additional paid-only content, I would sure appreciate it.

It’s been humorous to watch Republicans, like Jeb Bush, for example, all claim to be outsiders, despite being the heir apparent of a political dynasty, or men who are on their third term as senator project themselves as being of the people. But the fact is, it’s always politically expedient to deny that you, too, are part of the problem.

That said, in evangelicalism, conservatives always believe we are the minority party. We live under the delusion that men like John MacArthur are the resistance to ecclesiastical tyranny, the antidote to the evangelical leftist drift, or - most absurdly - the underdog in our great doctrinal skirmishes.

I am not morally equivocating between MacArthur, who is usually right on doctrinal and cultural issues, and Russell Moore, who is the devil in an effeminate meat suit. One is certainly better than the other, in the same way that Jeb Bush is better than Hillary Clinton.

But, as with any political dynasty at the beginning of a populist uprising, sometimes it’s just best to say “goodbye, and thanks for your service.”

What Protestia reported this week is that Steve Lawson, surprisingly, is not a member of a church anywhere. He was not a pastor anywhere. He is, it turns out, the “Lone Ranger Christian” that Josh Buice warned you about in May 2024.

Buice issued this warning within days of putting out an advertisement for G3’s Reformation Conference including, ubiquitously, Steve Lawson.

Of course, it’s obvious that Steve Lawson was walking in hidden sin, and sin is very deceiving. Sometimes it leads you to deceive others, but it always leads to deceiving yourself. The problem for so many people, is that Lawson’s sin, which included an immoral relationship with a young woman for a period of about five years, was surely a matter of sophisticated trickery.

We were told by those close to John MacArthur’s orbit that Lawson’s sneakery was spy-like, and that efforts to cover his tracks were sophisticated. Therefore, no guilt can be imputed to them, because he carried out the trickery like a covert agent of espionage. It was really no fault of theirs, because Lawson had been, like a ninja, able to carry out a double life without raising suspicion.

I chuckled at the thought of the biggest nerd in nerdom, sneaking around with reflexes like a cat, stepping out of the pulpit at Grace Community Church, taking off his neck tie in a phone booth, and then putting on his more casual tie before meeting up with his paramour. Right.

But the facts didn’t add up. The young woman’s family were longtime members at GCC, and her family attended Phil Johnson’s life group. Reports, credible ones, were coming out of GCC that his behavior with the woman raised enough eyebrows at the time, that when the news was announced of his infidelity, almost everyone knew who the woman would turn out to be.

But beyond that, something didn’t sit right with me, that I honed in on a decade ago. If you’ve followed my writing or podcasting much, you might have noticed a strangely absent number of times I played clips from Lawson, or quoted him, or referenced him. And if you’ve been listening hard enough, you have heard me say several times why.

I witnessed Lawson at a church event, come into the pulpit to preach (at the tail end of a song service, which he didn’t attend), and buzz off without speaking to anyone as soon as his sermon was over. It never sat right with me. It turns out, I discovered, it was well-known in our circles that Lawson did not “socialize” with the peasants, or at least did not make time for it as is customary among itinerant preachers. Despite having Washer, Baucham, Peters, Johnson, and many others speak on my stage at Reformation Montana, I never invited Lawson, despite the number of times I was asked to do so, for precisely this reason. He just made my spider senses tingle.

I didn’t suspect he was engaged in anything like adultery. I just assumed he was a professional speaker, and little more. I could listen to a polished, nasally pietist anywhere, and I certainly wasn’t going to pay for one.

But consider this for a moment.

Grace Community Church didn’t know he wasn’t a church member. G3 didn’t know he wasn’t a church member. Masters Seminary didn’t know he wasn’t a church member. Ligonier didn’t know he wasn’t a church member. And that’s best case scenario. The alternative is that they did know, and didn’t care, which I can’t bring myself to believe.

However, it was a bit much to watch Buice go off on a tangent about the revelation that Lawson was unattached to a church in any official way. Like, bro. That’s on you.

James White opined on this as well.

That’s a fair statement from James. No one would expect you to ask a fellow speaker, “Now, just to be sure, you’re actually a member of a church, right?” I’m not sure that would even be your place.

But this is much, much different from a conference organizer, seminary, or church to enter into contract with someone, without asking and verifying. From day one at Pulpit & Pen, and then Protestia, every single writer had be a member in good standing in a Biblical, New Testament Church. In fact, it was this reason (among others) Protestia rightly set me out when I was removed from my own church. And it was for this reason we removed at least one other contributor in years past.

I think I speak for everyone when I say, “How on Earth did this happen in regards to Trinity Bible Church, Grace Community Church, Masters Seminary, G3 and the other organizations that paid him to speak?” It literally undermines everything they are allegedly about, which is the local church.

In coming days, conservative-minded evangelicals will circle the wagons around these groups and defend them, laying the guilt completely at the feet of Steve Lawson.

Don’t do that.

They messed up. They need to own it. They need to acknowledge error, admit to a glaring, embarrassing oversight, and then contemplate really hard about whether or not they cared about associating with a celebrity (gosh, that’s a pathetic word) more than they cared about the message they were preaching.

I’m not calling the MacArthur orbit bad. I’m calling them wrong, which at this point is a material fact beyond dispute. I’m terribly afraid, that given their track record in the past, they won’t admit it.

But there’s another reason not to circle the wagons. These men no longer matter.

I’m sorry, they just don’t.

Back in the day when evangelicalism was subject to the monopoly of the book publishing industry and terrestrial airwaves, it was super important to have “our man” in that space. We very much needed MacArthur’s books to go to print, for Grace to You to be on the AM radio, and for JMAC to appear on Larry King Live.

Those days are over.

There is a certain comparison that can be made between John MacArthur and Rush Limbaugh. They provided a reprieve to the stranglehold on media ordinarily enjoyed by liberals. They were not alternative media, but they alternative to other media. And that was good and necessary.

But since the primacy of the Internet age, including start-up news blogs and podcasting - not to mention social media and online forums - we have no longer needed mainstream outlets. For example, when Fox News launched with Sean Hannity in prime time, that was a big deal. But if that’s all we had, the conservative movement would not have become what it is today.

Populism has been made possible by the democratization of media. From the Daily Wire to Catturd, from Louder with Crowder to 4Chan, the establishment has been completely bypassed altogether. Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch cannot control the conservative movement because of the democratization of punditry. Now, everyone is a pundit. And largely, figures that appeared to be conservative bulwarks, like Sean Hannity, now appear to us just another cog in the establishment machine.

The same thing is happening now in evangelicalism. We do not need John MacArthur or other “bulwarks” like Albert Mohler (gross) or the platforms they provide. In fact, if they were all we had at this present hour, the conservative evangelical movement couldn’t accomplish much besides a conference here or there to discuss doctrinal minutia and talk eschatology or whatever.

Currently, conservative evangelicalism has new rising stars, the type and kind that whose churches don’t have an orchestra pit; they have X followers. They don’t have a trove of retirees serving God by licking mailers to send out to financial donors. They don’t have contracts with terrestrial radio networks; they have podcasts. But they don’t need any of those things, either.

It’s here that I’m making the conservative evangelical establishment very nervous.

They surely have thought, as they have seen the leftist evangelical establishment gutted in recent years, that now they would be handed the keys to the kingdom of influence, and monopolize it. What they don’t know, is that we don’t want an evangelical establishment at all. And the same Populist Social Revival that is putting evangelical leftism out of business, has no room for them, either.

The chief argument they will present in coming months and years, is that we need them as our theological gatekeepers because, if not, we’ll get weird with our theology. The chief contribution of the MacArthur-G3 conservative evangelical power apparatus is having convinced us that they guard our doctrine. Young men with growing podcast audiences, for example, need the gatekeepers to keep their plumb line straight.

We need the “your doctrine needs work” conferences, brought to us by men who publish books on whatever topics Pulpit & Pen told you were issues ten years ago, and they are necessary to keep us from making terrible errors.

But then again, Steve Lawson.

What we should carry away from the Steve Lawson scandal is that anyone given power for very long periods of time, grows complacent with it. They grow lazy. They suffer mission drift. They start to build their own kingdoms instead of the Kingdom of God. They overlook the obvious, they start to consider themselves untouchable, and they begin to look like walking contradictions of their own message. They begin to appear not altogether convinced that what they tell us is important, is important to them.

This will become the fight of Christian polemics in the near future. Certainly, doctrinal error will need to be pointed out. But I’m convinced it can be done through a polemical version of X’s Community Notes, and not through a broadcast by America’s leading conservative spokesperson. In other words, doctrinal correction can be moved from the lone responsibility of theological gatekeepers or an evangelical Dalai Lama in Sun Valley, to a more transparent block-chain evangelicalism that is decentralized and, therefore, more secure.

There’s no telling if the groups complicit in platforming Lawson will correct themselves, but it doesn’t matter. Like the leftist establishment, their day is over.

Epilogue: For more information, consult the Polemicist Manifesto, #5 and #6.

5. 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.

6. 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.