Strachan, Wilson, Webbon, Wolfe, and Christian Cancel Culture

Say that five times fast.

Perhaps one of the saddest, and easily most pathetic, claims of evangelicalism is that our leaders are speaking prophetically to culture. No one made this claim more than Russell Moore, and those surrounding him, when Albert Mohler used his influence to install the lifelong Democrat as head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). We were told that Moore was leading us into a New Age of civic engagement, one in which evangelical leaders like Moore would be the third-coming of Elijah, preaching truth to power, and guiding secular culture to the New Jerusalem.

Of course, none of that happened.

Russell Moore did not use his prophet’s mantle to lecture government, but to lecture evangelicals. He did not lead evangelicals into the Promised Land, but into the Democrat Party. And certainly no legitimate cultural influencers gave a rat’s patoot about the messaging of Russell Moore or any of the other scold-mongers who chose to lecture us, instead of our overlords.

Evangelicals in America have demonstrated time and again, that we are on the tail end of literally every cultural trend. By the time people stopped singing Its Five O’Clock Somewhere and phased out of Jimmy Buffet-o-mania, the fat megachurch preacher just started putting on his best Hawaiian shirt to preach on Sunday morning. As NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and 98 Degrees became punchlines, churches started hauling out their worship boy bands. Or my favorite example, it took a full seven years after 50 Shades of Grey was published (and three years after it was adapted to film) for The Gospel Coalition’s resident lesbian to publish an article finding gospel themes therein.

We are quite literally on the arse-end of every cultural trend, and pretend as though we’re leading the parade. It’s lame, and dated, and stupid. Evangelicals are the fanny pack of culture. We are the New Balances and calf-high socks of cultural trends. We’re busy twirling our fidget spinners a good five years after they started to appear on gas station counters.

And in case you aren’t aware, cancel culture is over. Oh, sure. There are some who would like it to make a comeback, but it’s gone the way of high-waisted jeans. Bad example. It’s gone the way of low-rise jeans. But somewhere, there’s a worship leader at Hillsong or Bethel letting that thong strap sneak up above her britches like it’s 2001, thinking she’s on the cusp of relevance.

Or maybe, the Revoice guys are doing that. Again, I’m not sure.

Back to cancel culture, there was a time when it was all the rage. Largely, it began in 2013 with the rise of Black Lives Matter, it was coronated King of the Universe right around George Floyd’s overdose, and became immutable law during Covid. All it took to be canceled was for a bureaucrat in the U.S. Department of the Ministry of Truth to send an email to Twitter or Facebook, and *bam* canceled. It didn’t matter if you were a Stanford educated physician in virology and epidemiology, you could be canceled at the drop of a hat for WrongThink. Or, in the vein of #MeToo, all it took was a accusation of having received unenthusiastic fellatio, for you to be put into the time-out corner indefinitely.

If you appreciate my free articles, you’ll really like my paid content. This is one of the things I do to provide for my family, so please consider an $8 subscription. Thanks!

But consider the glorious revival of non-cancelation that America has enjoyed for the last year. Tucker Carlson could not be canceled just because FOX said so. President Trump has been re-platformed by X and Facebook. Even Alex Jones is bigger and better than ever, much thanks to people who fight cancel culture, like Joe Rogan, Steven Crowder, and Tucker Carlson. Almost everyone who has been canceled, has been uncanceled, except for Kanye, who will never be allowed back (because he criticized you know who). There was a time when Harrison Butker or Riley Gaines would’ve been canceled, and that was not that long ago. Things have changed.

Except, in evangelicalism, which is just now jumping onto the cancelation bandwagon, blissfully unaware that their fanny pack became unpopular in 1988.

I present for your example, Exhibit A from Owen Strachan.

If you’re not aware of the controversy, Douglas Wilson and James White (and a few others) drafted and promoted an absolute humdinger of a statement against…well….it’s complicated. Something to do with Aristotle and the Enlightenment, but also about how it’s wrong to question ‘received accounts’ and stuff.

So far as Strachan’s appeal to Wilson is concerned, he wants Wilson to disavow and cancel Stephen Wolfe for having politically incorrect notions. Wolfe’s crime is saying the quiet part out loud, which Wilson was entirely okay with, up until Pete Hegseth was nominated for Secretary of Defense and it became prophesied that his association with Wilson (and by extension, Wilson’s association with Wolfe) would come up in nomination hearings.

Beyond the fact that undertaking ecclesiastical anathemas for political purposes is vomitously gross, and quite frankly a betrayal of several different kinds, it’s what is behind Strachan’s cancelation plea that’s really disgusting.

Please let my fifteen-years experience dealing adversarially with the Evangelical Intelligentsia inform you of what, if you’ve not been around that long, you might be missing.

Strachan is the product of Albert Mohler, who happens to be the Lou Pearlman of evangelicalism. But instead of manufacturing boy band talent, Mohler has used his direct influence to place every single problematic figure in the Southern Baptist Convention (and many beyond the SBC) into positions of influence.

Thom Rainer, the long-time president of Lifeway who pushed the entity hard-left, was placed there by Albert Mohler’s influence (formerly he was the Dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions at SBTS). Danny Akin, who pushed Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary to become to woke flagship of Critical Theory in the SBC, was placed there by Albert Mohler’s influence (formerly he was the Dean of the School of Theology at SBTS). Jason Allen, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, who has promoted every single liberal idea known to man before he pulls back at the last second, was placed there by Albert Mohler’s influence (formerly he was a senior administrator at SBTS). Adam Greenway, the recently fired president at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary who tried to open up pastoral ministry to women, was placed there by the influence of Albert Mohler (formerly he was the Dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions at SBTS).

For crying out loud, Mohler has yet to denounce Nate Collins of Revoice or David Platt (who was placed at the IMB with Mohler’s heavy endorsements).

Surely Strachan knows all of this, for he too is a product created by Albert Mohler. Mohler was instrumental in placing a very young Strachan at the helm of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood in 2013, and head of the Carl F.H. Henry Center for Cultural Engagement at SBTS in 2014. Strachan, who has never had a job in the private sector, has been a member of the Evangelical Intelligentsia parachurch apparatus his entire adult life, thanks to something that Albert Mohler saw in him.

But one name, in particular, stands out as yet-denounced by Albert Mohler. And that’s the name Russell Moore.

The entire time Russell Moore was driving evangelicalism to the hard-left, he enjoyed the hearty endorsement of Mohler. And the two served together at The Gospel Coalition, while it was making a hard left-turn. And when Russell Moore’s uber-lilberal “research fellows” were supporting Revoice, they enjoyed guest-lecturer status at SBTS (for example, Karen Swallow Prior, who spoke at the invention of Dr. Haykin). When I emailed Haykin, to ask why on earth Prior was speaking at his invitation, he assured me that she was “as conservative as the day is long” because “Russell asked me to let her come, and he was my dean, and he’s as conservative as the day is long.”

In fact, despite chronicling Russell Moore’s leftward trajectory more closely than anyone in evangelicalism (I’d fight for that acknowledgment) I can find not a single word even bordering on a denouncement of the woke activist by Albert Mohler.

But here’s what else I can’t find. I can’t find an open letter written by Owen Strachan imploring Albert Mohler to denounce Russell Moore, despite the fact that Mohler platformed Moore far more extensively than Douglas Wilson ever platformed Stephen Wolfe.

No, my point is not that we ought to go around demanding people cancel others. Although their silence, like Mohler’s silence in the face of Russell Moore’s apostasies, can be used against them in the court of polemics, those on the right side of things rarely ask for censorship.

Largely, censorship and de-platforming and “canceling” is the tactic used against unarguable ideas. When one can’t challenge the validity of their opponent’s ideas, they insist their opponent must be quieted.

For example, the last thing we ever wanted was for Karen Swallow Prior or Russell Moore to be censored. In fact, we only wanted them to be candid. Confident we could defeat their ideas, we wanted their truthful ideas and honest opinions expressed.

When you’re Owen Strachan, or any of the Lance Bass or Justin Timberlake institutional clones on the payroll of an endowment left in the name of dead men, your platform means the world to you. But quite the opposite is true for the men who made their own platform.

I even saw several people in the thread on his plea to Wilson, hope that Wilsons’s “platform be taken from him” if he does not consent to Strachan’s demand. I chuckled at that, because if there was ever a self-made man, it was Douglas Wilson, who built his own platform with nothing but a Swiss Army knife and fantastic wit.

Meanwhile, I’ll remind you of Polemics Manifesto #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.”

Canceling doesn’t work, evangelicals. This isn’t 2020 any more.

Read more about that here.