"For example, I have noticed it’s really, really difficult to get a prominent evangelical critic of Trump to talk about gender ideology without attempting to “balance” the perspective. Transgenderism is a dangerous error, they write, “and so is [racism/xenophobia/misogyny].” This can pop up even in places where racism/xenophobia/misogyny are not even relevant to the topic, or when those sins are quite old and the sin of gender ideology is quite current. It’s not that this statement is incorrect. Those are sins! It’s that bringing them up feels like an attempt to change the topic, like the woman at the well who, when confronted by Jesus about her adultery, suddenly gets very good at asking theology questions." I agree that this tendency exists (speaking as a Never-Trump/conservative/Evangelical myself), but I might suggest viewing it, rather than changing the subject, to be communicating, "Yes, these things on the left are really bad. You know what is preventing us from having a persuasive and effective voice to combat them? These things on the right? We need to get this stuff out of our own eyes so that we can properly help our neighbors to get that stuff out of theirs!"
Maybe that is what they do care about, but what I want them to care about is the actual sins. Though I'd hardly consider myself a "fan" of Charlie Kirk, something that I really respected him for was actually trying to persuade his interlocutors that they were wrong, rather than just trying to disenfranchise or disempower them.
I don't want to sound sanctimonious, but that is the opposite of the attitude that Christ exemplified. But either way, turning our attention to our own failings and seeking to purify the sins that plague our movement doesn't logically imply that we would be just allowing ourselves to be marched to the guillotine. An army that neglects its own flaws is not more likely to prevail than one that seeks to identify, scrutinize, and excise them.
Blame it on my own media consumption, or ascribe it to the more moderate evangelical spaces I inhabit, but the role of Charlie Kirk as a Christian apologist was new to me. I had had him in a purely political box. Thus as with all new information, it's going to take some time to digest, to consider and perhaps appreciate. Was he a martyr? Perhaps. Although an equally likely scenario is that that public nature of the murder was itself the justification, the need our society pushes for public performances, that only by performance am I in some sense alive.
This in turn leads to the more regrettable aspect of the essay, ascribing the values to "secular progressivism". It seems far more likely to note that these values are leveraged, accelerated by the current algorithmic culture and in particular its intersection with young men. The repeated horror of young men and guns and a school is too well known, too often driven by the sort of despair fueled by algorithms and the social media desire to be seen. The emergence of the political posture of technology leaders undercuts any narrative that such algorithmic driven narratives possess a particular political color.
It does seem, on the other hand, that given this algorithmic-driven disease, this disconnection and fundamental disembodiment, Christians have a different task in front of them than jumping into this or that familiar political box.
The issue with the “straight line” comment is I can walk into a church and hear more people say “homosexuals should burn in hell” on a given Sunday than I will interact with trans people in a decade. Much fanfare is given to the “liberal trans agenda” than is ever given to the hardness of heart I interact with regularly in the church.
You can walk in a straight line in your endorsement of Kirk ideals, but that straight line isn’t always walking toward the cross. How do we reconcile the other things he said that dehumanized image bearers of Christ? I know you’re a brother in Christ, I am just advocating for more nuance and understanding that hell bent advocacy in the camp of conservatism is going to limit your perspective and exposure outside of what you already believe to be true about our country and the people who inhabit it. I’m exhausted by the boogeyman of the liberal agenda as a scapegoat for not dealing with other issues that plague the church. You can say that’s not walking in a straight line, but really it’s just holding fast that a church that is first known by humility and love is more effective than one who strives to snatch and keep power. Maybe you go to a church like the former now and that’s why you are more critical of the liberal agenda, but a lot of Christians in America are being failed by unqualified leadership and a shallow interpretation of the gospel.
As an observer of friends who were raised in strict, fundamentalist homes reject it, and instead of finding a flourishing faith in Jesus, are walking down a path of growing in anger and a complete rejection of him, I really do know what you mean about paths leading nowhere helpful or good for their souls or society at large. I really do understand what you’re saying and agree in part.
My husband is in the army and I was recently speaking to a chaplain about how I personally think one of the greatest failings of the church in recent decades is prioritizing teaching people how they should think about others instead of how to love and be a neighbor to them. Many teens grow up hearing about the evils of homosexuality and then meet a gay coworker or classmate and are like “uh what do I do with this?” How do you interact lovingly with someone you’ve been taught to view as participating in evil depravity?
This is why I think isolation - either individually chained to the algorithm intent on radicalizing you or the isolation of “us vs them” faith (even if it’s tied to “meaningful membership”) is more complex than the framework you’ve laid out. I’m not suggesting that you are proposing to have all of the answers, and I do mean this charitably, but sometimes it’s ok to recognize the limits of your exposure and the sheer complexity of what you are discussing. It’s also true that your comments about Charlie Kirk will always get some pushback due to the nature of him also being a complex and divisive person.
As to how this relates to political violence…it’s why we can see kids who were raised in “good, Christian, conservative” families participate it.
They were raised to think in absolutes and extremes. They are prime targets for radicalization because fear is a greatest driver to action. When you’re raised in fear - fear of culture, of the left, of the devil lurking around every corner, and the wrong person or group capitalizes on that - action is necessary, regardless of the cost. And this also applies to my friends who were raised that way, rejected Christianity, and now apply those principles to the left.
Yes, a lot of men have been left behind and failed, but they’ve also been discipled to behave in increasingly radical ways.
We can't possibly know which boys will or won't grow up to be lost in a sea of dangerous ideology and purposelessness, due to video game indoctrination. It is time Christians say no more to parking our kids behind an internet-connected screen or placing one in the palm of their hand.
The Governor of Utah might be a Mormon but in his decency and moderation he speaks for all who want peace to prevail. Thank God for those like him! Many in Britain who love America are praying for the USA today.
I don't know what goes on in the hearts and minds of every Never Trump Conservative Evangelical reader of yours, but I know what goes on inside this NTCE. I read Michael Reneau's piece on Kirk at The Dispatch and this one line jumped out at me: "In addition to grieving a man’s murder, I’m also grieving the distance between myself and fellow believers..." That grieving, for me, is real and ongoing. One of the spiritual lifelines, outside my local church, that the Lord has used to keep me sane and faithful over this last decade has been the depressingly small number of voices like yours who have, in various ways and degrees, stood athwart the MAGAfication of the American Right and, more importantly, the conservative American evangelical church. While Never-Trumping is not what you're primarily about (something I’m thankful for!), you're willingness to offer critiques in that direction, without making leftward compromises (a rare feat!), is a feature of you're writing and thinking many of us are drawn to and appreciate.
Because the remnant of voices like yours is so small (or at least perceived to be so), an apparent move toward MAGA by one of them can really sting. I don't feel stung by your initial piece on Kirk, though I wasn't tracking with all of it. (And that's OK! Better than OK! We need to challenge one another and not be threatened by every minor disagreement with brothers and sisters in Christ.) But I think I understand why so many of your readers passionately pushed back.
Also, for at least some of us, the issue is not a matter of straight-line thinking, but of a concern that our long-term ability as Christian individuals and communities to stay faithful, broadly and specifically on these hot-button social issues, is threatened by the toleration of the intensely partisan and *reality-denying* MAGA movement. How can a community long hold onto realities relating to gender - or anything else - when it has for years now calloused its conscious to embracing or, at best, ignoring a myriad of obvious falsities?
I hope all the pushback is not discouraging you and I hope none of your paid subscribers jump ship. You're a vital voice and I share your content with friends and family regularly.
Very thoughtful. This is a tighter and more comprehensive framework compared to what I've been bouncing around in my own head.
There are untethered, unwell loners on the right. But I do think it's more of a problem on the left, even if the vast majority of people who vote Democrat are not unwell loners. The church is a large part of the reason for this discrepancy, though the family is another. Both attending a church and building a family are partisan projects like never before.
One thing about godless philosophies is they have a tendency to be unbalanced in a way that promotes monomania. "Who, whom," as the famously monomaniacal Lenin said. By contrast, even the major false religions contain multitudes. I haven't ever put myself in the position of defending Islam, but I can say with confidence that Islam is a lot more than its most strawmanned caricature might suggest. It isn't just a project about destroying the Great Satan, or covering up women, etc. etc. It's a whole-life philosophy that, for most people in most times, means supporting a virtuous life dedicated to family.
I don't think that, for example, "Trans Rights Now" as a life philosophy has this going for it. It offers nothing in support of personal virtue or a balanced life. But it does a LOT to promote monomaniacal obsession.
If you have a family to take care of that you actually live with and would never abandon, you can only be so monomaniacal in pursuit of other things. Of course, this produces a gap in understanding. The childless struggle to understand the impact when we point out Kirk's children. And in turn, when someone comes after a father like that, it comes across as especially personal to the rest of us.
"For example, I have noticed it’s really, really difficult to get a prominent evangelical critic of Trump to talk about gender ideology without attempting to “balance” the perspective. Transgenderism is a dangerous error, they write, “and so is [racism/xenophobia/misogyny].” This can pop up even in places where racism/xenophobia/misogyny are not even relevant to the topic, or when those sins are quite old and the sin of gender ideology is quite current. It’s not that this statement is incorrect. Those are sins! It’s that bringing them up feels like an attempt to change the topic, like the woman at the well who, when confronted by Jesus about her adultery, suddenly gets very good at asking theology questions." I agree that this tendency exists (speaking as a Never-Trump/conservative/Evangelical myself), but I might suggest viewing it, rather than changing the subject, to be communicating, "Yes, these things on the left are really bad. You know what is preventing us from having a persuasive and effective voice to combat them? These things on the right? We need to get this stuff out of our own eyes so that we can properly help our neighbors to get that stuff out of theirs!"
I’d disagree, because the left doesn’t care about the actual sins. They care about power. The sins are clubs they use to gain power.
Maybe that is what they do care about, but what I want them to care about is the actual sins. Though I'd hardly consider myself a "fan" of Charlie Kirk, something that I really respected him for was actually trying to persuade his interlocutors that they were wrong, rather than just trying to disenfranchise or disempower them.
That’s nice. I’d like them to not kill me. Once that happens, I’ll worry about the sins.
I don't want to sound sanctimonious, but that is the opposite of the attitude that Christ exemplified. But either way, turning our attention to our own failings and seeking to purify the sins that plague our movement doesn't logically imply that we would be just allowing ourselves to be marched to the guillotine. An army that neglects its own flaws is not more likely to prevail than one that seeks to identify, scrutinize, and excise them.
And how well has that worked so far?
I'm pretty sure the movement has taken your view of appropriate strategy. Maybe you think it's going great.
What?
Blame it on my own media consumption, or ascribe it to the more moderate evangelical spaces I inhabit, but the role of Charlie Kirk as a Christian apologist was new to me. I had had him in a purely political box. Thus as with all new information, it's going to take some time to digest, to consider and perhaps appreciate. Was he a martyr? Perhaps. Although an equally likely scenario is that that public nature of the murder was itself the justification, the need our society pushes for public performances, that only by performance am I in some sense alive.
This in turn leads to the more regrettable aspect of the essay, ascribing the values to "secular progressivism". It seems far more likely to note that these values are leveraged, accelerated by the current algorithmic culture and in particular its intersection with young men. The repeated horror of young men and guns and a school is too well known, too often driven by the sort of despair fueled by algorithms and the social media desire to be seen. The emergence of the political posture of technology leaders undercuts any narrative that such algorithmic driven narratives possess a particular political color.
It does seem, on the other hand, that given this algorithmic-driven disease, this disconnection and fundamental disembodiment, Christians have a different task in front of them than jumping into this or that familiar political box.
The issue with the “straight line” comment is I can walk into a church and hear more people say “homosexuals should burn in hell” on a given Sunday than I will interact with trans people in a decade. Much fanfare is given to the “liberal trans agenda” than is ever given to the hardness of heart I interact with regularly in the church.
You can walk in a straight line in your endorsement of Kirk ideals, but that straight line isn’t always walking toward the cross. How do we reconcile the other things he said that dehumanized image bearers of Christ? I know you’re a brother in Christ, I am just advocating for more nuance and understanding that hell bent advocacy in the camp of conservatism is going to limit your perspective and exposure outside of what you already believe to be true about our country and the people who inhabit it. I’m exhausted by the boogeyman of the liberal agenda as a scapegoat for not dealing with other issues that plague the church. You can say that’s not walking in a straight line, but really it’s just holding fast that a church that is first known by humility and love is more effective than one who strives to snatch and keep power. Maybe you go to a church like the former now and that’s why you are more critical of the liberal agenda, but a lot of Christians in America are being failed by unqualified leadership and a shallow interpretation of the gospel.
As an observer of friends who were raised in strict, fundamentalist homes reject it, and instead of finding a flourishing faith in Jesus, are walking down a path of growing in anger and a complete rejection of him, I really do know what you mean about paths leading nowhere helpful or good for their souls or society at large. I really do understand what you’re saying and agree in part.
My husband is in the army and I was recently speaking to a chaplain about how I personally think one of the greatest failings of the church in recent decades is prioritizing teaching people how they should think about others instead of how to love and be a neighbor to them. Many teens grow up hearing about the evils of homosexuality and then meet a gay coworker or classmate and are like “uh what do I do with this?” How do you interact lovingly with someone you’ve been taught to view as participating in evil depravity?
This is why I think isolation - either individually chained to the algorithm intent on radicalizing you or the isolation of “us vs them” faith (even if it’s tied to “meaningful membership”) is more complex than the framework you’ve laid out. I’m not suggesting that you are proposing to have all of the answers, and I do mean this charitably, but sometimes it’s ok to recognize the limits of your exposure and the sheer complexity of what you are discussing. It’s also true that your comments about Charlie Kirk will always get some pushback due to the nature of him also being a complex and divisive person.
As to how this relates to political violence…it’s why we can see kids who were raised in “good, Christian, conservative” families participate it.
They were raised to think in absolutes and extremes. They are prime targets for radicalization because fear is a greatest driver to action. When you’re raised in fear - fear of culture, of the left, of the devil lurking around every corner, and the wrong person or group capitalizes on that - action is necessary, regardless of the cost. And this also applies to my friends who were raised that way, rejected Christianity, and now apply those principles to the left.
Yes, a lot of men have been left behind and failed, but they’ve also been discipled to behave in increasingly radical ways.
We can't possibly know which boys will or won't grow up to be lost in a sea of dangerous ideology and purposelessness, due to video game indoctrination. It is time Christians say no more to parking our kids behind an internet-connected screen or placing one in the palm of their hand.
The Governor of Utah might be a Mormon but in his decency and moderation he speaks for all who want peace to prevail. Thank God for those like him! Many in Britain who love America are praying for the USA today.
I don't know what goes on in the hearts and minds of every Never Trump Conservative Evangelical reader of yours, but I know what goes on inside this NTCE. I read Michael Reneau's piece on Kirk at The Dispatch and this one line jumped out at me: "In addition to grieving a man’s murder, I’m also grieving the distance between myself and fellow believers..." That grieving, for me, is real and ongoing. One of the spiritual lifelines, outside my local church, that the Lord has used to keep me sane and faithful over this last decade has been the depressingly small number of voices like yours who have, in various ways and degrees, stood athwart the MAGAfication of the American Right and, more importantly, the conservative American evangelical church. While Never-Trumping is not what you're primarily about (something I’m thankful for!), you're willingness to offer critiques in that direction, without making leftward compromises (a rare feat!), is a feature of you're writing and thinking many of us are drawn to and appreciate.
Because the remnant of voices like yours is so small (or at least perceived to be so), an apparent move toward MAGA by one of them can really sting. I don't feel stung by your initial piece on Kirk, though I wasn't tracking with all of it. (And that's OK! Better than OK! We need to challenge one another and not be threatened by every minor disagreement with brothers and sisters in Christ.) But I think I understand why so many of your readers passionately pushed back.
Also, for at least some of us, the issue is not a matter of straight-line thinking, but of a concern that our long-term ability as Christian individuals and communities to stay faithful, broadly and specifically on these hot-button social issues, is threatened by the toleration of the intensely partisan and *reality-denying* MAGA movement. How can a community long hold onto realities relating to gender - or anything else - when it has for years now calloused its conscious to embracing or, at best, ignoring a myriad of obvious falsities?
I hope all the pushback is not discouraging you and I hope none of your paid subscribers jump ship. You're a vital voice and I share your content with friends and family regularly.
God Bless!
Very thoughtful. This is a tighter and more comprehensive framework compared to what I've been bouncing around in my own head.
There are untethered, unwell loners on the right. But I do think it's more of a problem on the left, even if the vast majority of people who vote Democrat are not unwell loners. The church is a large part of the reason for this discrepancy, though the family is another. Both attending a church and building a family are partisan projects like never before.
One thing about godless philosophies is they have a tendency to be unbalanced in a way that promotes monomania. "Who, whom," as the famously monomaniacal Lenin said. By contrast, even the major false religions contain multitudes. I haven't ever put myself in the position of defending Islam, but I can say with confidence that Islam is a lot more than its most strawmanned caricature might suggest. It isn't just a project about destroying the Great Satan, or covering up women, etc. etc. It's a whole-life philosophy that, for most people in most times, means supporting a virtuous life dedicated to family.
I don't think that, for example, "Trans Rights Now" as a life philosophy has this going for it. It offers nothing in support of personal virtue or a balanced life. But it does a LOT to promote monomaniacal obsession.
If you have a family to take care of that you actually live with and would never abandon, you can only be so monomaniacal in pursuit of other things. Of course, this produces a gap in understanding. The childless struggle to understand the impact when we point out Kirk's children. And in turn, when someone comes after a father like that, it comes across as especially personal to the rest of us.
👏🏼Applause.. Well said..