One of the core concepts we have returned to regularly in our diagnostic writing about this cultural moment is that online networks have supplanted in-person institutions as the dominant forms of social belonging for most of our neighbors. One of the problems that follows from this is that online networks actually are better at spreading negative emotions than positive emotions. We are more incentivized to act online when we encounter content that makes us feel rage, fear, anxiety, and so on as opposed to when we encounter content that causes us to feel content, calm, or happy.
One side effect of this is that in forming coalitions and alliances, it is more intuitive and natural for heavily networked people to band together over common objects of hatred or fear or concern rather than common objects of love. Because much of our communal life in networks is defined by what we fear or hate, we tend to associate with other people who fear or hate the same things we do.
This creates a particularly nasty problem in Christian media and the American church more generally. To understand the point best, I'll refer you back to Michael Graham and Skyler Flowers' widely read "Six Way Fracturing" essay and I will link that essay up with the concept of horseshoe politics, which is the idea that political affiliation is not a horizontal plane but rather is horseshoe-shaped, meaning as you move further from the center, the far right and far left begin to move closer together and almost to converge.
For our purposes, I want to argue that the far right end of the horseshoe in evangelical media would be Graham and Flowers's "1" category, and the far left would be the "4" category. The outcome is something like this:
On the one hand, the Neo-Evangelicals and Progressive Evangelicals (the 3s and 4s) tend to share concerns about racial injustice, abuse within institutions (including Christian institutions), and more generalized issues of injustice in America's public life (though this concern often does not extend very clearly or at all to the injustices visited on unborn Americans or on minors who are aided in gender transition by negligent medical professionals who will later experience immense pain and regret over their choice). Meanwhile, Neo-Fundamentalists and Mainstream Evangelicals (1s and 2s) tend to share concerns about the spread of progressive sex and gender ideology, the particular role that public schools play in that problem, the erosion of the family, as well as more generalized tendencies on the progressive left to reduce all political disputes and truth claims about public life down to power claims which must be deconstructed.
That being said: The Neo-Evangelicals have not capitulated to heretical ideas concerning sex and gender whereas the Progressive Evangelicals have. Meanwhile, the Mainstream Evangelicals have not endorsed totalitarian political philosophies as well as white nationalism while many of the Neo-Fundamentalists actually have. So in terms of "fidelity to historic Christian teachings" the Neo-Evangelicals and the Mainstream Evangelicals actually have far more in common with each other than either of them do with the bloc that tends to share many of their particular anxieties and fears.
Moreover, there is nothing inherent in the Neo-Evangelical position that rules out a concern with the things that Mainstream Evangelicals rightly oppose anymore than there is anything inherent in the Mainstream Evangelical position that would prevent them from addressing the genuine evils that most animate Neo-Evangelicals. Indeed, we already know that the Mainstream Evangelical/Neo-Evangelical coalition can work because that is more or less exactly what the Young, Restless, Reformed movement was built on.
However, despite all this the plausibility of such a coalition is seldom apparent or obvious in our media environment right now because we are primarily networked beings and networked beings tend to center their fears and anxieties rather than their core beliefs and constructive vision for the future.
To put it in graphic terms, this is how the blocs would look if we centered our actual core beliefs and constructive vision:
In common practice, however, this is how we tend to actually function:
I'm going to share two examples of this dynamic at work. Note that while I am not going to name names in what follows, the situations I'm describing are real situations in existing institutions. I'm choosing not to name names for the simple reason that the fruit of this essay should be that neo-evangelical and mainstream evangelical leaders will take greater care to observe what they share with each other and will attempt to define their public posture and their associational choices on the basis of positive, constructive ideas rather than on the basis of fear, anxiety, and anger. But if I name names the response will simply become a long, tedious, and pointless argument over the specific figures I have in my mind as I write.
The first example I have in mind is a relatively prominent neo-evangelical leader. He regularly appears at conferences alongside progressive evangelicals. This isn't a surprise, given that both the neo-evangelicals and progressive evangelicals have many common concerns. And yet if you actually asked both the neo-evangelicals at these events and the progressive evangelicals to articulate their constructive vision of society, the differences would become readily apparent with the progressives basically parroting the talking points of the Democratic Socialists of America and the neo-evangelicals suddenly sounding less like left-coded discernment bloggers and more like older Neo-Evangelical leaders like Tim Keller or even a more Mainstream Evangelical figure like John Piper.
Likewise, there is a second example I know of in which a writer with far right ties who recently published a piece favorably citing a fascist political theorist and describing living space as the chief political problem (no doubt a German translation of this article will be coming soon) was published only a few weeks later by a well-known evangelical outlet with a relatively famous, by evangelical standards, editor in chief. Here, again, I am quite confident that if you asked that editor to lay out his constructive vision he would sound very like Piper or even Keller.
Yet in both cases, the public-facing coalitions that seem to be emerging are drawing together coalitions defined not by their constructive visions for the future, but the things they are most hostile to or fearful of.
What Happens When We Build with the Wrong People?
Once the divide shifts to a vertical split along the horseshoe one of two things will happen to the Mainstream Evangelicals and Neo-Evangelicals.
One possibility is that they will become slowly radicalized themselves, toward either Neo-Fundamentalism or Progressive Evangelicalism. This has certainly happened many times.
But there is a second possibility which in many ways is actually more sad. The Mainstream Evangelical leader will make no real effort whatsoever to police his right flank. Indeed, he'll behave as if the mere existence of anyone to his right is indicative of the fact that he must have inadvertently drifted left. Effectively, then, this causes the Mainstream Evangelicals to adopt a version of No Enemies to the Right.
Meanwhile, the Neo-Evangelicals will make no effort to police their left flank and will behave, in effect, as if the existence of anyone to their left proves that they are insufficiently alert to certain forms of public injustice.
In both cases, the people involved won't actually capitulate to heretical notions of anthropology, either of a racialist form or with regards to sexuality. However, they will make themselves impotent and irrelevant through their public conduct. How?
- First, because they don't actually capitulate to racial essentialist political theories or sexual progressivism, they will remain suspect to the flank they refuse to police despite their many efforts to avoid conflict with that flank.
- Second, because they don't actually police that flank in any real way, anyone on their opposite side politically will also find them to be rather suspect.
What ends up happening, then, is the Mainstream Evangelical and Neo-Evangelical leaders become almost entirely irrelevant because they don't have a real constituency behind them, nor do they have the ability to actually create any change of note within their broader movement bloc. In both cases, they end up like the French revolutionary who is alleged to have followed a mob into town and asked the townspeople which way the mob went because "I must follow them, for I am their leader."
What Should We Do Instead?
Three things spring to mind.
First, forget about your reputation. Remember that your goal is the truth before it is political success. Do not seek first the possibility of power, success, or fame. Political success and the acquisition of political power is not a bad thing by any means. But it is a secondary thing relative to fidelity to God. Many of our sins in this area stem from inverting that order. Because we live in a moment where the political forms of neo-fundamentalism and progressive evangelicalism seem to be ascendant, it can be easy for us to reconcile ourselves to those false forms of Christian belief in order to secure our own place in the world. Do not do that.
Seek thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.
Second, soak yourself in the wisdom of Scripture and the historic church and, flowing out of that, practice candor. Anchor your beliefs in timeless truth and then do not let yourself feel embarrassed by what you believe. Speak plainly. What is happening now in our media environment and many other places beside is that our worst actors are filled with righteous fury while those who might be our best seem to think it is uncool to act like you know what you're talking about:
Third, give your love to things that will anchor you when you are hated, slandered, and cast out because you refuse to play political games. These needn't be grandiose things, to be clear. They can be simple pleasures that become means by which we deflect our worship upward to God. I've thought often of how the thing that helps Sam, at least, make it up Mount Doom is the memory of the Shire, of streams and trees and strawberries and cream. As Lewis reminds us, whenever we are working in the domain of pleasure, we are in some way working on God's turf, as it were, for God creates pleasure and all Satan can do is mock what God has made. Real, genuine pleasures anchor us to the real and so can be a powerful form of lifting our attention up to God, the maker and giver of those pleasures.
Ultimately, of course, our love must be given to the greatest thing, which is God himself. And in loving God we ourselves are made lovely and, we are helped to see the unity we share with others who are beloved of God and being made lovely. Love of God is our best defense against the temptations of our moment and every moment.
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