There are men of influence in evangelical circles who’ve made a whole career of improving upon God’s Word with their own opinions, and then excommunicating anyone who questions their pet tertiary doctrines.
Such men are accustomed to silencing dissent within their spheres of influence by threatening the employment, professional standing or institutional status of anyone who interrogates the status quo.
But a growing number of professionals from outside the institutional settings in which these men exercise control—journalists, academics, clergy and so on—have taken an interest in critiquing the ideological commitments behind conservative evangelical theology and politics.
It’s been fascinating to watch the reaction from men in power and those who aspire to inherit power: they’ve never before had to reckon with sustained volleys of criticism from professionals who they can’t dismiss as unbelievers or threaten into silence—and it shows.
Their counter-arguments (if we may call them arguments) are uniformly *terrible*: mostly variations on the theme, “But I disagree with that person about what the Bible says, so that person doesn’t really believe the Bible, obviously [QED, pause for applause].”
The rest of their objections are either personal attacks against a given author, or complaints to the effect that the reviewer wishes the author had written a book on some subject other than the actual subject of the book—which just isn’t at all how arguing works.
Another thing that’s been fascinating to watch is who ends up getting labeled ‘divisive’.
Turns out, it’s not the doctrine sheriffs who ascended to and retain power by inventing a new controversy every few years to manufacture hysteria over theological liberalism.
Turns out, it’s not the doctrine sheriffs who ascended to and retain power by inventing a new controversy every few years to manufacture hysteria over theological liberalism.
It’s not the guys who’ve spent the last several decades doing everything in their power to conflate theological orthodoxy with retrograde ideas about economics and politics, and dismissing anyone who disagrees as sub-Christian and probably a Marxist.
No: it’s the folks who criticize the established order that get labeled ‘divisive’—as if the established order isn’t itself sustained by the very techniques of division which scholarly treatments of racism, misogyny and Christian Nationalism threaten to expose.
If you think critiques of the evangelical-industrial complex are more divisive than the evangelical-industrial complex itself—if, in effect, you think the people demanding justice are more divisive than those doing injustice—you should ask yourself why it is that you think that.
If you’re honest with yourself, I expect you’ll find that you benefit in some way from the established order and the sanctioned techniques of division that hold it together, and that perhaps you’re more comfortable with the status quo than you ought to be.
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