Thread by @WokePreacherTV

All right, long 🧵 with at least 11 clips incoming. When I saw this dustup with Gavin Ortlund last week, I remembered he just released a book on "theological triage" or discerning what are the "right hills to die on" in various debates. Some thoughts...

https://twitter.com/gavinortlund/status/1494732412898537473

Screenshots for the blocked. Ortlund was defending David French about something or other and then got into this bit of fearmongering about evangelicals/Deplorables. Implication is people who are on the right in current U.S. culture wars are a dangerous threat to the nation.

I'm gonna go through some highlights of an interview Gavin did with Remnant Radio about his book, where he nuances to death issues like Christians affirming gay marriage and universalism. The question is: how does such a Thoughtful Person fail to extend similar grace in politics?

These clips all go in chronological order. First, Gavin defines his four categories to rank issues:

1. They set the boundaries of orthodoxy
2. Distinguishes denominations
3. Important but shouldn't divide us in any way
4. Not important at all

"Calvin talks about how sometimes we divide not because we love the truth but because of pride. And he talks about how we need to distinguish the issues that are really essential to the gospel versus things that are in our flesh that we that make us feel superior."

Reminder, just setting up background here.

The hosts start a "lightning round" for Gavin to rank various controversial positions.

"I will reserve the right to say like 2.5 or something like that...I say in the book, something can be like a number 2 but it can be like a number 2 almost pushing into 1..."

Q: "Human sexuality"

"If we're talking about, for example, does a person affirm a traditional definition of marriage...I would see it as kind of 2, but very solidly into 2...I have friends who disagree with me on that. I'm not willing to say they're not a Christian."

There's an important caveat here, that we should not judge prematurely, that God will judge with more knowledge than we have, that some people may hold false beliefs out of ignorance rather than sin. I agree with these in principle: Luke 12:47-48, 1 Cor 3:12-15 govern my work.

But there absolutely is accountability for those who have been corrected on a false position and continue to hold to it in rebellion. Gavin is willing to say that people he has contended with on queer affirmation, who refuse to repent, are still somewhere within orthodoxy.

Next issue is universalism (long discussion, many clips). To preserve context, I've included the end of his remarks on annihilationism.

"That's certainly moving into the 2 category in my mind, but there's people I know who are universalists that I can't say they are not saved."

"Just because we might fall short of putting something at the rank of 1 or using the term heresy does not mean it's like no big deal. It just means we're not going all the way to that full level. And some of the issues here depend on how we use the term heresy..."

Further quotes from this clip ^

"There are differences in terms of the spirit with which a view is held. There are people who advocate for, maybe universalism or maybe another view, in such a way that really does become more destructive and corrosive..."

"...But I've, and so, we have to just kind of leave room for the complexities of real life, because I've just known other people who don't advocate for it in that way. And it doesn't seem to me like this is, 'Oh, they're the enemy of the gospel.' I don't feel that way about them"

Your tone helps determine the level of error?

I agree with the distinction that some are deceiving + some are being deceived, and those merit difference responses (2 Tim 3:13, Jude 22-23), but I can't co-sign this. The Bible has harsher condemnations for winsome false teachers.

Host says he's solidly in the "universalism is heresy" camp and asks Gavin to explain his thinking a little more. The meat of his answer is in the next clip.

"There are passages they, that I think a good-faith person could be persuaded by in error. In other words, I don't think the only way you exegetically get there is just if you're just tearing pages out of your Bible because you don't care what it means."

Final clip: "There's just too many people like a Gregory of Nyssa...There's too many people in that category that just seem to me like, 'that's heresy' is not the right category for that person. I disagree with them. I'm just, I wouldn't put it at that level."

(I miscounted in the first tweet, only 10 clips, I just recut the last one to keep the "universalism is bad" part from the host and forgot to overwrite the previous file)

So, again, how does this kind of Very Thoughtful Person, who sees a good-faith exegesis behind universalism and perhaps even queer affirmation, get to the point where questions about the 2020 election, vaccine hesitancy, and suing school boards = likely QAnon terrorists?

For context, this was the week's David French article. Ortlund was swooping in to defend this rhetoric, then had to clean up some zealous language likening French to the prophets of Israel.

In Gavin's view, there is some permissible, agree-to-disagree approach to advocating queer affirmation or universalism within Christian orthodoxy. But not for challenging public school mask mandates?

As a longtime QAnon hater who still sees the salt of the earth people caught up in it as my people, I will attempt to articulate a nuanced, respectable, agree-to-disagree position for each of the cultural issues Gavin is so troubled by.

1. "A majority of evangelicals still believe the 2020 election was stolen."

Yes, the Mike Lindell / "We have the packet data from Venezuela!" approach hasn't yielded anything impressive, but many of us have a different paradigm.

I can assure you that a sizeable chunk of those people are thinking less of Dominion machines and more of state leaders taking advantage of the pandemic to loosen voting rules + dark money funding mass-mail ballot harvesting. realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/…

Most of the people who suspect that this happened are not entertaining elaborate fanfic about JFK restoring Trump to his throne, but they have accepted the results and want to audit/inspect the results and use the info to draft laws to prevent a similar situation in the future.

2. 1/4 evangelicals affirm this statement: “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

This one's tough. I don't agree with it at all.

Heck, I don't even think the American Revolution or Bonhoeffer's assassination attempt were biblically justified. But I know there are people I can agree to disagree with on those events. Is there no situation ever where good-faith people might feel justified to revolt?

If rigged elections in the U.S. become as obvious as they are in Tehran or Cuba, and there's some sort of systematic oppression like the Uyghur camps of China, would I see Christians who take up arms against the govt as "dangerous political radicals"? Probably not.

3. "QAnon stuff"

No Christian should waste a second of their life deciphering "Q drops." It's an obvious larp, and it fails the Deuteronomy 18 test of making prophecies that come to pass. Now, if you frame it like that, you might make some headway in pulling people out of it...

...Especially if you acknowledge the truisms that are pulling people into it, that pedophilia seems to be a recurring problem among the world's elites, and there are many cases of curious coverups when the powerful may face accountability.

If we can empathize with why people believe in errors like universalism, we can empathize with why people believe silly fanfic psyops meant to keep them passive and alienate them from their immediate neighbors.

4. "Claims that Antifa was behind 1/6/21"

This particular phrasing hasn't aged well, but it's an error on the part of the pollster. We can affirm multiple facets to the story. The riot was big enough that some people may have been incited by agent provocateurs, and some weren't.

Some leftists were in the crowd, most notably John Sullivan, the videographer who captured the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. Sullivan is an anti-Trump, pro-BLM activist who shouted slogans like "burn this s**t down" on January 6. Does this make him culpable for the whole thing? Nah.

More recently, conservatives have raised questions about feds inciting the crowd. There's the viral video of a crowd chanting "Fed! Fed! Fed" at a guy on the eve of the riot, and the NYTimes has reported at least 1 FBI informant stormed the Capitol. washingtonexaminer.com/news/federal-a…

Again, this isn't to say that zero conservatives bear culpability for trespassing, violence against cops, and damaging property on that day. But it's clearly a complex and nuanced situation. Acknowledge that. Don't shame people for wanting more information.

5. "Vaccine refusal"

This has been a major theme of mine in the past few months. The COVID shots are clearly an issue of conscience. Even before they came out, people like James White simply made the argument: this is not only a new vaccine but a new *method* of vaccination...

...so it is completely reasonable to want long-term data on side effects for this new technology before taking it. I really want Gavin to explain how that is an unconscionable Christian position.

And with their rollout, these shots fell short of their sales pitch in many ways.

We were promised by the top levels of the federal government that they would prevent infection and transmission. They haven't. So there's no "love your neighbor" argument anymore, just "protect yourself." And people are free to make personal risk assessments. End of story.

6. "Christians suing public schools in connection to conspiratorial views"

The vague language doesn't give me much to work with here, but the kind of lawsuits I'm aware of are about:

-racial discrimination (because antiracism)
-LGBTQIA2S+ nonsense
-mask and vaccine mandates

Gavin asks this Q in his thread: "So you tell me, what is a way to address this that *won't* generate a volcanic backlash? Because we need to talk about these issues. But if you bring them up, there is an intense defensiveness."

Easy. Just like you address fans of gay marriage.

In this thread, I have disrespected Mike Lindell, the message board weirdo larping as a top-secret intel haver, the Founding Fathers, and more, but I'm not going to get the pushback you got. Why? Because I'm separating fact from fiction in corporate media narratives.

And that brings me to my answer on the initial question of this thread. A well-read, charitable theologian can drop his charity for the Deplorables when he has been radicalized by news outlets that, in his formative years, were seen as unimpeachably authoritative.

I'm reminded of Michael Crichton's "Gell-Mann amnesia effect." No doubt if Gavin were to read a piece in the Washington Post about church history, theology, or the evangelical conference circuit, he'd notice errors galore, being an expert immersed in those fields.

Yet, as he drifts over to other topics on the same page, any skepticism about the competence or the motives of the reporters vanishes, because after all, this is the Washington Post! They broke Watergate way back when!

It is long past time for Christians to have anything but an adversarial view of corporate media. Twitter has made it so easy to look up the bylines of story authors and get a peek into their thought lives. They are not operating in good faith.

Middle-aged evangelical conference circuit guys are still operating in the assumption that, just as in the '90s and even the 2000s, reporters lean left but can generally be trusted for an accurate snapshot of the world. But they just aren't. They've been trained up as activists.

You've been conditioned to think conservative media is all Alex Jones. That National Review went too far to the right, and that's why David French had to leave. If you want to keep the trust of your congregation, please consider the alternative possibility that he went left.

Please consider the possibility that you are now being conditioned to view defensible political positions as indefensible, that the problem is so big that church discipline cannot handle it and our intelligence agencies may have to handle it.

https://twitter.com/WokePreacherTV/status/1487099010137608202

Last tweet may sound alarmist, but consider what happened in Canada last night. Parliament approved the invocation of the Emergencies Act, *after* the convoy was cleared. This would give the govt power to seize property and freeze finances as though protesters are terrorists.

Just a couple weeks ago, Homeland Security named right-wing positions on the issues Gavin brought up (e.g. concerns about election integrity, COVID vaccines) as potential TERRORIST threats. dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/…

These are not ordinary times and we are not far from authoritarianism even in the western world. Pastors, consider how your venting about Deplorables contributes to the pagan world's justification of turning our intelligence apparatus against them.

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