Tim Keller was the flavor of the month for a few years among intellectual “conservative” and especially Reformed evangelicals. He was smart and winsome and lived in New York and wrote accessible but decent books. He even was given pretty decent treatment from secular news outlets.
After a few years he seemed to be going off the rails a bit. In 2017 a video surfaced at the church he leads, Redeemer, of an offeratory performace of a little fella prancing around in a ballet outfit. The video has been made private so you will have to take my word for it back in the day. Doug Wilson had this to say about it (link to his article in the link for my post if you are interested):
What is the problem with this? Summed up, it is that this performance is gayer than the kiwi queen at the Fire Island Fruit Festival. This performance is gayer than an HR memo at Google headquarters. How gay was it? It was gayer than an NPR tote bag full of rainbows. It was gayer than a unicorn parade through the Castro District. It was gayer than a lavender sparkly pen.
Doug always has a flair for that sort of thing. Short of performing an actual ghey sex act on stage, it was the gayest thing you could imagine and a lot of people pointed this out which is why Redeemer made the video private.
So things were starting to go sideways already for Tim and that seems to have escalated a few days ago.
You will search in vain for a single example of an even mildly prominent evangelical Christian leader who embraces “white nationalism” and you won’t have to look very hard at all to find plenty of evangelical leaders who take every opportunity to condemn “white nationalism”, even though none of them seem able to define it. It simply isn’t an issue anywhere significant in the Christian world, unlike the rise of degenerate behavior, the blurring of the gender role lines and a full on assault by “critical race theory”, a secular radical racialist theory that has been adopted by a number of far left “theologians” that have infiltrated evangelicalism. But that doesn’t stop people from making wild accusations of “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” being a serious issue in the Christian church.
So why is Keller banging the drum about “white nationalism”?
Simply put, as a member of the respectable, controlled opposition wing of evangelicalism, he expected to make these sort of random condemnations to stay in good standing. At the upper echelons of organized religion, most of it is reduced to a simple hustle and the people like Tim Keller make a sweet living by preaching a few sermons a week, pumping out books that I am assuming are mostly ghost written by their staff and speaking at big conferences. One of the keys to being successful at being a religious grifter is to never go against the grain. Sure you can make noises about some “conservative” issues but you always have to be ready to shift when needed. A perfect example of this is the Mormon “church”. Their flagship school, named after polygamous pervert Brigham Young, has always had a strict “honor code” that mostly meant “no sex outside of marriage or at least don’t get caught”. It is being reported that they are removing homosexual behavior from the honor code, shortly after the state of Utah moved to decriminalize polygamy. The Mormons have been shifting their unshakable moral codes for decades, most notably in banning the practice of polygamy and suddenly deciding black folks could be part of their “priesthood” even though God said they were cursed. I guess they learned their early lessons about being too far outside of the prevailing cultural zeitgeist.
The “leadership” ranks of evangelicalism are rapidly approaching the same sort of disconnect between leadership and rank-and-file we see in conservative politics and labor unions. I don’t think the average evangelical church member in America understands how far and how fast their leaders, who make a living based on the faithful giving of church members, have moved to the left. The early leaders of the Christian church, pre-Constantine, were often persecuted and impoverished. According to the accounts we read in the New Testament, they were bold and brave men. The leaders of Christianity today are mostly soft, effeminate men who hide in their church offices all week and live off the labor of real men and the charity of old ladies.
Organized religion is a massive swindle.