The year was 2008. America was coming to the end of the George W. Bush presidency of “compassionate conservatism”. While perhaps few remember it, W. Bush was the most outspoken evangelical President in my lifetime. Even Jimmy Carter, allegedly a Southern Baptist, was fairly quiet about his faith. Bush on the other hand wore his evangelicalism on his sleeve, frequently talking about his faith. He framed the “Global War on Terror” in terms of good versus evil, either you are with us or against us.
Conservative evangelicalism was feeling empowered and emboldened. America was on the march abroad making the world safe for democracy via piles of dead brown people. Southern Baptists and most conservative evangelical groups strongly supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and many attendees at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting cheered when it was announced that Saddam Hussein’s sons has been killed in a U.S. attack.
Evangelicalism in America had long been seen as the refuge of ignorant hicks in the South and Midwest that believed just a little too much in the Bibles they toted to church, unlike the genteel Episcopalians and Methodists that lived back East. By 2008 that was quickly changing. Two years earlier in 2006, four pastor/theologian friends decided to hold a conference to expand on their own personal talks. Those four men were Albert Mohler (president of the SBC’s Southern Seminary), Ligon Duncan (Presbyterian minister), Mark Dever (9 Marks Ministries) and C.J. Mahaney (Sovereign Grace Churches). Around 3000 men showed up to the conference titled Together For The Gospel (T4G).
Two years later they held the next T4G in Louisville and I was in attendance. While I am not sure how many men showed up to the 2008 conference, it was way more than 3000 (I have seen figures of over 5000). The audience was youngish, and very White. Each session we got a handful of free books and in-between sessions we would browse the enormous book hall where every major vendor of Christian books, especially those aimed at the Reformed audience, had tables set up. I came back with a ton of books, most still unread on my book shelves. The talks themselves from the four hosts and other Reformed luminaries like R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur were powerful, I took a ton of notes and blogged copiously in response. In retrospect 2008 really marked the launch of an intellectually robust evangelicalism.
It wouldn’t last.
Again in retrospect, the signs were starting to show even in 2008. At the T4G conference, all of the speakers focused on what could be argued is the central theme of evangelicalism, justification by faith alone. All but one that is. The lone black speaker was a man calling himself Thabiti Anyabwile who had been born Ron Burns in a Christian family before converting to Islam before converting back to Christianity. His talk instead focused on race. Of course. While it was in the context of justification, it was markedly different from the other speakers. Thabiti would soon take his mild racialism to new lengths.
It didn’t take long for things to start coming apart. Just a few years after T4G 2008, one of the founders, C.J. Mahaney who always struck me as kind of a kook, was accused to being complicit in Sovereign Grace ministries covering up sexual abuse. Initially the other three stood by him and he appeared once more at T4G but that was it and now the other three have distanced themselves from him. The damage was already done.
By October of 2021, two of the four founders of T4G, Mark Dever and Ligon Duncan, announced that the 2022 Together for the Gospel conference would be the final one. While Mahaney was of course absent, notable by his absence in the announcement video was Albert Mohler. Al has apparently found himself wandering too far afield and is busy burnishing his conservative credentials. In what seems appropriate, the final T4G prides itself on being “more diverse” than ever!
Dever and Duncan said there’s something exciting, or even freeing, about it being their final conference.
They emphasized being able to use the T4G stage to introduce new, lesser-known speakers this year who aren’t on what Duncan called the “celebrity circuit.” Four of 14 plenary speakers in the 2022 lineup are African or African American.
Stunning! Brave!
So what happened? A man I have spoken of before, Stephen Wolfe (See: The New Unpardonable Sin), penned perhaps the best post-mortem I have read about this issue to date: The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Elite. If you are a Christian and interested in these things, I wholeheartedly recommend reading his piece. I am no longer in that camp but I still obviously watch to see what is going on after spending decades of in the Christian church and recognizing that for many of my White brethren, their Christian faith is of critical importance to them.
The two big and obvious issues are Trump and Covid-19. One of the quotes Stephen Wolfe has in his piece that really was profound was this one:
By their own admission, many evangelical elites rarely if ever interact with their mostly white evangelical base. In 2018, the then-editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, wrote that his “elite evangelical” crowd were shocked to learn that 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. “Most evangelical Christians like me exclaimed, ‘Who are these people? I know hardly anyone, let alone any evangelical Christian who voted for Trump,’” he wrote.
Many evangelical academics and public thinkers suffer from the same type of inferiority complex I have observed of sports journalists. They want to be seen as big boy thinkers by the secular elites and many of them are horrified by the very people they pretend to represent, the average White Christian sitting in the pews. When people like Mark Galli condemned Donald Trump and then most evangelicals ignored him and voted for Trump anyway, he was baffled. How could they vote for someone so immoral? It would be remiss of me to not point out that moral high ground holder Mark Galli, hater of immoral Donald Trump, would soon lose his job at Christianity Today…..for immoral behavior:
Former Christianity Today editor Mark Galli accused of sexual harassment
Ooops! Not only was Mark a little handsy with the ladies, he also ran cover for another employee of Christianity Today with the same problem, advertising director Olatokunbo Olawoye who had been harassing the women of Christianity Today for more than a decade. That was another moral paragon….
Aurora Man Sentenced For Attempting To Buy Sex From Minor
An Aurora man was sentenced to three years in prison on Friday after pleading guilty for traveling to meet a minor for sex last year.
On March 10, 2017, Olatokunbo Olawoye, 46, drove to a specified location in Aurora expecting to have a sexual encounter with a minor or minors, according to the Kane County state’s attorney’s office. He was arrested as part of a sting operation conducted by the Homeland Security Investigations and Aurora police.
I am glad we have Christian leaders like Mark Galli to warn us about the immoral tone of Donald Trump!
After the 2016 election, many of the blacks who ran in the reformed circles, cheerfully selling books and rap to an almost exclusively White audience suddenly got pissed and stomped off, including the aforementioned Thabiti Anyabwile/Ron Burns who declared his intent to vote for Hillary Clinton. Rapper “Lecrae” declared he was going to distance himself from White evangelicalism, the very people that financially supported him for years because his “music” wasn’t black enough after a friend told him “the phenotype of your music was not black . . . sonically it wasn’t resonating with our soul”. It wasn’t sonically resonating with the black soul? A different black fella named Anthony Bradley boldly declared “from a black church perspective, evangelicals have never had the gospel.”. I would credit statements like these in 2017 as critical to the formation of this blog a year later in April of 2018, somewhat ironically exactly ten years after I attended Together for the Gospel in 2008.
Some are trying to pull back now but the damage is done. The once proud world of evangelical elites is shattered, and that might be a net positive. Various black evangelicals have demonstrated that racial solidarity trumps their alleged Christian identity, with a few notable exceptions like Voddie Baucham. More than a few elite White evangelical leaders and thinkers have shown their disdain for the regular Christians in the pew, people like Russel Moore, the late Tim Keller and David French. Various secular left-wing groups are prancing about sowing even more division in the rapidly dying movement, taking pleasure in seeing so much of what once the Christian church turned into an anti-White elitist snob fest.
The conservative evangelical churches were the last institutions of White political power in America, and that alone was enough to get them targeted by the Left. Their quest succeeded as tensions over racial politics tore apart denominations as the issue of race came down to one where either you rejected Trump and embraced George Floyd or you were opposed to “justice”.
Standing where I am now and looking back at the ruins of what was evangelicalism, it is clear that it is even more important now than ever that Whites find unity in our blood. While I appreciate the sentiment behind “Christian nationalism”, it is a fantasy. Christians in America have not been able to even hold their denominations together, much less form a nation-state. The percentage of people in America that even bother to show up to church is plummeting and those that do show up are largely not that terribly engaged.
By all means, work to build your local churches but building the Kingdom of God is not at odds with protecting your family and your people. You will never see these evangelical “leaders” that screech about Christian nationalism and “kinism” criticizing black Christians for being on board with bLM. Blending ethnic chauvinism with Christianity isn’t a problem for anyone except White Christians.
I will go a step further. Religious liberty is a uniquely White concept. Do you think you will be able to worship and raise your children in the faith in a hostile alien culture? A nation run by Chinese oligarchs or Jewish elites with a 2000 year hatred of Christianity or mestizo cartels isn’t going to be one welcoming to religious liberty.
Evangelicalism has been shattered as a political force. Now is the time to refocus, not on trying to reform that institution that has been corrupt for decades, but rather on White solidarity. Protestants, Orthodox, Catholics, pagans and agonistics alike can and should believe as they choose but we will all be better off if we embrace our common identity instead of finding ways to do Their work for Them by fighting among ourselves over religion.
We might not spend eternity together depending on who is right but we will all find out who is right a lot sooner than we have to if we don’t band together.
As a fundamentalist, the entire evangelical movement always struck me as secular, feel-good nonsense design to undermine the church and scripture via an umbrella of “if it feels good, believe it” and really execrable “modern” music.
The real work of the Christian faith is done in the trenches by men and women nobody has ever heard of, and don’t take a dime for their effort. Christian ‘movements’ are almost always Christ-less. Few teach men how evangelize, and the few that do have very little success in finding Christians who will actually do what Christ taught His men. The work is hard, thankless, and enemies abound in the spiritual and physical worlds. Christians are completely tied into the material world, they measure all of life by it, including, incorrectly, Christian ‘blessings’ and ‘success.’
I have always had a problem with burned again Christians that will readily “evangelize” to some random stranger they just met. In spite of what Mark 16:15 says, I find it ludicrous to try to preach to “every creature” and to “all of God’s creation”, depending on what translation you use. The New Testament is just the Old Testament, with the difference in the sacrificial ordinances. What is a “Testament”? A contract. Two parties agreeing to terms. But, the same persons were involved. The descendants of Israel and the Creator. And, no, the “gentiles” (nations) were not grafted into the same olive tree, making everyone capable of being a Christian. That’s just Satan’s attempt to introduce “diversity” into Christianity. We see how destructive “diversity” is in destroying nations. It’s just as effective in destroying religions. I think evangelism should follow Peter 3:15 – “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” Notice that you give the gospel to those that “ask”, not to someone you just met that didn’t request your invasive spiel. That is just an ego trip, with you speaking for “God” when you’re really just showing everyone how “holy” you are.
The thing I took away from this read is “everything *is* fake & gay”. I’ve always been a little suspicious of these famous sinister ministers.
Evangelical leadership is no different than the perverts of Catholicism
May I remind you of the Hypocritical National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) PRESIDENT, who was paying a GAY CALL BOY for sex and drugs, for over three years, while yet in this office, and married?
Sorry, Peckerwood. The Child Abuse crisis in Rome was not all Rome’s fault; it was a concerted effort by the Sodomite faction to USE/ABUSE Rome, after Jews Co-opted Rome after WWII- which gave Rome Vatican Eww; as Jazzhands noted so well in his podcast, ‘All Zog goes to Heaven.” – https://therightstuff.biz/2022/07/16/ftn-506-all-zog-goes-to-heaven/
Jews are 18x more likely to indulge in pederasty as the RCC was, BEFORE the FAGGOTS took over, and gave us Bergoglio. And I’m not even RCC anymore, but I get really tanked when bigotry like this happens, when the LOG is still in your eyes….
Timely post. I just commented to my husband yesterday in church that “This song has to have been written by a woman.” We’ve just started attending a small church in the small town nearest us, and the preaching is solid. But the endless praise and worship songs warbled by the devoted women singers (the church is attended by mostly families, but it’s the women who always want to sing) are soooo tiresome. The lyrics seem generated by AI (or emotionally incontinent women) with the endless repetition of a handful of words and catchphrases. The tune trills off into space or falters and withers away – because it’s not based on any musical theory or classic chords; it’s just an opportunity for the female songstress to demonstrate her vocal ingenuity and hop around the musical scale with abandon.
More to the point – Christianity, like all of our former institutions – has been poisoned by not just diversity, but by its precursor feminism. Women may not be preaching (at least at the churches we are willing to attend), but they still insinuate themselves and their emotional incontinence wherever they can. God may be love, but he is also a rational mind and a just being, which to most women is antithetical to the sentimentalism they term ‘love.’ Give me a solid, traditional hymn or even an ‘old’ praise and worship song from 30-40 years ago – some of them with genuinely inspiring lyrics and uplifting tunes.
Women need to be limited to the home, and volunteer/charitable endeavors – but men MUST remain in control of their every effort lest it naturally turn into a ‘feeling’ fest. Those ‘feelings’ are what permitted the perversity termed diversity to fore its way in and destroy all in its path.
Hi
First, I’m proud to say I go to a pretty good SB church, one whose pastor isn’t afraid to stick to scripture where moral issues are concerned. Sure, there are some references to the “chosen ones” that I could do without, but you take the gold with the bad, and my church is mostly good.
Having said that. It has struck me recently that just as the Constitution was basically superseded by civil rights legislation in the 60s, so was the Gospel superseded by the magic negro MLK. Since then, no mainstream church has been willing to endorse doctrines that are resistant to the New Constitution of civil rights laws.
The elite evangelicals sealed their own fate by discrediting the very religion they sought to preserve (by adapting it to modern elitist sensibilities).
Christian hucksters are no different than any other kind…They’re out for money and recognition by the establishment…And with very few exceptions, they don’t care a whit about their base….
“…what once the Christian church turned into an anti-White elitist snob fest.”
Much of what we are seeing is the power of framing an argument. Instead of starting a discussion about race, they make an accusation about race that immediately puts people on the defensive.
An accusation of “You are a racist!” leads to defensive claims that they aren’t a racist, without ever asking themselves what a racist is, or if it would be bad to be one.
Which is why the most powerful counter-argument to virtually every Leftist “argument” is, “even if true, so what?” It’s amazing just how many Leftists can’t answer that question except to double-down on the same accusation. All they have is framing, they have no logical reasons.
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“…many of them are horrified by the very people they pretend to represent, the average White Christian sitting in the pews.”
One of my religious studies professors pointed out something profound to me, so profound it’s still with me several decades later. She pointed out 2 obvious things, then put them together.
1. The priests/ pastors of pretty much every established religion have a ridiculous amount of biblical education. Reading latin, greek, even aramaic so they can read it in its earlier forms. Massive amounts of reading and study such that every paragraph in the New Testament likely represents multiple books of reading that they have done just on that small fragment.
2. The priests/ pastors of pretty much every established religion preach from the pulpit a basic bitch understanding of the Bible, ignoring virtually everything they know to be true about it (from an academic perspective) in order to pander to the people in the pew who drop money in the basket.
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“Do you think you will be able to worship and raise your children in the faith in a hostile alien culture? …mestizo cartels isn’t going to be one welcoming to religious liberty.”
AYYO ESSEY! Whatchoo sayin, that we all don’t worship the Virgin Mary corn goddess the same way?! Or wear the skins of our enemies and drink from their skulls on Día de los Muertos as Haysoos himself commanded in the Gospel according to Lupe?!
https://youtu.be/GDIlGA744aY?t=6
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christianity was anti-white from it’s inception. Look at the perpetrators and the targets.
I have never met a priest/pastor with a good understanding of English, no less Latin or Greek (leaving out the semitic languages). They don’t know the etymology of many words, instead emphasising definitions absorbed from preacher school or invented by themselves. Preachers, teachers, cops, politicians. All should be assumed to be lying by default.
At one point it was a very potent force, now the Left is making inroads. Many such cases.
I read this yesterday. Didn’t look at comments until this morning, thinking that surely “Saoirse” would be in here first or second with that atheist / “it’s all the Jooos” stuff that you hear so often among those who parade as /ourguys/.
What you’ve writtten is very true. My takeaway isn’t that the church — the real one — is in any danger of extinction; “the gates of Hell shall not prevail” and so forth. What we rediscover in times such as these is just how small the actual church, the body of believers, really is and always has been. “The way is broad that leads to destruction, and many are those who pass through.” No, the real church is both small and weak. And that’s okay, and better than okay. As Paul was told, His power is perfected in weakness.
Jim Wetzel, I ignore “Saoirse”‘s diarrhea of the mouth as well.
You might enjoy this, which was linked at WRSA a few days ago:
https://thetacticalhermit.com/index.php/2023/08/28/the-boniface-option/
I’m outside the Christian faith, but I’m cheering for the more muscular Christian faith the above writer espouses.
Good piece — thanks!
I have to admit, I don’t get here often enough. But when I do, it seems like the perfect timing. I have to say, Arthur, that your article is good, but the comments are almost as much fun to read. It seems like some who comment here are angry with things that are happening today, as if it is a surprise or something. To anyone who has paid attention, this has been coming for decades.
I especially was struck with Anonymous White Male and a couple of points made. One is that the only difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament are the sacrificial ordinances. I won’t go too far into it, but the Old and New Testaments are totally different as far as the themes and the timeframes. The O.T. is dealing almost exclusively with the nation of Israel, and the system of the Law as given to Moses. It includes a lot of history and encouragement as well. The New Testament, or N.T., is the fulfillment of the Law, with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and it also includes history, as well as many letters of encouragement and instruction.
That is not to say that the Old Testament is not for our day. While we are no longer meant to keep the law, we can still learn much from it. God never said things for no reason, and the words of the law are an example. The O.T. pointed to a Messiah, who is Jesus.
As for spreading the Gospel to people, and how he seems to not want people to boldly approach others, perhaps his personality doesn’t let him do that. My personality also tends to be somewhat more reserved. That still doesn’t relieve us of our responsibility to share the good news when we can. I think of one specific verse that says a lot. Paul in speaking to the Corinthians, had this to say. 2 Corinthians 5:11
Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men.
If people could understand the eternal consequences of a faith in God, and the salvation through Christ, it might make it easier to share the reason for our faith.
I remember when Jimmy Swaggart was having his problems with sin, and he handed his ministry to Jerry Falwell, who promised to return it, when Swaggart had gotten his act together. Later when Swaggart asked for his ministry back, Falwell said that ” I didn’t realize just how serious the trouble Swaggart was in”, and refused to return it.
I ask you, which man was more wrong, the one who committed the original sin, or the one who went back on his word, meaning lied? I submit that there is no difference, and have a little to back it up. James 2:10
10 For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.
I consider myself a fundamental evangelist, whatever that means. To me it is a person who puts the Bible first, but also wishes to see the entire world converted to Christ. We must remember when we say things like Southern Baptist, or Southern Methodist, that we really are not saying much, since there are so many different kinds of all types.
The most important thing I guess is to remember that we all have feet of clay, and that we can’t put our leaders on a pedestal, because we will certainly be disappointed.
As an aside, I’d be a little careful saying the old covenant is no longer in force. As He said, not one jot, not one tittle until all has been fulfilled. If your creed includes the phrase “He will come again to judge the living and the dead” or anything similar, then clearly your faith holds that not all has been fulfilled. Those who think the tribulation was talking about the Romans sacking Jerusalem in 70AD are the only ones I know of who have a logical case that all has been fulfilled.
It strikes me as odd that none of the other covenants with the possible exception of the Edenic Covenant (5, 7, or however many one reads into the OT) were replaced, simply augmented. The covenants with Adam, Noah, and Abraham still seem to be extant. Apart from man’s choice to invent Dispensations, I know of no reason to think the covenant with Moses is null and void. No scriptural reason, anyway.
If you’re looking for scriptural reasons, Galatians and Romans are fertile ground for such a search.
Sorry to reply so much later. I don’t consider the Law and the word Covenant to be the same thing. The Law has been fulfilled through the actions of Jesus at Calvary. As far as Covenants go, much has been written of them, but as far as I can think, the most important ones are the Noahic covenant, where God promised to never again destroy the earth by flood. That of course is an eternal covenant. The Abrahamic covenant, where God promised that Abraham’s descendants would possess the land forever. This covenant is also eternal, but the seed of Abraham has at times lost the land, and then gotten it back.
The Mosaic covenant was basically the Law, and has been fulfilled, as mentioned.
A covenant is basically a binding agreement, in these cases an agreement set down by God, telling mankind what He will do. It has been said that the Bible contains commands and promises, and a covenant is the promise part. In the case of the Law, there was something required of mankind, to fulfill their part of the covenant. The biggest part was the sacrifice of animals and the shedding of their blood for the remission of the sins of the people, in this case the people of the nation of Israel. The people who God had called His chosen people, we must remember.
It was later on that the offer of salvation was given to the gentiles, due to the bad behavior of the Jews. Paul considered himself the Apostle to the Gentiles. In Romans 11:11, we are told that salvation is come to the Gentiles to provoke the Jews to jealousy.
The promise of God to the Jews in the Bible has nothing to do with how Jews and the nation of Israel and her leaders behave during the 21st century, and in the past or future. Just like our salvation as individuals doesn’t depend upon our behavior on earth, once we have been saved. The Jews have made many, many bad mistakes as a nation, and as individuals. That doesn’t interfere with the plan at the end times of God, when He has said that He will bring the nation of Israel unto Himself.
I used to promote the idea, but I don’t think it is possible for white christians to put racial solidarity before their religion. Maybe in medieval days but not anymore. There is no pagan worldview for them to fall back on.
How many christians will forsake personal ‘salvation’ for the sake of the worldly salvation of their people?