A medal for disillusionment

The musical phrase, heard first in passing, connects with your startled intestines. With closer attention and repeated exposure, your hopes and conscience stir. A life clue, a glint in the dark. A key that unlocks a new level, a new ability. A tool for the battle, a timely insight, a rare glimpse of beauty.

You track it down, find the author, buy the album or book. For years, you listen and read. You catch up on the back catalog, wait for new releases, look at the reviews, the interviews, find other fans. Sometimes you can even befriend the champion. You congratulate yourself. You were right: The champion says something that needs saying, defends something that needs defending. Their genius illuminates. You celebrate their victories.

Then comes the blow. They fail. A scandal, with repentance a road not taken. Or worse, you see telltale symptoms of a poisoned mind, a sickness of the soul. The pseudo-principled betrayal. They make or act in ways that taint their own best work. Under pressure—or worse, seemingly not under pressure—they rewrite or recant. They collaborate. They leave behind their core insights. They abandon faith, or pervert it, or “grow” out of it.

And still you hold to their disowned faith, their abandoned views. The truth is greater than the turncoat, you tell yourself. But there were unplumbed depths in what you valued in their work. The battle rages yet, the road is darkened, new doubts weigh your steps. More work for your intestines, gut-wrenching grief at a champion needlessly lost, at gloating enemies.

It is a quiet shame. You know you’re not responsible. And yet. Other people’s heroes fail, to be sure, but you picked this one—this writer, singer, preacher, apologist, church leader, or (rarely) politician—because he or she outshone or showed up other thin and sorry thinkers. And now you find yourself a cadet member in the company of the disillusioned.

I joined the ranks some time back. I am a veteran of an earlier war, with scars and medals and an engraved timepiece to remind me of past battles. Intellectual betrayal is increasingly common during this latest wave of attacks on church and culture, the relentless barrage targeting adherents of classic Christianity (and Orthodox Judaism). But betrayal is not new. It is a cold comfort to recognize that my reaction to the recent spate of betrayals has been of lesser intensity than past rounds. I am not shocked, and yet in God’s mercy I am not quite jaded. And we may not quit the field.

Critical theory as fungal infection

Time and use blunts the emotional pain behind our terminologies, but a name does not enter the lexicon without cause. The intensity of the black mark on Benedict Arnold’s name was earned by his prior heroic accomplishments. And Vidkun Quisling had done humanitarian and diplomatic work before “inviting” the invading Hitler to take over his country (but I had to look him up, for the man is reduced to his eponym).

In this piece, I focus on cowards, quislings, and turncoats from the Christian Anglosphere as a starting point to introduce some running themes and careful distinctions that I hope to work through in the coming months, God and schedule permitting.

If you are wondering why the focus on terms and distinctions, it is because the primary tactical target of the spirit of the age is categories and language. Agents of the thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers came first as covert spies, then institutional terrorists—and now openly in corporate and government regimes—to explode order and bypass reason, confusing and conflating emotional and logical registers, deconstructing natural affinities, obscuring biological realities. All categories are reduced to zero-sum power struggles. The goal has been to sever memory and traditions and institutions from the past, leaving the self without a core identity and without a constituent community—isolated, free-floating, neurotic, demoralized, and, most of all, unresisting.

Dorothy L. Sayers once wrote that there is no such thing as a true synonym. Fields of force from each word offer critical nuances. Quislings, for example, are collaborators, often hidden, in an unjust system or occupation. Turncoats, by contrast, have more openly joined the other side. Cowards are unreliable and might break either way under pressure.

I’ve seen critical theory—more accurately, grievance studies—compared to a virus, a poison, brainwashing, or radioactive toxic waste (and, accurately, as a religion). I like the metaphor of fungal infection, like the space mushroom from the Twilight Zone that reprograms people when they eat it, with spores in the air a constant danger. The metaphor allows for involuntary infection as well as culpability.

The armor of God might be visualized in this context as a hazmat suit. We must put it on, and keep it sealed. For, whether poison, virus, radiation, or fungus, when this dis-ease takes hold, it first attacks the sense of humor, then destroys the spine, and then begins to rewire the brain. Initially, nothing changes on the surface. But the person—or the institution—wakes up a zombie, hollowed out, compromised, dangerous—speaking the old language with new intentions, and programmed to attack and infect anyone around them.

There are no noncombatants in a culture war. The attackers of civilization acknowledge no Geneva Convention. One must choose sides, and the defenders and builders must protect and prepare the innocent. This is a topic for another time, involving inoculation, decontamination, deprogramming—and remembering and re-storying. In this season, our energy for the necessary constructive work of building and growth must be carefully managed, with attention paid also to defending the builders, fielding troops, shoring up and restoring foundations, remediating the soil—and caring for the wounded.

A taxonomy of the infected

When speaking of turncoats and apostasy—strong terms, but necessary—we can distinguish degrees of culpability and degrees of infection. We begin with the relatively innocent, the would-be noncombatants. Many parishioners and citizens are even now unaware of danger. This is understandable; they have lives to lead and the threat has been growing quietly for some time. Some are now becoming uneasy, but have not yet identified the source of the attack or seen how their security and their leadership is compromised. Given the typical level of catechesis or education (and human nature, and naive good intentions), this group is naturally prone to muddled thinking. They do not understand that the infected know their passwords and are redefining their language and shibboleths, and are in many churches contaminating the life-giving water and salting the bread of life.

Moving to the stage of cowardice, we find those who have so far only lost their spine. Lingering biblical categories often operate as an anti-fungal that will slow brain rot for a time, but are insufficient if not maintained. Often the spineless want peace at any cost. So long as the forms are followed, they ignore the hollowing out of their institutions. They will not stand up for their own interests, nor protect their people. They resent those who raise alarms or do battle.

Many in the early stages of brain infection still mean well, and still name themselves as Christian (or liberal, if we are speaking in the political register), but the content is becoming hollowed out. The will to discern, to look behind the sunny slogans to the actual fruit of an approach, is atrophied. Quislings, collaborators, tend to emerge at this level.

A further distinction arises for this stage: bystanders and victims and quislings—even resisters—will incur injuries from battle and collateral damage, or who have otherwise weakened immune systems. With the infectious miasma in the air, those who sustain wounds need extra care. Where some would get the equivalent of jock itch or thrush, others will develop pneumonia or blood disease. If you lose a battle through being overwhelmed, or incompetent, or sinful, the danger of infection grows. Friendly fire and clerical abuse cause extra messy wounds, with more opportunities for the fungal load to settle in and do its work. Weak constitutions will succumb without support.

The fully infected have, at least for the time, stopped struggling. And then there are those who voluntarily eat the mushrooms, take the poison, volunteer to become spreaders. The turncoats. Some still try to retain the name of Christian, to redefine the faith around their feelings and experiences. Others, with more courage, will name themselves apostate.

Outside the taxonomy one can think of at least two groups—those outside the culture and not directly affected by the culture war, and those with a natural or cultivated immunity to the infection (one thinks of certain rational, humorous, or iconoclastic atheists, some avowed Marxists, and oddly enough the intelligentsia of France, who are trying to reject American critical theory—vive le nationalisme). Outsiders can act as allies, cobelligerents, or the occasional neutral party. We might place traditional liberals here, of the old style, who pride themselves on their open-mindedness. They look out for their own interests, but those interests often align with a cause, or even with the truth. When they disagree, it is not betrayal. The taxonomy here can take hold when the infection reaches them or when they become naive about interaction with critical theory—especially when they come to believe calumnies spread by the infected.

Lists, resistance, and calumny

After some decades now, resistance is lower and the infection is spreading faster. The agents are more open, and early victims are beginning to make headway in warning the churches, naming the dangers, organizing resistance. More voices are speaking up.

We know that all who serve the true King are promised persecution in this age. So it is to be expected that the infected will do their level best to discredit victims and whistleblowers and shepherds and those who recover. This might be a reason why the latest crop of infected zombies, the apostates and semi-apostates—the wanna-be Anointed—have become apostles of calumny and contempt. The induction practices for guerrilla groups and street gangs sever recruits from their past by forcing them to commit atrocities. Woke conscripts seem similarly required to contrive and murder straw men and issue vague and unprovable accusations in the vicinity of a disfavored group.

A goal of communications for the agents of the spirit of the age is to hide the growing cracks in the walls of the regime, discrediting or destroying all who might guide the innocent toward realities outside the infected system, all who might stir up courage to resist.

Lists, we are told, are odious and divisive. Binary opposition is unloving and unkind. Even though these instructions come from those who maintain their own lists, the statement is not wrong. Wheat and tares are not to be divided in this age; sheep and goats live together yet. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, and all in between.

But given the failure of too many shepherds and evangelical pseudo-bishops, it may help to be on record as raising warning flags, to deter the unwary from dangerous cliffs and tempting mushrooms. It also seems necessary to call on Christian leaders (infected or not) to spend much more time meditating on the words of God spoken through the prophet Ezekiel, chapter 34.

Moreover, while it is appropriate to name the symptoms of infection, an effective resistance demands clear guardrails on our means, for debased means will corrupt honorable ends. We can respond to the infected in several ways, but let me start with three particulars. First, we resist reductionism—not least by our willingness to recognize common grace. The calculus of benefit is fraught, but there is good available in the turncoats and their work, whether before or—in theory, at least—after infection.

Second, however convenient it might be, we refuse to reduce embodied souls to group identity, whether sociological, political, or even self-selected.

Third, we refuse to judge the trajectory or predict the ultimate end of any person. God is not mocked, but he is merciful. People—even smart people, even intellectual people—may repent, return to gratitude, and be healed. There are stories of such even now. The people I name here may, please God, return in full. And if they do not, I pray God’s mercy on their souls.

On turncoats and sheep-kickers, named

Having attempted a taxonomy, a brief survey of recent public cases may reveal lessons to be learned, patterns that might not surface from the normal round of commentary that follows each isolated incident. These fat sheep (and some still trying to fatten themselves) are all public figures—even if it is a small and circumscribed public—who have made some positive contributions. And given that, since their infection, so many are becoming known for generalized calumnies and condemnations of other Christians in the name of “love” or “kindness,” their words and actions deserve to be called out. Calumny and slander, are, as the reader will be seeing, the primary heuristic that earns placement in this list.

The political Christians are easily seen. Peter Wehner is an obvious case in point, having made a cottage industry of savaging fellow believers over prudential politics; in his case I suspect the fellow believers did not notice his attacks. And we saw recently how H. J. Hopewell is justly irritated by David A. French. I had been a reasonably regular French reader myself but abandoned ship months ago, wearied of being frothed at over trivial offenses of the culturally powerless while other forces were working serious damage under cover of distraction. The Hopewell reading of his situation is more than plausible, making him a clear case of serious infection after friendly fire. Then we saw, in mid-March of 2021, that his calumnies against Christians who voted against his conscience were appealed to by at least one apostate to affirm their denial of faith. Comfort to the enemy, confusion to an eternal soul. I will be praying that no millstone is required for Mr. French.

As I began work on this piece, another example hit the fan, with the public statements of James K. A. Smith, the philosopher whose descent into contempt had already tainted a once-excellent arts journal (I wonder if it can survive on sanctimony). Once a helpful proponent of embodied faith, Smith is well on the way to quisling status. His case is dealt with capably by Stephen McAlpine in “Off the road and into the ditch with James KA Smith.” It is worth quoting McAlpine here:

The requisite vision of an alternate ethical community that could withstand the howling furies of the cultural Chernobyl overtaking us is simply not strong enough in his books to capture my interest. For all of Smith’s observations that we are not heads on a stick, his lack of practical “how do we do this together?” just isn’t there.

It’s frustrating and more than a little saddening when a scholar you admire, who has intellectual clout, proves not to be the person who would lead you safely across the increasingly dangerous intersections that line the road we walk. And if all this is the intellectually immoral equivalent of the sexually immoral Christian leader who lets us down, then so be it. But it does feel that non-revisionist orthodoxy needs some heavy hitters who understand the culture enough not to be seduced by it.

Anne Kennedy builds on McAlpine’s piece and captures additional nuance and good advice in “Another One Bites the Dust.” Smith is indeed yet another case of an intellectual claiming to be courageous for following the crowd when following the teaching of the Bible has become inconvenient. Kennedy also makes a nice point about mockery of the prophets (I think the author of 2 Chronicles is onto us).

A current kerfuffle in my own tradition is caused by Bishop Todd Hunter, whose 2010 book The Accidental Anglican was endorsed by J. I. Packer; it is just as well that Dr. Packer is now with Jesus, for Hunter needs to become less accidental and do his part to maintain the institution necessary to nurture the Christian expression that drew him in the first place. Undermining fellow bishops and triggering an international scandal is hardly collegial, and he is simply wrong on the substance of core identity. I suppose he gets points for being more covert in his insinuations than many—though this action seems to suggest a pattern that he would do well to stop. Another data point is the very name of his diocese, “churches for the sake of others,” which carries a double meaning. Charitably, it is a pointer to their “missional” focus; in light of his contempt for his fellows, it reads as an attempted distinction from other, lesser, dioceses that must by process of elimination exist for the sake of … themselves. I’m sure glad he’s not like that publican, too. But really, I cringe. It is the ecclesiastic equivalent of Relevant magazine. If you have to say it, you have a problem.

Which brings me to Tish Harrison Warren, whose Liturgy of the Ordinary was quite useful. But now she seems to be devoting her attention to defending critical theory, defending turncoats, and participating in the larger culture of calumny (we always know who is déclassé). Kindness needs to go both ways. And as it seems to be unclear to several people, let me clarify: Calumny is not kind.

Ed Stetzer gets a mention here not because I am fond of his work but because his rush to judgment and need to blame unspecified churches for unchurched people’s actions after the January Capitol media pseudo-event is so typical of the Wheaton evangelical cadre. It felt like (and maybe was) part of a coordinated pile-on from the elites of evangelicalism, which probably only shows how disconnected those elites have become from the people they purportedly serve and with whom they are purportedly in fellowship. Let me ask the question: When was the last time Mr. Stetzer, affiliated with the Billy Graham Center, introduced someone to Jesus? Even institutions that have no need to comment on political events—the Wheaton Humanitarian Disaster Institute being one—rushed out pointless posturing statements attacking other unspecified Christians for nebulous heresies. And then there is Wheatonite Phil Vischer, who is indeed fully infected.

Other people piled on, including Karen Swallow Prior, who has done good work, but who does not follow her own advice in On Reading Well when reading the signs of the times, or reading charitably the intentions of the great unwashed. Or, come to think of it, quoting Bible verses out of context to support a preferred political opinion. It is no stretch to suspect that her infection was aggravated by proximity to Mr. Falwell the younger. One will refrain from further speculation; let us hope it is a mild case in the end.

Which brings us by stream of consciousness to the late Ravi Zacharias (not as blissful at present as he ought to be; may God have mercy on his soul). On this list he alone seems a suitable subject for critique from all sides, a unifying status that did not stop calumnies, in this case hurled by the infected at unspecified Christians who purportedly blamed women for the apologist’s sins against them. Of course, no real person actually blamed a woman, and no one defended Zacharias, but that is no reason to miss an opportunity to speak ill of the faithful.

Weak spines among musicians and artists are less surprising (that poor perpetually nameless banjo player from Mumford and Sons). Intellectual rigor is not a job requirement for those fields (Dante would disagree), and the romantic pursuit of the prophetic voice leads to cliched dissent. In recent seasons we have seen several artists I found interesting make distressing personal and theological moves. One wishes the zeal of the convert was less on display as infection takes hold. Derek Webb and Audrey Assad are two. I have not personally heard Assad attack anyone directly, just a trite statement that traditional beliefs about eternal punishment are traumatizing to her; one does wish heterodoxy would be less formulaic. I will refrain from naming a few other projects for which I had formerly held out hope, but I dropped several newsletters to reduce the toxic pomposity in my inbox. You can take the gospel out of the neoevangelical, but not apparently the preachiness.

Tim Keller is an interesting case. I have appreciated his reasoned apologetics and failed to get into his celebrity, I mean celebrated, city church books (perhaps just as well, given the bell tolling for New York City). He seems to be well into the quisling stage, and many now rank him among the infected. Some of my acquaintances are more quick to defend such attacks on Keller’s honor than to defend the gospel itself. But the feeling is not mutual. His regularly expressed disdain for a wooden caricature of politically concerned Christians could be made by any atheist. Apparently the only approved posture for the progressive Christian is to love the city but hate the nation.

Does N. T. Wright count as a turncoat? He is an example of those largely outside this taxonomy, but he occasionally pushes his way in. His work on critical realism and on the resurrection is worth affirming, and there is much to value in his scholarship. Yet an ongoing odor of contempt taints his writings, especially when he touches on American evangelicalism. Perhaps it is a case of projection—his groundbreaking scholarly work on how Jesus redefines lordship works out in practice indistinguishable from the latest Labour Party platform. From the tone of his commentary, he gets his knowledge of the United States and broader American Christianity from the corporate media, distortions received as gospel. The best methodologies will fail for lack of good data.

The author of the book slandering John Wayne that is the current darling of the infected set also deserves a place near this list. This is not because I have expended any emotion on her personally. Nor is she a turncoat (though her putatively Christian university certainly has turned coat over the past, well, decades); she seems more true believer, mushroom pusher, enemy agent. Does it need to be said that we are instructed to love our enemies? It does, in this culture, and with this author. Her book is an uncharitable tabloid-quality catalogue of self-congratulation posing as an analysis of just how bad those horrible evangelicals are. It is calculated prurience for progressives (and atheists)—The Da Vinci Code of quasi-academic sociology. And left-leaning Christian friends of mine are eating it up, and coming away feeling unearned contempt for their brethren. The infection spreads.

I experienced a rise in blood pressure and stomach acid as this section grew. The reader will have noticed me laboring to keep the tone reasonably light and level through such a catalog, incomplete as it is. And this with an intentionally limited exposure to social media. How much more damage is done to the professionally aggrieved—and by them—who focus so on their enemies? “Hurt people hurt people,” as the therapists quip.

This brings me to poor Dr. Anthony Bradley, who has done solid, even groundbreaking work in fatherlessness, but who seems recently to have been infected and is entering on a trajectory that will not end well (even the bellicose Doug Wilson commented with regret that something is eating Bradley from the inside. I suppose I could extend my metaphor to tapeworms or bacterial infections). Too much time with Twitter (or, you know, resentment) and he has apparently concluded that all believing Baptists are bad. Recently, he disagreed with an article. The emotional weight of his disagreement must have been heavy, for in a single tweet he made a vague assertion of quality, questioned the author’s credentials to speak, and pivoted to a groundless attack on a Christian denomination (and later another). Then he attempted to retreat into “I don’t have time for these lightweights” without addressing the substance of his dismissal. There are indeed times when life is too short, but Bradley is a public intellectual. And this was a case where I was interested in the argument, and—shockingly enough—had not taken sides. Bradley’s response was essentially to hide behind his lived experience and his credentials as he attacked other Christians. This is not persuasive. One strongly hopes the good professor will find some fresh air, some time to gain perspective, and treatment for his ulcer.

Three warning signs

One could, sadly, multiply examples. But looking at even this limited catalogue, I offer three heuristics as markers of infection in those you may have formerly trusted: contempt, language abuse, and joylessness. If you see these three together, brace yourself.

Contempt seems to be the primary warning sign that one is on the road to apostasy. It is possible to criticize someone—even to name someone as enemy—without being contemptuous, but this ability seems invariably eaten away by the infection. For the infected, it is not enough to disagree. You must assert the most uncharitable possible interpretation of the opponent’s actions and choices. And, of course, we are seeing increasing cases of guilt by association, and thus dismissal by assertion: no argument from these groups is worth addressing, nor even naming. Often, we see accusations that the deplored group is hateful to some protected demographic—but it is apparently appropriate for the virtuous to hate the deplorables. To whichever degree, the turncoats privilege cultural in-groups over the people that Jesus is currently redeeming, the people with whom Jesus puts them in a family relationship. Sheep are proverbially dumb, but Jesus does not look on kindly when shepherds kick them.

Language abuse, especially intentional imprecision, is a calculated attack vector, as noted. Granted, precision is in short supply even among those who are resisting infection. But the refusal to define terms, the habit of conflating categories, and the tendency to shift lanes without signaling, is too common in our online—and increasingly our in-person—interactions. No one can interact with them, it seems, without accepting their protean terminology. The reliance among the infected on tautology and begging the question is on the order—to risk a baseball simile—of declaring that coming up to bat is the same as a run. Who needs to address the ball or run the bases? Their feet have touched home plate. Blaming the ills of the world on “systems” is not only pernicious, it is lazy.

The irony of abused language is vulnerability to propaganda. The infected pretend to originality as they parrot phrases provided by the enemy. A recent example is “misinformation”—an accusation that is never defined, but which covers (up) a multitude of sins. It is a negative without a corresponding positive (the inverse of “progress,” which Chesterton rightly named a comparative without a designated superlative). The term misinformation suddenly appeared as people were asking hard questions about election integrity (read: fraud). It is designed to stop inquiry, to spike critical thinking, and particularly to silence questions and viewpoints that are inconvenient to the cultural regime. It proved so useful that it continues to be deployed in all venues where someone needs to be designated as a bad actor.

Joylessness points to a root of critical theory: envy. For envy is the only one of the seven deadlies that offers the sinner no positive satisfaction. The wisdom of the tenth commandment is that comparison with others eats away at the soul. For the infected, the dopamine rush of self-righteousness and superiority soon fades, leaving the subject perpetually aggrieved, angry that anyone is able to enjoy life, especially those horrid oppressors who oppress by holding incorrect opinions, or worse, by wanting to live and let live. Given past rhetoric, one would have hoped for at least joyful warriors—or winsome peacemakers. But infected public personas are vicious and bitter scolds, more likely to repress conversation than continue it.

A variation of the famous political question, “do I want to have a beer with this candidate,” is worth asking here. If you had a social interaction with a turncoat, how do you think it would go even if you agreed with them? What if your fields of concern did not overlap? Would you expect to be seen or heard in conversation with them? Would they ask about your children? Easier to have a dinner party in a minefield.

In their presence, jokes are not possible, because jokes recognize incongruity and discontinuity and reversals—and this is increasingly unspeakable. Sensitivity grows—like a damaged tooth that makes you unable to enjoy ice cream. Focused on oppression and power, humor becomes unrecognizable. A generalized cheerlessness grows. Anger at satire or sarcasm might be understandable, but in the infected, it is connected with a lack of ability to appreciate anything.

The mention of Chesterton, in fact, brings up his truly prophetic voice, and the way he so cheerfully resisted the proto-progressivism of his time by holding on to the “thin thread of thanks.” For these three red flags are united by an underlying ingratitude. Just as critical theory dogma necessarily denies any progress in justice or in race relations (and declares Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a failure), so these turncoats increasingly dishonor the memory and legacy of those who told them of Jesus. It feeds on itself: an ingratitude for the gifts of the people of the past, for the humanity of the present, for existence itself. Utopianism, rejecting the past, denies the possibility of progress. It is only about power and destruction.

Derangement and other catalysts

It seems noncontroversial to note that the infection has been furthered by three things in the past year. First is the governmental response to the pandemic—massive social isolation and disruption of routine, identity, and sacrament—which has led to a massive decrease in mental health, social trust, and reasoning capacity. Second (addressed below) are the people colluding to misdirect our attention, spreading dissension and guilt and misguiding the public agenda to increase racial tension (distracting from class issues and the actions of the people exercising power). Those two factors built on a third, which is longer running: derangement, a syndrome to which elites and the well-off are especially vulnerable.

Say what you like about the former president (most people cannot resist anyway, but—please—try to keep it truthful), he caused many otherwise intelligent people to froth at the mouth and lose all perspective. He has become an apocalyptic figure in the sense that home truths of many hearts were revealed. In elite Christian circles, revulsion at the man’s style made dissimulation impossible. Silence was apparently intolerable. Elites were compelled to publicly distance themselves from their unwashed brethren who had refused orders to abandon the president. This in turn led to a willingness—a need—to disown core identity markers, bypass theological guardrails, and in several cases abandon nonnegotiable doctrines. Sometimes in very quick order.

Granting such power over their eternal souls to a political figure seems unwise.

The derangement syndrome—avoiding the gentleman’s name amuses me, but may need to be rethought given the effort to banish him from public consciousness—is contagious to any elite, not just evangelical elites. One of several ironies is that a primary symptom is credulity to a conspiracy theory. Consider three things. (1) Most elites do not believe in the current action of the Holy Spirit in giving words of knowledge. (2) They refuse to accept the stated reason people gave for voting for the former president in 2016 and 2020, which was a clear and simple political calculus of available options within the American electoral system. (3) The spectrum of people who voted “incorrectly” crosses multiple demographics, has no organized leadership, and grew in numbers in 2020. And yet somehow, the quislings claim that they alone can expose the dark and shameful secrets of the non-infected voter.

Multiple factors underly any binary choice (not least the options on offer), but sure, let’s assume the only salient factor in the 2016 and 2020 elections is the theological deficiencies of a group that is already disdained by elites. The next step is to assert that this aggregate vote undermines the whole superstructure of orthodox Christian belief, and negates the evangelical witness. This single group is then assigned all blame for the wider culture’s rejection of Christianity. To hear the turncoats, people would never reject Jesus if they were not turned off by horrible pale rural southern conservative evangelicals. I have heard more than one bewail that no young person, no member of a registered minority will ever follow Jesus in an evangelical (or traditional Catholic) context anymore. Apparently the Spirit will now be powerless to call people to himself because of the political actions of a pollster-defined group of nominal believers in a single country during two elections. But the “evangelicals” are the ones prone to conspiracy theory.

Credulity is also seen in the hermeneutics of political speech. The oppressors now speak the language of justice, and that, for Christian-flavored turncoats, trumps consideration of the actual effects of their policies. Most of the infected in my personal circles have been unwilling (or unable) to recognize any positive elements in the recently ended presidency. They had no difficulty expressing the deepest moral outrage over actions and statements (or, honestly, the existence) of the past administration. And they were quick to demand their fellow believers not identify with the Republican party or the American nation. But it is telling that the turncoats have been silent about the new administration, despite several cases already where a public discussion of morality would be … helpful.

We are constantly warned about tyranny from the right (the World War II antagonist was reincarnated again, but for real this time). But these warnings grew from the devices and desires of the infected heart—as a wise man said, whatever is in your heart determines what you say. The accusations of phobias and hatred only come from one side. (No one on the right speaks of hate. But the term is ever on the lips of the progressive. The only reason “hate” has no home in their gated communities is competition from contempt, which led to gentrification that raised the rent. Hate now lives in a subsidized tent community in the elementary school parking lot.) For all the figurative and literal hysteria, the last administration was unconcerned with controlling speech or action. The current administration and its acolytes no longer hide their demands for controlled thought.

Dogs are not barking. The current regime gets a pass from infected Christians. Actual children and poor people are being hurt, with no voices raised on their behalf. The self-righteous are otherwise occupied—busy haranguing their own brethren (ad hominem) for ignoring the sins of the prior administration. But as ever, immoral acts of elite power are ignored because weak people curry favor with the cultural regime. The opportunity cost of progressive tolerance is an inability to speak of (and increasingly to discern) the difference between the surface and the substance of a policy, in James Burnham’s Cold War phrase. Or as someone said recently, we are systematically replacing what works with what sounds good.

On attention and caffeinated squirrels

The capacious human brain can only focus on one thing at a time. It has timelessly (and biblically) been noted that the thoughts of our heart shape the course of our life. This is why the prudent choose—and guard—the focus of our attention. Given the turncoats’ derangement, it seems plausible that their attention has been diverted from the timeless.

It is worth asking who sets the agendas for our attention. Who chooses the burning issues of the day? Who determines the facts that are allowed on the table? Who assigns proportionate value to items in the news, or determines what is “news”? Who tells us what opinions and proposals are permissible, what groups are to be honored, what groups must be disdained? We might have a carefully constructed worldview, but who provides the fodder that it processes? What informs our reason, sparks our emotion, fills our imagination? Who, functionally, do we trust to frame our world?

Lyotard (I am told) famously defined postmodernism as incredulity to metanarrative. In the case of the infected, rejection of larger controlling stories results not in freedom but in credulity to media narrative—and regime propaganda. Deconstruction is suspended in cases where overt power dynamics are applied by approved groups. The turncoats, too, give cultural gatekeepers power to define realities and priorities—power that should be reserved to the biblical text. It would be worth testing my taxonomy of infection against a related hypothesis: attention paid to the biblical narrative is proportionally inverse to attention paid to the cultural narrative.

With the willful self-debasement of our cultural gatekeepers, the frame imposed on the world is narrowed. Context and history is excluded and distorted, often consciously rewritten. The turncoats might comfort themselves with the “factual” content of the frame, but even the exclusions deceive. Wisdom, of course, is right out. Armed with their talking points and armored with self-righteousness, each of these brave and gullible turncoats are prepared to courageously regurgitate on cue the party line of the microsecond. Paolo and Francesca in hell are more grounded. The term “useful idiot” applies, for the idiot is someone without political context, a selfish and disconnected person who becomes a tool for others.

The agenda of corporate culture is one of distraction and division. It is to focus all attention on the rhetoric of people with no power, the deplorables and dissenters, so that there is no attention available to monitor the actions and policies of the regime. One distraction after another, big and small, plausible and preposterous, all offered at the same intensity of emotional manipulation. The eye is caught. Accusations, associations, smoke. Fire? The dopamine rush of being part of the in-crowd, not one of them.

Here is a question no turncoat bothers to ask. Why are we suddenly focused on racial issues? Who has stoked the fires of envy and decided that the globally unprecedented progress of the last hundred years is worthless? Who has declared the pie shrinking, or decided that client groups have no ability to achieve justice on their own? Attention focused on envy and disparity and power has festered into theologies of guilt and shame and anger.

It is yet another irony that the infected decry “Christian nationalism,” but they are even more responsive to media direction than were the nativist rioters inflamed by the press in the mid-1800s (today’s progressives carefully “know nothing” of Antifa attacks, any more than politicians of the American Party knew of the anti-Catholic mobs).

“Social justice” in this context becomes a narrow and naive reading of Scripture overlaid on a naive reading of patently implausible news stories directed by the narrative of historically naive and uneducated people programmed by envy, hate, and the algorithms of the technocratic overlords. The turncoats come in speaking the language of a toxic culture and wonder why the benighted do not trust them or their agenda.

Progressive ethics is the equivalent of the Bible read by a cartoon squirrel on caffeine: arguable good intentions with no inhibitions lead to devastation. The courageous prophet joins her voice to bless every cultural and government and corporate institution that makes up the establishment. She swells the witch-hunting mob, her flaming torch fueled with vague “biblical principles” untethered to any inconvenient text—the “spirit of Vatican II” for the recovering evangelical.

And the regime continues in power. No one is talking about the children at the border (let alone children in the womb, let alone children never conceived). The other week we were assigned to talk about Asians as victims. Meanwhile murder rates of black men by black men skyrocket in Philadelphia and Chicago and New York. Hopelessness grows in the cities. Suicides and mental illness grow along with the desperate quest for identity, for home, for being known. But who is concerned about that? There are Baptists to slander.

Fruit or fungus

I’ve always been fond of the Murphy’s Law style quip. Here’s mine. Call it Venables’ Application: Any biblical teaching applies most clearly to one’s enemies. (It also bites me and mine, but that does not make my analysis of them any less accurate. Surely.) In this case, I know from inside the core temptation of the religious teacher, that tacit assurance that intellectual knowledge of the truth (and my good intentions) excuses actual behavior. This is why we should examine the distance between stated intentions and actual effects.

Moving on to assessment—for someone once suggested we test false prophets by their fruit (and false prophets is in fact the specific context of Matthew 7)—it is instructive to peruse the letter to the Galatians, chapters 5 and 6, chapters that are rarely read together. Let’s start by focusing on the positive outcomes expected of people who sow to the Spirit. When we look at our turncoats, do we see anything hopeful? Or has the crop been ruined by brown rot blossom blight?

“Love, joy, peace”: Calumny, cheerlessness, and weaponized language do not seem to align well with these categories. I will leave it to the reader to reflect how well “patience, kindness, generosity” and “fidelity, gentleness, and self-control” apply to the infected, at least in their public witness. (Perhaps these spiritual fruits are sequential and cumulative rather than parallel. Certainly, you need patience to be kind, and the pursuit of instant gratification explains the tenor of modern life.)

Consider next the context for these famous nine fruits. Immediately following comes a discussion of how to correct people who are in error: to “restore them in a spirit of gentleness.” And the summary sentence of these chapters—and perhaps for the letter as a whole—is Galatians 6:10: “So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.” Many seem more willing to work for the good of anyone outside the family of faith. Perhaps it’s time for a refresher. But wait: the apostle is not done with us. He warns that the people who “want to look good by human standards” are the ones who will force others to certain external behaviors “only so they won’t be harassed for the cross of Christ” (6:12). Well now.

On opportunities purposefully missed

But we are instructed to correct people in error. And there is no lack of error to be corrected. Many of the wounds that opened turncoats to infection should have been prevented. I have myself at times refused to call myself evangelical; there are reasons I found my way to Anglicanism, reasons why others are now Catholic or Reformed or Orthodox. Many of the issues Bishop Hunter and Dr. Smith and the others want to address are real, if never so simplistic or comprehensive as they claim. And the human beings, the benighted followers of Christ, are not without mitigating virtues; Jesus continues to refine them.

Christianity, even the truest classic catholic orthodox anglican basically reformed evangelical flavor of Christianity, always needs reforming. It’s not like any Christian, any evangelical, is denying this. Relatedly, see Ross Douthat’s quotable summary of our whole tradition.

Apart from divine intervention, no correction that intends to reach the heart will succeed without love, nor without precision and truth. From most of the voices I named, and their ilk, I hear no honor or care or concern, nor love or gentleness. Contempt and disdain, yes. Shame and guilt, absolutely. Quick to speak, quick to anger. The infected “listen to the stories” of everyone except the those the mob shouts down; then they collude in the silencing. They are not moving toward their brethren, but away, toward the accusers. Today’s most vocal proponents of the doctrine of total depravity are progressive theologians exorcising Southern evangelicals.

And the critiques backfire. Where nuance is taboo, where any rational discussion becomes a threat to one or both sides (well, one side, usually), where you know enemies are primed to exploit any vulnerability, in such a situation any self-critique feels like a dangerous capitulation.

No one will ever be persuaded to reconsider their sins and shortcomings (or their votes) in the face of withering scorn. One wonders if they are intended to. As with the race grifters, if you resolved the problem, the new progressive prophets would be out of a job and searching for another font of borrowed self-regard.

On loyalty and its limits

So our turncoats help to poison the wider conversation. Do they benefit? Will they find camaraderie in the ranks of former foes? One thinks of Benedict Arnold himself, mistrusted by the British he came to live among, a byword and a hissing. Even Cardinal Newman, eventually canonized, had no easy road. The manner of departure seems as significant as the creed embraced. No surprise that today’s turncoats take their place in the infected ranks not as bullies but as toadies.

The infected, with their weaponized weakness, have redefined safe space. We know too well the new wariness, the self-censorship, the needing to read the room and decide if it is worth spending energy even to express an opinion. The danger shrinks the world intolerably. I am tentative of raising certain themes with coworkers and acquaintances. I have even caught myself avoiding the writing of some intellectual heroes in simple proximity with the infected, for fear of what I might find. The turncoats make all relationships more tentative, all believers more suspicious, all loyalty and definition suspect.

Loyalty and stability are no small things in a faithless age. The biblical witness shows that some lessons can only be learned, some necessary formation only accomplished, through binding adherence over time. Is not this the point of covenant? Perpetual revolution is wearisome, an endless burden of choice without hope of resolution or satisfaction. Attachment and belonging, genealogy and history, are human necessities that are now denied to us. Many have noted that critical theory pushers are privileged and parasitic. The infection saps both vitality and humor. Who has energy for building or discovery, for invention or beauty, when we must start each day by deciding our gender and disowning our past, redefining our identity? With all things negotiable, ephemeral, unsettled, little wonder that our culture builds no cathedrals.

A friend recently told me, “The culture wars are putting a lot of strain on my relationship to many of my most cherished teachers.” This is as true with writing as with personal interaction. And it raises troublesome questions. Must we cut ties when someone fails? Did something in their attractive ideas open them to infection? Or did the infection come from somewhere else? Are the spores pervasive, or can we cut away the surface taint and find a healthful core in their work?

The warning to the Laodiceans applies in several registers. I realized the other day that I had become more willing to quote an atheist than a quisling. There is less chance of confusion or nausea for me or the reader. On reflection, this is a biblical response: The master’s reward for fruitlessness is fiery. And the apostle calls the believer to shun, not the average pagan, but false teachers and the unrepentant.

But perhaps this wrestling might point us forward. The way is strait, but narrowness is not the same as orthodoxy. We cannot cut ties to the world. We do not abandon truth because of its provenance. The distinction between author and work is a perennial issue. When we read with discernment, with proper guardrails, with the appropriate framing, we can read even Nietzsche profitably (the madman was more rational than fragile DiAngelo). Despite any current irritation and agitation, with time and care, what is good in the work of our turncoats will surface and endure. But we cannot now pretend that they are part of us.

And that brings us to some wisdom about all human relations. We don’t need to go all the way with anyone except Jesus. In fact, we should not. Everyone else will fall short. Put not your trust in princes, nor in intellectual paladins, nor the orthodox, nor those from your affinity group, nor people who have achieved great things. Not even in someone sent by God to help you. We turn our eyes to the hills (or the heavyweights), but our help comes from the Lord. Dante is good on this theme. More recently Newbigin points us to a better grounding for confidence. His hermeneutic of the local church is a topic worth exploring at another time.

Fame and other snares

Can we recognize any patterns that we might ourselves avoid, or counter? The world, the flesh, and the devil are perennial snares, and I can certainly see why people are tripped up (and why others jump in). I usually try to walk around, myself, but this is largely because the Lord has declined to test me with great personal power or wealth.

Many turncoats fail over good old-fashioned hubris. They have fallen from some height. Perhaps the infection is a comorbidity of what I call Brunelleschi Syndrome, where the hangover of success is fame. Fame is corrosive to virtue, and given that expertise is not fungible across domains, success breeds failure. Build a dome, sink a barge—and an army.

Fame is also a currency. With it one can purchase power and respectability and other shiny and corruptible treasures. Laid up on earth, these will corrupt the soul. I have never much liked the images of narrow gates and needle eyes, but recently a teaching from Archbishop Foley Beach helped me toward an understanding. Wealth and success breed self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency keeps us from recognizing finitude and asking for help. As Wendell Berry will affirm, city life also teaches a false self-sufficiency, hiding our daily dependence on others (and of course on God).

Thus, tacitly or consciously, turncoats become too sophisticated for rules to apply to them. By their own accomplishments or by proximity to a technological society, they come to believe the propaganda that postmodern man has transcended human nature. Traditional wisdom is mere platitudes and maxims. But no maxims have been repealed. Platitudes point to verities. The eternal word is not subject to progress. Power corrupts. How hard it is for the rich to enter. The way is narrow. No woman can serve two masters. Friendship with the world is enmity with God.

Several of our turncoats, too, want to sleep with something they should not, or are the parents of someone who does. The “Christian sexual ethic” is difficult, and especially so when attention is focused on restriction rather than referent. And we would not want to make anyone feel bad about behavior that will destroy them. But the new “self-evident” ethic is oddly brittle; the turncoats need to be affirmed for their bravery in following the crowd. The existence of disagreement is intolerable. Thus the calumny against those who embody other standards. Thus too way the apostles of tolerance impose their morality on others. All that is destructive is celebrated. All guardrails and norms are attacked.

These attacks are a pointer. Despite our rebellious nature, people, especially those who know their need for God (in Peterson’s apt paraphrase of the beatitude), do not want revolution. They want order and belonging. They want a way of life. The norms and guardrails provided in the biblical witness and affirmed by centuries of Jewish and Christian culture are the only way that success and power and even fame can be constrained and channeled. Only this way of building culture stands out against the tide of other human efforts. This is why it is attacked. But this, and only this, is how people build civilizations where justice and order and liberty are possible, where growth and flourishing and beauty happen. This is how the oppressed themselves become builders of streets to dwell in.

On inoculations and antifungals

Vaccination is a cultural preoccupation as I write—and yet another excuse for slander and calumny against evangelicals, who are allowed no unease over new treatments pushed by vacillating experts that may not even allow for a return to human contact. A campaign is underway from the Wheatonites to shame evangelicals into submission. I predict a new era of closed communion—you may come to the progressive table no matter your unbelief, so long as you have a certificate of cleanliness. Would that as much energy were devoted to defending the faith from infection.

And we should be considering means of inoculation and defense against the fungus, including looking for developments in any field of study that might have antifungal properties. How do colleagues successfully resist infection? What common themes are found among past thinkers who held out against intellectual fads and mobs?

One primary defense is retaining or reclaiming a receptive approach to the Bible. This kind of reading will not presume that we get to decide from the outside what is legitimate, but instead expects that God might have something to communicate that we need to take into account. We might also consider that perspectives from God and from past cultures can offer frames, categories, definitions, and examples of wise application that can enhance and inform our lives today. One could continue in this vein, but for now I will refer the reader to Newbigin (or more recently, Leon Kass).

Speaking of wisdom, we can see that the infected come from specialists in every discipline, including theology. How can we overcome the hyper-specialization that leaches out local responsibility and leaves us vulnerable to narrow globalist experts? How can we ask questions from many different disciplines to highlight context, reveal new perspectives, and unmask ideological illusions? Perhaps cross-breeding by broadening one’s studies, and adding some manual labor and craftsmanship, might result in more hybrid vigor and fungal resistance.

I will mention in passing a need for basic training in quantitative analysis, whether statistics, computer science, formal logic, or even occasionally economics. Statistics are used to deceive, but these fields, as part of a generalist curriculum, are helpful in offering perspective—especially in assessing the real weighted importance of statistics that ideologues juxtapose to misdirect our emotions.

I also think of past heroes of faith and thought from troubled times. The worse the infection, the less these are read; perhaps the converse might be true. Chesterton I have already mentioned, and he bears mention again, along with MacDonald, who helped shape him (and Lewis too). Participants in the wider Inklings circle are bracing, not least for their ability to translate medieval wisdom to more modern idiom, sparking imagination and kindling emotions. My own touchpoint, as the reader might anticipate, is Dorothy L. Sayers, whose work deserves a revival.

These wartime Brits drew enthusiastically on Dante the exile, and rightly so—and Dante points us to Thomas and Dominic and Augustine (pace Dr. Smith, no turncoat during his own civilization’s collapse). In parallel streams, we could consider Pascal and Kierkegaard, Simone Weil and Walker Percy, and even (for God seems to be aware of irony) Auden. Dallas Willard resisted cheerfully and well, and I still chuckle at the thought of Wodehouse as the proper answer to Nietzsche. The reader grounded in Bible and in conversation with folk like these should have the resources to stand firm and rebuild. (Pity more smug Wheatonites do not benefit from their proximity to the Wade Center; but, as the evangelical trope goes, being in a garage does not make you a car.)

From their biographical details we are reminded of history. A broad historical consciousness is another antifungal agent. Students who can trace the cycles of despotism and empire will be more able to resist utopianism, even though history’s influence can obviously be diluted by ideology, deceit, and journalism (but I repeat myself). The critical theory infection is as provincial (and predictable) as it is reductionist. It depends as much on ignorance of historical and cultural patterns as on denial of human nature and biology.

To take a case not at random, we recently passed the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Let us presume that turncoats are not so ignorant of this Clinton-era atrocity as they are of The Black Book of Communism. If they can get beyond the progressive racism that views Africans as somehow unlike the rest of humanity, they might concede that media-coordinated ad hominem attacks and guilt by association are cause for extreme concern. The genocidaires included many professed Christians taught to think of themselves as better than their brethren. The American media has been inciting mostly peaceful protests for a year now. How far in our culture are we from the evangelical as cockroach?

All the heresies have been tried and named in the early centuries; today’s turncoat evangelical is repeating the monotonous heterodoxy of the mainline progressives of the last century, the liberal Christianity of the generation before that, and the formerly Puritan Unitarians before them. Today’s heterodox are at least less hypocritical because they make so little pretense of toleration. It is some comfort that most of the progressive religious thinkers of the so-called Enlightenment are known only to academics. The broad road has too much competition for popular history to recall one heretic over another.

We who remain

So here we are. It seems like a good time to take stock of our own disillusionment, lick our wounds—pick your cliche, but some soul searching is called for. Honesty about your feelings is important—not for direction (never trust your heart) but for information. Feelings tell us what is important to us. Why does it hurt? Naming pain and confessing sin helps us reset and decide how to respond.

In my case, analysis also builds resolve. As with many writers, I am focusing more here on diagnosis than treatment, for without an accurate diagnosis, no treatment will be fully effective, and misguided treatments can be toxic.

Let me confess again that I have known disillusionment at the fall of some great turncoats. They tried to bear the burden and the heat of the day, and it was too heavy. Was I trusting them to do my work for me? Yes, to my shame. Am I afraid of failing like them? Surely. Am I tempted to disdain them? Yes, but usually compassion wins out. Is it appropriate to think I can succeed where they are failing? Well … perhaps so, at least in my own smaller sphere.

As we are taught, where the results of the battle are already determined, success is to remain standing, to do the task we are given. The antifungals help avoid hubris. And honest fear is helpful, so long as courage is greater. I need to do my part. Peter Berger writes of the heretical imperative; in our age, faith can never be assumed. We cannot escape the need to choose (and to act). A clear-eyed look at the options on offer leads inevitably to the conclusion of another Peter. To whom can we go?

Action is part of the cure for disillusionment. Joy comes in accepting our responsibility, doing what we are made for. In the biblical understanding we are created to work, and guard and keep, and destined to rule. What must we now do? What is our part? We have different platforms, different capacities, competing responsibilities. We have different affinities and varied training, so our roles should vary. But sometimes needs must, and we must do what we can with limited training or resources, and hope to grow, or hold until relieved.

Whether overcoming or overwhelmed, our approach must be the inverse of the turncoat: Cheerful, discerning, loving.

On courage and compromise: A historic case

Any progressive will tell you (before you ask) that slavery was culturally orthodox before the Civil War, even in many churches. What they might not emphasize is how the abolitionists (all deeply faithful Christians) were shunned by society, unable to make their arguments in establishment media, subject to mob violence, unprotected by the state. Because that is nothing like our own time. Anyway, expressing anti-slavery sentiment took real courage, and William Lloyd Garrison had both courage and creativity. He was also a horrible cobelligerent. By 1840, principled people who agreed with him on immediate abolition had left to start their own parallel organizations, pursuing different tactics. In 1850, Garrison wrote a broadside against one of these, called “The Great Apostate.” His target was Senator Daniel Webster.

Looking back we might endorse Garrison’s call to “unchristianize” the Slave Power and deny it church sanction. But Webster claimed, with some evidence, that Garrison’s uncompromising righteousness raised the stakes and led to hardened positions, making more pragmatic and gradualist approaches less viable. On this view, Garrison was of no actual benefit to the enslaved. People then were no more likely than we are now to embrace reform simply for being labeled evil. Webster was no turncoat. He had tried for an ugly but ambitious—and desperate—political compromise. His oratory and dealmaking were not up to the demands of the time, but he remained an abolitionist.

The case is worth further reflection. Already I hear comments among the early responders questioning the courage and commitment of other resistance cells—not to mention the late entries, those still slow to realize their danger, and, I suppose, those for whom prudence looks different. Courage is called for, but also compassion, and sometimes compromise.

Bravado is not bravery. Our tactics must avoid the patterns of the infected, not least because adding pressure is so often counterproductive. Of my proposed three red flags, Garrison would have triggered one or two—certainly he was humorless and contemptuous of compromise and gradualism. His reading of what Webster was trying to accomplish was ungenerous. Maintaining conviction about goals and allowing some flexibility on tactics seems necessary to avoid factionalism and collateral damage. It might also allow for multiple coordinated offensives as opposed to a single frontal assault.

On engagement and disengagement

Having avoided infection for the time being, we persist. We direct our attention to living in truth rather than seeking out error, in the same way that good works demonstrate rather than secure our identity before God. We continue the long and painful obedience that can at times feel tedious and unrecognized, but which we know is the way of life and joy. We welcome and raise children. We find sustainable communities. We form platoons, loyal to the faith, to place, to people. We build redoubts, networks, partnerships, coalitions, cultures. We find sustainable practices. We train. We sing. We pray. We look to beauty and meaning. We express gratitude. We cultivate hope, and humor. We hold ground. As needed, we retreat and regroup. Where possible, we advance.

The Bible provides clear and prudent (if unpalatable) instructions for dealing with false and fruitless teachers, instructions that require naming infection—heresy, sin—and dissociating from turncoats in ways we would not separate from outsiders. But to what degree? Some of us may see wisdom in engaging in person or in public forums.

But the infected person treats all dissent as hate. If we are to refuse to return contempt in kind, if we aim at something more than destruction, if we do what we can to avoid adding to a turncoat’s wounds (or condoning their deception), the best option may be strategic disengagement. The “pearls before swine” teaching applies. The response of the turncoat to our overtures and our rules for engagement will help us determine what interaction is wise. Sometimes conversation is possible; often it is pointless. In either case, naive “dialogue” with the infected is suicidal.

We are not yet, it seems, restricted to monastic or Mennonite options, so rules for engagement are needed. For our part, we begin with confidence in the truth, responsiveness to the Spirit, and love for the opponent. We dare not go unarmed through ignorance of the Bible or of history, nor allow ourselves to be disarmed by baseless demands to abandon biblical categories (another minefield for another time).

The point for the present is that in any encounter we must demand a sufficiently neutral space, in which participation is not tied to a preemptive capitulation to terms. No single party can set the agenda or declare a topic off-limits. Our heuristics of contempt, language abuse, and joylessness—even when not directed at us personally—can also offer a gut check for the likelihood of a productive engagement. No conversation can survive contempt. Both parties must offer some reasonable expectation of a response in good faith. And the ability simply to achieve a pleasant tone, or even to begin with a lighter touch, is necessary for people to be willing to come together in the first place, let alone to stay in conversation long enough to get to the deeper issues.

Participants in such encounters will want tactical training in discernment of the environment and in identifying illegitimate moves, shifting terms, and slander (sucker punches, knives in the back). We will also need the skill and willingness to call these out in real time, and leave the table if required. None of this comes naturally. We also need a strategic awareness, so that our engagement is not reactive to the pressures and agendas of the culture but reorients people toward reality. We promote the kingdom of God by means appropriate to that kingdom.

Compassion and return

It helps to remember the several dupes of the twentieth century who later recanted support for communism and became strong allies in the fight for freedom. If our engagement can help one turncoat return, or do anything to stem the tide of infection, or support others in resistance, we should make the attempt.

Too many of the public voices affiliated with the evangelical and progressive movements are failing at a primary task. Their relentless hectoring schoolmarm tone will not bring unity or peace, nor even call people to repentance. It certainly does not fill churches nor introduce new people to Jesus. They will tell us to love our neighbor (and dictate what that must mean); perhaps we can remind them that their brothers are also neighbors. Echoing their tone (tempting as this is) will not help them.

Let us encourage the infected (and the self-anointed) to extend compassion beyond those in designated victim groups. Compassion is also due to the people who are panicking because they suddenly realize that everything they have held dear, every mark of identity, is being questioned and dismantled around them. If, in their search for a viable defense against emotional pain and social disapproval, they turn to people that the anointed dislike, perhaps the best rhetorical move is to ease their fears, and to address disagreements by modeling the fruits of a better theology. Given their theology’s fungal load, one can understand their need to resort to ad hominem attacks.

But truly, who is speaking for these voiceless? We have a lot of bruised reeds out there (and bruised sheep). Who will have compassion on these, the harassed and helpless, abandoned by their shepherds? Who will speak restoration and forgiveness to perpetrators? Who will follow Jesus in reaching out to collaborators as well as zealots, to the provincials as well as the rulers?