Joel, congrats on the single. I sent you a message.
Also thoughtful piece, even if I don't fully agree with it. This is the first time I heard the phrase "Machen's Warrior Children", and I get it.
But I think there's something missing here, that is not symmetric between right and left in the context of the church, which I think I might have voiced here before, and if you've addressed it, I apologize.
And I hate to say it, because I try to be charitable, and I appreciate your efforts to be charitable. But: THE LEFT LIES. And I think this poisons the entire well, and it's the root of much of the problem. Machen himself observed that the left lies, it's in his book: he describes clergymen who solemnly affirm the whole of the WCF and then turn around two seconds later and start chipping away at it. And to this day you can find any number of examples of this type of behavior. One high profile example that comes to mind is the whole way Du Mez coyly danced around her opinions on LGBT for the longest time, which I picked up from Dreher around the time her book came out.
Let me be clear, in the context of politics, maybe the right lies more. Trump certainly has a relationship with the truth that's as strained as any I can think of.
But in the context of the church, there's no contest. A conservative clergyman may lie to save his own skin, when it turns out he has engaged in, or covered for, horrific abuse. He may be coy or silent about how much he supports Trump or this or that conservative POLITICAL idea -- Chris Hodges of Church of the Highlands got in trouble for this. But when it comes to doctrine and theology, there's no conservative equivalent to the way that the left lies. There's no conservative pastor in a Mainline church who vows to support women's ordination and LGBT marriage, who claims to approve of higher criticism, and then immediately begins undermining those ideas, it turns out he believes in inerrancy. The closest equivalent I've ever heard of is Redeemed Zoomer out there, who is very open about his intentions and in any case hasn't accomplished anything to my knowledge.
But the left lies, and this means that anytime we catch a whiff of someone inside the church being significantly to our left, it's prudent to wonder for a second. Is that really his leftmost opinion? Or -- sorry for the mixed metaphor -- did he just let the mask slip, and it's the tip of the iceberg? If we give this guy an entry point, is our church about to be subverted, to become the next example of Mainline decay?
Anyway, maybe the argument is that people need to be given more of the benefit of the doubt. I don't think all this suspicion is a good thing! I think people should be able to voice ideas that are perceived as somewhere to the left of any given theological consensus without being instantly treated as heretics. But whatever the solution is, it needs to be offered in the context that, unfortunately, the left lies in a way the right does not, and real churches have been undermined and usurped as a result.
"arguably theologically orthodox, ***but*** [emphasis mine] sympathetic to Side B, celibate, gay Christians"... Is being theological orthodox and having sympathy towards Side B Christians in opposition?
Anyway, I would love to talk with you about this video sometime (both the original with Ms. Childers and Mr. Yuan as well as the response by Preston Sprinkle). I really did not like the original video especially with the accusations that the Side B theological framework and sensibility is "heresy" / "false teaching" as well as the odd straw men arguments at play and Yuan's no-platforming perspective. Side B obviously has differences with Side Y, but we both do hold the same basic points of the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, even if we differ in implications, aspects of human anthropology, and maybe the larger narrative of the gospel. Also, the idea that Side B does not think that people should repent of lust was shocking for me, I have never heard anyone say this, even if we have a more nuanced take on the dynamics of attraction compared to Side Y thinkers. Also, I appreciated your Frame and Machen examples, those dynamics are so common among some US evangelical traditions, sadly....
That said, I also did not really like how Preston engaged the discussion. In my opinion, he was too focused on what they implicated about him rather than defending Side B from gross mischaracterizations, and this episode also exposed some of his misunderstandings about the current Side B conversation around topics such as forms of committed kinship beyond marriage, among others. But he is definitely the one I would rather than a conversation with compared too Ms. Childers and Mr. Yuan - he is willing to approach conversations with hermeneutic of charity and engage publicly with perspectives that he actually disagrees. He seems open to complexity and nuance as well as learning in a way that I wonder if Ms. Childers and Mr. Yuan are.
I appreciate your sensibilities in all of this - pursuing virtuous engagement through sailing between the Charybdis of uncritical adoption and thoughtlessness and Scylla of purity spirals, tribalism, and "righteous" perfectionism.
Congratulations on the new band! Please share your first single with us a Communion & Shalom. We would happily give it a listen!
But side B has endorsed many dangerous positions. I am sure you have read the definitive article on the whole topic (https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/03/how-the-side-b-project-failed). My main problem with the side B movement is its refusal to acknowledge that same sex desire is bad, even if not itself a sin. It is misdirected, and exclusively feeling same sex desire is no different from any other mental illness, and mental illness is a bad thing. Trust me on that, I know! That is why we should be working on finding a cure, so the same sex attracted can have normal lives by ceasing to be same sex attracted. But at least one side B proponent has explicitly stated that if offered a cure he would refuse it.
As for gatekeeping and exclusion, I think the difference between me and you is that I do not have a problem with cancel culture, merely with the fact that the people in charge of the mechanism of cancelation are my enemies. I have no desire to go to bat for Richard Spencer's right to express himself on social media. Some views are odious enough that public suppression of them is probably good. Society has to decide what boundaries it chooses to enforce with respect to odious expression. And in the case of the Church itself, suppression of other opinions, sometimes even opinions which are within Orthodoxy, is sometimes good and necessary. When the LCMS forced a pastor to apologize for taking part in an interfaith prayer vigil after 9-11, this was a necessary action on the part of the Synod. Similarly, closed communion, which is almost the definition of gatekeeping and exclusion, is a good thing. There are people whom I believe to be better Christians than I am, including my own parents, who are not Lutheran, and cannot commune at my Church (and I cannot commune at theirs, since that is against LCMS rules). The Church is not a debate club where all views can be aired.
The search for a cure has been pursued already, by the way, both by secular Freudians and then Christians from the '70s to '00s. Greg Johnson's "Still Time to Care" tells the history, even if you disagree with his perspective. My hypothesis is that sexual orientation is not changeable for men and lesbians - it develops through puberty and is not neuroplastic afterward. (I exclude heterosexual women, who have observed to experience arousal to either sex, hence the trope of the divorcee woman shacking up with a gal.) I went through the science in "Sexual Orientation Is Not a Social Construct": https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcarini/p/sexual-orientation-is-not-a-social?r=k9yk0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Then on cancel culture, I have been realizing that what I'm about is conversation, philosophy, and truth-seeking together with people who disagree with us. That's not a "free speech" free -for-all per se. However, relative to what you're arguing for, I think we must be a bit more open. Obviously, our different feelings about Hanania are a good example. Within analytic philosophy, Hanania's social views are entirely conventional - shared, for example, by my secular liberal advisor. However, Hanania - being on the right - is much closer to me morally and politically on other things. To me, that's a co-belligerent. We've got a lot of common ground, and we can build from there. And that's what my song is about! :)
Maybe it isn't curable (I agree the x-gay movement mostly failed), but we should at least continue trying to find one. Imagine if we just stopped looking for cures for illnesses after thirty years. We would still be bedeviled by smallpox and mumps.
As for co-belligerency, in politics I only really care about social issues, and those are the issues I disagree with Hanania on.
I just want to say that that article is definitely not definitive.... It was poorly thought out and Ms. McGrew do not actually engage directly with Side B really so she knows relatively little about the discussions or school of thought. Also, Side B as a school of thought does say that same sex sexual desire is bad, I am not sure why these falsehood circulate. Comparing queerness to a mental illness is a fraught endeavor even if Side B generally thinks that there is something disordered about it. We are probably more willing to think of it in terms of "disability" than mental illness. Finally, I wish that you would consider a more principled stance around "cancellation" rather than just to own your enemies. If you are a Christian, you are to be guided by love, in particular love of your enemies.
The law exists to suppress evil and preserve the good. Anthony Comstock is a personal idol, to get an idea of what I think should be suppressed by the state. I consider public discussion of sex, especially evil forms of sex to be incredibly dangerous. Temptations should be between an individual and his pastor, family and closest friends. Heteronormativity ought to be preserved. And yes, it will cause pain for some, but the maintenance of the social order is critical, and some of us have to suffer for it. I have autism and am in the minority. My social issues don't get to determine the structure of society. I have to live in a world structured by people who do not share my particular issues. Tough luck for me. As for Dr. Mcgrew, I know her personally, and I am going to trust her to have a dispassionate take on side B more than I trust you. Associating with open supporters of castrating the mentally ill like Eve Tushnet is a huge red flag to me. In fact, my litmus test on whether I take you seriously is whether you support criminalizing medical gender transition. Those who don't are collaborators in a vast experiment on the mentally ill, and that is personal for me.
From the bits you have shared, we definitely have certain beliefs in common even as we diverge in others. Of course, I have little power to convince you about various things, but at least I would hope that you could have a hermeneutic of charity towards Side B and not just listen to its critics nor make straw men arguments of what the theological school of thought believes. Maybe think on the idea that sometimes we need non-"dispassionate" takes to see the true, good, and beautiful! May God bless you!
Hey TJ! Thanks for the comment. I don’t think there’s an opposition between Side B and orthodoxy at all. But I expressed it as an opposition in order to indicate which commitments people associate with right and left sides of evangelicalism.
I was just saying something like that to Joel about “gospel issues.” It reminds me of when either side in politics says “democracy is at stake!” Aka “listen to me and get on my side!”
Joel, congrats on the single. I sent you a message.
Also thoughtful piece, even if I don't fully agree with it. This is the first time I heard the phrase "Machen's Warrior Children", and I get it.
But I think there's something missing here, that is not symmetric between right and left in the context of the church, which I think I might have voiced here before, and if you've addressed it, I apologize.
And I hate to say it, because I try to be charitable, and I appreciate your efforts to be charitable. But: THE LEFT LIES. And I think this poisons the entire well, and it's the root of much of the problem. Machen himself observed that the left lies, it's in his book: he describes clergymen who solemnly affirm the whole of the WCF and then turn around two seconds later and start chipping away at it. And to this day you can find any number of examples of this type of behavior. One high profile example that comes to mind is the whole way Du Mez coyly danced around her opinions on LGBT for the longest time, which I picked up from Dreher around the time her book came out.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/jesus-and-elton-john-kristin-kobes-du-mez-denny-burk-evangelicalism-homosexuality/
Let me be clear, in the context of politics, maybe the right lies more. Trump certainly has a relationship with the truth that's as strained as any I can think of.
But in the context of the church, there's no contest. A conservative clergyman may lie to save his own skin, when it turns out he has engaged in, or covered for, horrific abuse. He may be coy or silent about how much he supports Trump or this or that conservative POLITICAL idea -- Chris Hodges of Church of the Highlands got in trouble for this. But when it comes to doctrine and theology, there's no conservative equivalent to the way that the left lies. There's no conservative pastor in a Mainline church who vows to support women's ordination and LGBT marriage, who claims to approve of higher criticism, and then immediately begins undermining those ideas, it turns out he believes in inerrancy. The closest equivalent I've ever heard of is Redeemed Zoomer out there, who is very open about his intentions and in any case hasn't accomplished anything to my knowledge.
But the left lies, and this means that anytime we catch a whiff of someone inside the church being significantly to our left, it's prudent to wonder for a second. Is that really his leftmost opinion? Or -- sorry for the mixed metaphor -- did he just let the mask slip, and it's the tip of the iceberg? If we give this guy an entry point, is our church about to be subverted, to become the next example of Mainline decay?
Anyway, maybe the argument is that people need to be given more of the benefit of the doubt. I don't think all this suspicion is a good thing! I think people should be able to voice ideas that are perceived as somewhere to the left of any given theological consensus without being instantly treated as heretics. But whatever the solution is, it needs to be offered in the context that, unfortunately, the left lies in a way the right does not, and real churches have been undermined and usurped as a result.
"arguably theologically orthodox, ***but*** [emphasis mine] sympathetic to Side B, celibate, gay Christians"... Is being theological orthodox and having sympathy towards Side B Christians in opposition?
Anyway, I would love to talk with you about this video sometime (both the original with Ms. Childers and Mr. Yuan as well as the response by Preston Sprinkle). I really did not like the original video especially with the accusations that the Side B theological framework and sensibility is "heresy" / "false teaching" as well as the odd straw men arguments at play and Yuan's no-platforming perspective. Side B obviously has differences with Side Y, but we both do hold the same basic points of the gospel of Jesus the Messiah, even if we differ in implications, aspects of human anthropology, and maybe the larger narrative of the gospel. Also, the idea that Side B does not think that people should repent of lust was shocking for me, I have never heard anyone say this, even if we have a more nuanced take on the dynamics of attraction compared to Side Y thinkers. Also, I appreciated your Frame and Machen examples, those dynamics are so common among some US evangelical traditions, sadly....
That said, I also did not really like how Preston engaged the discussion. In my opinion, he was too focused on what they implicated about him rather than defending Side B from gross mischaracterizations, and this episode also exposed some of his misunderstandings about the current Side B conversation around topics such as forms of committed kinship beyond marriage, among others. But he is definitely the one I would rather than a conversation with compared too Ms. Childers and Mr. Yuan - he is willing to approach conversations with hermeneutic of charity and engage publicly with perspectives that he actually disagrees. He seems open to complexity and nuance as well as learning in a way that I wonder if Ms. Childers and Mr. Yuan are.
I appreciate your sensibilities in all of this - pursuing virtuous engagement through sailing between the Charybdis of uncritical adoption and thoughtlessness and Scylla of purity spirals, tribalism, and "righteous" perfectionism.
Congratulations on the new band! Please share your first single with us a Communion & Shalom. We would happily give it a listen!
But side B has endorsed many dangerous positions. I am sure you have read the definitive article on the whole topic (https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/03/how-the-side-b-project-failed). My main problem with the side B movement is its refusal to acknowledge that same sex desire is bad, even if not itself a sin. It is misdirected, and exclusively feeling same sex desire is no different from any other mental illness, and mental illness is a bad thing. Trust me on that, I know! That is why we should be working on finding a cure, so the same sex attracted can have normal lives by ceasing to be same sex attracted. But at least one side B proponent has explicitly stated that if offered a cure he would refuse it.
As for gatekeeping and exclusion, I think the difference between me and you is that I do not have a problem with cancel culture, merely with the fact that the people in charge of the mechanism of cancelation are my enemies. I have no desire to go to bat for Richard Spencer's right to express himself on social media. Some views are odious enough that public suppression of them is probably good. Society has to decide what boundaries it chooses to enforce with respect to odious expression. And in the case of the Church itself, suppression of other opinions, sometimes even opinions which are within Orthodoxy, is sometimes good and necessary. When the LCMS forced a pastor to apologize for taking part in an interfaith prayer vigil after 9-11, this was a necessary action on the part of the Synod. Similarly, closed communion, which is almost the definition of gatekeeping and exclusion, is a good thing. There are people whom I believe to be better Christians than I am, including my own parents, who are not Lutheran, and cannot commune at my Church (and I cannot commune at theirs, since that is against LCMS rules). The Church is not a debate club where all views can be aired.
Thanks, Matthew! I'm in disagreement with Bethel on her analysis there - I've done a lot of work to stake out a theological defense of Side B, including attending Revoice last year "to see if the rumors were true." (A few are, many aren't.) My theological defense is in "Same-Sex Attraction and the Misery of Our Condition." (https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcarini/p/same-sex-attraction-and-the-misery?r=k9yk0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
The search for a cure has been pursued already, by the way, both by secular Freudians and then Christians from the '70s to '00s. Greg Johnson's "Still Time to Care" tells the history, even if you disagree with his perspective. My hypothesis is that sexual orientation is not changeable for men and lesbians - it develops through puberty and is not neuroplastic afterward. (I exclude heterosexual women, who have observed to experience arousal to either sex, hence the trope of the divorcee woman shacking up with a gal.) I went through the science in "Sexual Orientation Is Not a Social Construct": https://open.substack.com/pub/joelcarini/p/sexual-orientation-is-not-a-social?r=k9yk0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Then on cancel culture, I have been realizing that what I'm about is conversation, philosophy, and truth-seeking together with people who disagree with us. That's not a "free speech" free -for-all per se. However, relative to what you're arguing for, I think we must be a bit more open. Obviously, our different feelings about Hanania are a good example. Within analytic philosophy, Hanania's social views are entirely conventional - shared, for example, by my secular liberal advisor. However, Hanania - being on the right - is much closer to me morally and politically on other things. To me, that's a co-belligerent. We've got a lot of common ground, and we can build from there. And that's what my song is about! :)
Maybe it isn't curable (I agree the x-gay movement mostly failed), but we should at least continue trying to find one. Imagine if we just stopped looking for cures for illnesses after thirty years. We would still be bedeviled by smallpox and mumps.
As for co-belligerency, in politics I only really care about social issues, and those are the issues I disagree with Hanania on.
I just want to say that that article is definitely not definitive.... It was poorly thought out and Ms. McGrew do not actually engage directly with Side B really so she knows relatively little about the discussions or school of thought. Also, Side B as a school of thought does say that same sex sexual desire is bad, I am not sure why these falsehood circulate. Comparing queerness to a mental illness is a fraught endeavor even if Side B generally thinks that there is something disordered about it. We are probably more willing to think of it in terms of "disability" than mental illness. Finally, I wish that you would consider a more principled stance around "cancellation" rather than just to own your enemies. If you are a Christian, you are to be guided by love, in particular love of your enemies.
The law exists to suppress evil and preserve the good. Anthony Comstock is a personal idol, to get an idea of what I think should be suppressed by the state. I consider public discussion of sex, especially evil forms of sex to be incredibly dangerous. Temptations should be between an individual and his pastor, family and closest friends. Heteronormativity ought to be preserved. And yes, it will cause pain for some, but the maintenance of the social order is critical, and some of us have to suffer for it. I have autism and am in the minority. My social issues don't get to determine the structure of society. I have to live in a world structured by people who do not share my particular issues. Tough luck for me. As for Dr. Mcgrew, I know her personally, and I am going to trust her to have a dispassionate take on side B more than I trust you. Associating with open supporters of castrating the mentally ill like Eve Tushnet is a huge red flag to me. In fact, my litmus test on whether I take you seriously is whether you support criminalizing medical gender transition. Those who don't are collaborators in a vast experiment on the mentally ill, and that is personal for me.
From the bits you have shared, we definitely have certain beliefs in common even as we diverge in others. Of course, I have little power to convince you about various things, but at least I would hope that you could have a hermeneutic of charity towards Side B and not just listen to its critics nor make straw men arguments of what the theological school of thought believes. Maybe think on the idea that sometimes we need non-"dispassionate" takes to see the true, good, and beautiful! May God bless you!
Hey TJ! Thanks for the comment. I don’t think there’s an opposition between Side B and orthodoxy at all. But I expressed it as an opposition in order to indicate which commitments people associate with right and left sides of evangelicalism.
I’ll send over the link to the single!
I was just saying something like that to Joel about “gospel issues.” It reminds me of when either side in politics says “democracy is at stake!” Aka “listen to me and get on my side!”