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I’m not influential by any means, but I felt compelled to write something about this if for no other reason that I want to have something to share with my fellow Baptist congregants, some of whom greatly admire DW.
I don’t want to say “This is why you should cut DW out of your life,” and I’m certainly not doing to say that I’m going to dissociate from you should you fail to do so. (I don’t ever embrace “guilt-by-association” thinking because that quickly snowballs out of control.) What I will say is that what I’m describing here is why I will not, myself, be following anybody out of Moscow, ID until there is actual repentance.
There are two reasons, one that is personal and another that is biblical. The personal reason is that I’m not willing to spend my time being treated without the respect due another human being, unless I am doing so in order to minister to that person and call him or her to repentance. The biblical reason is that Christ calls us to treat believers in unrepentant sin as those outside the church, and that is exactly the situation that we find ourselves in. There has been no apologies or repentance, as far as I know. John tells us pray for their repentance (as this is clearly not a sin that leads to death), and I will do so.
This is not the first time I have experienced Presbyterian contempt for Baptists. Twitter is rife with it. Badly-behaving Presbyterian pastors are really the primary reason I left Twitter.
This post is not terribly rigorous or well-written, but rather a collection of thoughts. For that reason, this will probably appear unfocused and rambly.
I’m not going to recount every individual part of what has happened with Cross Politic, but suffice to say, they argued that Baptist theology caused the transgender movement. That’s almost a direct quote.
Tom Ascol has a good post about it here: https://founders.org/2022/08/24/the-stink-brought-to-us-by-crosspolitic/
The response from many 1689ers has led them to “clarify” that they were not talking about us, but were talking about “American Baptists”.
This is clearly a lie.
I think they’ve convinced themselves of their own lies, but the context of the original conversation made it clear: They said that Baptist theology, and they discussed what they meant by Baptist theology within that conversation even if they didn’t give names, caused transgender ideology. Trying to retcon a target after-the-fact to a nebulous group of “American Baptists” at best means that they treated a group of people other than one that I am in with disdain. So, it’s okay if they slander someone that’s not me?
Ultimately, even if they weren’t talking about 1689 Baptists, that makes little difference.
The premise behind this is that every societal sin in a post-Christian culture can be traced back to some failure from within the church. I do not agree with that, but that’s beside the point here. They then go on to say that the idea of Baptists teaching our children to repent and believe is teaching them to changing their identities, leading them to believe that identities can be changed. Leading to transgender ideology.
Even if I were to accept this premise, the rationale is so unhinged that the only possible explanation is that they were looking for a chain of reasoning to match the conclusion rather than reasoning from first principles to find the conclusion. In other words, they started with the conclusion that Baptist theology causes transgender ideology and found the path to that conclusion. This in opposition to looking at their own beliefs about baptism and reasoning to a conclusion from there. We see this kind of thing frequently– People already know what they want to believe, so they rationalize it instead of thinking critically.
Because of how completely ridiculous and, above all, arbitrary this thinking from Cross Politic is, I am forced to conclude that that’s what happened here.
Now, then, why is this a conclusion that they would desire to reach? Watch the show and it becomes abundantly obvious– They’re having a grand ol’ time laughing at and ridiculing Baptists. (The Bible calls this “reviling”, by the way.)
And that’s finally what I’m getting from this: Presbyterian contempt. As I’ve said, this is not the first time I’ve encountered it. There is somehow a subset of Presbyterians that believe that Baptists are subhumans only valuable as objects of ridicule. And I saw more of it from Jared Longshore’s comment section. (I don’t blame Jared for what’s in his comment section– I only point out that that’s yet another place I see it.)
Part of why I liked the crowd surrounding Doug Wilson is because they had hitherto been an exception to that. I always knew that they believed strongly in paedobaptism. I always knew that they wouldn’t bend on it, and would be willing to have heated conversations to defend it. But I also thought they would do so respectfully. Now, though, they’re in the same category to me as R. Scott Clark and Ben Woodring.
Personally, I’m sick and tired of being a sponge for abuse and being told that I have to have “thicker skin”. There’s only so much I can stand. I do not treat Presbyterians this way. I don’t treat anyone this way.
I’m far from a “cancel culture” type. They apologize and repent, and this will be over instantly as far as I’m concerned. Thus far, I haven’t seen any of that. All I’ve seen so far is a combination of doubling down and lying about what was actually said.
Some are calling for unity. Okay, great, but the ball’s in their court.