John Davidson

[John Davidson @macdavid379]

@MemesToView I thought i was the only one

[Christian Combatives 🦬 @RevIsaacWirtz]

Roman Catholics when you tell them to stop using corpses as props, decoration, and good luck charms:

[Jon Harris 🌲 @jonharris1989]

You offend the Left by your existence.

It’s not your reason for existence.

Please understand the difference.

[John Davidson @macdavid379]

@JayCCalhoun You just blew my mind

[John Davidson @macdavid379]

@TomBuck I've been supportive of you lately, but I can't get behind this. Sushi is for communists.

[John Davidson @macdavid379]

@james_d_baird I love this timeline!

[Joseph Spurgeon @Joseph_Spurgeon]

When I was in middle school, I really liked Lynyrd Skynyrd. I remember hearing “Free Bird” and thinking it was incredible. I had never heard anything like it. I liked Metallica too. At that age, I didn't have a sophisticated theory of music. I heard something I liked and I liked it.

Then I made some friends who were music snobs. They knew which bands you were allowed to like and which ones were beneath serious people. They listened to obscure stuff. They knew bands nobody else had heard of. Suddenly some of the music I genuinely enjoyed was apparently embarrassing.
So my tastes changed. I got into indie rock, alternative music, electronic music, and all kinds of obscure bands. In one sense, I'm glad I did. I discovered a lot of good music. But something else happened along the way. I learned to dislike music I actually liked because I didn't want to be associated with the kind of people who liked it.

I became a music snob.

There is something intoxicating about knowing what the masses don't know. You discovered the band before everybody else. You know the deep cut. You have better taste. Then everybody else discovers your obscure little band, and suddenly you're not quite as interested anymore. I can remember actually being irritated when the radio started playing a band I liked. Which is ridiculous. What changed? The music didn't. The crowd did. If everybody else liked my band, apparently I needed to find another band.

At that point, it isn't really about music anymore. It's about you.
And musical snobbery doesn't stop with music. You can also become a theological hipster.

Theological hipsterism is what happens when love for truth becomes tangled up with the pleasure of being one of the people who knows better. Our theology becomes a way of separating the enlightened from the rubes, the serious Christians from the normies, the sophisticated from the hokey evangelicals down the road.

There is an entire ecosystem of Reformed commentary built around finding the stupid thing another Christian said, the embarrassing clip from the megachurch pastor, the badly worded sermon illustration, the worship song with a questionable line, the ugly church building, or the evangelical celebrity who did something goofy, and then gathering around to sneer at it.

Some criticism is necessary. There are real principled reasons to hold to Reformed theology. I am with Charles Spurgeon when he said that Calvinism is the gospel. I believe Reformed theology is biblical theology. I hold these truths near and dear. False teaching should be opposed. Foolishness should be corrected. There are things worth fighting over.

But let's quit flattering ourselves. Not everything called discernment is discernment.

Sometimes you just don't like something. Sometimes you're a snob. Sometimes you're cynical. Sometimes it's good old Pharisaical pride.

The Apostle Paul understood that men could do genuinely Christian things for rotten reasons. In Philippians 1, he says that some were preaching Christ “from envy and strife” and “out of selfish ambition.” These men were competing with Paul. Their motives were corrupt. Paul saw it clearly. He didn't pretend their envy was virtuous.

But then he said something that cuts directly against theological hipsterism: “Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice.”
Paul could identify what was wrong without becoming incapable of rejoicing over what was right.

We are a cynical and competitive people. We are suspicious of sincerity itself. You can see it everywhere in the broader culture. We have trouble even making straightforward heroes anymore. Take good old Captain America, a man who loves his country, hates bullies, knows there is such a thing as good and evil, and wants to do the right thing. Modern storytellers immediately feel the need to complicate him. He needs to become embarrassed by his own patriotism. America needs to disappoint him. His goodness needs an ironic edge. The straight hero becomes the antihero because uncomplicated loyalty and virtue make cynical people uncomfortable.

We don't know what to do with the man who simply means it.
The cynic is so accustomed to posturing that he assumes everyone else must be posturing too. The thief thinks everyone steals. The man putting on airs assumes everyone else is putting on airs.
Think about the things we call “cringe.” Some things really are cringe-worthy. Christians can be sentimental, manipulative, foolish, irreverent, and embarrassingly bad at things. But I have had to admit that sometimes there is something deeper at work in me. How much of what I call cringe is simply sincerity that embarrasses me?

A thousand Christians are standing together singing about Jesus. Some have their hands raised. The music is contemporary. The room doesn't look like my ideal sanctuary. The worship leader looks like a “worship leader.” The whole thing feels a little too earnest for my tastes, and my reflex is to mock it.

Why?

Maybe I have a principled criticism. Fine. Make it. But perhaps that man with his hands raised loves Jesus Christ. Perhaps the woman next to him has been carried through a miserable year by the faithfulness of God. Perhaps another man came to Christ six months ago and is still amazed that his sins are forgiven. Maybe these people aren't performing for me at all.

Maybe they're sincere.

The real cringe in the room may be the Christian who can watch brothers and sisters rejoice in Christ and immediately begin searching for a reason to despise them.

I've seen that spirit in myself. I have been too quick to look at churches and Christians who weren't like me and feel superior. Sometimes the criticism was principled. Sometimes it wasn't. I've confused preferences with principles. I've treated my own discomfort as a reliable theological category. I've sometimes called something discernment when it was really cynicism.

That is theological hipsterism.

The hipster needs ordinary people to have bad taste. Without them, how would he know his taste is exceptional? The theological hipster has the same problem. He needs evangelicals to be shallow because their shallowness confirms his depth. He needs ordinary Christians to be naive because their naivete confirms his sophistication. He needs grandma's church to be cheesy, the megachurch to be compromised, and the Baptist down the street to be unserious.

His superiority requires somebody beneath him.
I think this helps explain some of the online blowups we keep seeing among Reformed and conservative Christians. There are real disagreements in many of these fights. There are principles worth debating, and sometimes one side really is wrong. But I don't believe all the heat is coming from principle.

Some of it is envy and strife.

Some of it is competition for platforms, conferences, audiences, influence, and positions of leadership. Men jockey for place. Groups form camps. One conference becomes suspicious of another conference. One podcast takes shots at another podcast. Men begin targeting each other, and every disagreement becomes evidence that the other side is compromised, dishonest, cowardly, or dangerous.

Then everybody recruits.

Jesus condemned the Pharisees because they would “travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte,” only to make him “twice as much a son of hell” as themselves. There is a warning there for men who build movements around resentment. You can disciple people into your bitterness.

Who cares who has the bigger platform? Who cares who got invited to which conference? Who cares which little faction gets to claim leadership of the movement?

Disconnect your ego from all of that.

The hipsters I knew were rarely producing much themselves. They latched onto the creativity of others. The new band with talent became something they could attach their identity to, until the band became too popular and they had to move on.

The theological version can work the same way.

Theodore Roosevelt famously said that it is not the critic who counts, the man who points out where the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

Theological hipsters can become very good at detecting what is wrong with everyone else's work while producing very little themselves. We know why that pastor is a sellout, that church is unserious, that ministry is compromised, that worship is effeminate, that man is a grifter, and the other guy is a fraud.

Maybe sometimes we're right.

But a man can be right and still be small.

Building is difficult. Critiquing the builder is easy. Planting a church is difficult. Raising children is difficult. Evangelizing unbelievers is difficult. Shepherding stubborn sheep is difficult. Training leaders is difficult. Building institutions that last is difficult. Building exposes your weaknesses and forces you to make hard decisions between imperfect options. Eventually someone gets to inspect your work and explain how he would have done it better.

The man in the stands always has cleaner hands than the man on the field.

That doesn't put builders above correction. Far from it. But perhaps the critic ought occasionally to ask himself what he has built.
The things we become hipsters about will change because the things themselves aren't really the point. It's the vibes, the smells, the bells, the stuff that allows us to signal that we are superior to everyone else.

One man may rightly recover things our fathers threw away: beautiful architecture, historic liturgy, Psalmody and old hymns, classical education, older books, masculine Christianity, and a sense of rootedness, inheritance, and civilization. He recovers those things because he loves God and wants to glorify Him.
Another man may want the exact same things because they confirm his superiority.

A man can be every bit as vain about Gothic arches as another man is about a smoke machine. He can convince himself that his aesthetic instincts are evidence of his righteousness. He can despise the faithful church meeting in a former Pizza Hut while his heart make a terrible temple for the Lord.

So be principled. Have preferences. And know the difference.
Hold tightly to what God has actually said. Argue for wisdom where wisdom is required. Enjoy your preferences without baptizing them as divine law. Have enough self-government to know when you are defending truth and when you simply don't like something.
More importantly, examine what is driving you.

I have increasingly found myself asking a different question: What if we stopped governing our work according to comparison with other Christians?

What if we simply built?

I want to be thoroughly Reformed. I want to be Presbyterian. I want a church with backbone. I want men who know how to fight, fathers who lead their homes, women who love their families, children who know the faith, worship filled with reverence and joy, preaching that actually says something, and Christians who aren't embarrassed by the lordship of Jesus Christ over everything.

We want to be men who speak the truth and stand against error. That is good. It takes courage to resist the theological and cultural drift of our age. But a good desire can become corrupted. Zeal for truth can curdle into censoriousness. Discernment can become habitual suspicion. We can become less defined by what we love, confess, and build, and more defined by what we oppose. And in many cases, it just becomes opposing Christians who are not us

So, I don't want less fight. I just want to be a man who fights for truth because I love the truth, not a man who fights because he loves the fight. The first man can rejoice when another church succeeds. The second experiences another man's fruitfulness as a threat. The first can learn from someone with whom he seriously disagrees. The second has to explain why anything good in that man's ministry doesn't really count.

One man wants Christ's kingdom to grow. The other wants his corner of Christ's kingdom to win.

Don't become the man who needs every disagreement to become a controversy and every brother with bad instincts to become an enemy. Don't build an identity around proving that everyone else is compromised.

There is too much to build.

Paul looked at men who were actually competing with him, men preaching Christ with envy in their hearts, and somehow the advancement of Christ's name mattered more to him than winning the rivalry.

“Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice.”
May God give us more of that.

[Albert Mohler @albertmohler]

Here it is. I think it was a really productive conversation and presentation. Read the book and watch the video. It’s a substantive conversation about things that really matter. And we had fun doing it.

[John Davidson @macdavid379]

@SavagelyAvg Every time brother!

[John Davidson @macdavid379]

@TheBabylonBee My buddies used last names exclusively when we were younger. It was weird or serious whenever someone called you by your first name.

[Classic Learning Test @CLT_Exam]

The strangest thing about classical education is how radical ordinary competence now looks.

A 16-year-old who can read a difficult book, write a coherent essay, calculate without reaching for a device, recite a poem, and argue without getting emotional seems exceptional.

None of this was supposed to be exceptional.

[Joseph Spurgeon @Joseph_Spurgeon]

I don't govern my ministry according to the approval of theological peer groups.

I fear God, and I serve the people He has actually given me.

I’m as right-wing as I’ve ever been. I believe in patriarchy. I believe civil government ought to obey Jesus Christ. I believe in the Reformed faith, Presbyterianism, postmillennialism, and all the rest of it. I haven’t softened on any of that.

I just don’t care nearly as much anymore whether the online Reformed world, the New Christian Right, or whatever little theological tribe is fashionable this month thinks I’m doing it right.

There is a kind of theological hipsterism that infects small circles. Everybody is too sophisticated to be impressed by anything. Somebody is used by God to build a church, reach people, sees sinners converted, develops leaders, plants churches, and immediately a bunch of guys with microphones explain why none of it counts.

Of course successful men can be wrong. But there is also such a thing as small man’s disease.

There are men who haven’t built much, haven’t led much, haven’t risked much, haven’t accomplished much, but they have developed an extraordinary ability to explain what is wrong with everybody who has.

I’m tired of that spirit. I’m tired of it in the Reformed world, tired of it in politics, tired of it in church circles, and tired of finding it in myself.

I want to build.

I want to see the kingdom of Christ grow. I want to see lost people saved. I want to see men become strong, holy fathers. I want marriages strengthened, children discipled, churches planted, institutions built, worship offered with reverence and joy, and Christians living like they actually believe Jesus Christ is King.

I want warmth. Joy. Hospitality. Holiness. Courage. Excellence. I want people walking into church to know that we are genuinely glad they came and that we desperately want them to know Christ.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Notice the refugees from South Africa are actual families. Men, women and children who will easily assimilate and appreciate the US.

Stark contrast between the hordes of single foreign men coming to abuse our system.

[Joe Gibbons @JoeGibbons84]

"You're mixing politics with the Gospel!"
*makes commitment to American democracy an essential article of faith*

"This is a distraction from the church's mission!"
*forms a study committee*

"We don't have control over who God places in power of civil governments."
*votes*

[William Wolfe 🇺🇸 @WilliamWolfe]

You should never take anyone seriously who promotes this as some “virtuous” approach to government and politics

[John Davidson @macdavid379]

@ThatEricAlper GOATED

[John Davidson @macdavid379]

@KellySpore01 @Saffron_Sniper1 Afraid not. But the point of my comment was to comedically express how touched I was by the post. I was in fact tearing up and love witnessing actions like that.