On Tranny Baptists & Such

Introduction 
So last week CrossPolitic launched into the deep end of the evangelical pool with a cannon ball, that sent waves into the stands. And while we were pretty impressed with ourselves, we were somewhat surprised by the enthusiastic response. Maybe enthusiastic isn’t the right word, particularly from a number of our baptist friends. A goodly number of baptist friends have reached out and thanked us and said that they understood exactly what Knox and Gabe and Jared Longshore and Jason Farley were getting at and appreciated the gut check, even though they are committed baptists. But there has been a fairly large explosion in parts of the internet, pretty worked up about it all. So here’s my three cents. 

What’s Done Happened
First, a quick replay of what’s done happened. The whole show started with Knox and Gabe walking us through some of the most recent horrors of transgender surgeries, particularly at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. For whatever it’s worth, I was not on the show that day, as I was out of town with my family. They invited a friend, Jason Farely, on the show to comment, who noted that this is not at all unrelated to the pervasiveness of “modern individualistic Christianity” (his words). He noted that most of the modern church says you get to choose your identity at your “age of accountability.” Jared noted that this is what Carl Trueman discussed in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. We have turned institutions and sacraments from structures that teach and instruct us and our children about who we are supposed to be into opportunities to “express who I am” – a radical expressive individualism. Jason noted that this is “American Baptist theology secularized.” Jared Longshore tied this to Lewis’s works The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. We are a nation of men without chests, lacking the courage to stand up to this, and he noted that this is ultimately why Christians apostatize. They do not have the courage to fight these pagan ideologies. 

After the regular show ended, the guys went “backstage,” and Gabe and Knox questioned Farley on what he had said, and Farley said that “baptists caused transgenderism.” This is the part where errbody lit their hair on fire and ran around in tight circles all weekend. But as the previous conversation had framed that comment and as the conversation continued, the point is actually incredibly clear. What was meant by “baptists” is not credobaptism per se. The central culprit they are talking about the entire time is this radical expressive individualism. At one point, Jared used the phrase “radical American baptistic individualism.” Jared also said clearly that if a baptist brother was deeply offended, he wanted to put his arm around him and assure him that they were not saying that credobaptism = transgenderism. No one is saying that if you hold to credobaptist convictions you are the direct cause of transgenderism. 

Later, when the topic of justification by faith came up, Jason noted that if you put all the emphasis on individuals and their choices, you will eventually lose justification by faith, since faith is receiving and resting upon Christ. It was also noted that you can baptize babies and still end up doing the same thing. You can still end up being a radical expressive individualist and feeding that same paganism even if you do baptize babies. 

Finally, Jason closed with a brief meditation on Psalm 11: when the foundations are destroyed what can the righteous do? The psalmist says when enemies are shooting at him, he will turn to the Lord and ask Him to test him. When you see the signs of the times, that God’s judgment is immanent, God’s people should know that judgment begins with the household of God. And so our prayerful instinct should be to ask God to take away from us whatever of the world is in us. We should be asking God, “In what ways have I bought into this metaphysic? Is there anything of this in me?” In other words, it is an entirely biblical instinct to ask whether there is anything in us, in the American Church, that has contributed, caused, or encouraged this current transgender crisis. Earlier in the show right after Jason’s fateful assertion, he also pointed to abortion as the church’s fault: we rejected children in our churches and that has led to the world rejecting children period. 

Thus far the original show and backstage content, and I believe that the context is plenty clear to explain what Jason meant and what the men were talking about. The target was radical individualistic culture in the church from beginning to end, and in this case, the way that mainstream American baptist culture has often discipled people in that pagan ideology. 

The Follow Up Show
However, the calls and questions were beginning to come in on Friday, so Knox and I decided to do a follow up show to help clarify the target. Watch and listen to that show, and the two things that should be massively clear are: 

1. We consider all baptists our brothers, and they are all welcome in our churches as members, welcome to take communion with us, and we are happy to baptize their children whenever and however their conscience dictates. We underlined this point because if we really thought that baptists are directly causing and are guilty of the transgender crisis, how could we possibly let baptists into membership? How could we in good conscience come to the Lord’s Table with them? How could I personally even be involved in baptizing (by immersion) older children by profession of faith? Whatever was meant by the critique, our central concern was to make it clear that we did not see it as the sort of thing that should interrupt or even strain our fellowship in the slightest. We also wanted to underline that if our brothers have blemishes, we consider it our problem too. We aren’t pointing and blaming. We are saying “we” have this issue in “our” churches, and we aren’t calling for an immediate end to credo-baptism. 

2. We looked at several tweets that had tagged us with questions or concerns, beginning with Dr. James White wondering why we couldn’t distinguish between confessional Reformed Baptists and mainstream evangelical Baptists. And our response was that we can and we do. I don’t know how we could have made it clearer, but we explicitly said that we weren’t talking about Reformed, confessional Baptists. We said that we differ with them on timing of baptism, but we said we’re not talking about them. Knox mentioned the debate between Doug Wilson and James White on paedocommunion, and how willing Dr. White was to receive young professions of faith before baptism. We said that we’re on the same team as Dr. White. We agreed with Dr. White that confessional, 1689 baptists are not promulgating radical individualism. And in my wrap up, I explicitly said this:   

“We also believe that American evangelicalism is shot through with idols and perversions, in both presbyterian churches and Baptist churches. Most presbyterian churches have rainbow flags out front, and many Baptist churches are woke. The worship of self, self-actuation, self-determination has made deep inroads in both traditions: Presbyterians are not much better than drag queen groomers, but by the same token, mainstream Baptist culture, and that kind of Arminian masturbatory revivalistic culture really is a gateway drug to the same ideologies that murder babies and carve up bodies.”

I’m not sure how I could be clearer. Our target all along has been “mainstream Baptist culture,” which I explicitly explained as “Arminian masturbatory revivalistic culture.” We were not aiming at confessional, covenantal Reformed Baptists. In my replies, a number of folks thought maybe I should have mentioned that our target was Arminian baptists, to which I can only say, that’s what I did say.

Twitter Clarity
In an effort to make my target even clearer, I took to Twitter on Saturday, and wrote this: “Look, if God is waiting anxiously in Heaven for you to decide whether to become a Christian and whether you really mean your baptism, how could that cosmic theology not have repercussions for comparatively lesser realities like whether you are male or female or a furry?” Given the fact that Reformed baptists don’t believe anything like that, and that is a very common trope that Reformed types use to describe Arminian soteriology, I figured all the Reformed baptists would do some basic logic and realize: clearly they aren’t targeting me because I don’t believe God is anything like that. To which, I was lectured repeatedly on Twitter over the last few days that it was a really bad look for me to double down on what we had said. It would be better to retract and apologize. To which I only smiled in amusement.

As replies came in asking if I thought that Reformed baptists thought that God was in heaven waiting anxiously for people to decide to become Christians, I repeatedly said “no” (since I don’t and never have) and eventually last night I just retweeted the original and added “So based on a number of replies, some folks think this tweet below was directed at confessional 1689 Reformed Baptists (e.g. my friends @HwsEleutheroi [James White], Durbin, Ascol, etc.). But it wasn’t since they don’t believe anything like this. I’m talking about mainstream modern evangelicals.”

And I would add that the key distinguishing factor between “mainline baptists” and “Reformed baptists” is the fact that Reformed baptists do not put all the emphasis on the power or sanctity of a child’s decision or choice since they believe that regeneration is the sovereign work and choice of God. They differ with us on the timing of baptism and believe that baptism should be applied to those who show clear signs of God’s sovereign work. But that Calvinistic soteriology puts that kind of credo baptism into a very different paradigm than mainstream baptist culture. Calvinistic soteriology most certainly is not putting all the emphasis on human choice and decision. Not only that, but many Reformed baptists have very robust covenant theologies which makes them key allies in our fight against radical individualism, even if they are an extreme minority position in the broader baptist world.

Trippling Down?
At any rate, I certainly will not retract or apologize for what I actually believe or what I believe was clearly articulated throughout the show, which is that radical individualism has infiltrated the American evangelical church. And the vast majority of the American evangelical church is baptistic (which includes piles of radically individualistic presbyterians by the way, going all the way back to Charles Finney). But this mainstream American evangelical culture is full of the rot and cancer of radical individualism that most certainly has contributed significantly to the current transgender frenzy.

I’ve been accused of committing the motte and baily fallacy in all of this, that Jason said something outrageous like “caused transgenderism” and then I showed up defending some lesser more reasonable stance. But the target has been the same all along: radical individualism, revivalism, putting all the focus on individuals choosing whether they want to believe or not, individuals choosing their own identities. Yes, those kinds of discipleship programs do “cause transgenderism.”

Conclusion
The most offensive comments were made by Jason Farley, but they were made in a context that made it utterly clear what was being targeted. And if that wasn’t enough, the follow up show that Knox and I did explicitly affirmed Dr. White’s point that there was and is a huge difference between confessional baptists and mainline baptists, and mainline baptists are the ones with radical individualism problems. And while some folks have given us doe-eyed confused looks, wondering how we could ever say that about any baptists, we are very grateful for the many who have affirmed that they know exactly what we are talking about. They grew up in churches where self-actualization, radical individualism, and revivalism were real things, and they have also seen the fruit of it in the mass apostasy of children growing up in those churches, including being groomed for all the current sexual madness. 

We do believe this conversation is important. And we are glad to have it. And as we have said repeatedly, that includes the conversation that asks what presbyterians have contributed to this current morass. The name of our show is CrossPolitic in part because this is the kind of conversation we want to have. We need to talk about how the church has failed to be salt and light, how the church has failed to disciple this nation. Jesus said that if it’s dark in the land, it’s because the light has grown dim. Culture is downstream of the sanctuary. Politics is downstream from the Church.