Recently, noted political commentator, opinion writer, author, and attorney David French announced he was leaving the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) because of what it has become since it was purchased by Elon Musk a little over a year ago. In the interest of full disclosure, while I’m not nearly as well-known as David, I left Twitter last year after 14 years because I couldn’t spend more than three minutes at a time on the platform without becoming frustrated with the nastiness, falsehoods, and unmoderated content and behavior that seemed to surge after Musk’s takeover. His vision of free speech seems to be allowing anyone to say anything, no matter how untrue, unsafe, or vile, unless he finds it insulting or offensive, in which case he’s quick to ban the offending party.
Many other Christian influencers are also leaving X behind. I understand David’s actions, and the reaction of many on his feed essentially validated why he was leaving.
However, what was more disturbing to me and other observers was the identity of far too many of the angry and vitriolic respondents, whose profiles often included, among other descriptors, “Christian,” “Christ-follower,” or a similar reference to Jesus or the Christian faith. As I struggled to reconcile their claimed identity with their words and actions, a question came to mind that bears discussing.
However, before I get to the question, let me set the stage for the uninitiated.
I first learned of David French from two friends of mine, Orit Kwasman (née Sklar) and Ruth Malhotra, who, as students, sued Georgia Tech for violating their First Amendment rights to free speech and religious liberty. David was the lead counsel on that case, which resulted in a resounding victory for his clients. He devoted his legal career to religious liberty cases until he stepped away in 2005 to serve as a judge advocate in the U.S. Army Reserve. He was deployed to Iraq in 2007 and returned a decorated Army officer with a Bronze Star. He became a writer and political commentator and briefly considered running for president in 2016 as an independent to counter the rise of the eventual Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
Today, David is probably known to most people as a columnist for the New York Times, which invited him to join their opinion staff and offer a divergent perspective from others on the staff and most of their readers. That perspective is about more than him being a constitutional conservative, a term I use to distinguish him and other traditional center-right individuals from whatever political philosophy this populist movement led by Donald Trump represents. David is also a faithful and outspoken evangelical Christian, which makes the attacks against him more baffling, at least to those outside the bubble of faith and politics in which his critics reside.
I can remember a time when an attorney with an extensive record of legal victories for religious liberty and conservative causes, a veteran with decorated military service in a war zone, and bonafide evangelical Christian credentials would have been held up as an exemplar of Republican Party excellence. Add to that a wife, Nancy Anderson French, an accomplished professional in her own right as a journalist and writer, and three children, one adopted from Ethiopia, and you have the picture-perfect family for a campaign brochure.
However, I don’t want that statement about them to come across as cynical. In my few interactions with them on social media, where we follow each other, I’ve found them to be authentic, delightful, and kind. I would enjoy getting together with them for dinners and cookouts, except for the nearly 500 miles and eight-hour drive separating their home in Tennessee from ours in Virginia! I only bring up how perfect a political family they would have been in times past to illustrate how dark the night has become in the American public square.
The darkness descended on the French family after he spoke out against Donald Trump as he pursued the Republican nomination for president in 2015. What happened to David and a few others back then was just the beginning of what is now a depressingly normal reaction to anyone who opposes Trump. The vulgarity, hatred, and violence of these attacks were unprecedented to most of us who participated in the political process. David wrote about it at the time, and he realized he was witnessing a paradigm shift in our political discourse, even as others tried to play it off as business as usual:
The misery is compounded when longtime friends and allies dismiss my experiences and the experiences of my colleagues as nothing more than the normal cost of public advocacy. It’s not. I have contributed to National Review for more than ten years now, and have been deeply involved in many of America’s most emotional culture-war battles for more than 20. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.
Moreover, he was frustrated, as are many of my friends who are on the receiving end of a sustained flow of personal invective, at the accusation that their exposure of these incendiary attacks was a way for them to curry favor with the elite class, or to increase their notoriety:
I have to laugh when people accuse me of opposing Trump because it somehow makes me rich, or because I’m currying favors with guests at the “elite” cocktail parties that I never actually attend. I oppose Trump not just because he’s an ignorant demagogue and a naked political opportunist, but also because bigotry and intimidation cling to his campaign. Every campaign attracts its share of fools, cranks, and crazies. But Trump’s candidacy has weaponized them. Every harassing tweet and every violent threat is like a voice whispering in my ear, telling me to do all that I can to oppose a movement that breeds and exploits such reckless hate.
Other evangelical Christians have also paid the price for speaking out against Trump, whose lust for power and attention and rejection of the need for repentance stand in stark contrast to the nature of Jesus Christ, or calling attention to the un-Christian words and actions of their fellow Christians.
A dear long-time friend with a national public profile as an evangelical Christian educator, writer, and commentator, Karen Swallow Prior, says, “Since 2015, I have been publicly slandered, harassed, and trolled by a handful of pastors in my denomination.” She was eventually driven away from the vocation to which she had dedicated her life, teaching young people to find the Good, True, and Beautiful of the Lord in literature:
Not only is 58 the worst age to be unemployed, but being unemployed in academia is even worse, and being unemployed in the field of English in this culture-wars-climate is worst of all. (If you don’t believe that, just google the news headlines.)
Beth Moore was an esteemed women’s ministry Bible teacher in the Southern Baptist denomination for decades until she dared to speak out on Twitter against Trump’s recorded comments behind the scenes from Access Hollywood endorsing sexual assault, a crime committed against her repeatedly as a child by her own father. The reaction was swift and condemnatory to the point of questioning her commitment to the pro-life political position fundamental to evangelical Christianity and even the veracity of her faith, as she recounts in her book, All My Knotted Up Life: A Memoir:
But when pro-Christian starts to look less and less like Christ, something’s gone off the rails. It was, to me, like they were under a spell. Like someone spiked their iced tea. I knew many of these people and no longer recognized them nor them me. What happened immediately following those tweets was the psychological equivalent of standing in front of a firing squad bereft of the benefit of dying.
She left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021, even as it struggled with revelations of decades of rampant sexual abuse and harassment in its ranks and the coverups committed by people in authority to keep the abuses secret. Historian Kate Bowler wrote:
“Ms. Moore is a deeply trusted voice across the liberal-conservative divide, and has always been able to communicate a deep faithfulness to her tradition without having to follow the Southern Baptist’s scramble to make Trump spiritually respectable. The Southern Baptists have lost a powerful champion in a time in which their public witness has already been significantly weakened.”
Whether it’s overlooking or excusing Trump’s character, displaying or downplaying racism, misogyny, and nativism, committing or hiding clergy sex abuse, or dehumanizing political opponents or those not in the inner circle, any Christian public figure who dares to point out the cognitive dissonance and the damage to the Christian witness of these behaviors is guaranteed to suffer an immediate and ferocious backlash from their fellow believers. The irony is that these are the same people who declared in 1998, amid President Clinton’s infidelity and sexual abuse of an intern, that character was essential to public service:
We urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.
I’ve said in the past that while I might be dismayed by the behavior of non-Christians, I don’t have expectations of them, “For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world” (1 John 2:16).
However, we who profess to be saved by the blood of Jesus Christ are told by the apostle John in the passage of Scripture immediately preceding the previous one, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). The apostle Peter admonishes us, “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance” (1 Peter 1:14). Jesus’ brother James is even more direct:
You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. (James 4:4)
The apostles could not conceive of someone saved in Christ spewing hate:
With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. Can both fresh water and salt water flow from the same spring? My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water. (James 3:9-12)
If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:20-21)
If we are truly transformed, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). When we accept Christ, the Holy Spirit takes up residence in us and, as we mature in our faith, brings forth “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” ( Galatians 5:22-23).
The Lord promised us the Holy Spirit before the time of Christ, telling us:
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. (Ezekiel 36:26-27)
Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as a “Helper,” the “Spirit of truth” from whom we will “receive power” (John 14:15-17; Acts 1:8). James describes the Holy Spirit as wisdom from above, given to all who ask for it:
But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. (James 3:17)
Since all who come to faith in Christ are given the Holy Spirit, our thoughts, words, and actions should increasingly reflect His nature as we mature. Especially when we feel compelled to correct a fellow Christian, we are called to do so with humility, not puffing ourselves up but acknowledging our own fallibility and equality with our brother or sister as we gently counsel them:
You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. (Romans 14:10)
Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you also may be tempted. Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:1-2).
You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:5)
When Jesus confronted the men who wanted to stone the adulterous woman, he was illustrating the very human tendency to be fixated on the faults of others while blindly ignoring our own. This was the point of the plank if you will, and the lesson is clear. If we rid ourselves of the pride and hypocrisy that generally accompanies condemnation, our heart for others expands because we are authentic and humble about our own struggles.
We constantly work to dislodge the plank from our own eye as we “press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called” us (Philippians 3:14). This ongoing and lifelong process of sanctification, or becoming more like Christ, should leave us with no time for self-righteousness or judgment, but our increased self-awareness should make us ever more charitable toward others and their struggles. We become allies in the journey to sanctification rather than enemies pointing out the other’s faults while ignoring our own.
My friend Karen made some eye-opening observations about some of her public detractors, whose lack of self-awareness is breathtaking:
One of these men has since been arrested for charges related to drug abuse and domestic violence. Another—who declaimed me by name from the floor of a national convention—was later arrested for domestic assault. Another is a self-admitted wife abuser who has merely changed the targets of his abuse and called it repentance. At this point, I’ve stopped counting. Abusers are going to abuse. No way around that. My abuse is so little compared to what too many have gone through. But what cannot be abided or excused is the supposedly “good, godly” leaders who have paid too much attention to such abusers for too long and given their voices any hearing at all.
Paul’s warning in Galatians 6:7 comes to mind; “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.”
So, after all that stage-setting, I’m ready to return to the question that these rageful responses engendered in me.
What have they done to quench the Holy Spirit within them?
Based on what the apostles declared in the Scriptures, some would conclude that the Holy Spirit is not in them. I am not inclined to do that. It is not my role to determine whether a person has repented and invited Jesus to be their Lord and Savior. That is between them and God; if they say they are Christian, I take them at their word.
As I prepared this article, I was intrigued to learn that before Christ, a person could be filled with the Holy Spirit for an event or a season. However, He could also depart from them, as He did many times in the Old Testament. The good news of Christ is that once we accept Him and the Holy Spirit comes into our lives, He dwells with us forever and never forsakes us. That’s a beautiful thing, and it should lead us to live in gratitude to God and grace to others as we share the gift we’ve received. So where is the Holy Spirit when Christians behave un-Christianly?
1 Thessalonians 5:19 warns us, “Do not quench the Spirit.” In this context, “quench” describes extinguishing a flame or stifling or suppressing a feeling. Paul also says, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). We are assured of our salvation, and it can’t be taken from us, but we can bring sorrow to the Holy Spirit or suppress the good that comes from His presence within us.
One of the agents of suppression is discontent.
Despite the eternal assurance we have in Jesus, many American Christians are deeply discontented with their status in life. They believe their privileged status in America has diminished, and they perceive adversarial forces intend to push them to the fringes of a society where they once held dominion. I’ve written about how eloquently Dr. Prior described the evangelical pursuit of empire in her book, "The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis. The perception that the prominence of evangelical Christian culture was shrinking led to the creation of the Moral Majority in 1980, which spurred the creation of an entire subculture of institutions and movements determined to “take back” the nation for Jesus Christ.
A question for another time is why we think we need to “take it back” when it’s already His, and always has been, and always will be. He declared before giving us His parting instructions to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:18) that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). Could it be that the dominion they seek is not that of Christ, who wants us to win souls to Him through service, sacrifice, and love, but instead of man, for whom dominion means control and supremacy over others?
Into this milieu of an empire lost comes a man, unlike the others who promised evangelical Christians political and cultural changes that didn’t come to pass. This man, seething with grievance, rage, and retribution, and who characterizes the current state of America as “carnage,” taps into the discontent of the evangelical electorate and promises to “make America great again.” The Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey reveals that most evangelicals “preferred a presidential candidate who could ‘protect and preserve American culture and the American way of life’ over one who could manage the economy.”
The dominionists of the evangelical community define “American culture and the American way of life” as one where evangelical political and cultural priorities predominate. They now have their warrior, a blunt instrument to wield against all who aggrieved them or siphoned off their influence, and anyone who speaks out against this man is attacked as an enemy of Christendom. If those critics profess to be Christians, they are guilty of heresy for rebuking their King Cyrus, and a particularly venomous scorn is heaped upon them.
In The Art of Divine Contentment, Thomas Watson wrote, “Contentment lies within a man, in the heart, and the way to be comfortable is not by having our barns filled, but our mind quiet.” The apostle Paul said:
I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength. (Philippians 4:12-13)
Paul found contentment through faith in Jesus Christ regardless of his circumstances. Discontent diminishes faith, and a lack of faith can quench the Holy Spirit and allow resentment and retaliation against the sources of our discontent to overtake us.
The other prevalent quenching agent is pride, which brokers no criticism and excoriates critics.
A spirit of pride is a close cousin of the passion for empire and the discontent it breeds and makes no allowance for the airing of “dirty laundry.” Even Christian leaders I would consider measured and thoughtful in their public personas take umbrage to Christian influencers like David French, Beth Moore, Russell Moore (no relation to Beth!), and Karen Swallow Prior publicly calling out scandals and moral failings in the church. If they do so from a secular platform, most of which evangelicals view with suspicion, if not outright hostility, the rage is palpable.
All but one of the individuals I’ve mentioned have written opinion pieces for the New York Times on the state of modern American evangelical Christianity. Beth Moore has been the subject of many news articles and opinion pieces in the Times as a dissenter of Trump and the Southern Baptist Convention because it mishandled the clergy sexual abuse scandal and made missteps in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the national conversation it stimulated on the continuing racial divide in America. Whatever the circumstances that landed them in the pages of the Times, they have been on the receiving end of many evangelicals’ fury as if they had abandoned the faith and launched their attacks on American Christianity from the enemy’s camp.
The truth is that their attempts to work within evangelical institutions and with evangelical leaders to address these pressing moral issues were privately and often publicly rebuffed. The prevailing response of the evangelical community to what David Brooks, a political and cultural commentator for the New York Times, describes as “many of the raw wounds that already existed in parts of the white evangelical world: misogyny, racism, racial obliviousness, celebrity worship, resentment and the willingness to sacrifice principle for power” is to keep things hidden, deflect attention from them, or attack the messengers rather than confront these issues transparently, honestly, and with humility.
Brooks summed up the state of affairs in evangelical Christianity for those who strive to steer it back to Solus Christus - in Christ alone:
Of course there is a lot of division across many parts of American society. But for evangelicals, who have dedicated their lives to Jesus, the problem is deeper. Christians are supposed to believe in the spiritual unity of the church. While differing over politics and other secondary matters, they are in theory supposed to be unified by their shared first love — as brothers and sisters in Christ. Their common devotion is supposed to bring out the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord,” say the opening lines of a famous Christian song commonly known as “By Our Love.” In its chorus it proclaims, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love.” The world envisioned by that song seems very far away right now. The bitter recriminations have caused some believers to wonder if the whole religion is a crock.
There is an eternal consequence to this quenching of the Holy Spirit, and it’s reflected in the last sentence of Brooks’ statement. If we who believe wonder whether our faith is nonsense, then our witness is meaningless, and we have no hope of making disciples of non-believers, which is the primary purpose for the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives:
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. (Acts1:8)