Return To Your Senses

No.223: August 9, 2024

Welcome to The Square Inch, a Friday newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is normally a paid subscription feature but today’s is free of charge. Please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with an occasional “Off The Shelf” feature about books, a frequent Pipe & Dram feature of little monologues/conversations in my study, and Wednesday’s “The Quarter Inch,” a quick(er) commentary on current events.

Dear Friends,

Eight years ago I had a surreal, almost out-of-body experience. I woke up one day and I thought everyone I knew—or so it seemed—had lost their minds. This RealityTV star, a worldview-and-substance-free blowhard New Yorker, decided to run for President and you know the rest of the story. What amazed me most is that I could watch Donald Trump give a speech and think to myself, this is possibly the dumbest and most incoherent thing I’ve ever heard. And people I’d known and respected for years, decades even, would exclaim, “Isn’t he awesome?” Honestly, I still don’t get it.

But that isn’t important right now. This past week has been the second surreal, out-of-body-like experience I’ve had in my life. I try to remind myself that the “online” world is just a small fragment of the real world, that it isn’t really very important in the grand scheme of things, and that people aren’t really like their online personae and I shouldn’t judge too harshly. But it really bothers me nonetheless. When a person you’ve admired and read and followed for years and years suddenly takes leave of his or her senses, it is disorienting, to say the least.

Last week Daily Wire writer Megan Basham published her book, Shepherds For Sale. And what played out ever since is pretty much incomprehensible to me. I mean, I do know what’s going on (keep reading), but it still stuns me. She has been legitimately criticized (see, e.g., here and here) for misleading and/or dishonest treatment of a number of her targets (Gavin Ortlund—here and here—JD Greear, Karen Swallow Prior, and others). The mischaracterizations are in plain print. In English, not Sanskrit. Basham says a person said “X” when the other person said “not X.” Just yesterday Neil Shenvi posted a paragraph in which she writes that Karen Swallow Prior engaged in “moral equivalency.” In the article Basham herself cites, Prior writes, “By no means am I saying [x and y] are morally equivalent.” And …

Basham and her tribe look at the sentences, squint a bit, tilt their heads, and then literally say, “Yep. Megan’s right.” To say I find this baffling is an understatement. As for Basham herself, when confronted by Neil Shenvi with very specific questions about her treatment of JD Greear she dismissed him as “pedantic,” Bulverized that he’s upset because it was his pastor getting criticized, insisted her specific claim was justified by nebulous “broader context,” and never did answer the question. Go ahead and poke around those Twitter threads. They’re not pretty. When addressed by Ben Marsh or Janet Mefferd, she ignores it and smugly proclaims she doesn’t care. When she does attempt to defend her citations, it essentially goes like this: Look, we all know that so-and-so is a bad actor from all these other bad things I’ve claimed, so we all know that he or she meant what I say he or she meant. Read this Tweet. She can’t directly quote Greear on a specific point because “Greear is extremely skilled at speaking with a forked tongue so as to maintain plausible deniability.” I thought that was supposed to be what she’s proving in the book, so I guess she thinks she can prove it from a lack of evidence as well as its presence. Amazing how that works, and it is certainly a “Heads I win, Tails you lose” proposition for the people she writes about. Basically, she finds meaning not in words, but in penumbras emanating from the text. Figments of her own imagination projected onto her bogeymen. I honestly—and I mean this—miss her former career giving charming and insightful film reviews for the World and Everything In It. Those were edifying, and vastly preferable to this new career.

I thought about writing a parody essay in the style of Megan Basham, only about her. I could wheel out all the rhetorical devices, play Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon and point out all sorts of “questionable” associations, and put the most uncharitable spin on her every sentence. I think it would have been a great and punchy essay (I’m pretty good at that sort of thing), but I couldn’t stomach the thought of even pretending to do that to her, even for illustrative purposes. So then I thought about writing a more measured, lengthy essay on scholarship and the ethics of speech. I was going to show, in meticulous detail, the multitude of fallacies she routinely employs. But, having seen so many otherwise highly educated and respectable people not recognizing libel when it is right in front of their eyeballs, I came to the conclusion that, (A) You cannot teach people to read when they are determined to not know how to read. And (B) It is usually fruitless to attempt to argue somebody out of a view they were never argued into in the first place.

I believe my first reaction to all this last week was exactly correct: this is just pure, 120-proof, cask-strength, reactionary, toxic tribalism. Megan Basham, you see, has the right enemies. And people who share some measure of her breathtaking hostility toward those same imagined enemies are highly motivated to see her vindicated. Even to the point of looking at two completely contradictory sentences and saying, “They’re the same sentence.” Mind you, this is the “live not by lies” and “facts don’t care about your feelings” crowd. Tribalism is a helluva drug.

I don’t care very much about Basham’s book. What I do care about are my longtime, deeply respected friends defending garbage. You know who you are, and knock it off. The Ninth Commandment is still in full force and it doesn’t budge because of “what time it is” or because the overall “vibe” seems right or because it’s at the expense of the right “enemies.” And she isn’t “taking flak” because she’s “over the target.” She’s taking flak because people get justly upset at having words put in their mouths and having the words they do say twisted in the most uncharitable ways imaginable. This is not about culture war, not progressivism, not fighting the good fight. Ultimately, this is about the honor and glory of God. None of you wake up in the morning wondering if Brian Mattson respects you, God forbid. I’m nobody. But all of you hopefully wake up in the morning wondering if the Lord Jesus Christ is pleased with you. And I can tell you with epistemic certainty that he hates lying with a holy and perfect passion.

And the worst and most tragic part of all is that most of the people whom you hold in such ugly contempt are not even your enemies. What a waste. Of time. Of life. Of joy. Return to your senses, please.

---

That was an unpleasant thing to have to write, but now I’m off to pleasanter things. My daughter’s wedding! I’ve got my wardrobe all sorted out, and the only job remaining for me is to figure out a really good toast. Thanks for reading The Square Inch Newsletter, and have a wonderful weekend!