The Antioch Affair

Campolo, Racism on the Right, and Uncle Andrew's Hearing Problem

Dear Friends,

Tony Campolo passed away yesterday. I have mixed feelings. He was a well-known Christian social activist with somewhat complicated relationships—a man of the Left, yet also critical of liberal churches that devalued a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. For a long time he steadfastly maintained the sinfulness of homosexual acts (but not “orientation”), but eventually came to regard that, too, as licit. It was, from my vantage point, a very predictable progression and I am sorry that he couldn’t see (or care about?) the trajectory he was on. I charitably assume that he maintained his personal relationship with Jesus Christ and rest in the confidence that the Lord will adequately sort out his shortcomings. But those shortcomings were not benign here in the present world.

He was most known for his concern about poverty and hungry children. And that is an admirable legacy. This pretty famous quote captures it:

I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.

The irony is that Tony Campolo did this guilt-trip shaming routine while resolutely opposing the very thing that genuinely alleviates poverty and starvation: free, unfettered economic markets and the economic growth and productivity they generate. For Campolo the world was divided into haves and have-nots, and his solution to everything was for the State to take from the one and give it to the other. That can never work, and has never worked. And while Campolo was wagging his finger at affluent Americans, the rest of the world got to work implementing sound economic policies to varying degrees; in his own lifetime the rate of extreme poverty in the world dropped from 50% of the world’s population to 9% today. And I showed you just last week a chart showing that global starvation has dropped over that same time period from 50 deaths per 100,000 per decade to 0.5 today. Very little of that was accomplished through redistributionist transfer payments. But some people just cannot take yes for an answer and I will never comprehend it. I suspect it is because some people think wealth is bad, and in free societies a lot of people get wealthy.

Campolo’s heart may have been in the right place, but his prophetic role was decidedly a mixed bag. RIP

---

Today The Antioch Declaration is being released. It is the work of some well-known figures like Doug Wilson, James White, and others, responding to what I called the “Growing Menace.” It is a movement of young, disillusioned men turning to overt identity politics (i.e., racism) and conspiratorial antisemitism, and doing so in the name of Jesus Christ.

The statement is a sharp rebuke—not as sharp as I would have made it, but still sharp. I am grateful for these brothers to call out this rot in our midst without equivocation or dissembling. I have a quibble here and there, but I nevertheless signed the document and encourage you do so as well. Lines in the sand must be drawn, and the fact is—incredible as it still seems to me—there are real, living, breathing professing Christians with big platforms who, In The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Four, romanticize the very racial ideologies that gave us the Holocaust. It is Antichrist, and quite simply must be made utterly and entirely unwelcome in the church of Jesus Christ.

---