Welcome to The Square Inch, a weekly newsletter on Christianity, culture, and all of the many-varied “square inches” of God’s domain. This is normally a paid subscription feature with a preview before the paywall, so please consider subscribing to enjoy this weekly missive along with 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,
Social media as we know it debuted twenty years ago—Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006. The iPhone arrived in 2007. For twenty years we (our society at large) have pretended that we hate each other. It has been fun. We built platforms pretending that we hate each other. We raised billions of dollars for various social and political causes by talking about how much we hate each other. We entertained ourselves with endless jokes and memes about how much we hate each other.
Twenty years later we hate each other.
Hatred does not come from an object, of course, like a desktop computer or handheld device. It doesn’t come from digital platforms, either. Technology is not the source of hatred. It is what comes out of a man that defiles him, Jesus taught, not what goes in. And yet. Using technology to pretend, half-joke, or play-act hatred for political or money-raising or entertainment purposes has, in fact, resulted in the real thing.
Social media is an environment like a petri dish, where all the deepest native hatreds and bigotries of our hearts have been carefully cultured—sorted, even: specimens with like hatreds grouped with similar specimens with like hatreds. These cultures were catalyzed and nurtured and encouraged, not from the sinister, external hand of some “Dr. Evil” named Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, or the suits at Google whose names nobody can ever recall. Autonomously, rather, the human heart doing what the sinful human heart does absent constraints. Make no mistake: there weren’t any constraints. “Terms of Service” were a joke nobody read and rarely enforced. The added benefit of anonymity supercharged the phenomenon. People could now write out and publish to the world their sickest thoughts and find people who also had those thoughts. The cultures separated, found each other, grew, and multiplied.
I have friends who scoff at this kind of thing. All they can hear is me blaming technology, and of course there are many other complex factors to how our society has arrived where it has. But the environmental effects of social media are not really debatable. We know it. We all know it. The fact is that our environments and the company we keep (even digital) do, in fact, shape our character. The Bible teaches this. “Do not be misled: bad company corrupts good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33). Psalm 1 begins with a progression of one who “walks,” “stands,” and then “sits” in the “seat of mockers.” That sharp historical spike in depression among teenage girls? It coincided exactly with the debut of Instagram, as Jonathan Haidt has documented. The social contagion of trans identity? Incubated in the digital hellhole called Tumblr, as Abigail Shrier documented. White supremacy and antisemitism? 4Chan and Reddit. The spike in political polarization and radicalization? Twitter. People begin by walking by, then they stand there observing, and then like a gambling addict just happening by a poker game they take a seat and they’re all in.
Politicians leaned into it, oblivious to or uncaring about the dangers or fallout. What the Founders of our country feared more than anything else 249 years ago was what they called “factions.” Where they saw factions, our politicians see “constituencies.” Like the Frenchman who said, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader!” our political class has courted and pampered and fed every base instinct—every hatred—harbored and cherished by these factions. It’s what pundits mean when they say a political speech “served up red meat.” Two Presidents in a row have catered in this way. President Biden—to the extent that he knew he was President—practically let the newly graduated, fresh-faced woke and enlightened interns run the country. They eventually used the autopen to pardon an appalling number of vile felons they labeled as misunderstood “political prisoners.” That kind of thinking just got an innocent Ukrainian refugee savagely murdered in cold blood on a bus in Charlotte (the perpetrator, a man with fourteen prior criminal convictions. Poor, misunderstood fellow). President Trump, from the beginning, threw red meat to haters of immigrants, winked-winked at “Groypers,” hosted Nick Fuentes and Kanye West long after their antisemitism was well known. I actually don’t believe he’s a racist at all. But he has a large constituency of them. And he must follow them, because he is their leader. He also gave blanket pardons to his faction. “Political prisoners,” you know.
It has been a very long time since I have heard a President of the United States talk about being the President of all Americans. Joe Biden gave that outrageous speech—written by said woke interns, no doubt—in front of Independence Hall basically calling half the country Nazis. Donald Trump often refers to “real” Americans, by which he means the ones who voted for him. The others invariably “hate America” and are its “enemies.” Barack Obama probably talked about unity, but it was shallow because he was in fact a very divisive President, despite the romantic whitewashing of his tenure by mainstream commentators.
I have to go all the way back … look at that coincidence … twenty years to remember a President talking like that. His name was George W. Bush, and he had the opportunity to bring national unity after a horrific event. I wish we had a leader, or leadership class, that had the ability to do something similar, lower the temperature in this country, to appeal to our better angels, but alas. They’ve sold out to the factions lock, stock, and barrel. Did you see the Democrat leadership asked about Charlie Kirk’s murder? Nearly all of them said the appropriate thing, followed by a “but.” As in, but he kinda sorta had it coming, speaking those opinions out loud. How ironic and lame can Leftists be? UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer sent out a Tweet condemning Charlie Kirk’s murder and extolling the virtues of … free speech. Just last week his government arrested a comedian for his social media posts.
They. I mentioned it in my newsletter on Wednesday. They. They did this. They are responsible. They must answer for it. They must pay. That is a strange way of talking about a murder that, as far as we can tell, involved a single individual—about whom, as of this writing, we know little, much less an identity. “They” is a word that contains a world. A worldview. One shaped and cultured by an obsession with our divisions, to the complete obliteration of our commonalities. When I see ostensible “conservatives” liberally use the term, I shiver. Group identity politics is supposed to be the province of the Left.
I had no sooner sent off my lament for Charlie Kirk, and my lament of the use of the word “they,” than I saw Nick Freitas—a popular state representative and online darling of the MAGA right (yes, he built his large platform online—where else?) publish this:
I am told that as a state representative this is the moment where I'm supposed to express my heartfelt condolences and then stand in solidarity with those on the other side of the aisle as we condemn political violence and stand unified as one people.
But we aren't ‘one people’ are we? The truth is we haven't been for some time now, and there is really no point in pretending anymore, if there ever was. We are two very different peoples. We may occupy the same piece of geography, but that is where the similarities seem to abruptly end.
He goes on to say that this is “not a civil dispute among fellow countrymen. It’s a war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist with one another.”
That, my friends, is a terrible way to honor Charlie Kirk. Because that is a repudiation of our classically liberal order and a recipe for violence. That is, in other words, giving up on Charlie’s own mission in life. He believed he could speak and persuade people, and he saw it as his calling, and he did it with incredible bravery, going into the lion’s den on college campuses around this country. And he succeeded in ways nobody imagined he could. Fine way to honor him, to give up on his cause. Because of one person with a bolt-action hunting rifle? Not exactly the image of the bearded manly-man with bold courage you were wishing to portray, Mr. Freitas. I commend to you Ben Domenech’s essay on Charlie Kirk’s legacy, which beautifully argues that reactions like that are a betrayal of Kirk’s cause.
But there I go again, punching to the right. Man, does that irritate people. Why do I always have to criticize would-be conservatives? Don’t I know how evil progressives are? How dare I draw moral comparisons between the God-hating Left and the “Jesus-loving” American Right? I must just be one of those sell-out squishes who wants to be liked by the “elites” and invited to cocktail parties. Right?
Wrong. I will tell you a reason or two why I talk about the weaknesses and blind spots and sins of the Right. Because I don’t know a great many people on the Left. I do not live, move, or have my being in those circles. I assure you that none of them read what I write. They don’t listen to me. I have less than zero influence on them.
For me to incessantly—and exclusively, which is the real demand—pile on at the activist Left’s obvious outrages like the trans insanity, their hatred of Christianity, opposition to freedom of speech, their cancel culture, media biases, and all the rest would be lazy. It might build me a modest online estate, as it has for so many other social entrepreneurs. Every two-bit mediocrity has a podcast doing that sort of thing, if that’s what you’re after. Feeding the frenzy, tickling the ears of people desperate to see another lib “owned” brings lots of clicks, shares, and for some people money. But doing that would also feed the cancer I see in the political community I do intersect with: what used to be accurately known as conservatism, but which has become an inchoate and hardly recognizable populism. I think my job is to write to “my” people. They are the ones for whom I feel more responsibility.
They. I need to return to that word. A useful word, but also liable to be a dangerous and sweeping abstraction. I am hesitant to do this because I am not sure I can pull it off. But let me try to get at what bothers me by talking about … Calvinism. I admit that is a wild change of subject, so hold on tight.
In the history of the Reformed theology stemming from Calvin’s Geneva there arose from time to time factions often labeled “Hyper-Calvinists.” Hyper-Calvinism is not Calvinism at all, in my estimation, but it has some important semantic and conceptual similarities. Hyper-Calvinists make everything about God’s absolute eternal decree of Election and Reprobation. So great and important is this doctrine that it essentially is the only doctrine. There are the elect and the damned, in God’s mind, from eternity. Fixed and inalterable. Hyper-Calvinists allow or positively encourage this doctrine to swallow up or overshadow or displace history itself. The whole messy world of change, of people having journeys or narrative arcs is just an illusion (in this it owes far more to Greek philosophy than John Calvin or the Bible). Offering the gospel to reprobate people (how the Hyper-Calvinist can tell who is who escapes me) is not a “well-meant” offer. People do not move “closer” to the kingdom. They are in or they are out, based on the timeless, changeless decree somehow known in advance by our semi-Gnostic Hyper-Calvinist. They know the ends, and they cancel out the means. Hyper-Calvinists hate “seeker sensitive” churches. There are no seekers. Reprobates don’t seek, you see.
For the Hyper-Calvinist everything is about the antithesis, the absolute divide between good and evil, God’s elect and everyone else. For the Hyper-Calvinist, anyone not Elect (again, how they know is a mystery) is a “they.” The Reprobate. Evil. Incapable of any good whatsoever. I often call these the “1-Point Calvinists” because they only seem to know the first one (and even that one they don’t get): Total Depravity. You know who had a very similar theology? Westboro Baptist Church, the notorious little cult in Kansas that used to make news for outrageous behavior that they justified because it was targeted at “them.”
I could write a book on everything that is wrong with all this, starting with the fact that the God who decrees all things, the end from the beginning, created a world with time and change and creatures with self-consciousness and wills and ability to relate to him and the world around them. And it is in and through this history that his decree is realized and brought to fruition. History is not an illusion happening in spite of God’s decree. It is reality because of God’s decree. And that reality and decree involves change, people converting and being persuaded and moving from one “category” or status to another: from wrath to grace.
Moreover, in that history God himself showers even the Reprobate with real, if not ultimately salvific, grace. The Reformed—by which I mean the real Calvinists—call this “common grace.” This consists of all the good things unbelievers have and do. People—let’s call them “they”—are not as evil as they could possibly be. The sun rises on the evil and the good, and God showers rain “on the just and the unjust” (Matt. 5:45). “If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him?” (Matt. 7:11). Jesus says even the reprobate can genuinely love his or her kids.
Even the reprobate can lament a murder and mean it.
You would not necessarily think that’s the case if all you had to go on was a hefty diet of right wing conservative and even “Christian” commentary today. I get that people are emotionally raw over Charlie’s murder. So am I. But this reflex to immediately start talking about “they” and “them” is poison. Do I think left wing radicalism likely bears some responsibility for motivating this murderer? Yes, I absolutely do. That is not at all a stretch of the imagination. But “left wing radicalism” is an it—an ideology. “They” refers to people, actual human beings, who may or may not hold to an ideology at maximal or equal levels of knowledge, self-consciousness, tenacity, and determination. Because of this salient fact, they did not kill Charlie Kirk. They are not liable or responsible for killing Charlie Kirk. That would be a he. An individual. Conservatives are not supposed to suffer from pronoun confusion.
I remember when a well-known Pastor once wrote in The Gospel Coalition that my grandparent’s generation were guilty of lynching blacks, and he unmistakably meant that each and every person of that entire generation bore blood-guilt for those atrocities. People were outraged. As they should have been. My grandparents, tucked away in the far northeast corner of North Dakota plowing fields, or trying to scrape together a living working in a machine shop in downtown Minneapolis, had absolutely nothing to do with lynching blacks. It was a complete affront.
I feel the same way when people (many of whom know the article I just referenced and had the same reaction) say “they” killed Charlie Kirk. Who is “they”? Who are we at “war” with? My very left-wing, pro-LGBTQ neighbor who walked across the street to give me vegetables from her garden this summer? She’s responsible for killing Charlie? I am at “war” with her? What does that mean, Mr. Freitas & Company? She and I cannot “coexist”? Is that what I am being told, as a matter of ideological purity?
I don’t believe the world is sorted into white hats and black hats or easily identifiable Elect and Reprobate. Because I’m not a Hyper-Calvinist or member of Westboro Baptist Church. I believe the real illusion is the one we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe for twenty years: that the Internet and social media is the real world and that people can be easily sorted into these artificial silos, and that we are entitled to hate people grouped into another silo. That was the assassin’s view, too. We’ve convinced ourselves that persuasion is impossible, the Reprobate is unchangeable, and there is no transition from wrath to grace.
The God I believe in is in the change business. That’s what Charlie Kirk believed, too.
The fatalism implied in the rhetoric of “they” is functional atheism.
I will leave you with this image. It is a picture of “them.” A congregation of tens of thousands of them. They live in one of the deepest blue, most liberal urban cities in America. One about to elect a real-life, actual Communist as their mayor, in fact. It is a picture of them standing, silent. Reports are that you could hear traffic outside the walls. No boos. No jeers. No celebration. Just respect. This is the real world.
Thank you for reading The Square Inch Newsletter. Have a blessed weekend.
"The cultures separated, found each other, grew, and multiplied." --- I think your article touches on a crippling weakness within the church, which is the aloofness by which has become the status quo in how we engage one another. If more of us understood that apathy is the opposite of love, I wonder if factions of us would unite over our need to confess we aren't pretending. The Bible declares our non-engagement with one another is hatred.
The internet hasn’t made it easier to love one another sacrificially—it has made it easier to avoid doing so.This is the trajectory of complacent people. America and its Christians have been successfully lured into the internet's “community and customs.” This is why we fail to recognize with any urgency our dissolving sense of true Christian community.
I think this is why we relate to the martyrdom of Charlie more than his mission.
Spot on, Brian.