The Guild
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.I would never begrudge God His providence, but, if I had known how the ecosystem of American “conservative” Christian media functioned four years ago—if I had been prophetically allowed to peek behind the curtain and had seen the ubiquitous corruption—I would have never written a single word about the Christian Nationalist movement making headway within its ecosystem. I would have avoided the entire space and, in some way, would be grateful such an on-its-face antichrist movement, chock full of antisemites, “race realists” and slavery apologists, making such headway into so-called “Christian” discourse would expose the hypocrisy and rot. I would have never created a Substack account, let alone a Twitter account. I wouldn’t have wasted six months of my life writing a book personalities in that industry called slanderous, only to now be championing its core propositions, because the men they claimed I slandered have descended to the point of extolling the good of National Socialism in answering the Jewish question. God allowed me (perhaps required is the correct word) to, piece by piece, personal acquaintance by personal acquaintance, witness how modern Christian media, to put it mildly, is far more media than Christian.
— Matthew 6:19-21
I won’t name names, not because I’ve ever been afraid to, but because I don’t want to give the guilty the benefit of full public acknowledgement of what really is an ideological victory, though one that will ultimately be cast into the fire. Besides, those who most need to hear this message will know exactly whom I’m writing about. So, forgive my vagaries in what follows, and please trust that the greatest lesson is in the ethics, not the particulars.
There is a consortium of conservative Christian academics who form what one could rightly call an unofficial guild; they work to provide each other various gigs, be it podcast appearances, journal articles or conference slots. One cannot interact with online conservative Christian commentary, especially that which shapes most of the worldview of Reformed denominations, without quickly coming to the conclusion it’s dominated by a rotation of several dozen personalities. It’s not organic, by any means....
