Joe Carter Wants You to Be Gelded
TGC's latest article on masculinity accidentally makes the case for my book
The election of 2016 saw the rise of the memelords, those who created quick graphics to mock opponents and promote friends. I came late to the party but quickly took to the model. In the early days, some would call me a theobro or edgelord. I was not familiar with these terms (I have now become educated). The basic critique was that I was engaging in tactics and rhetoric that was unbecoming of a pastor, much less a Christian.
Joe Carter is a Big Eva fan favorite. The Gospel Coalition (TGC) often trots out Joe Carter to promote a liberal framework for engaging in politics. I want to highlight areas of agreement and disagreement with his latest piece published today over at TGC, “Edgelords Won’t Inherit the Earth.”
Carter highlights many of the same issues I address in my upcoming book. Men today are facing a malaise in which they lack ambition, drive, and purpose. They are lonely and depressed, some even given to contemplate taking their own life. The church has largely failed men, particularly young men. On these things Carter and I share much agreement.
What Carter fails to deal with is his own complicity in creating this world. He seems to lack any self-awareness, like a cog in a machine just doing his part to keep the machine cranking. He belongs to one of the foremost progenitors of weak and woke Christianity and has spilt many words defending the liberal order. Rather than taking accountability for any role he had in the plight of young men today, he spends an entire article going after the guys showing up and trying to help them.
Carter’s article traffics in the predictable framing that we’ve all come to expect from TGC. He frames anyone engaging with strong, even acerbic, rhetoric as simply an anonymous troll with no actual institutional power or authority. This is effective because he can simply dismiss anything these “edgelords” say by saying that they are essentially worthless and ineffective (which is odd considering he chose to write an article attacking them).
Like Carter, I too hold up Paul as an excellent example to follow, an offensive Christian. Paul was well educated, smart, strategic, and ambitious. He was not afraid to deploy strong rhetoric nor was he limited to “edgelording.” He had an adaptable tool kit of rhetorical strategies that he utilized depending on what the situation demanded. Paul rebuked Peter to his face and tells others about it (Gal. 2), pushed arguments to their end point with sarcasm (edgelording much Paul?) by encouraging people to emasculate themselves (Gal. 5), and strikes a sorcerer blind (Acts 13).
This is all quite unfortunate for Carter who wants to hold up Paul as simply a tender hearted guy:
“The man who could win any argument consistently chose to focus instead on showing godly love.”
Notice the framing. What Carter approves of is considered showing godly love. What Carter disapproves of (confrontation, winning an argument, and name calling) is ignored at best.
When dealing with the qualifications of elders, Carter selectively engages with the expectations. He ignores the picture of the godly man, modeled by Paul himself elsewhere in favor of a soft man. The ideal elder for Carter is a domesticated manager, a man who toes the party line and doesn’t rock the boat.
All three suggestions for the audience in Carter’s article are passive. First, he suggests ignoring them (I wish Carter would follow his own advice). This can actually be effective if you want to win a contest with an enemy. Sometimes it is best to ignore them. But Carter is not following his own wisdom here. If he would, he wouldn’t have written this article.
Second, Carter suggests that people need to be educated on how the algorithm captures their attention,
“why certain content captures their attention so effectively. When they grasp that algorithms are designed to hijack their emotions to keep them doomscrolling, they have a better chance of resisting the manipulation.”
Considering TGC’s fine tuned audience capture methods, this is laughable to me. Most people know that the algorithm is feeding them content based on watch times or engagement.
What most people don’t know is that TGC is determining their public witness with a similar strategy.
“For all their tech-savviness, the younger generation is largely unaware that their attention is the ‘product’ being sold to advertisers.”
What I and others have been trying to warn people of is that the content being promoted by outlets like TGC is a fine tuned algorithmic product of liberalism.
Third, he suggests we should recover the boring virtues. I agree with him in part. I don’t believe that the entire purpose of life is to find a vocation that meets all your needs. You will probably live a life that is “boring” according to the world. Carter writes,
“This means promoting the real men who led with conviction and humility, the ones who built institutions rather than merely burning them down.”
Is Carter a Catholic bishop writing a pamphlet against Martin Luther? Because that’s what he sounds like.
In the mind of Carter and TGC, boldness and courage are often framed as the opposite of faithfulness. This is reflected in this article. This allows Carter to dismiss anyone who violates his carefully curated public witness as engaging in “spectacle” or “edgelording.”
Lastly, Carter wants to encourage young men towards meekness. I agree! He actually uses a similar definition that I use in my work: meekness is power under control. But notice the sleight of hand. He basically interprets meekness to mean “don’t rock the boat” when he says,
“It’s the opposite of the edgelord, who is unable to exercise self-control because he has an adolescent desire to be noticed. The edgelords won’t inherit the earth. The algorithms that reward them today will replace them with someone louder tomorrow. That’s the nature of the platform: It has no loyalty and confers no legacy.”
How rich! Of all the evangelical institutions, TGC knows a thing or two about algorithm chasing. In Carter’s mind, people that don’t use the same strategy as TGC just want to be noticed, all while writing for an outlet which fundamentally just wants to be noticed by coastal elites. They themselves confer no legacy to anyone, simply providing cover for the continued decline of the West. They are loyal to liberalism. Young men have no future with TGC.
The bottom line is that the TGC gatekeepers have been outflanked. They are reduced to crying out that “edgelords,” by which they mean anyone who engages in rhetoric they don’t approve of, are not faithful, not honest, and probably not Christian.
The operating assumption for guys like Carter is that we don’t need men to pursue glory leading them to righteous action, but that we need men today to simply be quiet and accept the liberal order so that we can survive. I denounce this in the strongest possible terms.
So with all that said, I would agree with Carter, we should ignore his TGC edgelording. Pre-order a copy of Offensive Christianity: Restoring the Strength of Men in a Feminized Age instead.