“Through a series of personal scandals and the broader collapse of credibility surrounding social justice and Covid narratives, the second generation lost much of its authority. I do not want to overstate this. The Gospel Coalition still hosts a well attended biannual conference. But the momentum has shifted. The third generation of the Young, Restless, and Reformed effectively marks the end of the movement as a movement.”
(Jon Harris) Bob the Baptist put out a video recently that is making the private message rounds in my circles. Essentially, his thesis is that baked into the young, restless, and reformed movement, otherwise known as the New Calvinism, was a particular weakness that made it susceptible to the manosphere and the Pagan Right. It is a thoughtful and well documented take, and worth your time if you are interested in understanding how many people who bought into The Gospel Coalition or Acts 29 started prioritizing things like race essentialism, overturning women’s suffrage, and questioning the validity of the Holocaust narrative.
One thing I appreciate about Bob’s take is that it does not attempt to locate the cause of this development in Reformed theology itself. In other words, belief in predestination, or even Covenant Theology, did not lead to blaming Jews or Israel for just about every social problem. I had a friendly disagreement with Will Spencer a few months ago along these lines. Calvinism itself did not open people up to wokeness or what I call the Dark Right. New Left ideas emerged across denominational lines. This becomes more obvious when one takes the long view of history and finds Anabaptists, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and others all adopting social justice ideology at various points.
CRN has compiled a list of false teachers and several other professing Christians we’ve warned you about over the years. The list also contains those we must keep an eye on plus movements, organizations and “frauds, phonies and money-grubbing religious quacks” to mark and avoid as per Romans 16:17-18