Jared,
Listen, we know you make a living primarily from your ability to make pithy tweets and shmooze shoulders with prominent evangelical celebrities. We get it. But our ability to stomach blind sycophancy has its limits, and that limit for us happens to be defiling intellectual honesty.
And you, Jared, have been intellectually dishonest. It’s beneath you, and it’s shameful.
Two days ago, Joe Carter, who is a contributor at both the ERLC and TGC (which, let’s face it, is pretty much the same organization these days), made a post with asinine, reaching assertions. He jumped off the cliff of conclusions, set fire to logic, defecated upon reasoning, and victimized history. Carter’s article was embarrassing, and in any secular field that was competitive in the scholarly or academic Marketplace of Ideas, it would have been career ending. His article was just that bad.
To summarize, Carter’s arguments went like this:
The recent synagogue shooter (name withheld) was a kinist. He also referred, in his manifesto, to the political ideology known as Cultural Marxism. Therefore, to use the term, Cultural Marxism, is Kinist. Furthermore, because Cultural Marxism came out of the Frankfurt School, and most of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School were Jewish, it is anti-Semitic to argue against Cultural Marxism.
The reason people have roundly rejected Carter’s diatribe is because it is foolish, fatuous, imbecilic, and demonstrably daft. It was sub-intellectual σκύβαλον. It was darn-near plagiarized from a 2003 Southern Poverty Law Center article that first compared the use of the term Cultural Marxism with anti-Semitism based upon the faulty logic described above.
However, the term was actually invented by a Marxist (Trent Schroyer in 1973), not by kinists. Carter’s claim that it was invented by William Lind is historically invalid. Furthermore, as the leading opponent of theonomy perhaps in the world, I can tell you that Carter knows little to nothing about kinism, which was evident in his article. He must have done a Wikipedia search or something, and it shows.
And yet, you provided cover for your Evangelical Intelligentsia crony here:
Dear Moron, that’s not what happened.
Forgive the use of the term μωρῷ, but this is mental midgetry. It is foolishness. It is intellectually vapid. It is shamefully bereft of intelligence.
No one rebuked Joe Carter for criticizing kinism, which no one but a tiny number of theonomists hold to (and that number is, to reiterate, tiny; there are more flat-earthers out there by far). The articles I saw criticizing Joe Carter’s piece, from Doug Wilson’s to P. Andrew Sandlin’s to my own, criticized Carter entirely on the grounds of his intellectual ineptitude in drawing parallels between kinism and use of the term Cultural Marxist as being driven by anti-Semitism.
In nothing, written by anyone of any notability, did anyone rebuke Joe Carter for criticizing kinism, which almost anyone rightfully finds repugnant. We criticized him for arguing like a third-grade Girl Scout who just graduated from her first United Methodist VBS taught by a gender studies professor.
In other words, we criticized Carter for what is one of the dumbest articles (and most blatantly politically biased articles) ever to be published at The Social Gospel Coalition (and that’s saying something).
I, for one, have had enough of our evangelical overlords who make fame primarily from their tweet history and whose contributions are almost entirely relegated to social media and present themselves as intellectually astute. They are often children, with little minds and even smaller consciences.
I’m going to address Carter’s article on the Polemics Report later today, and I assure you there’s not a pro-kinist bone in my body. Unlike Carter, I have challenged the grandson of the original kinist in a moderated debate. I was writing about Rushdoony’s kinism when you, Jared Wilson, were still finding Gospel themes in Hollywood blockbusters.
The issue is that we – that is, those of us who use a term invented by Cultural Marxists to describe their (and your) ideology – refuse to be called racist or anti-Semitic merely because we adequately label your worldview and you’d prefer to have nuanced, gelatinous positions that are hard to nail down.
Instead of just shouting “Racist!” and “Kinist!” and “Anti-Semitic!” like a bunch of crybaby college freshmen on the campus of UC Berkeley, make your points and intellectually defend your positions.
