Chris Bolt, a leftist blogger who masquerades as a “conservative” Southern Baptist pundit (but is widely known to be on the ‘woke’ side of any given argument) took potshots at Pulpit & Pen communications manager Cody Libolt last week. Since our writing about Bolt in the post Gone to Hell: Founders Ministries Teams Up With Notorious Leftist Blogger, Bolt has deleted his Twitter account and his post critical of Libolt.
As I wrote in that article…
“As a supposedly “reasonable” conservative, he’s a liberal on 9 positions out of 10. But he’s a conservative, you guys. For real. You know, because he says so. Chris Bolt is to conservatism what the Lincoln Project is to the Republican Party. Chris Bolt is the Susan Collins of Southern Baptist conservatism.
Of course, Bolt considers Mohler to be a conservative in spite of the fact that Mohler is the granddaddy of the SBC’s Great Awokening, is speaking out both sides of his mouth on nearly every issue, is promoting Critical Race Theorists to the highest places in his institution, and is squarely behind leftist evanjellyfish, Russell Moore and Danny Akin. So, consider Bolt’s past defenses of Karen Swallow Prior as a solid conservative with a grain of salt.
It seems that Bolt ran for the hills, deleting tweets as fast as he could that demonstrate he’s a liberal wolf in sheep’s clothing, which of course is how leftists operate. As J. Gresham Machen so aptly demonstrated in Christianity and Liberalism, liberals always masquerade as conservatives. In the case of Chris Bolt, he set up a blog with the word in the title.
Abracadabra…conservatism somehow.
I’m glad Bolt deleted his cyber footprints. He needed to. There was simply too much evidence of him opposing the Social Justice Contras on every turn to position himself as anything but a fringe moderate in an Overton Window that’s gone solidly to the left.
The latest post from Bolt, however, is not written about Libolt but me personally. I’ll not link it, lest he endures a spike in readership that gives him the feeling his publication is anything but a tumbleweed-blown ghost town of a blog.
Let it suffice to say that other than revisioning his entire long history of getting things wrong, doubling down on his defense of Wicked Witch of the Southeast, Karen Swallow Prior (who thinks abortion isn’t murder) and making a few things up (I’ve never attacked Todd Friel, Karen Swallow Prior did more than “reference” a transgender bathroom suggestion, and I have no idea who “Garret O’Hara” is), the oddest thing about it is that Bolt wrote the piece in the third person.
Weird, right?
“Chris Bolt is a conservative,” says…Chris Bolt?
For example, Bolt writes, “Hall tries to dismiss Bolt’s critique of Revoice – ask yourself why a supposed conservative would do that – by attempting to discredit Bolt, comparing him to a RINO and Baghdad Bob.“
Of course, I dismiss his flaccid critique of Revoice because he supports the people who serve as its muse and who endorsed the conference. Someone with such lacking discernment shouldn’t share their opinion on much anything at all.
My question is in regards to Bolt’s health. He deleted his Twitter after our criticism, no doubt trying to scrub it of five years of gushing liberalism, and then his article about our Communications Manager. And now, he writes a defense for himself in the third person.
Weird.
It used to be, back before the advent of Christian alternative media, Southern Baptist pew-sitters could be convinced of their leaders ‘conservatism’ by a few words well-spoken about inerrancy and positionally aligning with the pro-life movement. Thankfully, today’s Internet-savvy news consumers are well aware that paying lip-service to those two issues is not the be-all and end-all to real Biblical conservatism. Rather, those two things often just constitute a mask snuggled in over the snout of a wolf.
In the end, I’m thankful that history always vindicates discernment work. I’m also thankful our critics, like Bolt, seem to be crazy as loons.
