Hey. It’s Pulpit & Pen, the Rolex of watch blogs. Remember us? We do discernment. You may have forgotten about us, but like Lightning McQueen said about Route 66, we’re still here! And, like Route 66, we get a lot less traffic than we used to. A major reason for that is that we publish a lot less. We didn’t retire in order to raise chickens in the peace of the Midwestern prairie or anything, but there have been more pressing matters in our lives than firing up the blog every time Church of the Glades blasphemes God. Also, sometimes, nobody cares. Big Eva keeps on stealing DNA from Jurassic Park in Barbasol cans, and people keep on apathetically ignoring it.
Other times, something is very wrong, but the perpetrators are so obscure that it’s not worth covering. A good example is seeing video after video of Caitlin Clark on X getting absolutely abused on the court in the WNBA and never retweeting it because, while wrong and unjust, no one gives a crap about professional women’s basketball. I wish I could say no one gave a crap about the New Christian Right and New Christendom Press and the New Reformed Bearded Christian National Socialists (that’s a thing, right?), but I believe that’s not so. Granted, those things aren’t worth a crap, but I think it’s time to finally address them here at Pulpit & Pen. So, here it is in the plainest terms: Joel Webbon, Brian Sauve, Eric Conn, Dale Partridge, and their ilk are bad. They should be marked and avoided. If there are young men in your church being influenced by them, it’s a problem, and it needs to be dealt with.
Back in the heyday of Pulpit & Pen, this blog’s founder, JD Hall, could see men like Webbon, Sauve, and Partridge coming from a mile away. He used to refer to those in the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement as men who “traded doctrine like Pokémon cards.” These so-called “reformed” men put the popular style of their time over theological substance. Hall lamented their influence thusly:
“There is a plague of young men who call themselves Christians and call themselves Reformed, who can quote the greatest theologians and speak all the right lingo, and who call the Puritans their homeboys, and who trade doctrines back and forth like Pokémon cards. They believe what makes them Reformed is the right catechism, or believe that their doctrine has something to do with beards and beer and cigars, but in spite of their facial hair and affinity for certain Christian liberties, are nothing but little boys playing church!”
If this doesn’t describe the followers of Webbon, Sauve, Conn, and Partridge, I don’t know what does. Granted, they aren’t a part of the Young, Restless, and Reformed movement. There is now a different movement. It’s a Christian Nationalism where Nazi- and Third Reich-related literature can show up at conference vendor tables and then be defended as mere historical interest. Its orbit has repeatedly produced rhetoric that is hard to read as anything but racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic. It’s American History X goes to church.
How did we get here? The answer is obvious. Sunday worship is feminized. Young Christian men are alienated. Church and denominational leaders (think David Platt and Matt Chandler) push wokeness. Young conservative Christian men are alienated. At the same time, secular society is crumbling under the influence of feminism, BLM, Gay Pride, DEI, and Critical Race Theory, which have also made inroads in the church. New York City elects a democratic socialist Muslim mayor. Conservative young white men are alienated. There is no shortage of disaffected men to whom to appeal. Enter the New Christian Right. Granted, Doug Wilson–Jeff Durbin-style theonomy entered first, but now Moscow and Ogden are engaged in a dubious battle for the hearts and minds of young white men who have more frustration with society than theological grounding.
To be sure, the leaders of the New Christian Right are men who have done their fair share of trading Pokémon. How else do you explain the visible repositioning of some of these men from softer evangelical or charismatic-adjacent worlds into bearded “reformed” preachers pushing a brand of masculine Christianity? Y’all remember Duck Dynasty? The Robertson brothers grew those beards and changed the way they dressed as part of their hunting and outdoors brand. It’s a work. It’s a costume. It’s a gimmick. Go find at a before-and-after picture. Sauve and Webbon are doing the same thing as the Robertsons. Eric Conn, one of Sauve’s co-pastors, literally worked in outdoor journalism before coming to Ogden to be a pastor at Sauve’s church. Dale Partridge was a social media influencer before starting his church and seminary. Again, y’all, it’s a gimmick. Think hard about that. They are using church as a gimmick, a launching pad for their podcasts, music releases, schools, and publishing enterprises.
Whatever pastoral role they hold, their public footprint often looks less like ordinary local-church ministry and more like religious entrepreneurship. They found (and re-found) their own churches as easily as a businessman starts a gas station, and they are just as in charge. I challenge you to research the ecclesiology of Covenant Bible Church, Refuge Church, and King’s Way Reformed Church. Who appoints the elders there? Who can fire the elders? Who, if anyone, has any oversight at all? Where do the so-called pastors of those churches direct the majority of their efforts: inward toward the local congregation, or outward to their podcast and conference audiences? From where comes their funding? They are known more for tweeting than pastoring, and their most vociferous followers are a cadre of anonymous X accounts who could be lurking in a pew near you.
Speaking of those vociferous anonymous followers, those are real people. Somewhere, those men have jobs, churches, and families who, I imagine, would be mortified by their online behavior and support of New Christian Right causes and leaders. I think that says something about the movement. If your movement is so vile that its followers have to hide under a cloud of anonymity to support it, then maybe you should give it up. Here’s another thing to think about: since when has the word “new” ever been good in the post-apostolic era? Usually, the “new” is a rejection of orthodoxy or basic Christian decency. Imagine the arrogance of men who would look at 2,000 years of church history and decide that they were “new.” We Christians know there is nothing new under the sun, and we should see the New Christian Right for what it is: just one more schismatic movement that will do more damage to the local church than whatever progress it makes taking dominion in the prevailing culture.
*Please note that the preceding is my personal opinion. It is not necessarily the opinion of any entity by which I am employed, any church at which I am a member, any church which I attend, or any educational institution from which I have graduated. Any copyrighted material displayed or referenced is done under the doctrine of fair use.
**Editor’s note. An earlier version of this post had a formatting and ordering error that put the wrong paragraph in a quote block.
