Last week, leftists and Social Justice Warriors called for a boycott of Pulpit & Pen, which is independent and often times blunt Christian news. Incensed (whether real or fake) at our use of “trigger words” regarding an Intersectional Golden Goose, Jackie Hill Perry, snowflakes melted into a collective puddle on Social Media. Hundreds of Social Justice Warriors called for a boycott of Pulpit & Pen, posting screenshots of them blocking our Twitter account. Others tried to flag our Facebook page for being politically incorrect. Small-time blogs wrote posts encouraging people to not post our articles.
Of course, the strategy did not work. Pulpit & Pen has more readers and supporters than ever, with overwhelmingly positive feedback over the last few days. While hundreds threw fits on social media, our article about Jackie Hill Perry’s followers has more than 12 thousand Facebook shares. A tweet with 8 ‘likes,’ which has received so much over-blown criticism, has now led to hundreds of thousands of people reading about how dangerous Jackie Hill Perry is.
Thanks for your criticism.
WHY THE BOYCOTT?
A Social Justice Warrior, or SJW for short, is someone who has confused the Gospel with social activism. Authentic Christianity is concerned with the redemption of souls. Liberalism is concerned with the redemption of society. Due to intensive propaganda in powerful parachurch organizations, many evangelicals have abandoned the call for personal salvation for the cry of social reform. Modern evangelicals have adopted the “old liberalism,” however by a different name.
Conservatives love free speech. Liberals hate free speech. Conservatives are fine with truth. Liberals think truth is unloving.
What these SJWs and liberals are doing is learned behavior. They’ve learned it from Antifa. They’ve learned it from Black Lives Matter. They’ve learned it from the #MeToo movement. They’ve learned it on college campuses and at universities. If they don’t like something someone has said, they just shout them down or run them out…in the name of tolerance.
To suppress free speech, the number one tactic employed by the American left is to accuse the truth-tellers of racism, sexism, or homophobia. Because these accusations are so problematic for the accused, it keeps people from honestly discussing things like race, sex, and sexuality and this is how free speech is therefore suppressed.
This tactic is being employed by the evangelical left toward conservative Christian news and commentary.
As stated above, a few hundred critics have brought out tens of thousands in support of Pulpit & Pen. But why did their boycott fail so miserably?
WHY DID IT FAIL?
First, SBC Voices called for a boycott and block of Pulpit & Pen. As we have documented, their readership has declined to less than 270k on Alexa web ranking since going full SJW, which means it’s virtually unread. Nonetheless, they urged their meager audience to boycott Pulpit & Pen because of our “racism, sexism, and homophobia.” Dave Miller also, very explicitly, pronounced me and our senior correspondent, Seth Dunn, of being outside the Christian faith (our editor, admins, and copyrighters all avoided his anathema, thank goodness).
In doing so, SBC Voices earned a few new supporters…
Some of those happy at SBC Voices’ boycott of Pulpit & Pen’s conservative voice were trannies with axes to grind.
To the left is “Tammy” Rainey who, like Bruce Jenner, is a man. He began to cheer on SBC Voices, happy that they were taking a stand against the “homophobic” Pulpit & Pen.
“Tammy” claims on his Facebook page to be a “Trans advocate.” Apparently he, like Dave Miller, is a fan of Jackie Hill Perry and thinks it’s wrong to call her “butch.” What do you want to bet “Tammy” also thinks it’s wrong to call him effeminate?
The first problem with boycotting the Christian Free Press because it is too conservative (you know, calling it as you see it) and not “nice” enough is that it by necessity coalesces you with the enemies of Christ who likewise share a distaste for truthfulness.
Southern Baptist pastors and transgenders working together to stone truth-tellers…now that’s emblematic of our age.
You can see SBC Voices rally the transgender community on their Facebook page.
Actual Christians looking at what’s happening with this so-called boycott are going to figure out pretty quickly that something’s not right.
Second, it’s pretty stupid to beg people not to give Pulpit & Pen any attention by writing blogs about our news site, tweeting about us, and posting Facebook statuses against us. No one has accused Dave Miller of being the sharpest knife in the drawer, but the lack of logic in this ill-advised boycott is silly.
To be clear, Pulpit & Pen doesn’t believe that the attempted boycott has measurably driven to us any web traffic except for what we have written about it ourselves. SBC Voices, Lyndon Unger, Emily Thomes or anyone else with micro-platforms could be uniformly combined, and it wouldn’t make a difference in our readership, pro or con. Hundreds, or even thousands, could band together on Twitter or Facebook and it wouldn’t make a dent in the tens of thousands who share our content and hundreds of thousands who read it.
Regardless, the intention of forbidding us attention while simultaneously giving it is…well, stupid.
Third, the boycotters weren’t Pulpit & Pen patrons to begin with. It would be like me threatening to boycott the gym. At the end of the day, nothing would be different than when it began.
Karen Swallow Prior, the feminist and animal rights activist who defended abortion doctors in the pages of Christianity Today, re-tweeted SBC Voices’ call to boycott Pulpit & Pen. There could not possibly be a demographic less likely to follow Pulpit & Pen than the followers of a lady who goes to LGBT fundraisers and thinks cats go to Heaven.
It’s like a group of vegans trying to hurt the food industry by boycotting steakhouses. If they weren’t customers to begin with a boycott doesn’t really matter.
Fourth, people who read Pulpit & Pen don’t like being told what to do, what to think, what to read, or what to believe. Pulpit & Pen readers are independent, thoughtful, rational consumers of news and intelligent commentary and don’t need a nanny to govern their reading choices.
They already read Pulpit & Pen because we’re truth tellers and pretty uncensored about it. If they wanted to read milquetoast, brain-numbing, flavorless thought-regurgitation they’d be reading SBC Voices. You can’t get people to boycott a news source for the very reason they read the news source.
Fifth, people know what Pulpit & Pen says is true. While the social media mob knocked on more than a few doors, demanding certain Christian celebrities denounce our news source for saying true things, and some capitulated, in reality, most thoughtful Christians know very well that tone doesn’t dictate truth.
This is a supply-and-demand type situation. Truth is in high demand. There is little supply. Therefore, Pulpit & Pen will always have an audience.
If Pulpit & Pen says it or writes it, you can guarantee that most are already thinking it. We just might be the first ones to say it out loud.
Sixth, the hypocrisy of who these same snowflakes have not demanded a boycott or blacklist of is palpable, noticeable, and obvious. SBC Voices and the rest of the Neo-Liberal snowflake storm have not asked for a boycott, blockade, embargo or blocking of homosexuals in ministry like Sam Allberry, homosexuals in the press like Jonathan Merritt, heresy peddlers like Ed Stetzer and Thom Rainer, Neo-Socinians and Marxists like Tim Keller, or a whole herd of Cows from Bashan and a gaggle of lady preachers from wild-eyed Beth Moore to Hillsong’s Christine Caine.
As I wrote in the post about Jackie Hill Perry that has since gone viral, if your theological tent is big enough for these clowns and not big enough for conservative Christians who are sick and tired of putting up with your backslidden and compromised doctrinal chicanery, you’re in the wrong tent.
[Editor’s Note: Contributed by JD Hall]
