Why Christians are more frustrated than ever and desperately need discernment

Set aside any distinctly political topic or person for a moment, if you can. 

If you’re a 40-year-old (or over) Evangelical like me, you’ve probably seen and heard so much about who Christians are in the last 20 years, and much of it has been hogwash. I know this personally, having spent nearly a decade in the media, and I have seen from the inside how these distortions and cartoonishly Ned Flanders caricatures are generated in real time. 

Before the proliferation of social media platforms, many legacy media narratives that sincere, theologically orthodox believers faced were, and still are, beyond tiresome. While I can't speak for everyone, many Christians have been intensely frustrated that no matter how graciously they tried to explain where they were coming from, they were routinely misrepresented in the press, and they’ve often felt as though they were neither heard nor understood. And to be sure, I’m not defending truly evil people within churches and ministries who are ravenous wolves (Matthew 7:15) in sheep’s clothing, who should be exposed. 

But I was wrong about something that I’ve believed for a while. Maybe partially wrong, but still wrong. As the world rapidly changes, it's important to be honest about what I've seen previously but now see more clearly.  

A few years ago, I remember watching a clip of MSNBC’s Alex Wagner on Bill Maher’s show comparing the Westboro nuts from Kansas to Islamic extremists as though they were remotely equivalent. These were the lunatics who showed up at military funerals with placards that read, among other things, “God Hates Fags.”

To his credit, Bill Maher ridiculed Wagner’s analogy. The Westboro crazies are maybe 30 lunatics, mostly in one family, and whose abhorrent antics 99.9% of normal Christians find despicable. I’ve often wondered why and how they got such traction in the mass media and have long thought that it might have been a sinister comms strategy to tar normie social conservatives and like-minded Christians with the worst of the worst. That Wagner tried to do something like that fairly recently seemed to confirm my thesis. I figured that if even a leftist atheist like Maher could make the distinction, so could most people. 

But I no longer think that significant swaths of the masses are capable of making important distinctions, not to the same degree anyway.

And why not? Social media has entirely changed the equation. Bad actors with hordes of online followers on these platforms are doing grave damage to people and the Gospel. Many wear our faith like a skinsuit.

It’s largely a generational chasm. Younger generations who have grown up online and are glued to their phones spend inordinate amounts of time on social media platforms, and their perceptions of reality are shaped there. The older, not-online generations are mostly not clued in as to how extensively the younger generations are being digitally malformed. Though some biblically rooted pastors host solid YouTube channels, many distortions abound.

Consider also the tumultuous context in which this has transpired. 

Ponder for a moment how, starting in 2020, we endured a global pandemic with draconian policies, extended school shutdowns, large-scale media deception about the origins of the coronavirus, the chaotic summer of “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots in the cities, and a contested presidential election. Consider also the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, the October 7th horror in 2023, the subsequent Israel-Gaza war, enormous mainstream media deception about President Biden’s cognitive decline, two assassination attempts against President Trump, the insanity of men battering women in boxing rings at the 2024 Olympics, and the ongoing medical scandal of thousands of children and young people being chemically sterilized and surgically maimed under the banner of so-called “gender-affirming care."

Add to that the rise of technocracy and the rapid advance of AI technology that distorts reality beyond comprehension. It is truly a wonder that any of us can think clearly at all. If I’m honest, I semi-frequently catch myself second-guessing my perceptions, especially with what I see online, asking myself: “Is this real or fake?” 

The postmodern swirl has been nonstop. It’s the Book of Judges 17:6 territory where “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” And whatever you thought of him, when Charlie Kirk was murdered, and there was widespread gleeful cheering of his death? Even as many young people began exploring faith for the first time after he was killed, it has also felt as though something gravely evil was unleashed. 

Many people across the spectrum are understandably dog-tired and angry about many issues. Emotions are volcanic. Delusional conspiracy theories are proliferating. Woke leftists scapegoat white men as the source of all worldly ills, while an obnoxious, loudmouthed swath of the political right (especially online) does the same to women. Increasingly, Jews are being scapegoated across the board amid an alarming spike in antisemitic harassment and even violence. Vengefulness on several sides is perversely hailed as a virtue. 

In her essay “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt wrote that the “result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”

I maintain this has never been truer than it is right now, and both the corporate press and social media are actively eroding our means of thinking and moral categories.

If you’re an age-40-and-over Christian, and you remember what it was like before social media exploded and rewired us, pray for wisdom like never before. While the distortion of the Gospel is not a new problem, some of the varieties of deception being spread online will likely seem so outlandish to you that it may be deer-in-the-headlights territory when you encounter it for the first time. 

My apologies if this all seems vague, as I’m sketching a big-picture view here, and I’m deliberately not naming names because I don’t wish to give devious grifters and rascals engagement and clicks, which, in the realm of social media, is often monetized.

Mainline religious progressives have been awash in all kinds of false teaching and apostasy for many years now, and they don’t hide their blasphemy. But mainstream media figures do not have to further their deliberately dishonest messaging about the Westboro nutjobs or televangelist kooks anymore. 

Whether you like it or not, and whether you are aware of it or not, normie Christians, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is being digitally twisted at an enormous scale, and God’s character is being maligned by people who know how to sound biblically orthodox enough but are, in fact, horrible frauds and shysters. 

May God grant His faithful remnant discernment like the sons of Issachar. We need it now more than ever.