Tucker / Isker 1: A Disconnect between the Clergy and Laity

Pastor Andrew Isker - author of The Boniface Option, co-host of the Contra Mundum podcast - was interviewed by Tucker Carlson about a month ago (I'm fashionably late, as always - had three weeks of leading a test campaign in Buffalo at a facility that runs 24/7) which had a number of relevant insights. Let's start with the disconnect between the clergy and the laity, which I believe find application in our little Wisconsin synod.

First, we have a description (~23m timestamp) of figures like Tim Keller and the idea of "whispered/shouted sins":

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Isker: "And you had figures like Rick Warren or Tim Keller who sort of adapted these things. So Tim Keller is in New York City and he tries to adapt Christianity to your upper middle class, striver people in New York City, or to make it easy for them to come to church. So, he wouldn't ever talk about homosexuality or if he did, it would be, well, that's not so good for human flourishing, but we're not really going to talk about that too much. There's the former president of the Southern Baptist convention J.D. Greear, you know, famously, said in a sermon, well, the Bible just whispers about sexual sin, but it shouts about financial sin or greed, right? So, they want to downplay-"

Tucker: "But it takes shots about both of them."

Isker: "It does, and the two are connected, right, if you're greedy for money, you're also going to be lusting after the flesh, like the two go hand in hand. But it's to down play things that the culture does not want to hear, right? Because you'll be branded as a bigot, as intolerant, as a bad person if you're just like, well, this is what the Bible says, like this, you know, fornicators, adulterers, sodomites, they will not inherit the kingdom of God. Right? If you say, yes, I agree with that, well you're a bad person, right, you're, you are outside of polite society if you say those things."

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The conversation moves along discussing issues in Isker's home state of Minnesota, with a focus on the abortion debate where he was the lone pastor to show up to a senate hearing. Summing up the previous 20 minutes of conversation (~39m timestamp)

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Tucker: "But what, why aren't the fearsome evangelicals, who I will still defend, I'm just saying that."

Isker: The laity absolutely defend them. "

Tucker: "Well, the laity know a million of them, and I love them. In fact, there's some working here right now in this office. But the preachers, like, where were they during all of this?"

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Isker's explanation is that the relevant scorecard isn't fidelity but butts-in-seats

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Tucker: "So to put a finer point on what you're saying, the point became the more souls we convert, the more people who profess faith, that's like the scorecard that we use?"

Isker: "Yeah, that's the metric that that everyone follows. And so you look at it and you think, well, if we just water it down a little bit more, make it more palatable to people, just get more butts in the seats, then that's the metric of success, not the internal development, discipleship of people, not actual repentance and conversion, not fundamental life change and so forth, that traditional Christianity always was. It's as if we just get them here and, of course, if they put some money in the plate and they're attending, that's what matters. So, you see churches where it's like, okay, we have amazing production values, we a great band and all of these things, and it's all of these entertainments to get people in, or the sermon is sort of like a self-help talk. There isn't really Bible in it at all, if it is, it's like tangentially related to to something that the pastor wants to say, it's not, all right, we're going to go through a chapter of Leviticus today and explain what the sacrifices are about. Well, there's no, there's none of those things. And so, you see many evangelical people, right, have not been taught really any Bible or theology at all. "

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Obviously, there is some hyperbole to these statements as Isker is clergy, but the broad sense holds, especially when we are talking about the big Evangelical names like J.D. Greear, Rick Warren and Tim Keller. We have some truly excellent Pastors in our synod. But how many of our pastors are fans of the winsomeness of a Tim Keller? And what about the big names with big platforms in our little synod? 

We have, for instance Mike Novotny telling us that the sin of Sodom was not about homosexuality, that the Christian should not find homosexuality gross, and that using preferred pronouns and attending gay weddings are a matter of Christian freedom. We have an LGBTQ+ bible study which tells us to walk in homosexual shoes and to not tell someone who is coming out of the closet that their feeling are wrong.  The merge for mission conversation on Facebook organically expresses disconnects between leadership and rank-and-file when it comes to how we approach missions and mergers. Rev. Dr. Michael Berg presenting signals not to send that are heavily biased against conservatives which, let's be honest, broadly comprise our laity. 

Almost all of these follow the pattern of high-low-middle mechanism: the "high" clergy pander to the "low" minority audience (defined as such by skin color, sexual orientation or political stance) which are "oppressed" by the "middle" laity. 

And speaking of Sodom as being an issue of 'hospitality', a refreshingly take to close out this article (~42m timestamp), addressing both the issue of whispered/shouted sins and boldly confessing the plain meaning of the text:

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Tucker "God didn't destroy two cities with sulfur and fire because people were eating pork.

He destroyed them because they tried to commit gay rape on an angel."

Isker: "Yeah, and they'll just say that with, well, the sin of Sodom was in hospitality."

Tucker: "No, it wasn't. It was gay rape."

Isker: "Yeah, it's like, well, yeah, the least hospitable thing you could do to a guest is to anally rape them."

Tucker:  "Yeah, so all the men of the town came out they demanded to have sex with these Angels and then Lot's like um, I've got some daughters in here take them. (which kind of takes a Lot off my Christmas card list for saying something like that.) But whatever. It's in Genesis and they're like no we want to rape the dudes. It's... these are not euphemisms. It's pretty straightforward."

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Don't get your theology from a Tucker podcast. But do note, Tucker - whose interviews regularly get a million vides across multiple platforms - doesn't flinch from calling a spade a spade but we have our own luminaries in the synod who maybe get 500 or 5,000 views carefully tiptoeing around these issues. What is their motivation? Butts in seats, maybe. Money in the coffers? I hope not. An overwhelming sense of winsomeness and social acceptance? I do think that is our particular sin, manifested quite often manifested in therapeutic antinomianism and (as I'll be discussing on June 1st to kick off (pri)DEMON(th)) what we might call the sin of (disordered) empathy.