Just Christian Things: Confusing wisdom with self-discipline, then failing to offer a roadmap for cultivating either quality

Earlier today, I was reading this evangelical exhortation over at Baptist Press. It concerns wisdom. Of course, its author has the usual difficulty in defining what that word even means. But that’s not what attracted my attention. Rather, I noticed that he was trying very hard to square an absolutely impossible circle: for Christians, there’s always been a mighty big leap from knowing the rules of the tribe and actually following those rules. His solution sounds a lot like the non-solutions his fellow leaders have always offered, and like theirs, his is guaranteed to keep Christians locked in an endless cycle of failure and self-blame.

Let’s explore how this latest Christian (mis)defines wisdom—and then fails to offer a real way to cultivate even the quality he’s actually described.

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Everyone, meet Jason Thacker

Jason Thacker wrote the post we’re examining today. He works as a researcher for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). You might remember the ERLC. Russell Moore led it for years, until his enemies drove him out around May 2021. He caused those enemies no small amount of embarrassment over the years, with a special little cocktail of ultra-embarrassment at the end there.

But in April 2020, Moore hired Thacker to be the ERLC’s “chair of research in technology ethics.” Before that, Thacker worked as a “special projects manager” at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS). That’s Al Mohler’s school.

So like a strangely high number of mid-level leaders in the SBC, Thacker has only been in this ERLC role for a couple of years. It sounds like he got this ERLC job because he’d written a book about how evangelicals should think about artificial intelligence (AI).

Nothing Thacker describes about his education seems to have prepared him for a career in research of any kind, much less anything related to technology or AI, but that’s nothing new. Ed Stetzer, who conducted research for Lifeway (the SBC’s publishing and propaganda division) for years, wasn’t at all qualified for it either. For that matter, Southern Baptist presidents are clergymen, not businessmen. The SBC has always preferred a thorough indoctrination and obedience to actual qualifications.

The basic premise of _Following_ *Jesus* in a Digital Age

Regardless of his lack of qualifications, his newest book will be published soon: Following Jesus in a Digital Age. On the cover, the word “following” is emphasized mightily, while “Jesus” is highlighted. (My, how droll!)

The book seeks to help worried evangelicals maintain their faith in a world that panders less and less to them or their beliefs. Here’s the beginning of its Amazon blurb:

We were told technology would make our lives easier and more convenient, but technology just seems to have made it more complicated and confusing. As Christians, what does our faith have to do with these pressing issues of life in a digital age?

I could write a whole post about the cringeworthy mistakes he’s made just in those two sentences. Hey, maybe I will sometime! For now, though, just know it’s coming out in a week, so he wants to publicize it. His post is an excerpt from it. Baptist Press, the official news site of the SBC, gave him a little room to whet readers’ appetites ahead of the release.

Evangelical self-interest for the win, yet again!

This thing about wisdom might not have been the very best excerpt he could have chosen

Our excerpt today is called “FIRST PERSON: Wisdom in the digital age.” Wow! We’re going to learn how people can cultivate wisdom, right? And from a guy who, I kid you not, looks like he’s not even old enough to remember what life was like before Friendster MySpace Facebook. What happened to wisdom being a product of a life well lived? So once again, we have someone who doesn’t look really experienced in something telling us all about it.

(Some years back, we all used to marvel at the trend of newlywed evangelical men writing marriage-advice books. Their advice ranged from hilariously ineffective and useless to OMG GET OUT OF THERE GIRL.)

Thacker begins his post thusly:

As my pastor recently said, the church has “an information overload and an obedience deficit.” The reality of the digital age is that we often know certain truths about God, who we are as His creatures, and other theological truths, but then fail to live out those beliefs, especially in light of the technological challenges we face today.

He emphasizes “live out” in the above quote, if my quote formatting doesn’t show it.

So for Jason Thacker, The Big Problem Here is that somehow “technological challenges” in the modern age have prevented Christians from living out their beliefs. In turn, this hypocrisy causes a deficit of wisdom.

Wait, how does technology prevent wisdom?

I am beyond mystified at exactly how “technological challenges” make Christian hypocrisy any worse now than it’s always been. Jason Thacker never explains that point. At most, he implies that “tips, tricks, tools, and apps” can’t make Christians less hypocritical, which is true, of course. Christians do love their busy-work apps.

But before smartphones, they had busy-work self-help books like The Love Dare. Evangelicals in particular have always had an eye out for anything that might substitute for the hard work of self-improvement. Modern technology just gives them a wider range of substitutes to pick from.

However, Thacker just waves his hand loftily toward the apparent “division” and “tension” caused by technology. He steadfastly refuses to tell us how technology causes either.

So let’s brainstorm. A new iPhone could cause division and tension for some folks, as could pay-to-win or gacha casual games. Heck, online games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft cause plenty of divorces.

But somehow, I suspect Thacker means social media. On social media, we see evangelicals duking it out with each other every day: accusing each other of all sorts of things, snarling epithets at each other, conjuring up conspiracy theories about each other, insulting each other, and generally just showing the whole wide world the enduring and eternal truth of “Christian love.”

Though I’m sure plenty of evangelicals act like complete hypocrites in Call of Duty, when I think of the worst-of-the-worst friction they put on public display, social media wins by a longshot.

So apparently, the newest excuse for rampant hypocrisy is technology, which totally causes Christians to blow off learning wisdom, which would enable them to better follow their own tribe’s rules. Because they’ve abandoned wisdom for the “division” and “tension” of technology, they’re having more trouble than ever following their own rules.

Defining wisdom, sorta

The only thing I spotted in Jason Thacker’s book excerpt that accurately describes wisdom is this:

… wisdom calls us to take the long view rather than always trying to seek the immediate reward or gratification of the digital age.

Well, sorta.

Every definition of wisdom I found online talks about having experience, knowledge, and good judgment, about being able to apply it correctly, about making sound decisions, and about being able to draw upon a vast body of knowledge. In essence, wisdom is about being able to perceive the deeper currents under the surface in a situation. For example, think about the ability to spot red flags in people:

Someone who actually detects and acts on a serious red flag would be using wisdom. Maybe the guys in this silly fake SNL ad have experience with women like the lady in red. Or maybe they learned secondhand from media or their friends. Regardless, they recognize that she is very bad news. They’re drawing upon a vast body of knowledge to apply those principles to the situation at hand. And then, they’re wisely avoiding her. They’re making a very sound decision based on what they know.

But that isn’t the quality that Jason Thacker clearly means here in his excerpt. What he wants is for evangelicals to obey the tribe’s rules. And simple obedience doesn’t require wisdom of any kind. It requires discipline, either applied to the person in question or summoned from within that person.

Fitness enthusiasts have the discipline to get up at 5am every morning to go jogging because they have learned that the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term pleasures of sleeping in. And yet they might still date the worst people ever, or spend entirely too much money on frivolous things.

Someone can be dumber than a box of wet hammers and denser than a neutron star, and yet still consistently follow rules, do what they need to do, and correctly execute commands. We’ve all had co-workers like that, I reckon.

‘A biblical worldview’ and ‘Godly wisdom’

Jason Thacker makes use of the popular evangelical Christianese here, “a biblical worldview.” It just means an interpretation of the Bible that evangelical culture warriors like. Seriously, that’s all it means. Every Christian in every flavor of Christianity thinks that their interpretation of the Bible is biblical. But when evangelicals use the specific term “biblical worldview,” they specifically mean an ultra-right-wing, bigoted, racist, sexist, everything-phobic, control-grabby set of beliefs. Any other doctrinal stance becomes unbiblical, of course, even if the Christian holding it can support it with a dozen Bible verses.

And wisdom, apparently, leads to automatic agreement with Jason Thacker about all of his doctrinal stances:

Through wisdom, we can cultivate a biblical worldview that helps us see through the allure of our modern society and technology to the core of the problems we face. And by seeing technology as more than simply a tool that we use, we can begin to see the patterns and habits that are being formed in us as we seek to reorient our lives in line with Godly wisdom.

He thinks that wisdom, misdefined here as obedience to the tribe’s rules, will bring about “a biblical worldview,” which in turn will lead to Christians to “reorient our lives in line with Godly wisdom.”

Like “biblical worldview,” “Godly wisdom” also means agreeing with Jason Thacker. Someone who agrees with him has Godly wisdom. Someone who doesn’t agree, of course, is simply not oriented correctly yet. They’re missing the mark, which is a sin.

(Guess what the only penalty for sin is, in evangelicals’ belief system?)

But ‘a biblical worldview’ does not at all bring about obedience or wisdom or anything else

We’ve seen evangelicals make this mistake many, many times. They all think that if someone holds the correct beliefs and knows the correct tribe-approved interpretation of the Bible, then obviously they’ll obey the tribe’s rules consistently.

It’s not true, however. Someone can believe every single thing that Jason Thacker himself believes, down to the tiniest doctrinal quibble, and still be the worst hypocrite imaginable.

I’m sure that J.D. Hall, who used to run the hardline Calvinist website Protestia (formerly Pulpit and Pen, before his hate speech got the blog banned and blacklisted from Facebook), doesn’t vary much at all from Thacker in beliefs and stances. But he displays no wisdom at all, nor even basic obedience to the tribe’s rules. Instead, he constantly reveals his own total lack of self-discipline. And thanks to this lack of self-discipline and obedience, Hall has lost not only his blog but also his pastor gig. (He’s not even a basically decent human being: he baldfaced lied about a trans woman. She sued him for libel, and he lost bigtime.)

But I’ve no doubt that Hall’s “biblical worldview” completely agrees with Thacker’s!

A “biblical worldview” is simply a set of indoctrinated false beliefs. Wisdom does not lead to those beliefs. Instead, wisdom steers people clear of false claims and warns us to avoid those pushing such claims.

Worse, that “biblical worldview” is exactly why evangelicals make rash short-term decisions, fail to fix their personal flaws, and plunge into one ill-advised personal choice after another.

Evangelicals aren’t hypocrites because of a lack of wisdom or because of social media

Technology has nothing to do with evangelicals’ lack of wisdom or their disobedience to their tribe’s rules.

We can lay both of those problems at the feet of evangelicalism itself.

Evangelicals’ “biblical worldview” gives them exactly what they crave. It gives them an excuse to fight with everyone around them, tells them they’re on the correct side of their fights, and then blesses them for digging in their heels in those fights. It gives them instant forgiveness for their offenses against Jesus (as long as they really, really mean it when they apologize) and, of course, an unbeatable moral high horse from which they can judge and control other people.

And this worldview tells them that there’s an instant, easy fix for everything that ever bothers them: a magical wizard friend who can instantly and magically do anything imaginable, as long as they ask just right and they’ve been super-good little children and he’s in the mood and it’d be good for them and it’s something he’d planned to do anyway.

The worst-of-the-worst evangelicals gravitate to this “biblical worldview” because it’s a handy substitute for wisdom, self-discipline, and obedience. It’s a way to slip free of all that ickie gross hard work.

If I were to design a worldview from the ground up to produce nonstop hypocrites of the worst kind, predators who could rationalize any crime, abusers who could excuse any cruelty, and believers locked in complete dysfunctionality, then I could not do better than modern evangelicalism.

When we encounter genuinely kind, wise, loving, functional evangelicals, we know for 100% sure that they’re like that despite their beliefs, not because of ’em.

The hard work of doing what’s right

Think about something you have to do according to a schedule. It might be walking your dog, or getting up in time to get to work, or making sure you set bread dough to rise before you go to bed, or eating yogurt every day, or doing your homework or attending classes. Or heck, getting up at 5am to go jogging every day.

Some people have a really hard time doing stuff with consistency. It can really take time to capture a new habit like that. That’s what personal trainers and coaches call it sometimes, by the way. I like the phrasing: capturing. That’s what it feels like. It takes time to really get a new habit settled into our heads, anywhere from a few weeks to almost a year. And no gods or magical friends can zap it into our heads. We have to do it the old-fashioned way, with consistency and conscientiousness.

Similarly, learning to respond to things in a different way can take a lot of time. If someone wants to stop lying, learning honesty can take a very long time to establish as a mental pathway. It can also take some painful self-examination. In some cases, it might even take the help of a trained therapist. And again, no gods or magical friends ever seem inclined to zap those mental pathways into place in people’s minds. (Gosh, I just can’t imagine why…!)

In both cases, it’ll always be easier to fall into the old pathways. Or to try to find an easier substitute for the hard work. That’s why so many people repeatedly try silly, extreme, possibly harmful fad diets instead of permanently fixing their eating habits. Or get involved in religious groups that promise easy fixes, like, well, evangelicalism.

Many of these people might even feel just terrible that their good intentions never materialize into lasting, meaningful changes. They might be otherwise lovely people deep down. Just somehow, they’re stuck on substitutes and stabs at change. And so change eludes them.

Sidebar: Did you notice the problem with technology that Jason Thacker didn’t mention?

Maybe Jason Thacker addresses this in his book, but it’s just so interesting to me that the excerpt missed the real danger of the internet to evangelicals:

The ease of finding accurate, objectively factually-true information that completely contradicts Christian claims.

I had to read the excerpt a few times just to make sure, because I was pretty blown away by its absence. He seriously thinks that The Big Problem Here is that technology leads Christians to fight with each other and act like horses’ asses online, not that they’ll constantly run into information that challenges all of their tribe’s false claims.

Back in the early 2010s, when I realized just what a serious wrecking ball the internet really is to Christians’ claims, I wondered if any pastors were trying to forbid their flocks from accessing it. I couldn’t find many doing that. A few forbade social media, at most. None seemed aware of what the internet might represent in terms of a challenge to the flocks’ faith.

I suspected then, and still do now, that it all just crept up on authoritarian pastors, who aren’t usually the most tech-savvy people anyway. By the time they realized what was going on, it was far too late: the internet was in almost every home, in almost every school, and starting to appear in the phones kept in almost every Christian’s pocket and purse.

Whatever these pastors could have done to stop the internet from becoming such a huge part of evangelicals’ lives, that ship sailed without them many years ago. Instead, Jason Thacker’s focusing only on the way that technology allows evangelicals to fight and act out easier than ever before.

Evangelicals will never figure out how to become obedient, much less wise

Ultimately, evangelicals won’t ever be able to tear themselves away from modern technology, nor step back from all the delicious slapfighting and sinning they can do with it.

Evangelical leaders can exhort them all they want to Jesus harder. To read the Bible more. To buy books by people like Jason Thacker. These leaders might even get a lot of nodding heads and “amens” back from the flocks, and they might even sell a lot of books.

But none of it will lead to greater evangelical obedience or to any higher levels of evangelical wisdom. At most, it’ll lead to greater degrees of indoctrination in what evangelicals call a “biblical worldview.” And as we’ve just established, that worldview is what happens instead of obedience or wisdom. Its presence in a Christian all but ensures disobedience and a stunning lack of wisdom.

Whether the Christian is sincere and tries their best or is willfully nasty and sneaky, it hardly matters. Either way, they’ll have trouble behaving themselves on social media.

Y’all, this guy’s book is going to be a serious howler, if the excerpt he chose to show it off is this bad!

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