Jack Hibbs predicts lots of spiritual warfare in 2024

Last time we met up, I showed you the timeline of an evangelical pastor, Jack Hibbs, who jumped on the grift wagon in the mid-2010s. Once he realized where the real money and fame was in late-stage evangelicalism, he went all in. Lately, he’s been yammering (archive) about how the flocks need to do lots of spiritual warfare in 2024. He’s even thoughtfully offered a listicle of skirmishes that he says he believes will be fought purely in evangelicals’ imaginations. Today, let’s see how they line up with the overall evangelical culture wars—and in doing that, get a feel for evangelicals’ strategies for the year ahead. (Note: A TRUE CHRISTIAN™ is someone who believes the same basic blahblah the judging Christian does, who hasn’t been caught doing anything the judge thinks is completely off-limits, and who dies with both prior conditions being true. Alas for evangelicals, nobody recognizes any authority who can set a single objective definition of Christianity for all Christians. Effectively, anyone who identifies as Christian is a Christian. You’d think they’d be more chill about self-identification in other situations, but here we are.) (This post first appeared on Patreon on 2/15/2024. Its audio cast lives there too!)

Spiritual warfare: A quick refresher

Evangelicals love the concept of spiritual warfare. Most of the time, their leaders barely even define the term. They know the flocks will know what they mean by it. Of course, what those flocks believe about spiritual warfare runs very contrary to what it actually is. In evangelicals’ runaway imaginations, spiritual warfare is an epic battle of good versus evil. They conduct this battle on the spiritual plane of existence using spiritual weapons their god has graciously crafted for them. These weapons include prayer, recitation of Bible verses, and fasting. Just as dying in the Matrix means one’s body dying in real life, a victory in spiritual warfare translates directly to victory in the real world. Oh, and Yahweh’s side always wins the war. Now rerun that paragraph. This time, translate “spiritual” to what it really means: “imaginary.” In reality, spiritual warfare is an imaginary fight evangelicals wage entirely in their own minds against imaginary enemies using imaginary weapons for an imaginary god’s imaginary cause. When evangelicals can’t get real victory, they comfort themselves with imaginary ones. Of note: These imaginary enemies represent their culture-war tribalistic enemies. Often, evangelicals piously proclaim that they totally don’t wish violence or harm upon any real people. Their fight, they continue sanctimoniously, is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers! But somehow, it never looks that way to outsiders. If you’re wondering, spiritual warfare looks almost exactly like the psychic battle from South Park. Just make the psychics speak in tongues and brandish Bibles, then substitute an imaginary demon for Cartman, and you’ve got it. And yes, it is ridiculous as it must sound from my description. Though you can find a wealth of videos about spiritual warfare, and even some that try to depict the supernatural side of it, you will find few that dare to display evangelicals actually doing it. There’s a very good reason for that.

Jack Hibbs chose an odd text for this sermon

Taking 1 Thessalonians 5:14-22 as his guide, Jack Hibbs sought to predict five major skirmishes in the overall spiritual war between TRUE CHRISTIANS™ and the evil, demon-controlled heathens all around them. What’s so funny is that this text contains the rules evangelicals are supposed to follow. Listen to this, and compare it in your mind to how evangelicals as a group actually behave:

And we urge you, brothers, to admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, and be patient with everyone. Make sure that no one repays evil for evil. Always pursue what is good for one another and for all people. Rejoice at all times. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in every circumstance, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Do not extinguish the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt, but test all things. Hold fast to what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.

If evangelicals really obeyed this list and did it consistently and reliably, nobody’d ever have any issue with them. But they clearly believe that this stuff is boring and don’t want to do it. With this text, Jack Hibbs tried very hard to square the circle of spiritual warfare. By that, I mean that he tried to make a very martial-sounding battle sound like it would be won not by fighting, but by following evangelical rules and Jesusing very hard. Alas, evangelicals don’t tend to care about following their own rules, and they can easily fake the Jesusing part (since there’s no Jesus around to prove them wrong). No, they want to get into the Rambo-style SPEERCHUL WARFARE! So usually, when pastors talk about spiritual warfare, they use Ephesians 6:12:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

The next verses detail the “full armor of God,” the “sword of the Spirit,” and the “shield of faith.” Hordes of little evangelical children grow up immersed in these verses. Their parents can even buy little child-sized versions of all of these things. I even found a blog post offering parents instructions for making a set at home (archive). It features a super-cute photo of a little blonde tyke wearing the full getup. But no, Jack Hibbs chose a list of evangelical rules that the flocks don’t ever actually follow to sell his vision of spiritual warfare in 2024. And he offered them up in a long sermon, linked below:

Jack Hibbs Prediction #1: The war against “the Truth”

First and foremost, Jack Hibbs thinks evangelicals must conduct SPEERCHUL WARFARE against the dark forces keeping heathens from accepting evangelical claims. (If you noticed that not one bit of that relates to the text Hibbs said he’d be using, you’re good. It took me a hot minute to realize that when I first read his post!) See, he thinks we heathens are in pain and confused. We’re disillusioned, see, so we just can’t appreciate the TROOF YES TROOF that evangelicals keep pushing at us. As he says in the video (at around 18 minutes into the video):

When you tell somebody the actual truth, they don’t believe it. And it’s not that they’re being mean about it. It’s that “why should I believe that because I’ve just heard 10 other things.”

Obviously, The Big Problem Here is that America’s government and culture allows other claims to compete with those evangelicals make. I’m not sure that’s actually a good look for Jack Hibbs or his beliefs, but forget it, he’s on a roll. Of note and interest: Jack Hibbs won’t ever offer any suggestions to make evangelicals’ claims sound better when stacked against all those other claims people encounter every day. With the crowd he’s cultivated, he doesn’t need to.

An attempt is made

Evangelicals really do not like being reminded that what they call “the Truth” is really just their own subjective beliefs, and that those beliefs lack any objective tether to reality. So Jack Hibbs tickles their itching ears with this common and hilarious bit of evangelical hand-waving:

Should anyone say “this is my truth” or “well, that’s just your truth,” they have denied the fundamental reality of what truth is. It is an absolute attribute of God. Not us, God. And without God, it is a falsehood, a counterfeit reality. [. . .] This is very popular today among humanists. And maybe [. . .] you have fallen into that deception where you use that very terminology. “Well, I just follow my truth.” You have been deceived and are quite possibly beyond hope. May God have mercy on you.

If nobody allowed evangelicals to lie or to threaten people to get their way, they’d barely ever open their mouths ever again. Insisting that he has a capital-T Truth super-duper hard doesn’t actually make it the capital-T Truth. It never becomes more compelling just because he insists that it is completely compelling. If he can’t tether that claim to reality somehow, all he’s got is an opinion that he really hopes is true. Jack Hibbs doesn’t know his opinion is true, because he can’t tether it to reality at all. He just hopes it is. He just wants it to be. No matter how certain he seems to be, it’s always going to be false certainty. That leads us to a truth Hibbs would rather we never know. The reason heathens reply to evangelicals like this is simple: Without that tether to reality, nobody really has the truth. I’ll go ya one further, too. The real capital-T Truth is built entirely on a foundation of little-f facts. Evangelicals simply don’t have the facts on their side. They never have, and they never will. To be evangelical is to believe a thousand impossible things before breakfast. But wait! Jack Hibbs has lies to spew about little-f facts, too! Jack Hibbs Prediction #2: The war against “the Facts” Having totally and completely established that evangelicals will fight a war “against the Truth” in 2024, Hibbs moves smoothly on to his second prediction at around 23:50 into the video:

You say isn’t the truth and the facts two different things? Not necessarily. They incorporate one another. First of all, truth is unwavering and eternal. It’s an attribute of God. Facts is the reporting of what is observed, heard, seen, experienced. It’s the reporting of what happened.

Right out of the gate, Hibbs has no clue what facts actually are. They are not a person’s subjective report “of what happened.” That’s about the worst example he could possibly have picked to illustrate what facts are. Facts actually don’t change with the report. They don’t hinge upon the beliefs of the reporting person. They can be measured and duplicated by anybody in the world. Any fool utilizing standardized tools gets the same results. But Hibbs chose his spectacularly bad example for a reason. The flocks must expect war “against the facts” in 2024. And by “the facts,” he means evangelicals’ subjective claims and feelings. Because he’s told them that facts totally consist of “the reporting of what is observed, heard, seen, experienced,” that means that their testimonies, miracle claims, and other subjective reports can totally be facts. And we heathens are just meaniepies for not accepting those “facts!” He spends a long time sneering at fact-checking sites like Snopes and Politifact. I’m not surprised. These sorts of sites never confirm his claims, after all. So he hates them. More than that, though, he needs to discourage the flocks from trusting or visiting those sites. (Gee, I wonder if one of his own claims getting blasted as false by Snopes (archive) has anything to do with Jack Hibbs’ hatred?)

If only evangelicals could actually accurately weigh claims

Under the “war against facts,” Jack Hibbs offers this rare gem at about 29 minutes in:

Do you understand that the only way that life really works right is a life that operates under the fear of God?

Really? That must be why evangelicals are such paragons of virtue and functionality. It explains why their relationships are so enviably perfect. Why their family are so stunningly successful. How their leaders never, ever get caught in sex scandals. Why their churches fill to overflowing every Sunday. How racism and bigotry never blemish their hearts. Why the whole world recognizes them for their endless love, mercy, and generosity. Oh wait. Actually, the harder an evangelical Jesuses in public, the more likely that person is to be a hypocrite. Evangelicals display their Jesusing as a substitute for becoming decent human beings. In the “facts” part of the sermon, Jack Hibbs mostly just attacks transgender people. But he also pontificates about the meaning of the word “love”:

Five years ago, it was words, because we all kind of use the same dictionary. Now, it’s like, what does that mean, “I love you.” What does that mean? We’ve got to ask for a definition.

Considering how evangelicals have mangled the word “love,” that’s quite an accusation. I didn’t know what the word meant until I deconverted. But evangelicals have mangled lots of other words, too. They have no right to complain about words changing definition.

Jack Hibbs Prediction #3: The war against “the Faith”

No evangelical ever misses a chance to indulge in martyrbation. And Jack Hibbs is no exception to that rule! He piously complains about how “the Faith,” meaning “TRUE CHRISTIANITY™, will be targeted by demons in 2024. In his complaint, Hibbs also issues an interesting set of threats:

Your faith is the most precious thing that you own. When faith is lost or broken or neglected or rejected, the very coexistence of man is also lost and broken. When this happens there will be no direction or meaning or purpose or reason for living. When you have no faith in someone or something greater than yourself, you lose hope. You lose direction. But if your faith is in Jesus Christ and him alone, then you’re secure.

Citation needed! Also, nice equivocation there, eh? (Definition; archive.) He sneers at having “no faith in someone or something greater than yourself.” But he only means his flavor of Christianity. No other faith in any other ideology or god counts to him. He’s lying, too. Plenty of evangelicals already feel hopeless, lost, broken, neglected, or rejected. They already feel like they have “no direction or meaning or purpose or reason for living.” When I was Pentecostal, I knew so many Christians like that. And I, of course, suffered from terrible anxiety and anger. As a pastor, he ought to know all of this already. By contrast, deconversion changed everything for me. Real therapy taught me to manage my anger. Medication smoothed out my anxiety and panic attacks. In reclaiming my own power, I soon gained a very strong sense of direction and purpose.

Whisking along to Prediction #4: The war against “the Church”

By now, Jack Hibbs is running out of time in his sermon. He stops rambling so much and gets to the point more quickly. In 2024, he thinks evangelicals will fight a massive spiritual battle for “the Church.” When evangelicals use the term “the Church,” they could mean one of two things. Often, they equivocate here as well.

• Definition 1: The entire body of Christians everywhere. Everyone get in the pool now!
• Definition 2: Only TRUE CHRISTIANS™.

Context alone provides guidance regarding which definition a Christian is using in any given situation. Often, they slide between definitions mid-sentence. Here, Hibbs clearly reached for the second definition:

The war of 2024 is against the church. In fact, can I say it this way the war has always been against the church. In 2024, it appears to me the way that this war has been trending against—watch my fingers’ air quotes—the church. I think the world is going to win this year against the church. Now, I’m not talking about Jesus’ Church. There’s a big difference. Organized church, it’s done. It’s done.

Really, this one’s just a continuation of the third prediction. But he knows how much evangelicals love to feel important and special. While the rest of Christianity collapses and all those fakey-fake fake losers fall away, they shall stand strong! No demon can win against them! SPEERCHUL WARFARE FOR THE WIN!

But he knows that winning the war against “the Church” requires real-world action

If you like listening to evangelical blahblah, don’t miss this section. In it, Hibbs complains up a storm about the culture wars. He appears to think that evangelicals need to circle the wagons harder and insulate their children even more from the ickie evil heathen world around them. Nothing will speed up their decline faster than that, but dysfunctional authoritarians can’t help themselves. They have nothing else in their toolbox besides clamping down harder on those they control. Here, Jack Hibbs deviates from any of his texts to offer advice about how “the Church,” meaning TRUE CHRISTIANS™ alone, can win the war against “the Church.”

What you can do about it? The Church is to be recognized as the foundation of Truth. And I know that’s hard to believe these days because the Church is so anemic and silent.

Interesting bit of passive language, there: “To be recognized as the foundation of Truth.” Who will recognize it as such? And how will this recognition translate into a win for “the Church?”

Answering my own questions

Sounds like someone’s forgotten that he fights only against principalities and powers in his rush to reclaim cultural dominance over all of America. It doesn’t matter how many gods and angels think Jack Hibbs’ beliefs are the capital-T TROOF. That assessment doesn’t matter a bit to anyone outside his own group. He can claim his little group of insular control freaks are “the foundation of Truth” all he wants. When he talks about “the church is so anemic and silent,” he means that evangelicals aren’t noisily demanding power over others like he thinks they should. He thinks that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ need to fight the culture wars, and they need to fight them in the real-world arena. They must be the opposite of anemic and silent; they must be puissant and loud. Hibbs offers some chilling words to consider against how much outsized political power evangelicals still have! Man alive, I only wish they were as “silent” as he’s complaining about here! Anemic he can’t help, I’m afraid. His religion has always been bloodless and passive, cruel and inhumane. It’s never had any divine power, only that which real people can give it. But silent? Oh, we wish. We wish. Of course, “the Church” can’t be recognized the way he wants without other people accepting his claims as real. For that to happen, people must first accept his dysfunctional-authoritarian mangling of both reality and little-f facts. And there’s no reason to accept his claims over those made by the representatives of countless other religions featuring meddlesome gods offering afterlife insurance. They all have exactly the same amount of little-f facts to prop up their claims of big-T Truth: None! Zero! Negatory!

Jack Hibbs Prediction #5: The war against “the Marriage”

At first, when I saw the headline here, I thought Jack Hibbs would be going for the Marriage of the Lamb in Revelation 19. It’s an interesting story with rich apocalyptic imagery:

For the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His bride has made herself ready. She was given clothing of fine linen, bright and pure. For the fine linen she wears is the righteous acts of the saints. Then the angel told me to write, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”

Incidentally, evangelicals think they’re “the Bride.” In Revelation, this marriage happens right before the battle with the “Beast” and the Antichrist. Apparently, Jesus gets married to his “Bride,” and then he rides right out to lead his armies against “the Beast.” (The Beast loses, obviously. Like, DUH.) But that isn’t really what Jack Hibbs means. He means actual marriage between actual people (54 minutes):

Marriage is a joke. It’s even a game show stuff now. Or reality programs. [. . .] They’ve never met each other on this show, and they’re going to get married, and then they’re going to meet each other! [. . .] That’s what marriage has been reduced to!

Like all culture-warrior evangelicals, Jack Hibbs thinks that his god created marriage. More than that, his god set the rules for marriage for all time. Gee, he hasn’t read the Bible much on that score, has he? Whoops. As it turns out, the Bible recognizes a vast variety of marriages. Though they generally follow the “one cock per household” rule, these rules allow Jewish men to take sex slaves and concubines as bedmates, and press war-captives into service as wives. But that’s messy and not a good look for modern culture warrior evangelicals. So instead, Jack Hibbs goes with the rule that Jesus’ ghostwriters put forth: One man, one woman, both hetero, both cis, no divorce or take-backsies allowed, and they better have a lot of kids for the cause. Gosh, it’d super-suck if it turned out that humans were marrying eons before Judaism became a thing, wouldn’t it? His god’s demands weren’t the first, and they certainly won’t be the last regarding marriage.

Jack Hibbs is extremely upset that his side lost the culture war about marriage

This section is really just Jack Hibbs’ saltiness over his side losing the culture war about marriage. That’s it. He’s incredibly upset and angry about evangelicals losing the ability to force all other Americans to follow their ad hoc, made-up, pulled-out-of-their-tightasses rules about marriage. As he puts it around 54 minutes in:

There’s just a few foundational institutions created by God in all of all of time and eternity, and one of them is marriage. [. . .] If you don’t like that, well, take it up with God.

Unfortunately, his god isn’t talking to anybody. So that leaves only his self-declared representatives to discuss the matter. Alas, because they have no little-f facts behind any of their claims, nobody is obligated to obey those representatives. Nobody is even obligated to stop and listen to those representatives’ demands. Simply by aligning marriage with love, modern humans have redefined marriage forever. Even evangelicals usually won’t even consider marrying someone they don’t love. Somehow, their god always wants them to marry the people they have already fallen in love with! (Long ago, I noticed that male evangelical leaders always seem to marry extremely conventionally-pretty and slender young women. Single moms need not apply, either! Jack Hibbs is absolutely no exception to that rule. Interestingly, the wedding picture he chose to use (archive) to wish his wife a happy anniversary in 2015 has them standing with their heads tilted away from each other. Also, in every recent photo I’ve seen of these two (archive), he smirks while she smiles like someone’s aiming a flamethrower at her children off-screen and ordering her to smile OR ELSE. I betcha anything these two argue like a pair of feral cats in a pillowcase.)

Compelling explanations for evangelical-style marriage

I used to love News of the Weird. One of its funniest sections was “Compelling Explanations.” These were always the opposite of compelling, like this one from 2019 (archive):

The Philly Voice reported on June 5 that a resident of White Haven, Pa., has solved the mystery of why that state has experienced more tornadoes than usual this year. The unnamed amateur meteorologist called WNEP’s “Talkback 16,” which allows locals to opine on the issues of the day, and left a voicemail on May 31. In his own words: “We didn’t have tornadoes here until we started putting in traffic circles. … When people go round and round in circles, it causes disturbances in the atmosphere, and causes tornadoes.” So there you have it.

There we have it. Well, Jack Hibbs offers his own “compelling explanation” for why his god set rules on marriage that look suspiciously like a 1950s dream world for evangelicals:

You should thank God for your wife, and thank God for women. You know, Satan hates women. That’s why they’re pimped out and prostituted and trafficked. Satan hates them. By the way, if the whole world was full of men, that’d last about an hour. We’d all kill each other.

That’s an odd claim. I never felt more devalued, objectified, demeaned, and cruelly used in my entire life than I did while I was Pentecostal. When I married my Evil Ex Biff, he took delight in lording his male privilege over me. He mocked me when I complained that changing my last name was a time-consuming, bureaucratic nightmare. Other men, both from my own denomination and from other flavors of evangelicalism, treated me and other women the same way. They did so freely and without concern, and they all said Yahweh/Jesus wanted it that way. But we women also believed that Yahweh/Jesus had ordered things that way. We couldn’t defy his orders, or we’d go to Hell. We were trapped by terror. To Jack Hibbs, though, demons stand behind all marital unhappiness, not unfair and cruelly-misogynistic evangelical expectations of women:

The world is against marriage and that means friends listen up real quick. That means there’s a demonic power and the world ganging up on you to attack your mind and your relationship, so that Satan breaks up your home life.

Oh, okay. Demons. They hate women and so does the heathen world! That’s why evangelical women are so unhappy with evangelical rules! It’s not the rules themselves, it’s demons and heathens!

Also, a really creepy observation from Jack Hibbs about men in general

As for men themselves, I just don’t think as little of men as Jack Hibbs does. It’s really unnerving how certain he seems that without the influence of women’s redemptive genitalia to calm men’s innate violence, he’d be out there murdering everyone in sight along with all the other TRUE CHRISTIAN™ men. I’d love to know what this guy does under the cover of darkness. I bet it’s headline-worthy. Poor guy. He’s just so, so, so upset that evangelicals no longer get to tell other people how to conduct their relationships and private lives. Maybe he needs to start by dealing with all the people in his own megachurch who have gotten divorced. After all, if he wants people to follow evangelical rules, he needs to demonstrate—with real little-f facts, not his redefined, mangled, purely-subjective version of facts—that his rules work better to create lasting, harmonious marriages. And unfortunately, they do not work at all. They produce misery and agony in everyone who tries to use them. Evangelicals have no clue in the world how to conduct any relationship, be it personal or professional. But most especially they have no idea how to conduct an intimate, love-based relationship with someone who can leave for any reason at all without first obtaining their permission or agreement. Dysfunctional authoritarians cannot operate in an environment like that. They need their power to be complete and unassailable. The only happy spouses I ever knew in evangelicalism were either complete newlyweds, or older people who had quietly rewritten those rules for themselves. Their rules emphasized two-way intimacy, respect, and cooperation. And I knew exactly two couples, one in each situation, who were happy. I sure wasn’t. And neither was Biff, really. After all, he’d been promised a bangmommy to do all the household chores while working a full-time job and facilitating every whim he ever had, including having children for him. He was extremely upset that he didn’t get what he regarded as a set-in-stone promise made by Jesus himself.

Poisoning the well with Jack Hibbs

Well! Like Jack Hibbs himself, I had a lot to say today. It’s just so funny to me that Hibbs’ sermon about spiritual warfare had nothing to do with spiritual warfare. It also had nothing to do with the actual text he said he was using, 1 Thessalonians 5:14-22. None of his sermon involved evangelicals minding their own business, avoiding sin, and doing the stuff they think Jesus ordered them to do. Instead, his sermon amounted to complaint after complaint about evangelicals’ lost temporal power in America. He hates being on the losing side, like all dysfunctional authoritarians would. He hates knowing that evangelicals no longer set the tone for America’s ongoing dialogs regarding women’s rights and LGBT inclusion. Heck, they can’t even command who may and may not marry! Obviously, demons caused all of these losses. Yes. Obviously. By now, evangelicals are simply a tribalistic Christian nationalists with a thin frosting of Jesus across the top. That’s all they are, and they will become less and less like their ideal as time marches on. Maybe that’s why I actually did laugh at one thing he said early in the sermon, at around 18 minutes in:

I don’t mean to be funny. In fact, I’m going to say some things today that you might be tempted to either laugh or get angry at.

But as far as Jack Hibbs’ predictions go, none requires a god’s help to devise. They’re all stuff that any normie could guess just looking at evangelicals’ situation. And none requires evangelicals to seriously hunker down and start following their own rules. They can use the handy-dandy substitute of SPEERCHUL WARFARE Y’ALL instead, and Jesus will like it just as much! The rest of us, however, will not be as easy to fool as evangelicals have proven to be. How you can support Roll to Disbelieve Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! And now, here are some ways you can support my work:

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