Recently Evangelical Dark Web hosted a livestream where I posited a theory that Christian Post is worse than The Gospel Coalition. This is not to say that The Gospel Coalition has done less damage. However, my reasoning is that The Gospel Coalition is defeated and diminished in influence. Majority of the damage they have done has been done. They’ve been exposed. This stands in sharp contrast to the Christian Post which I see as a rising threat in its proliferation of unsound theology. In discernment ministry, we can never expose a false teacher off a cliff, so to speak. A success is like Beth Moore no longer being able to profit from a Southern Baptist audience and having to move to a more liberal denomination. A success is someone like David Platt going more in the Hillsong direction. We’re never going to be able to expose a false teacher enough to where they can never bounce back. I even think Carl Lentz will rise again. Sometimes teachers are old enough to retire when they are exposed, and others received the majority of their exposure posthumously, like Ravi Zacharias.
With that said, when I examine The Gospel Coalition and the articles I’ve written about them this year, they started out with a massive counteroffensive going after Woke Preacher Clips. This blew up hard in their faces and their website has not been nearly as aggressive since. The most aggressive they’ve been in Griffin Gulledge using his bylines there to advocate for Southern Baptist to stay and pay guilt tribute. Otherwise, some of their most problematic articles have been horrendous examples of trying to read Scripture into movies where it does not even work. The Gospel Coalition remains rather silent on salient cultural issues in their short form.
Instead much of the idiocy of The Gospel Coalition is shoved in longform content. Their “Good Faith Debate” series seemed as though it would be a treasure trove of content to report on, but even this is buried underneath ten minutes each long opening statements. And while AD Robles has covered it, the recent pacifist who got caught by Woke Preacher Clips appears to be the biggest blunder for The Gospel Coalition in a while.
The Christian Post, though surprisingly a much smaller website, is far more aggressive in its push of bad doctrine and far less polished in doing so. The example that rings most true is their recent column drawing a moral equivalency between wokeness and anti-feminism. I have to ask myself: would The Gospel Coalition have published this article? And the answer is a resounding no. Not in 2022. Maybe last year or the year before that, but not today. Additionally, they don’t have a rotation of guest post defending Israel (or Ukraine) as though they were paid propagandists either.
In discernment, it is unfruitful to continue beating dead horses or swing only for low hanging fruit. That is why I am not constantly running articles on Joel Osteen or Andy Stanley. They’ve been exposed. The Gospel Coalition is apparently still a large website, so they remain fair game, but the rising threats must be confronted. When I started Evangelical Dark Web, that is what I had in mind. Vigilance requires early exposure.
