Matt Chandler Peddles Liberal Myths, Third-Waysim

With the election coming up, and in some places ongoing, various big-name pastors are giving their takes on politics via the Sunday sermon. While it is unsurprising that overt liberals like Ortlund would endorse Kamala, what makes this season more interesting is the potential shifts occurring within certain pastors reasonably perceived to be liberal or woke. Josh Howerton has publicly shifted in a more Mark Driscoll direction regarding political engagement while Kamala being so demonic has The Gospel Coalition supporting her via an obscure third party.

One such pastor who is shifting his posture is Matt Chandler. He has shifted against the Critical Race Theory he previously championed in ACTS 29 while he has taken a more third-way approach to politics. This posture dictates that he cannot attack the Left without also attacking the Right at the same time.

His current sermon series entitled, Thrones and Thorns, is designed to speak to the broader culture going into the election. The sermon opens with Chandler speaking to the political divisions and frustrations Americans have with the political process in which he claims that both sides are more focused on defeating each other than solving issues. This then leads to him claiming that the partisan process preys on men and women, especially lonely people. The loneliness aspect is supported by a quote by David Brooks, a moderate political commentator from Canada with a terrible track record on politics. Nevertheless, much of what Chandler laments describes the Left, since unmarried women are a primary voting bloc. If marriage and family make people less political, then they would need women to be unmarried to maintain zeal within their base. Apart from Trump, the Right has not sought to appeal to disaffected or lonely men. If anything, this claim is more fairly charged against the likes of Andrew Tate than the GOP. By warning that his congregation is being “fed” with constant political propaganda, Chandler essentially issues a disclaimer to preemptively blame the political environment for the negative reactions his congregants might have to his upcoming sermons.

The primary text of the sermon is Genesis 1:26-31. Ironically, Chandler argues that civic organization is a facet of the Dominion Mandate, almost resembling Stephen Wolfe’s argument in The Case for Christian Nationalism. Chandler presupposes that society would be built up but that the curse of the Fall in Genesis 3 leads to a corruption of government and tyranny. His anthropology that assumes wherever there are humans, they are building is incorrect as certain peoples have never built up a civilization or were civilized via colonialism. Nevertheless, he argues that when a “government organizes or aligns on purpose or accidentally with God’s creative design order, people flourish, and where they move from it, people, particularly women and children, suffer horrifically.” For a few minutes, Chandler sounds like a Christian Nationalist. He would even say that he is a Christian who loves his nation.

However, as the sermon goes on, this is where the viral clip is located, in which Chandler accused the GOP of taking up abortion as a strategy to win elections because Christians would be easily manipulated into a frenzy. While this is wrong, the greater context illustrates the Third-Way approach of Matt Chandler. Despite the electoral success of Richard Nixon in 1968, he claimed that because Republicans were losing elections in 1972, they adopted the pro-life position as a strategy to win elections.

They were losing elections. They developed a strategy in the 70s to co-opt us and make us their people. They know we’re easily manipulated. They know we are easily worked into a frenzy, we can be controlled by them.

Although there is some truth that the GOP uses the life issue for votes, Chandler is outright wrong on the overall claim that they do so because Christians, presumably White Evangelicals, are easily manipulated. In fact, White Evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity because they are not as easily manipulated as other groups. They represent the last holdouts to the gay agenda, CRT, demographic replacement, and even the starkest Covid resistance, whereas the progressives were most easily manipulated by BLM, the rainbow Jihad, and covid tyranny. It is unsurprising that the least malleable group just so happens to have the most heritage in America.

But Chandler’s Third-Wayism requires this attack, however poorly constructed, so he can justify his much longer attack against the Left, in which he decries their demonic policy agenda. In no uncertain terms, he professes his deep dislike of Trump’s character, while attacking the Democrats as supporting Molech worship via policy.

The end of the sermon contains mid-wit level analysis in which Chandler claims that “no one is talking about policy” but instead the candidates are appealing to emotion to rile people into a frenzy. This is untrue, as the Trump campaign has been policy-focused. In case people have forgotten, Trump was literally shot while speaking directly to policy. Regardless, policies do not win elections but rather the most important element is a candidate’s ability to resonate with voters. And that is where the sermon ends. There is no real direction or guidance on how to navigate the culture other than a generic “both sides bad” argument.

Ultimately, while Matt Chandler accuses the GOP of implementing a shrewd strategy since the 70s, he is himself implementing a Third-Way strategy to navigate the election cycle so as to appear nonpartisan because he contends that partisanship is worship. This is untrue. However, on a positive note, for once a Third-Wayist actually attacked the Left in harsher terms than the Right.