Eli McGowan is an antifa-adjacent muckraker on Christian social media who has routinely gone after and slandered Christian Nationalists. But as providence would have it, he has a skeleton in his own closet which highlights his flaming hypocrisy. So in this article we will be partaking in an excersize of measuring McGowan to the standard by which he has measured others.
Background
Part of why this comes to mind is that Eli McGowan was part of a coordinated campaign to attack Joel Webbon for a sin from over a decade ago that he confessed to and submitted to ecclesiastical adjudication. But McGowan has his own decade-old indiscretion that is worth highlighting.
Defending A Child Molester
An account by the name of Modus bodied McGowan by pointing out his previous support for a child molester. Little information is known about the case of Jaymes Opheron (Jay Lauser) who, though born in 1990, was convicted of first-degree child molestation in 2012, and the acts might have been committed or began while he was a minor.
Eli McGowan wrote a glowing endorsement letter for his sentencing.
This is the testimony I sent to the Lausers to be handed over to the proper officials in Washington regarding the sentencing of my friend and mentor Jay Lauser in his trial.
To whom it may concern:
James Darren Lauser, known to all his friends as Jay, has been a good friend of mine for about a year and a half. I am the owner and administrator of an online community for Christian students, a fellow web developer. I saw, and continue to see Jay as a mentor, a mentor whose Christian walk is one to be emulated, one to follow. Since I first met him, I have sought his advice on problems small and large, and enjoyed his mentorship and encouragement.
In all the time I knew him, including working for him as a moderator and project leader on his own forums, I took especial notice of the way he treated women-with the utmost respect, care, and willingness to die for them as Christ died for his church. He lives out a Biblical model of how men, representatives of Christ, are to treat and care for women, representative of God’s precious church. Jay is quite likely the most chivalrous of men I know- one holding to a withering and dying code of honor followed by few today.
I do not hold it impossible that Jay committed grievous sins in his past. We all have. St. Peter, the rock of Christ’s church, denied Him three times. St. Paul was a brutal murderer. Mary Magdalene was a whore. In my own past, I have committed grievous offenses to my God, and to the law of this land.
But today, I am as innocent as Jay is. Both of us, among countless others, have been saved by the power of the Holy Spirit, picked up against our will and dropped facing the opposite direction, not by anything of ourselves, but by Grace, shown by God, because of what His son accomplished in being crushed for our sins, even becoming sin for us, and drinking the cup of His father’s wrath on the cross. And now, the sins we once loved, relished in, and worshipped, are dead to us. We were brought out of darkness and his marvelous light..” as scripture says, and now we are dead to our past. The famous hymn Before the Throne of God Above has a verse that fits well in describing this. It says:
When Satan tempts me to despair And tells me of the guilt within, Upward I look and see Him there Who made an end of all my sin.
Our sin has been put to death. Paid for by Christ during those moments when he hung on the cross between declaring “Father, why hath thou forsaken me?” and declaring the death blow to death itself “it is finished!” During that time, he was punished for our sins. Because, God was a good judge. As a judge yourself, you would surely wonder how a judge could simply allow another to take the place of the guilty. That would be morally wrong. Ah. That is the glory, the mystery of Christ’s love story for His church. I will spend all eternity pondering this question, and I will never fully understand it. Understand why. But for some reason, Christ, in perfect obedience to His father, and for His love for His church, for his bride, for Jay, and for myself, became an abomination for us, taking on every sin we had ever committed. He was the remedy to the fact that Proverbs says “He who justified the wicked is an abomination before the Lord” yet Romans says “God is both just and the justifier of the wicked.” God the father cursed Himself, another part of His triune being, out of His love for us. I will never understand this. Why has he put my sin to death? Why am I justified”, a term meaning “legally without blame”?
What I’m attempting to say here, is that Christ’s work is evidenced in Jay, from his loving words, his righteous walk, his repentance of his sins, and genuine sorrow over them. Because of this work, Jay is innocent. The old man has been put to death, and you have the wrong person in custody of the State of Washington.
I hope you take this into consideration. I hope my words have not offended. I pray that if He has not already done so, God would awaken you to a new life in Christ Jesus.
Jay has my complete trust, as I am a witness of the glorious work of our savior in Him. He is my brother in Christ, and I look forward to being united with Him. He has my complete trust, and I see no reason whatsoever for him to be imprisoned. I find it an utter impossibility that he is any danger to himself, or to any other.Sincerely,
Joseph Eli McGowan
The entire letter is a disgusting Jesus-juke, going so far as to claim that because of the blood of Jesus, Opheron is innocent of the crimes he committed. The horrendous theology could be beaten to a dead horse, but suffice to say the thief on the cross acknowledged his punishment was just.
Flash Forward
Eli McGowan has since repudiated this letter, denounced Opheron, and done works-based activism in the abuse grift in the church. As someone who has encountered a very similar situation when I was around the same age that McGowan was when he penned that letter, I would not have had sympathy for someone who molested their sister (I’m reflecting on my situation while making an educated guess on the situation McGowan was aware of), regardless of their profession of faith. Such testimony in defense of a child molester is worse than a man sleeping with his girlfriend, and it was a terrible witness for Christ.
The Bible says, “For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.” I do not use the sins that McGowan has previously repudiated to condemn him, but I will highlight the hypocrisy of a man who goes back in time to dig of the repentant sins of a brother in Christ while having an even worse sin in his own past. McGowan is an accuser of the brethren, a wicked and effeminate snake.
One Response
“What I’m attempting to say here, is that Christ’s work is evidenced in Jay, from his loving words, his righteous walk, his repentance of his sins, and genuine sorrow over them. Because of this work, Jay is innocent. The old man has been put to death, and you have the wrong person in custody of the State of Washington.”
This letter shows the paucity of Calvinistic theology in rejecting the Catholic distinction that Jesus’ death doesn’t erase the temporal punishment for sin. Even if Charles Manson were to become a Christian they day after eating his victims he still has to go to prison.
Also this overly idea that everything is “the work of Christ” rather than people having free will is disgusting. Its an essentially Calvinist notion that if someone seems good they must be the elect. Its clearly false. That leaves no room for admitting that someone did anything wrong as this vile letter shows.