The internet has allowed many names and figures to arise in opposition to the previously established institutions that buttressed intellectual Christianity. Institutions like Christianity Today and The Gospel Coalition, though prominent, no longer have the same credibility they once had. There is an ongoing retrieval movement where many men are learning more historic forms of Christianity and political theory, and this has met some of its most strident opposition within Christian institutions.
Carl Trueman is a professor at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which is an interfaith Judeo-Christian think tank. He even made an appearance in Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? Last year, Trueman attacked right-wing Christians as “pop Nietzscheans” because they sought institutional and political power to enact cultural change, which is the only way cultural change is ever enacted. This was very much in line with The Lord of the Rings Theology of Power, in which Power is in and of itself evil. It comes not from Tolkien, but rather the Jackson movies. His alternatives amounted to Gospel Jukes and tone-policing that ultimately accomplishes nothing.
This year, he has invented “Gig Eva” as a replacement for “Big Eva” in his latest article at First Things:
Many years ago, I coined the term “Big Eva.” While today the term is used as a quick and lazy smear for any well-known figures of a previous generation that a particular X-man happens to dislike, at the time I intended it to be a humorous but pointed reference to a specific phenomenon: the rise of big conference platforms and the promotion of certain speakers—which I called “celebrity pastors”—that supplanted or subverted the role of local congregations, ministers, and denominations in shaping church policy.
While he takes credit for coining the phrase Big Eva, it is important to note the parallel terms like Big Tech, Mainstream Media, or even Con. Inc., which denotes institutions and major figures who are predominant in various industries. What he coined to describe the conference circuit took on a broader definition to denote institutional Christianity in America, which is entirely consistent with the comparative terms. In other words, he was describing the elites.
By “celebrity pastors,” I did not mean those church leaders who happened to be well-known. I meant those who consciously leveraged their public platforms to exert influence beyond their church, thereby weakening it. These were not simply podcasters or bloggers or op-ed writers. They were key players in large parachurch organizations that sought to operate as denominations but without the typical accountability that denominations are, in theory at least, supposed to involve. At the height of Big Eva’s influence, I once asked a class of students who was the most influential pastor in their lives. Almost none mentioned his or her actual minister, defaulting instead to naming the headline acts at the big evangelical conferences.
Pastors who “consciously leveraged their public platforms to exert influence beyond their church, thereby weakening it” would include Tim Keller and his third-wayism, which is an objectively failed methodology to approach the culture. The Gospel Coalition was instrumental in peddling the “shepherdess” positions in the PCA, as seen in their promotion of Jen Wilkins and in Keller’s former church. Other institutions, like Christianity Today, capitulate on major issues to promote progressive goals, which includes their article endorsing the Respect for “Marriage” Act which codified sodomitical “marriage” in 2022. The main usage of the term applies to those with institutional credibility, which is why it can be expanded to notably weak pastors who write for prominent outlets and seminary professors, like Carl Trueman, who promoted Aimee Byrd to the detriment of the church.
He proceeds to say that while the conference scene has not died and persists, the problems of “Big Eva” have migrated to social media. This has caused the conferences he described to lack the same influence of prior years. This is true in part because major players involved in the conference circuit have died or fallen to scandal. Other conferences, like Passion Conference, appeal to women, while TPUSA also arose in the space, giving added competition.
The broader business dynamics in the U.S. are now sometimes referred to as creating the “gig economy,” a term that describes the shift from the traditional business model and institutions as sources of income to the more disparate and informal network of opportunities offered by new media. Ubers have squeezed licensed taxi drivers. Airbnb has opened up the world of short-term accommodation well beyond that once offered by professional hoteliers…And so in the world of evangelicalism, Big Eva is being challenged by what we might call “Gig Eva.”
Gig Eva is not rooted in the “Giga-Chad” meme culture, which perhaps is why the term is not taking on negative connotations by the X-Men, who, if anything, have embraced the label. The comparisons to gig-employment would seem to indicate that there are a bunch of men picking up theology as a side hustle, but the real problem is that those men are better at applying theology than seminary-trained pastors. The pastorate, as a class, is horrendous at politics. Despite their desire to speak to political issues, they often reduce politics to theology when it is a distinct category of its own. Their solutions often equated to having tolerance for homosexuals, accepting/aiding their dispossession via immigration, and embracing Black Lives Matter. Those more conservative are Zionists, which promotes foreign interests at the expense of the home front. No wonder those under 40 are looking elsewhere. The parallel to this dynamic can be seen in the evangelical support for Donald Trump which was not shared by evangelical elites.
However, Trueman paints a strawman of what he means:
There are some obvious differences between the Big and the Gig. Even in the world of Big Eva, the headline acts were generally men and women who had first established their reputations through service of local churches or talented writing for established publishers. They had a certain authority that predated their rise to Big Eva influence. In Gig Eva, anyone with the time to spend living online can become a celebrity without having proved himself beforehand in any real service to any church. But there are also similarities, such as in the matter of accountability. Big Eva gurus were accountable only to each other. Their heirs in Gig Eva are accountable to nobody. To put it another way, both tend to marginalize the actual church by making their own platforms and declarations the source of all wisdom, but Gig Eva has only intensified the problem that led me to coin the term “Big Eva.”
He states that Big Eva earned their spots through service and credentialism, which enabled them to have their works published and develop platforms. This is laughable as the publishing industry is overwrought with DEI and, in Christian circles, is being supplanted by niches like Canon Press. That the SBC’s Lifeway exists to promote female writers is itself proof that merit is not what gives cause to success in Big Eva. The other factors that contributed to the rise of various figures include their location (major or rising population centers), affiliation with a seminary, and first-mover advantage (first to utilize the internet). Many of their advantages came from their time and place, much as the “Gig Eva” types are taking advantage of the internet today.
He further strawmans the notion of accountability. Many of these Gig Eva types are actually pastors themselves who are accountable to local churches but are dissidents to Big Eva. Regardless, there is a lack of accountability for major Christian figures, especially when they promote liberal women from their platforms. In Big Eva, there is no accountability for exposing their audiences to heretics.
The economics of social media are different, and this is reflected in the culture of Gig Eva: Building a platform on X, for example, involves constant transgression of boundaries, hence the emergence of Gig Eva personalities whose trademark behavior ranges from attacking the leaders of Big Eva to rehabilitating Hitler.
There is a hypocrisy of those with large platforms accusing others of “platform building,” which is what Trueman does here when he talks about seeking social media engagement to build a following. In order to have an effective movement, boundaries must be transgressed. Thus, Hitler and holocaust jokes can be an effective means to transgress the so-called Post War Consensus since modern culture has equated Adolf Hitler to Satan himself as the ultimate evil, even though his evil was not unique in the 20th century compared to other dictators. This is not an endorsement of Hitler or any particular joke, but the Holocaust narrative blames all white people, which is why we require constant “education” and emphasis, despite America fighting against the Third Reich. As Josh Hammer once said, “Jew-hatred is inherent to the European DNA.” Hammer is the “conservative” Jew, but this same belief manifests in why secular, liberal Jews are the biggest proponents of multiculturalism in white nations. The progressives won because they constantly transgressed the culture to move the Overton Window in their favor. The Right can only win if they are willing to transgress the world that liberals built. Even Christ transgressed the culture when he flipped tables.
And Gig Eva also has the advantage of the frictionless nature of technologically mediated engagement. Big Eva silenced critics by ignoring them or making quiet phone calls to employers [emphasis added]. Gig Eva launches full-frontal personal attacks but does so from the safety offered by tech platforms that have no place for that pesky prerequisite of personal competence.
There is a sinister remark where Trueman gives implication that Big Eva types sought to have their critics fired from their jobs, but this is somehow better than public “attacks” on social media. Calling out the liberalism in Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is what cost Dr. Russell Fuller his employment. Though perhaps not quite Big Eva, this dynamic was seen in James White and Tobias Riemenschneider’s attempt to struggle session Joel Webbon and his church member over a meme in a group chat. Essentially, they wanted to dox this person and cost him his livelihood.
No individual group or writer in Gig Eva will likely enjoy the breadth of influence experienced by their Big Eva forefathers. The diffuse nature of online discourse means that there will never be a focal point of the kind provided by the conference stage in the ten-thousand-seat convention hall. But Gig Eva may well reshape significant parts of the Christian culture because it is so attuned to the pieties of the dominant expressive individualism of our day. Its advocates validate their personal authenticity by their constant iconoclasm, their decrying of anything that stands in their way, and their priority of disembodied, cost-free online engagement over the more expensive demands of service—and accountability—to real people in real time, in church and in homes. Big Eva had its problems. Gig Eva is set only to intensify them.
This is how the free portion of the article ends. Trueman asserts that they will not have the same relevance as Big Eva, but this is untrue. Social Media and YouTube allow their critics to amass larger audiences than they would inside evangelicalism. They may not be bigger in terms of market share in evangelicalism, but the size of the overall pie is larger because they have a larger target audience. That Andrew Isker can appear on Tucker Carlson is more impactful than him speaking at G3.
The rest of the paragraph is just Bulverism of his opponents, who he has characterized as anons seeking validation, a sign he does not actually touch grass. Anonymity is essential to protecting the livelihood of the individual after over a decade of liberal institutional control. Seminary professors with cushy jobs would not understand what the worker bees inside corporate America have to do to protect themselves. If one meets the laics in so-called Gig Eva, they will find upstanding individuals, fathers with children, or otherwise reasonably successful individuals, not embittered, fatherless young men in their mother’s basement.
Conclusion
The reason for the rise of so-called “Gig Eva” is because the seminaries and the Christian institutions no longer offer compelling Christian thought, or their thought is contrary to historic Christianity. This is true even in the secular world, where compelling thought and debate is happening outside of the universities and the mainstream media. People like Carl Trueman will complain about accountability, but he himself has never been held accountable for the promotion of Aimee Byrd. Trueman will complain about Gig Eva’s disregard for the “pesky prerequisite of personal competence,” but the reason this group has arisen is because of the incompetence and impotence of institutional Christianity, which has, much like conservatism itself, done nothing to rebuff the progressive gains since the sixties. If anything, Gig Eva is the next generation of evangelical elites, one that actually wishes to fight for a Christian culture, not capitulate to liberalism. This is what has led to the so-called Bro Revival among white men. The New Christian Elite is rising and, while Trueman objects, this is a positive development.
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One Response
“Even Christ transgressed the culture when he flipped tables.”
Not a good example. Under the Mosaic law, money-changing was only supposed to be done if you were required to offer a sacrifice but circumstances prevented you from getting to the required place to offer it. The religious rulers of that era first turned what was supposed to be an exception into a regular and accepted practice and then began practicing it inside the temple. It was utterly ridiculous: it was impossible to claim that you needed to exchange money for your sacrifice because you couldn’t get to the designated sacrifice location when they were exchanging the money at the sacrificial location itself!
That puts the response of the rabbis into context. They were regarded as the ones with the authority to make rulings and regulations on the law and they based their authority on Numbers 11:16-30. So their position was that by objecting to their decision to change the Mosaic law, Jesus Christ was objecting to the Mosaic law’s giving them this power in the first place and by extension the Mosaic law itself. Now granted, they did not have the position that their rulings were absolute. So they demanded from Jesus Christ proof of prophetic authority, a sign from from God, as evidence from God that their making moneychanging a regular practice was wrong. They constantly asked Christ of this. And Christ, true to form, refused to humor their demands, as the Gospel of John tells us that Christ’s signs and miracles were not for that purpose.
So Christ was not transgressing the culture but rather objecting to the Pharisees’ causing the Jews to violate the law. Incidentally, the idea that Jesus Christ was this counterculture rebel is liberal fiction. It requires reading the Bible, tossing out the things that you don’t believe and keeping what you do, only after reinterpreting them according to your framework of unbelief. If we were to use modern political terms, Christ was very conservative. He didn’t object to the Pharisees because the Pharisees were too religious and conservative. If that was His objection, then there were other more “liberal” Jewish sects at the time, most of which aren’t listed in the Bible but they did include the Sadducees. Christ objected to the Pharisees because their religious conservatism was according to their own teachings and not the Bible’s; a false religion instead of the true one. The Pharisees were the first to abandon sola scriptura for their own traditions. The counterculture rebel false Jesus would have never told the woman caught in adultery to “go and sin no more” as the actual One did. The counterculture rebel false Jesus would have never told the man that He healed to “stop sinning before something worse than your 38 year disability happens to you.” And He certainly would not have endorsed every single sin that the Old Testament does and stated that hell fire was the fate of everyone who didn’t reject those sins and believe in Him.
And finally, the Bible teaches against anonymous charges in both Testaments.