JD Hall, of Insight To Incite, one of the largest Christian substacks, recently called out Mike Winger, one of the largest Christian YouTubers. In a recent article titled, “Mike Winger, Controlled Polemics, and PR in a Discernment Mask,” Hall characterizes some of Winger’s seminal work as “an entertaining post-mortem on an already-cooked career[s].
Winger has gone after Benny Hinn, Shawn Bolz, Michael Brown, Todd White, Mike Bickle, Brian Simmons and his The Passion Translation, Che Ahn, and Rick Joyner. That’s quite a list, and they’re all scoundrels, every last one of them. God knows – and so do you – I’ve written about all of them (I hyperlinked them above with articles I’ve written about them), and most of them, more than 15 years ago and long before the scandals that Winger has used to do the same. But Hebrews 5:14 tells us that mature believers have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. The keyword is “trained,” and it implies a willingness to engage with the hard cases before they become easy ones.
If what Christian discernment is, is a post-mortem on the careers of scoundrels, those whom the church is already broadly aware are wolves in sheep’s clothing, then it isn’t truly discernment. It’s just tale-bearing. Discernment is more meaningful than that. Its purpose is to warn fellow Christians, in advance of some obvious public moral or doctrinal failing, so that the individual is to be marked and avoided. Discernment, done well, will always earn far more jeers than applause.
Discernment, for example, was warning the world that Beth Moore was a feminist who inwardly supported female pastors back when Beth Moore was swearing up and down she was not a feminist who supported female pastors, but her trajectory, her actions, and even her words – when listened to carefully – said otherwise. Discernmemt, for example, was warning the world that Russell Moore was a Democrat operative who supported the policies and perspectives of Beltway Leftists, back when he was still denying it and the rest of evangelicalism was calling you a liar. None of it was popular. But it was discernment.
JD Hall’s criticism of Mike Winger is one that I’ve made in the past, whereby I compared Mike Winger to Ben Shapiro who promoted the Covid narrative for months until he one day decided that the evidence had convinced him to switch to the side that it supported the whole time. It’s that level of arbitrary egoism that had Mike Winger defend Bill Johnson, until he called him a false teacher despite the overwhelming evidence that people told him about whilst he defended him. Mike Winger shows up late to the fight while manufacturing a level of credibility on the issue through exhaustive coverage.
But the timing of Winger is not Hall’s only criticism. He also takes issue with the fact that Mike Winger goes after only easy targets, what I’ve long called Clown World Evangelicalism, which does not pretend to have mainstream legitimacy. Benny Hinn is perhaps the largest figure in this camp.
JD Hall’s reason for why Winger goes after the lowest hanging fruit: shared theology.
But Winger’s views as a “soft charismatic” and those of “hard charismatics,” like Benny Hinn and Kenneth Copeland, are the same, which is the very problem that has led to modern charismaticism becoming a hive of scum and villainy. There is no doctrinal difference. On paper, it’s the same beliefs; the only difference is that one is wearing a seatbelt. The issue with Continuatitonism is not a rogue false prophet now and then arises, like Shawn Bolz getting caught using Facebook to conjure special “words of knowledge.” It’s all false. Every last bit of it. That’s why the true prophets are always just as surprised as the rest of us, or even more so, when someone like Bolz gets caught engaging in trickery. It’s why not a single charismatic prophet saw COVID coming. Their prophecies are less accurate than palm-reading.
Winger treats each of the charlatans he’s “exposed” like an anomaly, some bizarre exception to what is otherwise a solid, biblical movement, and himself as a brave reformer who is excising the occasional wolf in sheep’s clothing from the body of Christ. But none of them – Hinn, Bolz, Brown, Bickel, Ahn et tal – are anomales. None is an exception. They’re the rule. His failure is to treat the disease, which is charismaticism itself.
Hall goes after continuationism as the root error of Benny Hinn et al, and argues that Mike Winger is portraying himself as a legitimate charismatic who is policing the camp. Perhaps true, but Winger is not the first to do that. Michael Brown has made multiple attempts to do that in the past as well, until his own hypocrisies caught up with him. Hall gives Brown an extensive look in his article, as Winger defended Brown until it was no longer tenable in popular opinion.
JD Hall calls this “Controlled Polemics.”
Every large institutional body develops an immune system. The immune system exists to protect the institution, to identify threats and neutralize them before they endanger the host. What looks from the outside like the charismatic movement holding itself accountable is, on examination, the movement identifying figures who have become liabilities and executing them publicly before their scandals contaminate the broader institution. The theology survives every time. The premises go unexamined. The machinery keeps running. What gets removed is the personnel whose continued presence costs more than their removal.
Essentially, JD Hall alleges that Mike Winger is defending charismaticism from deserved scrutiny by going after the worst actors in a bad movement.
Benny Hinn, a 4-hour review in 2024. Hinn has been a punchline for thirty years and has no serious defenders anywhere in evangelical life. The documentary cost Winger nothing because Hinn was already finished.
Shawn Bolz, a six-hour review in January of this year. Protestia had been documenting Bolz as a fraud for years before that video was published. The major charismatic networks had already quietly distanced themselves from Bolz. He was a liability the movement had decided to discard, and Winger showed up to film the burial and take credit for the funeral.
Brian Simmons and the Passion Translation, targeted since 2018, were already widely mocked as a charismatic vanity project before Winger weighed in.
Michael Brown in 2025, after every exhausted ounce of institutional capital had been spent defending him, only after Brown had already served his purpose and become a liability to the charismatic movement.
This leads to Hall’s final critique, which is akin to the phrase “content over everything” used by creators.
Winger is not engaging in actual discernment. He is engaging in content production aimed at an audience that wants to feel theologically sophisticated by watching someone mock people they already mock. It is the Christian equivalent of a political commentator doing a hit piece on a candidate who just lost by forty points. The courage involved is exactly zero. If Winger is the serious theological heavyweight his audience believes him to be, the question worth asking is why he has never produced a single video on Gavin Ortlund, a man with real institutional credibility, a Christianity Today Book of the Year award, and a growing platform who has argued that Catholics are Christians, promoted the secular climate change agenda from a Christian pulpit, denied a global flood, and is methodically positioning himself as the next Tim Keller for a generation of young evangelicals who do not know what Tim Keller cost the church. Ortlund has defenders. Ortlund has platforms. Ortlund has the institutional weight of Big Eva behind him and a family name that opens every door in respectable evangelical circles. That is a real target. That is a fight that would cost something. Winger has never shown up for it, because entertainment discernment only works on cartoons, and Ortlund is not a cartoon.
JD Hall cites Big Eva darling, Gavin Ortlund as an example of a real target of discernment because of his institutional backing and defenders. On this, he is on the money.
Encouragement For Winger
Although Hall’s argument is sound, there is ample opportunity for it to be proven wrong. Mike Winger, even adhering to his charismatic convictions, could choose to go after false teachers within the church, even within the charismatic movement, who aren’t punching bags and well-exposed. Mike Winger has the capacity, the patience, and the production value to pull this off.
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