Mainline Christianity is often low hanging fruit. The popular perception is that it is a dying brand of Christianity as the older generations who often occupy mainline pews die off without youthful injection. Financially, when this day comes, these denominations will be in financial jeopardy unless they have sufficient endowments to sustain them. Richard Ackerman (AKA Redeemed Zoomer) seeks to reverse this trend and has become the face of the so-called Reconquista Movement, which seeks to retake the mainlines from the liberals.
There is a variety of flaws with this approach as it would forego more viable denominations in pursuit of reviving those which have long been dead. The opportunity costs and inherent exposure risks, particularly for family men, deter many from pursuing this project. The antics of Redeemed Zoomer further disprove the logic behind the movement. For example, Redeemed Zoomer is notorious for defending the legitimacy of female “pastors,” even touting churches with female “pastors” as conservative.
Recently, he has been known for opposing “schism.” His standard to schism might cite historic precedent, but he is wielding the Reformers to suggest that men should sit under the authority of female elders, which is inherently sinful. Moreover, the PCUSA requires ordained clergy to affirm homosexual rights and other antinomian practices while their synods are woke assemblies. Claiming an altered version of the Westminster Confession of Faith does not override the heretical doctrines the PCUSA otherwise indulges in its practice.
Now, after weeks of his bellicose online behavior, Redeemed Zoomer is complaining about the backlash he has received.
Redeemed Zoomer is known for “posting coal,” which is to say that he gives an outrageous opinion on a given topic and receives a heap of backlash for his imbecility. Evidently, he is complaining that he angered all the groups at once. One of the recent screenshots is of him claiming that anyone who attends a nondenominational church is committing the sin of schism. To argue that one is sinning by going to a nondenominational church or a non-Mainline Church, like a PCA church, is inherently a personal attack, both against the members and the faithful pastors of those churches. These are the types of takes which he makes that instigates this online drama.
He is blaming the “angry mobs” for his stupidity and then claiming victimhood. What makes this more ridiculous is that he claims he cannot quit because he is financially dependent on content creation. His YouTube channel is rather successful with over 700K subscribers. From a Twitter standpoint, his “coal-posting” is conducive to monetization. Ironically, he is quick to block people which is counter-intuitive for engagement farming. Nevertheless, he is financially incentivized to persist in his idiotic theological takes because viral idiotic tweets are monetized. To his second argument, the fact that he is the “only big voice supporting mainline Protestantism” is evidence that his movement is a failure. While he has a large following, the internet has largely rejected his movement.
One might expect this to yield greater self-reflection but instead it is causing him to lash out and accuse people who do not agree with him of sinning because they refuse to submit to female pastors.
He was not always this divisive and incendiary towards those who attend PCA or OPC churches, so this shift in his rhetoric is a recent development. Where before he was amenable towards other denominations, he was not claiming their adherents were schismatic sinners.
Overall, this lays out a worsening trajectory for Redeemed Zoomer, that age and more study have not made him a more mature believer. This has been a recurrent critique against him made by pastors like Matthew Everhard. When Content Over Everything is the business model for delivering hot takes for quick dollars, it results in foolish behavior. Reformed theology did not change between 2024 and 2026, but the internet incentives have. When the Reconquista brand matters more than faithful Christians attending faithful churches, then the movement is fundamentally flawed, and hardly will such be rewarded by God.Â
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The whole concept of gen Z flooding boomer institutions is flawed. There are simply not enough zoomers around to even make a dent against all the boomers. Even if another “great awakening” would make everyone under 30 flooding the churches, it would not make any difference against the masses of old people still in every church (while many of them already left). The guy completely missed the demographic reality that boomers didn’t have children and won’t have them retroactively. So these numbers are the numbers to work with.
As a result the boomer institutions will simply go extinct during the 21st century, because their size is about tenfold of that what still existing zoomers actually need. And the entirety of boomer theologies of the 20th century (liberal AND conservative) and their entirely redundant clergy (female or not) will just go with them. Nobody needs one bishop plus one pastor per one sheep. This affects ALL denominations, not just the mainline. There are just way to many churches for the few young people to fill in the future.