Human Conversion in The Digital Age
Authority, Hard Lines, & The Winsome Wars | Pt. III
If you haven’t already, you can read Pt. I & Pt. II by clicking the blue.
Venkatesh Rao’s evergreen article The Internet of Beefs highlights the negative side of internet combat, where storied digital “knights” fight for the loyalty (and often money) of anonymous hordes of “mooks” which can be directed against opposing knights. Rao notes that for most knights, “mooks are not important,” and “knights are neither responsible for what the mooks do, nor accountable for the views held by mooks who fight under their banners.”
Any public figure with a social media presence participates in this dynamic to one degree or another. Jay Dyer often comes under fire for taking this dynamic too far. That is, rallying bands of mooks against opposing knights. He is not apologetic about battling worldviews out in the open or drawing hard lines. Social media is built, to a large degree, on bad blood. A carefully curated selection of clips taken out of context from Dyer’s thousands of hours of videos and/or social media jousts would leave anyone who has never encountered his work before to assume this guy was a giant jerk. These algorithmically influenced snapshots are simply inevitable in the new social landscape.
However, the knight-mook relationship is not necessarily unhealthy; at its best, mutually beneficial relationship forms where mooks exchange loyalty and financial support for insights and online connections that translate into actions and in-person relationships of genuine value. Granted, under digital constraints, more unworthy knights exist than worthy ones. An unworthy knight will, at best, waste a mook’s time and, at worst, send them spiraling into an existential tailspin, often with a lighter wallet.
My trust in Paul Vander Klay, Jay Dyer and Jonathan Pageau was in part predicated on their insistence that they had no spiritual authority over their audience and the willingness to admit their own faults at times without coming off as overly pieistic. I trusted that they genuinely desired to help their fellow man, whatever their faults. Each of them also repeatedly stressed the importance of joining an on-the-ground church body. Their specific recommendations speak to their general approach to cultural engagement: PVK: join a church, Pageau: join a traditional church, Dyer: join a canonical Orthodox Church, and within an American context, it’s probably best to avoid certain jurisdictions (GOARCH).
PVK has repeatedly stated, “I am not your pastor!” after people online insist, “you are my pastor!” This “I am not your pastor!” is more difficult to accept within a Protestant framework than Dyer or Pageau’s “I am not your priest!” which is more obvious; you can hear a sermon online from any Joe or Sally these days, but from an Orthodox perspective you can only receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ from an ordained Orthodox priest.
PVK has taken an interest in the rise of Orthodoxy in America, pointing out that as the pre-modern Orthodox tradition comes into deeper contact with protestant America, the Church will have to incorporate converts with a radically different set of cultural and religious priors. Change, even if it is not doctrinal, is inevitable.
Dyer and Pageau are examples of this phenomenon. For better or for worse, and for younger adults in particular, these two laymen are the most well-known evangelists of Orthodoxy in the online English-speaking world. Thousands have joined the Church because of their work. It is telling that both are former protestants who have excelled in the new aural-visual space of Youtube, in part through engagement with popular American culture. Both have the blessings of their bishops and frequently speak with clergy online, but what does it mean for church hierarchies when laymen potentially have more influence over their congregations than the clergy?
Another former protestant and layman Orthodox apologist, Perry Robinson, the OG “mean” formally philosophically trained Orthodox apologist, remarked in a recorded discussion on his Youtube channel Energetic Procession that:
“The defining issue in my opinion for this century as far as the Church is concerned, as far as our survival as Christians, will be what the boundaries of the Church are, will be Church discipline…Where are the boundaries of the Church? Can you establish them by discipline? Because if you can’t, you’re finished.”
You can get as grumpy as you want about individuals drawing hard lines in the sand but with the accelerating de-Christinanization of society, we are witnessing in real time what the disintegration of nominal Christianity looks like. To not draw any hard lines is to accept extinction.
In the same discussion, Robinson makes clear his opposition to para-church organizations. He knows from experience how these organizations can go wrong. A former employee of the Christian Research Institute (CRI), Robinson has documented the chicanery which has gone on in that organization on his website Energetic Procession. CRI is run by Hank Hanegraff, aka “The Bible Answer Man.” Hanegraff converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2017 and caught plenty of flak from the protestant world in doing so. He’s also come under fire from the Orthodox for, among other things, continuing his Bible Answer Man program, or shtick if you will, despite never publicly renouncing his Reformed views. In fact, he went so far as to say in one of his broadcasts soon after converting, “Look, my views have been codified in 20 books, and my views have not changed.”
Is there the ability or the willingness to discipline influential laymen when they cross the line? Where, exactly, are the lines anyway?
Robinson advocates that apologetics be done directly by the Church, suggesting that selected Deacons be trained to fulfill this specific function for their respective locales. They are, as he points out, actually ordained by Christ. The credibility of his own part-time apologetic work is strengthened by the fact that he does not accept any form of payment for his efforts.
Since my reception into the Church in 2020, more Orthodox clergy are embracing public-facing apologetic work online, the most notable being Fr. Josiah Trenham who has a PhD in theology. Other notable clergy are Dr. Fr. Deacon Ananias Sorem, a professor of philosophy, and Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen of ROCOR who is the abbot of St. Demetrios of Thessaloniki Monastery in Virginia. Both are active on Youtube and who have collaborated with Dyer at times.
Within the English speaking Orthodox world the most popular platform for Orthodox content is Ancient Faith Radio (AFR), or Ancient Faith Ministries, a department of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America (of which I am a member) that offers a wide variety of online radio shows, podcasts, and interviews. However, the organization has a small presence on Youtube, the gold standard of social media influence, and no official apologetics branch exists. With AFR’s popularity and breadth of content comes a larger scope for comment and criticism. Online, the nexus for such comments and criticisms is a handful of popular blogs and, of course, Youtube channels.
AFR platforms laymen and clergy, and has come under strong criticism in the past for its platforming of certain laymen who have publicly advocated for the Church to be more LGBTQ-friendly and inclusive—which many Orthodox perceive, rightly, in my opinion, to be an implied call for change in doctrine from these lay contributors. Although certainly not alone in his displeasure with this, Dyer was at the forefront of this criticism, a criticism specifically centered on the platforming of laity.
As a brief aside, I think many in the older generations have little conception of just how rhetorically effective it is to drive home your argument when you can do a multi-hour livestream going through dozens of examples showing the subject of your criticism doing what you’re criticizing them for while responding to any objections in real-time. Remember, the internet remembers all. That deleted tweet? Yeah, that got screenshotted. That obscure blog article from six months ago? Yeah, a 20-year-old found that in six seconds. The machine memory of the internet is no joke.
The issue of credibility associated with platforms should also be raised. Dyer has a steady slot on the infamous The Alex Jones Show. It’s not for nothing that he jokingly refers to Jones as Lord Voldemort. Not that Dyer cares, but in the eyes of many, an association with the "they're turning the fricking frogs gay!" guy removes any shred of credibility. Similarly, Pageau’s recent appearances on another alternative media platform, The Daily Wire, facilitated by his friend Peterson, hampers his credibility. These dynamics are inevitable for public figures as they receive increased exposure.
By contrast, PVK has often remarked on happily running a small Youtube channel (approx. 25K), although he has shared the stage across North American and Europe with well-known public figures in the Christian and Christian adjacent world such as Aaron Renn, Tom Holland, Paul Kingsnorth, as well as his friend Pageau. His credibility comes largely from his pastoral approach to online randos and the occasional sneak peeks into his homeless ministry and local church life.
This “lowly” position has allowed him to form stable connections over time with a hodgepodge of colorful and (gasp) heretical characters that larger, more commercial channels wouldn’t have the time or inclination to engage with on such a level. This approach, running parallel to the conversation around platforms, is what the ever-irenic PVK has coined The Winsome Wars.
This refers to a debate, primarily in the American protestant landscape, that began after some pointed public examinations of the now departed PCA pastor Tim Keller’s perceived toothless, albeit New York Times-endorsed, winsome cultural engagement strategy. PVK has often noted that one of the easiest ways to grow on any social media platform is to find your tribe's favorite enemy and attack them effectively. Keller obviously did not win a hearing with the NYT by campaigning against the horrors of abortion, which would have been terribly mean of him.
While PVK’s online ministry, which is centered around his own winsomeness, has won him numerous friends and provided succor to many struggling with their faith, his own denomination, the Christian Reformed Church, is seemingly in the slow-motion process of splitting over same-sex marriage. Or you might say hard lines are being drawn.
In my own experience, it was the combination of winsome and hard line approaches that predisposed me to seriously considering the Christian faith. Like many unchurched millenials I had little contact with devout Christians in my day-to-day life, or if I did they didn’t have the nerve to share their faith, so just spending time watching someone profess and exhibit Christian virtues was refreshing. At the same time, in an age when the ascendent morality is so frail, so goofy, and yet so effective in winning over young people, it seems encumbent on Christians with the ability to do so to step into the intellectual arena and defend the faith, even if that is perceived as being “mean.”
At the same time, one should remember, as PVK is fond of pointing out, in the Judean culture war of the day, the only thing the warring factions could agree on about Jesus of Nazareth was that they would all be better off if this troublemaker was dead. So if you really live as Jesus lived…
In Pt. IV, we’ll wrap up this series on Human Conversion in The Digital Age with Orthobros & Discord Bringing Us Together.