Warlords of the Ghetto: Why the Evangelical Influencer Ecosystem Radicalizes Instead of Reforms

The grievance is real. A good friend of mine recently remarked, “David, young men – particularly white men – in this country have been abused. They’ve been discriminated against, literally and culturally. Told that who they are – male, white, and Christian – is the cause of everything that ails Western civilization. They see no hope or prospects for the life that you and I enjoy – wife, kids, social stability. They feel that something is deeply, existentially wrong, and they’re going to follow whoever gives them answers, even if those answers don’t actually solve the problem.”

He was right.

What he articulated is not a fringe sentiment or a manufactured grievance. It is something you hear quietly (sometimes shamefacedly) from young men who feel unmoored from a social order that no longer has a place for them. They are told they are dangerous by default, suspect by nature, and guilty by inheritance. At the same time, they are told to compete, to succeed, to be productive, to shoulder responsibility, all while the pathways that once led to stability (marriage, homeownership, respected work) seem to grow narrower and more precarious.

And yet, despite all of this, the ordinary obligations of life remain stubbornly unchanged. The lawn still needs mowing. Bills still need paying. Classes still need attending. Employers still expect punctuality and competence. Whatever injustices exist (and many do) life does not pause while we litigate them.

This tension has always existed to some degree. Every generation inherits a world shaped by the sins, failures, and blind spots of its forebears. But something has shifted in how this tension is narrated and exploited. What is new is not alienation itself, but the media ecosystem surrounding it. This ecosystem does not merely acknowledge grievance, but affirms it, centers it, and sells answers to it.

Young men today are not simply being told, “The world is unfair.” They are being told, “Your anger is the truest thing about you.” And there is no shortage of voices – often men my age or older – eager to confirm that message, to translate frustration into identity, and to offer belonging in place of responsibility.

That is where the danger lies. Not in acknowledging grievance, but in what we do with it.

I. Grievance as Raw Material, Not Destiny

Grievance, by itself, does not radicalize people. It never has.

History is littered with societies that endured humiliation, poverty, political exclusion, or cultural collapse without descending into totalitarian madness. Conversely, history is also filled with movements that arose not because suffering existed, but because suffering was interpreted, narrated, and weaponized by people who stood to benefit from it.

After World War I, Germany was subjected to an extraordinarily punitive settlement. The economic devastation was real. Hyperinflation destroyed savings. National pride was crushed under forced moral blame. Democratic institutions were discredited before they had a chance to mature. These conditions did not cause Nazism in some mechanical sense, but they created fertile soil into which a demagogue could plant meaning.

What the Nazi movement offered was not merely scapegoats, though it certainly offered those. It offered explanation, identity, and purpose. It told disaffected Germans not simply that they were suffering, but why, and more importantly, who would redeem them. Grievance became the foundation of a story in which the party cast itself as savior.

This distinction matters. Grievance becomes dangerous not when it exists, but when it becomes the organizing principle of identity. When suffering is no longer something to be endured and overcome, but something to be curated, protected, and endlessly reaffirmed, it ceases to be explanatory and becomes formative.

The modern mistake is to imagine that this dynamic belongs only to the twentieth century, or only to mass politics, or only to extreme ideologies. It does not. The same psychological mechanism operates wherever grievance is captured and leveraged by people who have no incentive to see it resolved.

II. The Attention Economy and the Death of Epistemic Stability

Christianity is not a novelty-driven system. It does not promise endless innovation or ideological reinvention. On the contrary, it explicitly grounds itself in a once-for-all revelation of truth received rather than manufactured. Our truth is preserved, not endlessly upgraded.

That epistemic stability is not incidental. It is the bedrock upon which Christian theology, moral formation, and civilizational continuity rest. Truth is something you submit to, not something you perform.

The modern attention economy operates on the opposite principle.

Online platforms reward what is new, provocative, and emotionally activating. Saying “this is still true” does not drive engagement. Saying “everything you were taught was a lie” does. Algorithms do not care whether an idea is wise, durable, or sanctifying; they care whether it keeps people watching, clicking, sharing, and arguing.

This creates a profound tension when religious discourse is filtered through influencer-driven media. The problem is not simply that bad ideas spread more quickly than good ones. The problem is that stability itself becomes unprofitable.

An influencer cannot survive by repeating settled truths indefinitely. They must produce fresh angles, sharper enemies, more dramatic crises. Over time, the pressure is not merely to explain old truths better, but to reframe them more radically, to distinguish oneself in an increasingly crowded marketplace of voices.

Ideas become content. Theology becomes performance. And the line between conviction and provocation begins to blur.

In such an environment, restraint looks like fear. Consistency looks like stagnation. And transgression is sold as moral courage. Saying the forbidden thing becomes a way of signaling independence, insight, and authenticity, regardless of whether the thing said is true, wise, or necessary.

This is not a failure of individual character so much as a failure of incentives. A system that rewards escalation will reliably produce escalators.

III. Warlords of the Ghetto (Defined)

By “Warlords of the Ghetto,” I am not referring to unserious cranks or fringe extremists. I am describing a leadership pathology that appears whenever authority is built on dysfunction rather than flourishing.

In failed states and socialist dictatorships, you often see leaders who preside over shrinking, impoverished societies while enriching themselves. These leaders could pursue reform, trade, integration, or reconciliation, but doing so would dilute their control. Prosperity might empower citizens to leave. Stability would reduce dependence. Dysfunction, by contrast, secures loyalty.

The people remain poor. The leader remains powerful. A small, desperate population is easier to rule than a large, flourishing one.

The online influencer ecosystem produces a strikingly similar dynamic. Some leaders would rather preside over a small, angry, perpetually aggrieved audience than help people mature, integrate, and move on with their lives. Followers who improve (get married, build careers, log off) are bad for engagement and worse for revenue.

So resentment is curated. Outrage is escalated. Growth is quietly discouraged.

The “ghetto” here is not geographic but psychological: a bounded identity space defined by grievance, opposition, and shared enemies. The warlord’s authority depends on keeping people inside that space. Any solution that would allow followers to outgrow the need for constant interpretation threatens the leader’s position.

This is why so many online movements feel intense when they are actually inconsequential. They generate endless noise, but little fruit. The leader thrives. The people stagnate.

IV. Elder Rule, Platform Authority, and the Rise of the Spiritual Warlord

At some point, any honest analysis has to descend from abstraction to reality. Systems have faces. Incentives have beneficiaries. And the evangelical influencer ecosystem I’m describing is not theoretical. Rather, it is populated by specific men whose public ministries are inseparable from their online personas.

Enter a trio of pastors who, despite their claimed differences, are actually cut very much from the same cloth. While I have criticized both Phoenix apologist/pastor James White and Moscow, Idaho pastor Doug Wilson, I have held back on commenting on Texas pastor Joel Webbon until now. Frankly, he wasn’t (and may still not be) influential enough to warrant inclusion. Yet the symptoms/developments he represents are – if nothing else – helpful in analyzing the current nature of the online world of reformed evangelical influencers. 

Figures like Webbon, White, and Wilson are not aberrations. They are not outsiders or theological curiosities. They represent (particularly Wilson and Webbon) a mature stage of a model that has been developing for years among conservative evangelical leaders who have learned (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) how to convert theology into audience capture.

Before going further, a clarification is necessary. I affirm the 1689 London Baptist Confession and congregational polity. I will not argue that elder plurality, postmillennial hope, or civilizational concern inevitably leads to the problems described here. The issue is not these doctrines in the abstract, but the way overlapping theological commitments are operationalized inside an online influence economy that rewards escalation, punishes restraint or interpersonal compromise, and makes it impossible for effective rebuke among its own.

What these men share is not identical theology, but enough theological overlap and audience overlap to make fundamental critique costly.

Formal Accountability vs. Functional Authority

All three men would insist (truthfully) that they have accountability to local churches. Formally speaking, that is correct. The question, however, is not whether accountability exists in theory, but whether the kind of accountability on offer is capable of restraining a leader whose real authority is derived elsewhere.

In each case, the practical center of gravity is not the local congregation, but:

• platform reach
• audience loyalty
• institutional brand
• conference circuits
• publishing networks
• algorithmic visibility

In other words, functional authority is audience-derived, even if formal accountability structures remain in place.

This distinction matters. A congregation can correct, rebuke, discipline, remove, and restore. An audience cannot. An audience can only amplify, abandon, or radicalize.

Elder Rule Without Congregational Teeth

Here the elder-rule paradigm, as it is commonly practiced in these circles, becomes especially relevant.

In its biblical and historic form, plural eldership exists within a framework of meaningful congregational authority. Elders lead; congregations retain the power of recognition, correction, and removal. As has been noted many times recently, elder plurality was never intended to create self-generating spiritual authorities insulated from the people they serve.

But when elder rule is severed from real congregational oversight, it becomes something else entirely.

In the case of Apologia Church, where James White serves as an elder, the church explicitly affirms an extrabiblical “ruling-elder” model that concentrates authority almost entirely in the hands of elders. From a Baptist perspective, this is not a minor difference in emphasis. It removes the most immediate and effective mechanism by which a congregation might meaningfully restrain or correct a dominant public figure whose platform extends far beyond the local body. Discipline flows downward, not upward. Authority becomes insular.

Joel Webbon’s situation is even more stark. Though his church is real (until recently, they met on Sundays in the event space of a burger and beer joint, but now lease part of a commercial building in a newly-built industrial park – both locations 35 miles north of Austin), his public authority is plainly generated online, and his church’s governance structure (by design) offers little visible means of congregational restraint. Doug Wilson, while technically accountable within the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), derives far more authority from the Canon Press ecosystem and its allied institutions than from any single congregation exercising direct oversight.

In all three cases, accountability exists, but it is structurally incapable of checking platform-driven escalation.

When elders are accountable primarily to other elders who share the same incentives, accountability becomes circular. The congregation is sidelined. The audience becomes the real court of appeal.

From Shepherds to Warlords

This is how the influencer model quietly reshapes ecclesiology.

Pastors cease to function primarily as shepherds of a local body and instead become sovereigns over digital territories: small, loyal, grievance-defined audiences that reward rhetorical aggression and punish restraint. Growth, reconciliation, and maturity are liabilities. Escalation is an asset.

This is where the “warlords of the ghetto” metaphor becomes unavoidable. Like leaders in failed states, these figures preside over shrinking but fiercely loyal domains. Their authority depends not on the flourishing of their people, but on their continued alienation. Prosperity would allow followers to leave. Stability would reduce dependence. Dysfunction secures loyalty.

Joel Webbon is not malfunctioning in this environment. He is optimized for it. He understands that provocation drives engagement, that taboo-breaking signals authenticity, and that saying what others won’t functions as a loyalty test for an audience already primed to distrust institutions.

And critically, the ecosystem that produced him cannot easily correct him, because doing so would require confronting the very structures and incentives that sustain everyone involved.

Boundary Statements and the Limits of Self-Correction

This is also why post-hoc boundary statements (such as the Antioch Declaration) never quite reach the root of the problem. Whatever their stated intent, such documents function primarily to clarify what a network does not endorse, while leaving untouched the structural dynamics that made such clarification necessary in the first place.

They manage optics. They reassure allies. They blunt external criticism. But they do not interrogate why the same controversies keep arising, nor why they seemingly continue to lose influence and market share to their younger and more transgressive online selves.

The problem is not that boundaries are necessarily wrong. The problem is that boundary-setting alone cannot fix a system whose incentives continually generate the need for new boundaries.

Why This Matters

None of this is an argument against elder rule ecclesiology or postmillennial hope per se. It is an argument that – in the same way this combination has enabled the older generation of influencer-pastors – it has enabled the younger and more radical version, and is in no position to do anything about the predictable excesses of the system. Pastors became brands, congregations became audiences, and the old guard can’t figure out why the same play to authority that worked in the pre-social media days has no ability to counter their digitally-upgraded replacements.

V. Why the Old Guard Can’t Deal with the New Radical

If Joel Webbon represents an escalation of the evangelical influencer model, the most revealing question may not be why he behaves as he does, but why his predecessors respond the way they do.

Men like Doug Wilson and James White are not unaware of the problems Webbon creates. They criticize him. They distance themselves from his excesses. They warn about his tone, his tactics, and the reputational damage he causes. And yet, these critiques are strikingly limited in scope. They circle the edges. They never reach the center.

This pattern is not the result of cowardice or ignorance. It is the result of structural constraint.

The Difference Between Rebuke and Management

A genuine theological rebuke does not merely say, “This is unwise.” It says, “This is wrong at the level of principle.” It does not ask whether a statement is counterproductive, but whether it flows inevitably from a malformed framework.

What we see instead is managerial criticism. Webbon is scolded for saying things too loudly, too crudely, or too directly. The concern is not primarily theological integrity, but strategic fallout. The question too often being asked is not “Is this true?” or even “Is this Christian?” but “Is this helpful?” Behind it all, the question may very well be, “Why are they listening to him and not me?”

This is an important distinction. Helpfulness is a tactical category. Truthfulness is a moral one. When critique remains lodged in the former, it signals an unwillingness, or in this case, an inability to interrogate the deeper commitments that made the behavior possible.

Shared Frameworks Create Mutual Vulnerability

The reason such interrogation rarely happens is straightforward: Webbon’s project does not emerge in opposition to the theological world of Wilson and White, but within it.

All three men operate within a broadly civilizational vision of Christianity. All three reject liberal pluralism. All three view the modern state and modern culture as hostile to Christian truth. All three understand theology as something that necessarily has public, political, and cultural implications. And all three address audiences that are already primed to see themselves as embattled minorities in a hostile world.

These shared commitments matter because they create mutual vulnerability.

To confront Webbon at the level of principle would require asking uncomfortable questions about whether – across the entire ecosystem – grievance is being allowed to function as an identity-forming force; whether pastors both primarily known online and whose online personas are far more culturally influential than their churches (that have little to no authority over them anyway) can possibly put the genie they created back in the bottle.

By functionally operating beyond the bounds of church authority while insisting on the benefit of presumed pastoral authority, they’ve permitted a cancerous ministerial mutation – the online influencer who bears their title and insists on the same level of presumed ruling authority. They can’t appeal to God’s immune system (the church) with any credibility, so they are forced to finger-wag, and the young men are predictably ignoring it.

Market Share, Not Merely Theology

There is another factor that cannot be ignored: audience competition.

The conservative evangelical world that sustains these figures is not large. It is insular, highly networked, and economically fragile. The same conferences, podcasts, donors, and publishing networks circulate among a relatively small number of players. Influence is zero-sum. Gains by one figure are perceived as losses by another.

In that context, conflict becomes risky. A decisive theological confrontation could fracture alliances, alienate donors, or drive audiences elsewhere. Criticizing Webbon too strongly risks legitimizing him as a rival. Ignoring him risks allowing him to define the narrative.

The result is a familiar pattern: partial distancing without full repudiation; concern without correction; optics without theology.

This is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when pastoral authority becomes entangled with brand maintenance.

Webbon as a Stress Test

Joel Webbon functions as a stress test for the system. He takes its underlying logic and drivers – grievance, opposition, civilizational urgency, audience capture – and pushes them further than his predecessors are comfortable admitting. “No enemies to the right” is a functional call to out-flank everyone, and Webbon is theologically younger and lighter than his predecessors. 

He says the quiet part loudly. He dispenses with euphemism. He embraces transgression rather than apologizing for it. And in doing so, he exposes the limits of the old guard’s ability to discipline from within.

When faced with a choice between confronting the logic that produced Webbon or preserving the structures that sustain their own influence, the system reliably chooses preservation. And conveniently, the system’s inability to blunt guys like Webbon remains packaged with plenty of “look what he said this time” content for YouTube.

The problem, then, is not merely that Webbon exists. The problem is that the ecosystem cannot decisively reject him without rejecting something of itself.

Why This Is Not About Personal Motives

It is tempting to frame this dynamic in terms of personal jealousy, pride, or rivalry. All of that might be true, but we’re not in the business of motive-reading. Without direct corroboration, such an explanation is too shallow.

The issue is not whether Wilson, White, or any number of Webbon denouncers feel personally threatened by him. The issue is that they are embedded in a system whose survival depends on avoiding certain questions. Even the most sincere leaders find themselves constrained by incentives they did not consciously choose but now rely upon.

This is why appeals to “do better” ring hollow. The system does not reward doing better. It rewards staying relevant.

And relevance, in the attention economy, is almost always purchased at the cost of steady faithfulness.

The Tragic Outcome

The tragic outcome of this arrangement is that correction becomes impossible precisely when it is most needed. Extremes emerge. Boundaries are tested. Credibility erodes. And the leaders most capable of offering a substantive theological response find themselves unable to do so without undermining their own position.

What remains is a cycle of escalation and damage control – a cycle that produces more Webbons, not fewer.

And this is why the question is no longer how to manage the “problem,” but whether the system itself can be trusted to solve it.

VI. When Extremism Poisons Legitimate Critique

One of the most destructive consequences of the evangelical influencer ecosystem is not that it produces bad arguments, but that it renders good arguments impossible.

There are real, serious, and unavoidable problems at the intersection of theology, politics, and culture. There are excesses within Christian Nationalism that deserve critique – not from the standpoint of liberal pluralism, but from within Christian theology itself. There are real questions about the relationship between the modern state of Israel and American evangelicalism, including the use of explicitly spiritual pressure in political lobbying, propaganda efforts aimed at American Christians, and the basic question of whether American foreign policy serves American interests. There are also genuine concerns about racialized identity politics, historical revisionism, and the flirtation with neo-pagan or ethnonationalist ideas under a thin Christian veneer.

None of these issues are imaginary. And none of them can be responsibly addressed without moral credibility.

That credibility is precisely what the influencer ecosystem squanders.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf—With a Platform

When online figures minimize mass atrocity, toy with historical denialism, or speak cavalierly about events like the Holocaust, they do not merely cross a moral line. They obliterate the conditions under which serious critique can occur. And when their blustering critics offer nothing beyond tone/word policing and “Holocaust minimization (whatever that means) is sin!” pearl-clutching, they trade the potential for real prophetic rebuke against sinful partiality to preach to the choir, score a few more followers, and get a few insincere “atta-boys” from the world.

At that point, it no longer matters whether a later argument is careful, qualified, or well-sourced. The speaker has already taught both supporters and critics how to interpret everything they say. The conversation is over before it begins. Legitimate concerns are dismissed not because they are wrong, but because they are now indistinguishable from provocation or self-promotion.

This is the modern version of the boy who cried wolf. Except here the wolf is real, and the constant false alarms ensure that no one listens when it actually appears.

In this way, influence-driven “dialog” functions as a kind of protective shield for the very ideology, institutions, or power structures it claims to oppose. The “that guy’s a neo-Nazi” or “that guy is fake and gay” absolutism ensures that no one downstream can benefit from or build upon what has been earned through the conflict without being the victim of the same conversational deformities.

How Extremism Protects Power

This dynamic is not unique to debates about Israel or Christian Nationalism. It appears everywhere.

Legitimate critiques of racial essentialism are buried beneath racial slurs. Legitimate critiques of DEI ideology are dismissed because others insist on framing every disagreement in terms of animus. Legitimate theological critiques of Jewish rabbinic tradition are silenced because bad actors insist on sliding into ethnic hostility. In each case, the most irresponsible voices become the defining image of the critique itself.

The result is predictable: figures who deserve scrutiny gain insulation, not because they are innocent, but because their primary critics are merely varieties of the same thing.

This is why trying to correct within a system dependent on non-correction simply defeats itself. Within the influencer economy, this self-defeat is not a bug. It is a feature.

Outrage as Renewable Resource

Extremism (no, not the leftist bogeyman of “extremism,” but the push to be as extreme as possible to gain attention and notoriety) persists because it is profitable. And it need not be institutionally profitable – it can merely be profitable for one lone guy with a green screen and Fuentes-quality production.

The attention economy does not reward resolution. It rewards escalation. Every time a line is crossed, the outrage cycle resets. New content is generated. Audiences are re-mobilized. Donations spike. Loyalty is tested and reinforced. Everyone reshuffles their deck of good and bad guys.

There is no incentive to slow down, to clarify, or to repair. There is no incentive to say, “This conversation has become unproductive.” Most importantly, there is no incentive to repent. Doing so would mean relinquishing relevance and the “always right” image that drives online Christian personalities.

So instead, lines are crossed deliberately. Taboo is treated as currency. Historical tragedy becomes rhetorical fuel. And the young, alienated followers, who are sincerely searching for meaning, are taught that shock itself is a form of insight.

The cost of this strategy is borne not by the influencer but by everyone else who now finds serious discussion foreclosed. Like multilevel marketing, a handful of people enrich themselves at the social, financial, and relational cost of everyone else.

Why This Matters for Christians

From a Christian perspective, this behavior is doubly destructive.

Christian ethics demands truthfulness, care with speech, and reverence for the dead. It explicitly forbids bearing false witness and exploiting suffering for personal gain. When Christians minimize genocide or treat atrocity as a rhetorical prop, they are not engaging in bold truth-telling. When their opponents use undefined, emotionalized generalizations to cast unfavorable views as anathema-worthy sin, they are similarly destroying the basis for fruitful engagement. Both are violating the very moral framework they claim to defend.

More than that, they are forfeiting moral authority.

Once that authority is gone, even correct arguments fail. Scripture itself teaches that wisdom without credibility is easily dismissed. The problem is not merely that extreme or loaded arguers are wrong; it is that they ensure no one who follows them will be heard. I have reiterated more times than I can count: Trust is built on consistency, not agreement.

This is why the older generation of pastor-influencers cannot corral the younger version: the common ground between themselves and their younger opponents is the exact thing they’d have to rebuke. To offer a metaphor White and Wilson would clearly understand, stopping Webbon (or whoever comes next) from getting the precious requires throwing it into the fire, but doing so would prevent them from using it.

Whatever correction needs to happen cannot be done by clarification statements or boundary documents after the fact. The harm is already done. The audience has been trained. The reputational cost has been incurred.

A System That Cannot Police Itself

The evangelical influencer ecosystem is incapable of correcting the behavior that powers it.

Figures whose influence was created by the system cannot credibly condemn it without undermining their own relevance. Leaders who rely on the same attention dynamics cannot dismantle the system that sustains them. And institutions that profit from perpetual conflict have no incentive to bring it to an end.

This is why extremism persists even when it is widely acknowledged to be harmful. The system does not merely tolerate it. It selects for it.

And so the question becomes unavoidable: how can real problems be addressed by people whose livelihoods depend on keeping the conversation broken? The answer is that they cannot.

Until the incentive structure itself is rejected, extremism will continue to function as both spectacle and shield – burning credibility, protecting power, and ensuring that the most serious issues remain untouched.

VII. JD Hall Is Right, But Not Entirely

In June of last year, JD Hall published a candid reflection on the evangelical polemical ecosystem, and it resonated with me precisely because it named so much of what I had been circling for years. JD described the world of online discernment and theological conflict as a kind of Kabuki theater: scripted enemies, predictable outrage cycles, and an audience trained to clap, boo, and mobilize on cue.

He was right.

JD acknowledged that young men are routinely conscripted into theological and political wars their leaders never intend to finish. These “wars” carry real social, relational, and professional costs for the foot soldiers, while the generals remain insulated. He admitted that influence, platform size, and audience loyalty warp discernment. He testified to the spiritual toll of living in perpetual conflict, of always needing the next enemy to justify the next post.

Where JD’s essay was especially valuable was in its honesty. It was not written from the posture of a man who “won,” but of a man who had counted the cost.

And yet, for all of that, his conclusion stopped short of what I believe his own analysis demanded – at least for those of us actively participating in the influencer system.

Diagnosis Without Exit

Although it was primarily aimed at social media participants rather than influencers, JD’s prescription, broadly speaking, was caution. He argued that we should be slower to denounce, more careful in our rhetoric, and less eager to cast people (especially “deplorables”) into permanent exile. In other words, he believed the system could be moderated.

I don’t disagree with the spirit of that impulse. Christian charity demands patience, restraint, and a reluctance to pronounce final judgments. But charity also demands truthfulness about structures that corrupt behavior, regardless of intent.

I am not convinced that the evangelical influencer ecosystem can be reformed by better intentions, better tone, or better targeting.

The problem is not merely excess. It is design.

Why Restraint Is Structurally Punished

In theory, one could imagine a healthier version of the system JD describes: one in which influencers exercise restraint, audiences reward maturity, and conflict gives way to formation. In practice, the incentives run in the opposite direction.

The attention economy does not reward restraint. It punishes it. I only need to look at the last 4 years of my work at Protestia to attest to this. I’ve lost track of the number of times I could have gained more attention by sharpening my rhetoric, attacking with a rhetorical sledgehammer when careful precision was warranted, or simply leaving pieces out of what I wrote to intentionally cause friction. Protestia could have rocketed past where it has been in terms of viewership if I had been willing to go full Fuentes – that is, embrace the transgressive devil our “respectable” critics considered us to be.

I recognized that a platform that slows down or refuses to escalate loses relevance and engagement. And online voices who truly would rather resolve conflict because they believe there are real people on the other side of their keyboards may very well forfeit the very fuel that sustains their visibility. Even sincere attempts at moderation are quietly disincentivized by algorithms, donors, and audience expectations.

In such a system, calls for “doing better” function less like reform and more like wishful thinking (and are likely going to get you called fake and/or gay). The machine does not care about virtue. It cares about output. And output requires conflict.

And this is the point at which personal resolve may become irrelevant. No matter how well-intentioned an individual may be, participation in the system requires a steady supply of controversy. Without it, the lights go out. This may very well be why I’ve had such a problem with accusations that Protestia trafficked in anger and controversy (when mostly we simply reported news) – it didn’t matter what we were actually doing, we were guilty merely because we were participating in the system.

The Illusion of Moral Neutrality

One of the more seductive lies of the influencer ecosystem is that participation is morally neutral – that one can simply “use the platform” without being shaped by it. JD’s essay gestured toward this tension but ultimately retained hope that the platform can be wielded responsibly. Perhaps it was merely his acknowledgement that the influencer ecosystem will exist and influence people with or without us.

This may be true, but I, for on,e am prepared to exercise my right to abstain.

When your relevance depends on constant engagement, disengagement becomes a threat. When your influence depends on grievance, healing becomes sabotage. And when your livelihood depends on conflict, peace becomes unaffordable.

At that point, participation itself becomes a moral choice.

It is not enough to say the right things occasionally or to denounce the worst excesses when they become inconvenient. If the system predictably produces radicalization, burnout, and extremism (and if those outcomes are consistently rewarded), then continuing to participate is not neutral. It is tacit endorsement.

Why Leaving Is Not Quitting

This is where my conclusion diverges most sharply from JD’s.

I am not interested in finding a better seat at the table. I am not interested in refining the rhetoric, narrowing the targets, or adjusting the tone. I am not interested in becoming a “healthier” warlord.

I am unwilling to play the game.

This is not because the grievances are fake. It is not because the stakes are low. And it is not because the fight is unwinnable. It is because the arena itself is malformed.

Leaving is not retreat. It is refusal.

It is the refusal to participate in a system that requires men to remain angry, alienated, and perpetually mobilized in order to remain relevant. It is the refusal to treat young men as a renewable resource for outrage. It is the refusal to confuse visibility with faithfulness.

The Cost of Staying

There is a final, uncomfortable truth that must be acknowledged: staying in this ecosystem comes at a cost that is not always immediately visible.

It corrodes judgment. It flattens theology into slogans. It trains us to see people as audiences rather than sheep. And it conditions everyone involved to mistake intensity for conviction and opposition for righteousness.

Over time, it becomes difficult to tell whether one is speaking because something is true and needed, or because something needs to be said to keep the machine running.

That is not a cost I am willing to continue paying.

JD Hall was right to name the problem. Where I differ is that I believe the best response may not be moderation, but withdrawal. Not silence, but relocation. Not despair, but clarity.

And that clarity leads inexorably to the same conclusion: if the system cannot function without perpetual conflict, then it is not a system worth reforming. It is a system worth destroying.

VIII. Why Protestia’s Independence Changes the Math

One of the great ironies of the evangelical influencer ecosystem is that the most effective critique of it can only come from a position that the system itself cannot tolerate.

That position is independence.

I do not mean ideological independence. I mean something far more mundane and far more threatening: financial, reputational, and platform independence. The freedom to say what is true without worrying about donor backlash, conference invitations, subscriber counts, or algorithmic punishment. The freedom to speak or stop speaking without it costing you your livelihood.

This is where a project like Protestia has always occupied an unusual, yet increasingly untenable, position.

Much of Protestia’s day-to-day work has never been about ideology so much as exposure. We report what is sent to us. We document what is publicly available. And in many cases, we are quietly encouraged (sometimes by explicit public pressure) to “do the dirty work” for pastors and influencers who wish to remain publicly above the fray. Protestia too often acts as the mechanism through which conflicts are prosecuted, while others retain moral distance. In theory, this allows leaders to avoid unnecessary escalation. In practice, it simply transfers the reputational and relational cost downstream. We are never permitted to remain above the fray ourselves, and often absorb hostility from both sides of debates we did not initiate, particularly in internecine Reformed conflicts like Christian Nationalism. That asymmetry is not accidental. It is how the ecosystem preserves the ministerial plausible deniability of its leaders.

Fortunately, my work with Protestia was never designed to be a career path. It was not built as an income stream. It has cost me, not paid me. I never wanted it to cultivate influence for its own sake. This has made it inefficient, awkward, and difficult to monetize. It has also made it dangerous to the wrong people. And it results in even “friends” perpetually keeping us at arm’s length.

Because when you do not need the system to survive, you can tell the truth about the system.

Why Career Incentives Change Everything

The evangelical influencer world often presents itself as a marketplace of ideas, where truth rises and error falls based on merit. That is a comforting fiction.

In reality, it is a marketplace of attention. And attention is not neutral. It flows toward conflict, spectacle, and escalation. When influence is monetized (whether through donations, subscriptions, conferences, or institutional patronage) ideas stop being evaluated primarily on their truthfulness and start being evaluated on their performance.

This is not because the people involved are uniquely corrupt. It is because they are human.

A man whose mortgage depends on relevance will behave differently from a man whose conscience does. A pastor whose income depends on engagement will feel pressures that a pastor accountable to a reliable and obedient local congregation won’t. A platform that must grow to survive will inevitably shape the content it produces.

Independence changes that equation entirely. For the church, it’s autonomy and congregationalism. For online influencers, it’s monetary.

When walking away is a real option, truth regains its weight.

Why the System Can’t Hear This Critique

This is also why the critique I’ve offered here is so rarely voiced by those most deeply embedded in the ecosystem. To accept it would require admitting that their own success is bound up with a system that inevitably deforms both leaders and followers.

It would require acknowledging that some of the very behaviors they decry are not aberrations, but predictable outcomes. It would require conceding that men like Joel Webbon are not intruders, but products.

That is an admission few are willing to make, because it raises an uncomfortable question: If the system is broken, what does that say about those who thrive within it?

Independence makes it possible to ask that question honestly. Dependence makes it impossible.

Why Leaving May Be the Only Coherent Ending

At a certain point, critique becomes complicity if it never leads to action. Once you understand how the system works (grievance monetized, extremism rewarded, accountability blunted, credibility commoditized), you are forced to choose between two paths.

You can stay, adjust your rhetoric, and hope to carve out a healthier niche within the same incentives. Or you can leave.

I am not interested in being a better warlord. I am not interested in ruling a cleaner ghetto. I am not interested in finding a more respectable way to profit from outrage or to manage perpetual conflict.

I am interested in truth, formation, and the kind of faithfulness that does not require an audience to validate it.

Those things are not compatible with the influencer economy as it currently exists.

Old Answers, Unprofitable Virtues

The answers Christianity has always offered are stubbornly unglamorous. Work. Repentance. Responsibility. Family. Church. Patience. None of these is sexy enough to scale well in their true form. None of them generates clicks. None of them thrives on outrage.

They do, however, build lives. And they do not require constant commentary to remain true.

The evangelical influencer ecosystem thrives by convincing young men that their anger is their deepest insight and that their alienation is their calling. It promises belonging without transformation and purpose without patience. It offers the thrill of opposition in place of the hard work of obedience.

I no longer believe that the ecosystem can be reformed from within. I believe it can only be exited.

So this is my exit. Not from truth. Not from conviction. Not from concern for the church or for the men being shaped by these dynamics. But from the arena that turns those concerns into content.

I’m not switching sides. I’m stepping away.