By Kaeley Harms,
A friend recently lent me a copy of a book with something of a bombastic title: Be Intolerant, by Ryan Dobson, son of the acclaimed Dr. James Dobson.
I cringed when I first saw it and thought, “Oh boy. Here we go. A manifesto that’s going to scratch about a million itching ears that desperately want to believe the Bible gives them carte blanche to behave like antagonistic jackasses within a culture that needs Jesus.”
I picked it up and quickly skimmed through about 75% of the content within 20 minutes.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Dobson seemed to be gently nudging his target audience of pugnacious pundits toward the truth in love the Bible demands. He essentially said, “Yes, guys. It’s important to tell hard truth in this world, and people will hate you for it, but in the process, the goal needs to be reconciliation and sharing the love of Jesus. The confrontation shouldn’t exhilarate you. You should be rooting for these people to see the light, not to face humiliation.”
I’ve been stewing on this a lot this week, watching a certain flavor of online ministry treat confrontation like it’s some sort of black belt of effective activism rather than a last resort.
I’ve spent enough years in advocacy work to know the difference between speaking hard truth and getting high off the reaction to it. And believe me, there’s a difference.
Enjoying the confrontation fundamentally changes what you’re doing because the reason you’re doing it ceases to be pure. If it’s fun for you to get up in someone’s face and try to dominate them, if you find it thrilling to watch them melt down, if you live for the adrenaline rush of exerting power over another person and telling them they’re stupid or evil or bound for Hell, you’ve stopped ministering to that person. You’re using them. You’re ministering to your own ego.
You can still say true things this way. You can build quite the brand doing it, in fact, because everyone around you seems to lack the moral courage to say these things out loud, and they are often things that desperately need to be said. A parched dog bumbling around in the desert isn’t going to be too terribly particular about the nature of his water source. A mud puddle will do if he’s thirsty enough. Or as the good book put it, “He who is full loathes honey, but to him who is hungry, even the bitter tastes sweet.”
It’s the same way with our collective hunger for truth proclamations, really. When speaking, it is costly; people deeply crave leaders to take the first blow and blaze the trail ahead of them to make it just a little bit safer for them to follow suit without being canceled or doxxed or verbally pummeled themselves. So, when grifters come along with impure motives, the masses don’t often care enough to pump the brakes; they’re just eager for a frontrunner to plow on ahead of them.
But grifters shouldn’t really be seen as courageous because courage is costly, and these people aren’t expending anything. On the contrary, they’re gaining something: attention, a platform, a rush, a sense of power and superiority. The parts the rest of us fear are the parts they secretly enjoy the most.
I saw this sometimes on the trans debate mainstage. We would host rallies to promote common sense policies in defense of women, and we would show up with our voices shaking as raging men in dresses would scream into megaphones in our faces to drown us out. There was nothing thrilling about it. It was utterly taxing on the adrenal system and would often take me a good couple of weeks to recover before risking doing it again.
What you wouldn’t find us doing, though, was hunting for confrontation. We defended our own spaces when people came to shut us down, but we didn’t go looking for trans rallies to crash because we needed fresh footage of people screaming at us. We didn’t manufacture conflict and then point to the conflict as proof of our courage. We weren’t going all Westboro Baptist at Pride parades with “God hates queers” signs, deliberately poking the hornet’s nest and then congratulating ourselves for getting stung.
But of course, as I got a few years deeper into the work, I quickly realized that there were, in fact, rising “influencers” who grifted onto the cause in order to build massive platforms for themselves, and for them, proactive antagonism became an actual strategy, and an effective one at that. They would show up to badger trans-identified people at their own events, provoke them to anger, and then capture really click-baity interactions that inevitably got picked up by mainstream media outlets to the degree that they continually got featured on every piece of media coverage related to the topic.
One of these guys in particular, who shall remain nameless for the sake of my sanity, treated the women who had done the lion’s share of laying the groundwork for his own success like absolute garbage. If you listen to this guy for more than 10 minutes, it becomes abundantly clear that he’s saying a lot of the right things for the very wrong reasons, and that antagonizing people who are obviously of much less sound mind than he is makes him feel powerful. It’s like Michael Jordan showing up to a middle school basketball game and dunking on little kids to remind himself how good he is.
I think about this same dynamic when I watch footage from abortion clinic sidewalks. There’s genuine ministry that happens outside those clinics, and it’s God’s work. There are women and men who show up week after week, quietly, sometimes for years without a single visible result, holding signs that say things like, “I regret my abortion. I’m here if you need someone to talk to.” Nobody’s filming them for content. They stand in the cold and the heat, and sometimes a woman walks over and talks to them, and sometimes nobody does, and they show up again the next week anyway. That’s ministry. That costs something.
And then there’s the other version. The crowd gathered with bullhorns, screaming at terrified teenagers about “killing centers” before she’s even made it to the door, filming the whole thing, editing it down to the most explosive 30 seconds, posting it with a caption about boldness while the comments fill with people calling them heroes.
If I have to spell out the difference between those two postures, we’re in a world of hurt. Screaming “murderer” at a scared teenager on a sidewalk does not introduce her to a single new fact. It does not create space for the Holy Spirit to work. What it does is confirm every suspicion she already had that Christians are cruel and that the Church has no room for her, and you have done that while telling yourself you were being faithful.
Now inevitably, at this point in the conversation, someone will interrupt me to say, “But abortion IS murder, so shouldn’t we say so plainly?” Yes. Say it plainly. Nobody is asking you to soften the truth about what abortion is. But truth-telling and cruelty should not go hand-in-hand in God’s economy. We got a whole chapter of the Bible dedicated to reminding us of this reality in 1 Corinthians 13. Jesus told the truth to the woman at the well. He also didn’t organize a crowd to meet her there with stones.
As I said earlier, the method is not separate from the message. It IS the message. You can hold a theologically airtight position and still communicate, through how you deliver it, that you don’t actually think the person in front of you is worth saving. You can tell people God cares about them and somehow manage to leave them fully understanding that while that may be true, YOU only care about them insofar as you’re able to leverage their situation to amplify a story about the impressive courage of you.
I don’t think most of the people doing this are cartoonishly evil. I think a lot of them genuinely believe they’re being bold where everyone else is cowardly, and I think that belief is exactly what makes it so hard to reach them. They aren’t at all wrong in their diagnosis of the global courage deficit. They aren’t wrong to fill the gap either. It’s the “why” where things get wonky. Some of them actually manage to delude themselves into the belief that they are really pretty special, handpicked by the Almighty to lead the charge for the rest of the peasantry. The ego here is wild.
That’s exactly what I saw in the guy I previously mentioned, the one who built his brand screaming very true things at confused kids and their parents at Pride parades and then mining and capitalizing off the most insane footage. I never got the sense that he was at all anxious or worried about what was about to go down. I never felt an ounce of genuine compassion for the people wounded and marred by the ideology he opposed. Nope. Homeboy was excited to rush into battle and destroy people. This was his time to shine.
Courage that costs you nothing and gains you a platform of praise is something else entirely. A transaction? A marketing strategy? An ego boost?
While your admirers may be too relieved or starstruck to discern the difference, the people on the receiving end of your schtick can smell it a mile away, and they’re not going to go home and stew on the possibility that you’re secretly right; they’re going to go home and say, “That guy is an absolutely hateful loser. Why on earth would I ever want to be anything like him? I do NOT want what he’s having.”
Ryan Dobson’s book, though hardly life-changing or terribly profound, had it right in a way I didn’t expect: Tell the truth. Tell it plainly and without flinching and even when it costs you followers or friends or your standing with people who’d rather you stayed quiet.
But if you find yourself getting a rush out of the confrontation itself, if someone else’s face crumpling feels less like grief to you and more like proof that you’re winning votes toward your ultimate inauguration as president of the culture wars, what you’re doing no longer constitutes ministry or even genuine advocacy. You’re just doing Michael Jordan at the middle school game again, and this time the kid you’re dunking on is somebody’s daughter on the worst day of her life.
Originally published at Honest to Goodness.
Kaeley Harms, co-founder of Hands Across the Aisle Women’s Coalition, is a Christian feminist who rarely fits into boxes. She is a truth teller, envelope pusher, Jesus follower, abuse survivor, writer, wife, mom, and lover of words aptly spoken.
