What Happens When a Culture Warrior and a Confident Pluralist Exchange Tweets About Trump’s Border Wall?

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Last week I did a post on evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem’s biblical defense of Donald Trump’s border wall.

Here is what a couple of smart people tweeted about Grudem’s defense of the wall:

As noted in my original post, Trump court evangelical and Christian radio host Eric Metaxas called Grudem’s view “A Sane View of the Border Wall Controversy.”

Washington University law professor John Inazu was not going to let Metaxas get away with this.  Here is his Twitter exchange with Metaxas:

Apparently, Metaxas did not realize that Inazu is the grandchild of Japanese immigrants.  His father was born in the Manzanar Japanese internment camp.

Here is Inazu again:

I can’t read Metaxas’s Twitter feed because I was blocked (and disparaged by Metaxas on more than one occasion) after I wrote a multi-post review exposing the serious historical errors in one of his recent books.  But it appears that he is now claiming that “thin-skinned Jacobins” are oppressing him for his remarks about Inazu.  Katelyn Beaty, a writer and former managing editor of Christianity Today, is having none of it:

There is something much deeper going on here than simply another twitter battle.  Metaxas believes in Donald Trump.  He is a cultural warrior.  He believes that America was founded as a Christian nation and should continue to be one.  He once called down the wrath of God on Christians who did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016.

Inazu, on the other hand, is a Christian law professor at a prestigious Midwestern university and a member of the Board of Trustees of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.  His book Confident Pluralism is a call for Americans, including evangelical Christians, to learn to live together while respecting their deepest differences.  It is, in many ways, the antithesis of Metaxas’s culture-war approach.

The two approaches to culture are quite different and I think we see them playing out, to a degree, in this Twitter exchange.

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Comments

  1. Jim in STL says

    “It helps confirm secular critics’ worst caricatures of evangelicalism as politics masquerading as piety.”

    It’s not a caricature if it’s real.

  2. CarefulReflecter says

    Has anyone posted a detailed rebuttal of Grudem? Most of what I’ve seen here is just citations of people who say “that’s stupid and not what the Bible really says.” They don’t actually try to dismantle his arguments, and neither does this post. It merely dismisses them.

  3. Justin S. says

    LOL Right? It’s not a caricature, it’s who they are at their collective core. It’s exhausting to listen to the moderates wring their hands and say, “This fringe doesn’t represent us” when in fact the fringe is a huge, even majority segment of the group. Religious fanaticism and magical thinking got Donald Trump elected.

  4. Justin S. says

    when you pander to foolishness it normalizes the foolishness.

    when you argue with a dumb idea you give it automatic credence in the culture wars

  5. Justin S. says

    It makes me sad for America and for Protestant evangelicals that people like this not only exist but thrive in the public square

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