Pastor Chuck Swindoll’s Gay Compromise

On Tuesday, I had the displeasure of attending the Christmas Eve service at Pastor Chuck Swindoll’s gigantic Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas, an extremely affluent northern suburb of Dallas.  It’s within easy driving distance, and they have an incredible pipe organ, choir, and instrumentalists, so I thought it would be an evening of beautiful music for my family.  Unfortunately, the string quartet felt a little threadbare in such a massive space, and the choir was on vacation, for which the passionless voices of over 3000 mumbling yuppies was no substitute. read more

Christmas in the Twilight Zone

By Ehud Would

One of the most famous Twilight Zone episodes is titled It’s a Good Life (hereafter IAGL). Though the television version isn’t available for free in any significant online platform, the radio adaptation is.

I’m sure others have noticed what I have in this story, but to my knowledge, this may be the first such assessment to reach publication. The fact is it’s an analogy of Christ’s advent and dominion as seen through heathen eyes. Yes, it’s a Christmas story, albeit inverted. read more

Scapegoating Your Ancestors: A Response to Reed DePace

By Davis Carlton

The Gospel Coalition continues its agenda of blaming all of America’s problems, past and present, on the ubiquitous evils of white people. Ron Burns has posted an article authored by Presbyterian pastor Reed DePace on his congregation’s “repentance” for their evil racist past. Interestingly, DePace considers himself “Hispanic American,” so when he mentions the sins of “our forefathers” he’s really talking about your white forefathers. DePace pastors Historic First Presbyterian Church, founded in downtown Montgomery, Alabama in 1824 and now affiliated with the PCA. DePace describes the perennial success of the church which at its apogee in the 1920s reached a membership of 2,000 and maintained a membership of 1,100 as late as 1961. After this point the church experienced a precipitous decline and today only boasts about 50 active members. This naturally caused DePace and the leadership to inquire as to what has been going wrong. Why has God seemingly cursed their ministry efforts? read more

The Frivolous Factionalism of ‘Shut Up, Millennial!’ ‘OK, Boomer!’

By Colby Malsbury

(Author’s note: the following article does not represent individual Boomers or Millennials who are committed Christians – both of whom I count as valuable kith and kin.)

Hey kids!

Did you know that baby boomers are a generation of grubby parasites who had the world handed to them on a silver platter to such an extent that they finagled economic booms and busts to their credit all their working lives, allowing them to take a very early and very cushy retirement, allowing them ample opportunity to globe-hop the world picking up exotic mail order brides and bemoaning the fact that younger folks weren’t picking up extra shifts down at the Apple factory or wherever they’re working these days in order to keep the Social Security gravy train on the rails in perpetuity? read more

The Immanence of Biblical Nationalism, Part I

By Bret McAtee

In Genesis 10 we have recorded the table of Nations. Chapter 10 ends with these words:

32 These are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, BY THEIR NATIONS; and out of these the nations were separated on the earth after the flood.

Genesis 10 is the effect of the cause that is listed in chapter 10 and is placed out of order in order to put chapters 11 and 12 in stark contrast. (Nimrod and Babel seeking to make a name for themselves and Abraham being promised by God to make a name for him.) read more

From Gilded Age to Guilted Age: A Review of the 1927 Film, Children of Divorce

By Ehud Would

I recently viewed a remarkable film — Frank Lloyd’s Children of Divorce, a 1927 silent film now digitally restored and available free online. Definitely worth viewing.

Not to worry, this review avoids any significant spoilers.

Sure, modern cinephiles sneer at silent films, but cinematically, this one is quite well done. What’s more, it offers a rare gestalt with respect not just to divorce generally, but its central role in the fall of the WASP aristocracy, that linchpin presaging the internal collapse of broader WASP society. read more

The “Christocentric Hermeneutic” and the End of Christian Theology and Morality

By Davis Carlton

One of my Facebook friends recently posted that we are approaching the year 2020, the first year of the decade in which ostensibly conservative Christian denominations will capitulate on the sodomite agenda. I think he’s right. There may be a few stragglers by the end of the upcoming decade, but I believe that traditional Christian orthodoxy will be mostly dead by the end of this next decade. A book I recently read helped me to understand how purportedly conservative Christians are abandoning the authority of the Bible and any semblance of Christian doctrine. The book is Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God by Eric Seibert who is a professor of Old Testament at Messiah College. I borrowed this book thinking that it would wrestle with difficult texts in the Old Testament. What I found instead was an altogether radical proposal in which the author suggests that the traditional Christian understanding of divine inspiration is wrong and needs to be replaced. read more

Exclusive: a Preview of the Upcoming Three Presbyterian Stooges Movie

By Colby Malsbury

We here at Tribal Theocrat take tremendous pride in our Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism. Thus, when our ace cub reporter Skip Gailee burst into our editor’s office announcing he had scooped the script for Columbia Pictures’ latest Three Presbyterian Stooges short subject, it almost blew our editor’s green visor off of his lumpen bald head. Who doesn’t laugh uproariously at the zany antics of those incompetents PcaMoe, OpcLarry, and PcusaCurly? We were so pleased with Skip we promised him he would be promoted to an unpaid assistant intern position any year now. read more

The Strangely Familiar Love of the WOKE Church

By Ehud Would

Time: the mid-1960s. Place: Southern California.

Middle Class Christian youth found themselves borne upon a revolutionary tide, the portents of which were more revolutionary still. A growing contingent of young women in particular found themselves groping for a more enlightened expression of Christ: a Christ free of all the old bigotries which had sullied Christendom from the beginning — one which announced social equality between genders, nations, and races. read more

Doug Wilson: Straddling the Fence, and Falling Off Both Sides at Once

By Bret McAtee

“There are alternatives to Tribalism; whether we are talking about massive tribes of white liberals or micro tribes of city league bowlers in Topeka. On the secular side of things those alternatives would include massive Nationalist ideologies like “Nazism,” or Internationalist ideologies – Communism, which is the kind of thing that happens when tribalism tries to scale. Mass ideologies, like petty tribalism, demand loyalty and empathy and to hell with outsiders. The only real alternative to an insider vs. outsider mentality is the Christian faith. Because the claims of Christ are ultimate because He is the head of the Church these claims originate from outside the cosmos, which means His claims trump every other claim. I have a tighter bond with someone who is baptized in the Triune name but who lives in Tehran than I do with my next door neighbor who is not baptized. read more