Where Dank Right Reviling Goes

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Introduction

Coming straight to the point, right wing reviling goes where all revilers do, which is straight into the Abyss.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once made the telling point that the line between good and evil is a line that runs down the middle of every human heart. A corollary to this point is that the line does not run down the line between my faction and the other guy’s faction—such that anything I say on my side of the line is justified “because they are evil,” and anything they say is unjustified . . . “because they are evil.”

Chesterton once made the same point when asked to submit an essay on “What’s Wrong With the World?” He answered with a two-word submission . . . “I am.” Someone with this outlook can be a mighty force in combating evil, as Chesterton was, but such a person will never descend into scurrilous abuse. He knows too much about himself.

One of the more astonishing things about the last several years has been how many ostensible conservatives have simply abandoned their basic values . . . in name of fighting for the survival of their basic values. I am no stranger to polemical combat, and have believed for many years that the church has needed a lot more of it. But what we most emphatically did not need was an infusion of boiling dank right acrimonious pus, with much of it a sickly green, like antifreeze, and all covered over with a thin glaze of hypocritical anonymity.

At some point, most likely later on in this post, I am going to make a political point with all of this. But before I do that I want to get off on the right foot, and make the spiritual point first. Before getting to the value of terms like woke right, or dank right, or the worthlessness of such terms, or any of that, we need to address something else first. How is it with your soul?

We are going to talk about our partisan politics later on, but I want to look at them through a gospel lens, rather than do what a lot of people seem to be doing these days, which is looking at the gospel through a partisan lens.

One more introductory comment. My title refers to dank right reviling. This should in no way be taken as a defense of left wing reviling, or as an ignoring of left wing reviling, or as a relativizing of left wing reviling. All of that is really bad too, and is headed for the Abyss also, and which reveals the basic point. All such venomous spitting needs to be grouped together at some point, and after the last judgment, it will be.

So let’s turn to the Word, shall we?

Important Preface

Because my topic is the damnation of professing Christians, it is important for me to state at the outset that I am not condemning any particular man. I am not a pietist, and my reflex move is not to doubt the salvation of anybody who disagrees with me, however vigorously, however disagreeably. I am happy to take any man’s profession of faith at face value. But we also need to take the plain statements of Scripture at face value, and what that means is that the ungodly behavior of numerous anons is a sign of real spiritual trouble. It is a blinking light on the dashboard, and this is why I say there are many men out there who need to be under wiser pastoral care than they are currently getting. They think they are contending for the faith, but they are actually disruptive troublemakers within it. I am saying nothing about the godly anons. But the ungodly anons and the men who coddle the ungodly anons, making excuses for them, need to do some serious soul searching. And the first step in genuine soul searching is to look straight at what the Bible teaches.

The Carnal Heart is Manifest

In the fifth chapter of Galatians, Paul says that the carnality of the natural man cannot be successfully hidden away or suppressed. He says, coming right to the point, that the works of the flesh are manifest (Gal. 5: 19). Put another way, a carnal heart will out.

And in addition, in one short passage in 1 Corinthians 6, he tells us twice about the character of those who will not inherit the kingdom. He says in v. 9 that the unrighteous “shall not inherit the kingdom.” And he then launches into a list, concluding in the next verse with the statement that none of these people are going to “inherit the kingdom of God.” This means that, absent repentance, such people, when they die, will be lost eternally. A summary of the Pauline teaching here is that they will be damned, and damned forever.

Most of the sins on that list make good middle-class sense to cultural conservatives. Who will not be going to Heaven? Well, fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, catamites, sodomites, thieves, greedy men, drunkards, and extortioners. But there is one other category on the list, and that one is the central issue I intend to address here. Revilers will not go to Heaven when they die.

The word is loidoros. The same word is used in 1 Cor. 5:11, where it is translated as “railer.” In that passage, we are plainly instructed not to keep company with any man who is called a brother who is a “fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner.” Do not share a meal with such a person, with the clear implication that such a man, if unrepentant, is to be the subject of church discipline. If you can’t eat with such a one, this surely must include the Lord’s Supper.

And no, we can’t fix anything by calling such a one a “based railer.” Neither can it be fixed by shielding or hiding the abuse behind an anon account. Behind that anon avatar is a real person who is an object of God’s wrath, and he is actually sitting in the same boat with all those others who are the objects of his scurrilous abuse. In other words, sodomites are going to Hell and revilers of sodomites are also going to Hell. Drunkards are lost, and revilers are also lost. There is no biblical reason why people who hate each other cannot go to Hell together (Tit. 3:3).

The verb form, loidoreo, is translated as “to revile.” The contempt of the Jewish Pharisees for the man born blind is expressed with this verb.

Reviling, like lying, is an essential part of the syntax of the language of the lost. Such language is particularly aimed at those who live in such a way as to provide a stark contrast with such rancid attitudes. Whenever unholiness sees holiness, one of the first things it wants to do is revile it, twist it, misrepresent it.

Not only are believers not to talk this way, but they are not even to return fire in this way. This is the wonderful example that was set for us by the Lord Jesus.

So the bottom line is this. Revilers are unconverted, unregenerate, and unforgiven. Carve outs and exceptions to this are not granted on the basis of the sinfulness of the object of their scorn. It is no defense to say that “the person I treated so abominably was also lost.” That’s as may be, and also entirely beside the point.

French Panes or Plate Glass?

One of the things the natural man loves to do is grade on a curve. He may well be flunking the class, but not as badly as “that loser over there.” He will say things like “well, yes, I have been with a few women. But at least I’m not a pedophile . . .” In a world as sinful as ours, whenever we look around for someone we think has been worse than we have been, we usually do not have to go very far.

We like to grade on a curve because carnal ethical theory envisions the law of God as a series of French panes, with each commandment being its own separate pane of glass. The ideal would be to make it through life without breaking out the majority of them. But the Bible contradicts this kind of thinking. The commands are not individual French panes, but rather the law of God is a unit—a large plate glass window. And if the law of God is a plate glass window, it doesn’t matter all that much where you put the hole. If you put a BB through the lower right hand corner, or if you throw a brick through the center of it, in both cases, you have still broken the window.

What this means is that the reviler is in the same category as the drunkard, the adulterer, the sodomite, or the any of the others. He is guilty of all, as James puts it.

When the Mask Comes Off

One of the marked features of this twisted pattern that I have noticed has to do with the levels of voltage in the abuse. The whole thing starts out predictably enough, with someone abusing various commie miscreants, or Hollywood homos, or treasonous congressional hounds. They hate the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which Christ also hates, but the way that they hate shows that they have plainly fallen away from their first love. They start out with the right enemies, but instead of fighting them in the way we were commanded to fight them, they spiral downwards into malicious invective.

That in itself is bad enough. But the real toxicity doesn’t come out until a Christian leader or minister rebukes the reviling. At that point the tasers of invective are turned up to eleven, turned on the one who dared to admonish them, and then the most appalling things are said. In the first wave of their abuse, they were selecting easy targets—people who celebrate evil, people who embrace what the Scriptures condemn. That was their initial cover. But the ease with which they move their abuse over to any godly men who admonish them is a true indicator of where their heart actually is. They don’t want to critique the unrighteous because they love righteousness. They just want to abuse someone or something, and the unrighteous will do for starters.

Moreover, all these appalling things are said by people who apparently have no troubles in their conscience over it.

And this is how we can identify these railers as sons of Belial, or as children of wrath—they are speaking a language that is native to them. This is the tongue of their home country.

Now to the Political Point

If someone wants to fight for Christendom, or for a Christian way of life, or for cultural Christianity, the first thing to realize is this cannot be successfully done without a large number of real Christians. And real Christians are those who seek to live in a way that honors God and honors His Word. And that means no reviling. My understanding of the dank right is that it refers to those who have decided to fight fire with fire, with those who want to answer category confusions with more category confusions, who want to challenge a misplaced antithesis with a misplaced antithesis of their own. But the most obvious tell is the scurrilous abuse. Dank is as dank does.

We must have enemies, and we are called to fight them. But effective Christian leadership will lead the way across the board. Good and godly leaders will identify the idolatrous currents that create our enemies, they will name our enemies, they will show us how to love our enemies, and they will be used by God to overthrow our enemies.

As they do this, there will no doubt be some who want to enlist in the ranks of our forces who have no understanding of this point at all. It is probably impossible to keep such men out of our ranks. But it is possible (and most necessary) to keep them far away from any leadership or decision-making authority at all. When David pursued and defeated the Amalekites after the sack of Ziklag, it turns out that he had wicked men and sons of Belial in the ranks of his fighting men (1 Sam. 30:22). But it is also important to note that he didn’t give way to them for a moment.

So Salvation is Never Oxymoronic

In the passage from 1 Corinthians 6 that we started with, there is an important point made in the next verse, a point that is emphasized with the tense of the verb.

“And such were some of you . . .” There are forgiven drunks who enter the kingdom. There are forgiven sodomites, forgiven thieves, forgiven adulterers. And there are forgiven revilers. Such were some of you.

Those who see the oxymoronic contradictions of those who want to be “conservative” and homosexual—say Dave Rubin, Spencer Klavan, Douglas Murray, et al.—need to recognize what the message of the gospel is for such men. That message is “repent of your sins, particularly sodomy, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. As you do, you will be saved, you and your household.”

The situation with based railers is exactly parallel to this, and so the message of the gospel for them is just as pointed. Repent of your sins, particularly the dank reviling, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. As you do, you will be saved, you and your household.