A Diamond-Studded Turd

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The Occasion for Writing About This

Last week, as we were enjoying another round of “Christ is King” posturing, a thought occurred to me, and so I went ahead and tweeted it. And when I tweet my observations, or links to a post, or anything like that, I almost always get enough responses to encourage me to keep doing it. You know, that’s why we’re here. That’s why we do what we do.

Do not dare to confess that "Christ is king" with your mouth when pretty much everyone knows that Christ is not king of your mouth.

— Douglas Wilson (@douglaswils) May 20, 2026

But this tweet was different in two ways. First, it took off like a rocket, indicating to me that this was indeed a hot topic. A lot of people have noticed the discrepancy between rhetoric and life. And second, if you will take a moment to note a certain kind of comment that started to appear under my exhortation, you will quickly realize the truth of D.L. Moody’s adage—that if you throw a rock into a pack of stray dogs—the one that yelps is the one that got hit.

What I want to do here is follow up. And by “follow up” I mean the kind of thing that Gideon did with the Midanites (Judg. 8:4). I then want to set out some biblical definitions, and to make a few other general observations, along with some of what might be considered debris clearing. But if all goes well, I am not going to deliver the payload until the very last section. And by “payload” I am talking about what needs to be said to those who are doing their level best to pollute the name of Christ, the same name they are pretending to honor.

And I know that when I drop that payload, there will be some who see in it some kind of inconsistency on my part. They will say, “Ho! We thought Christ was supposed to be king of the keyboard . . .” Oh, He is. The one who spoke many hard sayings, recorded for us in Scripture, is certainly capable of sanctifying hard sayings. More about all that here.

Of Course Christ is King

Christ is king, king over all. Let us confess it. However . . .

Phrases, like individual words, have both a denotation and a connotation. The denotation of a phrase consists of what the words mean when put together, and all according to their dictionary definitions. The denotation of Christ is king is not only unobjectionable, but it is a truth that lies right at the heart of the Christian faith. As John Calvin ably taught us, Christ holds three offices in His glory—prophet, priest and king. Unless He is king, He cannot be Lord, and “Jesus is Lord” is the foundational Christian confession (Rom. 10:9).

But the connotation has to do with how the phrase is being used in any particular moment. This is determined by the immediate context and intention. In 1685, during the Killing Times in Scotland, 18-year-old Margaret Wilson was executed by drowning. She was bound to a stake in some mudflats such that the incoming tide would drown her. All she had to do to obtain a reprieve was to say “God save the king,” which she would not do. Those executing her did not want her to die, and pulled her up out of the water to give her a last chance to “just say it.” She said that she wished that God would save the king, but she would not say the words in the formulation as it was presented to her, because denotation and connotation are not the same thing.

To say it in the way they were insisting was to grant the great point at issue, which was whether or not the king had authority within the Church of Scotland. In that context, that is what the phrase meant. And also in that context, to retreat to the dictionary and to cling to those definitions alone was to play the part of a coward.

So if I were to come across a mob somewhere that was chanting “Christ is king,” and they were doing so while lynching a Jew, and they were lynching him because he was some sort of a distant cousin to a pornographer, my only duty would be to try to stop them by whatever means I could. Joining in with the chant just because it was true would be unthinkable. The truth of it makes everything worse, not better. What they were saying would in no way ameliorate what they were doing. Truth spoken in any such context would actually make the offense that much more of a travesty. Great crimes committed in the name of the great God are not thereby cleansed.

If I were to walk on by because the denotation of what they were saying was true, then I would be a coward, a fool, a miscreant, and all the rest of it. The name for any such exercise would be rationalization, pure and simple. More on this in a bit.

So the Biblical Teaching Remains Unambiguous

Not only is Christ the king, but He is the king over all kings (1 Tim. 6:15; Rev. 19:16)—He is the great emperor. When the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, she was told that her son would inherit the throne of David, and that He would reign over the house of Jacob—His kingdom would have no end (Luke 1:32-33). His kingdom encompasses all worldly kingdoms, but is not itself grounded on worldly foundations—His kingdom is not from this world (John 18:33-37). It is the kingdom of the heavens (Matt. 3:2). Although the Lord’s authority is spiritual, it is not ethereal—His reign will continue until all His enemies on earth are subdued and placed under His feet (1 Cor. 15:24-25). At the end of days, when all nations will be gathered before Him, they will be gathered before His throne of glory (Matt. 25:31-34).

All throughout the book of Acts, the early Christians preached the kingdom, as they had been instructed to do (Acts 1:3). Philip preached the kingdom to the Samaritans (Acts 8:12). Paul encouraged the saints at Lystra, Iconium and Antioch, teaching them the manner of entering the kingdom, which was through tribulation (Acts 14:22). Paul taught in the synagogue at Ephesus for three months, and his theme there was the kingdom of Christ (Acts 19:8). He also reminded the elders of Ephesus about how much he had labored to teach them about the kingdom (Acts 20:25). And when the rabbis came to talk with him in Rome, he spent the day testifying about the kingdom of God—that is, he persuaded them about Jesus (Acts 28:23). And the book of Acts concludes with him preaching the kingdom (Acts 28:31).

And if you can read those words without hearing the music of Handel in the background, you are made of tougher material than I am.

Judgment is in the King’s Right Hand

So yes. Christ is king. And in the exercise His kingly authority, He will judge two sorts of men. He will come with justice in His right hand, and He will judge all those rebels who impudently rejected His sovereign authority.

But He will also judge those who pretended to acknowledge His kingly authority, but who corrupted and twisted it to their own ends. They will come to Him in the last day, and they will say, “Lord, Lord, didn’t we say ‘Christ is king’ to own the libs, and didn’t we say it a lot? And didn’t we really frost the Jews?” And He will say to them . . . well, you can fill the rest of that scenario.

In short, what good does it do to call Him king, and then sneer at the scepter as He wields it?

Various Dodges

What I am addressing here is the rank and manifest hypocrisy. In the original tweet, my point was that a hypocrite has no right to proclaim that Christ is king over all when it is manifestly clear that He is not king of his own mouth, or keyboard, or meme strategies. How can you declare that Christ is king over all those realms that you cannot change when His kingship is not apparent in those realms that your repentance could change?

And this very simple point can of course be met with various dodges.

“What’s wrong with saying ‘Christ is king?'”
Nothing . . . unless you are at the same time denying that He is king with that hypocritical mouth. This is nothing other than the point.

“How much did the Jews pay you for this?”
Not a cent. I am always willing to repeat what the Bible says for free.

“Isn’t Christ king of hypocrisy and hypocrites also?”
Yes, He is. But not for their blessing. You are confounding His decretive will and His revealed will. “The Son of Man indeed goes just as it is written of Him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had not been born” (Matt. 26:24). The betrayal by Judas was the will of God in one sense, the sense in which Jesus submitted to it, but that did not mean that Judas was not being disobedient to the revealed will of God. And it was by the latter that he is to be judged.

“You are simply generating a long list of ‘eligibility requirements’ before someone can say ‘Christ is king.'”
No, it is a very short list. This is not some esoteric doctrine. “‘These people draw near to Me with their mouth, and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me” (Matt. 15:8). Don’t deny with your life what you affirm with your mouth. That’s not a long list.

“Why does this matter? We should simply rejoice that Christ is preached.”
Paul rejoiced when Christ was actually preached, even though the motives of some preachers was envy. This is not the same thing as when Christ is openly denied through corruption and wickedness The unnamed preachers in Philippians are one thing. The false brothers who crept in to spy out our liberty are quite another.

“How many times do I have to tongue kiss the wall before Christ is king of my mouth?”
I have been to that wall, and would never dream of kissing it. But having been there, I have also seen all the rubble that is the debris field of Christ’s holy and fierce judgment against Jerusalem. And if He did that to those first-century Jewish hypocrites, what do you think He will do to the Gentile hypocrites who turned a deaf ear to Paul’s explicit warning against being high-minded over this very point (Rom. 11:20)?

“Serrated edge for me, but not for thee.”
Correct. Christ can call His adversaries whited tombs, while they do not get to call Him a demon-possessed drunkard and glutton. This is because He was right, and they were wrong. The fact that Nathan called David an adulterer and murderer did not give David the right, in the interests of fair play, to call Nathan an adulterer and murder. It is lawful and right for the serrated edge to be used on hypocritical postures. It is not lawful and right to use the serrated edge on widows and orphans.

“So was Christ king over how you titled this post? Lots of Christians wouldn’t like the fact that you used the word turd in the title.”
Yes, Christ is king. Read on.

The Payload

Nick Fuentes is manifestly unregenerate. His entire schtick consists of flaunting his reprobate mind. The fact that he is more than willing to decorate that schtick with “Christ is king” is a gold ring in a pig’s snout. It is lipstick on a camel. It is a diamond-studded turd. Stop trying to pick it up by the clean end. There is no clean end.

And the fact that professing Christians are willing to give men like that a pass because they are supposedly “based” shows us exactly how far out onto the sewage lagoon we have drifted on this leaky air mattress of ours. I refer, of course, to the leaky air mattress of reactionary and very ignorant indignation.

In turbulent times, Christians fall into different traps. There are the revolutionaries—Jim Wallis. There are the sneaky revolutionaries—Russell Moore. There are the false flag revolutionaries, pretending to be reactionaries—Candace Owens. There are the simple reactionaries—Joel Webbon. There are the sneaky reactionaries—those anons who joined your church and started to hold secret meetings in order to “ask questions,” while pretending that ordinary pastoral care was oppressive. And don’t forget the old guard conservatives, scattered throughout the Trump administration, not quite sure what’s going on.

And then there are the reformational Christians, fighting the good fight without forgetting their souls—like Jon Harris. Be more like that.

Now for a cluster of admonitions. If someone hands you a bottle of vinegar, you don’t need to drink the whole thing to determine what’s at the bottom. You should recoil at the hypocrisy of the first drop. Remember your old Sunday School lessons. “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight,” that kind of thing. Remember what your mama taught you. “Be good. Don’t be like other boys.” When the Samaritan bound up the wounds of the man who had been beaten between Jerusalem and Jericho, he was not doing any of that out of obedience to the secular and liberal post-war consensus. He was embodying the ethics of Christ, not the ethics of the Huxtable family in The Cosby Show. You owe nothing to that old “United Colors of Benneton” ad campaign, but you do need to pay at least some attention to the Sermon on the Mount. And stop learning the history of WW2 from memes.

A second cluster now, which would be a bit of wisdom from The Two Towers. Éomer asks this: “The world is all grown strange . . . How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” And Aragorn replies: “‘As he ever has judged,’ said Aragorn. ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’” The more unsettled the world is, the more settled you must be in your understanding of the goodness of the Word of God, all of it. When the world has gone mad, and has jettisoned all the common grace basics that God gave to us, it is the height of folly for Christians to respond by throwing away their understanding of the revealed basics.

A third. Lies are always lies. Hypocrisy is always rancid. Do not let those who don’t know what time it is try to tell you what time it is. And don’t let the “winsome” Christians try to tell you what winsome is. Just stop. Worship God on the Lord’s Day. Read your Bible daily. Sing psalms. Love your wife. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies. And everybody you meet, all day long, will be at least one of those. Love everybody—and love means treating people lawfully from the heart. Pray for the conversion of the Jews.

What does God say to believe? Believe that. What does God say to do? Do that. What names do you get called when you believe and do? Ignore that.