A masterclass in being right until you aren’t.
This past week I did what trolls do. I went looking for the soft spot in people who follow a man the way you’d follow a team, and I found it on the first try, and I want to tell you what happened after that because it did not go the way I expected.
Some background on the room. There’s a local Facebook group here, political, loud, run by admins who believe in free speech no matter how absurd or asinine the speech turns out to be. They allow anonymous posting and nicknames, so you can’t click a name and go stalk the profile behind it. You can imagine what that does. It’s a dumpster fire of bologna most days, and it produces more material for the tin foil hat crowd than it does anything you could honestly call debate. It’s 2026. Debate used to be the outlet. Now it’s mudslinging with better distribution.
I post there under a nickname with the word Logical in it, which is exactly the kind of thing a person does when he wants to be argued with. It works. It stirs up the fringe and gets me called things I’d have to explain to my wife.
So, on my morning stroll through the feed, I came across a photo of a local megachurch pastor on a visit in Washington D.C., grinning in a selfie with a couple of far right-wing influencers, all of them in expensive suits, standing in a room full of friars. Men who took vows of poverty, used as wallpaper.
I chuckled. I screenshotted it. I posted it to the group with a remark about men who talk about spreading the gospel while dressed like that and selling culture war for a living. These men like to hand out the heretic card weekly to an opposing Christian view.
Now, I live in the same town as that church. Five-digit congregation. That was not an accident on my part, and I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I knew where the nerve was and I put my thumb on it. Full bore.
It worked exactly as designed. Within a day I had a man telling me I only felt this way because I hadn’t been successful at whatever it is I do, that jealousy breeds conflict, that I should go look in the mirror and know I’m the problem. As my usual, I just replied, I am satisfied with the man in the mirror and have been blessed. Very simply.
Another told me I was upset about people spreading the good news of Jesus. This one, well, that is something people outside the reach of that echo chamber know better. The teachings of Jesus do not align with the pastor and influencers’ constant barrage of attacks against other Christians, ethnic groups, religions, genders, you name it…there is a podcast from the pastor and the influencers denouncing and ridiculing it served with scripture.
And I was having a wonderful time. That’s the part I need you to understand. I had my references lined up, Matthew 18, Paul telling the Corinthians that judging outsiders wasn’t his business, the whole apparatus. I was going to explain to these men that heretic is a serious word with a specific meaning, that Peter’s false teachers denied the Master and John’s denied the incarnation, and that you don’t get to hand the word out like a business card at a networking event just because somebody votes wrong.
I made that argument for two days. I made it well.
Then one threw out that I was “criticizing Christians.” Which is strange, as my jabs were at three men and their modus operandi. So, I went back to the post to make sure of what I’d written. Damn…
I had called them heretical charlatans.
Right there in the third paragraph. Heretical. The exact word I’d spent forty-eight hours explaining to strangers that they had no standing to use, sitting in my own post, where I’d typed it without a second of hesitation because I was annoyed and it felt good and it came out of me like it had been waiting by the door with its coat on.
Here’s the thing that got me. Nobody caught it for two days. Then it hit me, I had handed out a “heresy card”. I just stared at the screen and shook my head, knowing what I did. And it meant the only person who was ever really going to notice was me, and I damn near didn’t.
So let me say the thing I learned, which is not the thing I set out to prove.
The word is free.
It costs nothing to type. It requires no study, no relationship, no standing, no follow-up. You never have to sit across from the person afterward and watch it land on them. You get the entire satisfaction of having drawn a line without any of the work of figuring out where the line goes, and if the room already agrees with you, it doesn’t even cost you a friend. That is a hell of a bargain, and I took it without thinking, on a Tuesday, before coffee.
Which brings me to the uncomfortable part.
I’ve spent this week describing a man who builds an audience by telling them which other Christians to write off. And I still think that’s what he does. But the mechanism he’s running and the one I was running are not different in kind. They’re different in scale. He does it from a stage to thousands with a production budget and a podcast feed. I did it from my kitchen table to a Facebook group under a fake name. Same drug, different dosage, and I was the one lecturing about addiction.
That’s as far as the equivalence goes, though, and I want to be careful here, because I don’t think it goes all the way.
Nobody sits under my teaching. Nobody brings me their marriage or their kid or the worst week of their life. When I’m wrong on Facebook, the damage stops at me. A pulpit is different, and a pulpit with a media arm attached is different again, because the people in those seats aren’t scrolling past. They’re being formed. And what a good many of them are being formed into is people who know, with confidence, which other believers don’t count.
One denomination doesn’t get to decide who the rest of us are. I’ll stand behind that one all day.
I just no longer get to say it from up here.
So, I went back into the thread and put it on the table myself. Charlatan I’d keep, because conduct is visible. Heretical I’d take back, because it was me doing the exact thing I was objecting to. He responded that I was talking in circles, which is what people say when they’ve run out of road but don’t want to leave the car.
Maybe. Or maybe that’s just what it looks like when somebody changes his mind in public, which happens so rarely online that we’ve stopped recognizing it when it does.
Either way, I went fishing this week and caught something. Just not the thing I baited the hook for.
Dak