Jesus Is Not Edgelord

How a TikTok Trad Wife Decodes Our Cultural Moment

Sometimes, a viral video can explain a cultural moment better than a stack of sociology journals. This is one of those times. Standup comedian Josh Johnson expertly explained the ironies of the recent double-cancellation of a racist-talking TikTok “trad wife.” His larger point is one we need to hear right now.

Johnson explained in his set the background of all of this: the growing trend of women who bill themselves as “traditional wives,” instructing other women through cooking and other sorts of videos on how to be “better” at being women. One of these content creators enraged the internet with a use of the most notorious racial slur while seasoning some chicken. The comedian was intrigued not by that controversy but by what happened next.

The trad wife, he said, doubled down on the racist talk and, after being fired from her job, started dropping the slur repeatedly in her videos. She tried to affiliate herself with other alt-right white nationalist “influencers.” It did not go as she planned.

“She just doesn’t quite have the juice,” Johnson said. “Like, when you’re watching her, she’s saying bad things, and they’re annoying, but I’m not angry—she just doesn’t have the oomph to get me there.”

She kept using more and more slurs, Johnson recounted, more and more frantically, in the hopes of getting an audience with neo-Nazis and other bigots, “just trying to prove how terrible she is.”

“The neo-Nazis start rejecting her as a psyop,” Johnson said, “because they feel what I feel. They see the video and they’re like, ‘Um, you don’t mean it, though.’” That’s when the turn comes. The neo-Nazis, Johnson explained, start finding and posting things the woman had tweeted years ago, calling out racism.

“So now she’s getting canceled by the neo-Nazis for old not-racist tweets,” Johnson said. “Then she’s over here fighting for her life, trying, like, N-word, F-word, everything, just throwing it all out there, trying to see what sticks,” but all that just makes the white nationalists angrier.

“She doesn’t have enough of the real. You can tell she’s not really racist. … You can just tell she doesn’t have the fire in her,” Johnson said, so much so that her awkward, frantic attempts to fit in were actually making racist people uncomfortable.

“That’s not how you do it,” Johnson said. “If you really want to be somebody as a racist, if you really want to make waves as a bigot, you start out slow, you start with a bunch of slow and steady dog whistles over decades.”

Johnson’s routine makes the audience laugh, of course, because he recognizes the pathetic nature of the ironies of it all—the career woman who makes videos pretending to be a trad wife, the climber who tries to be a star by pretending to be a bigot. We cringe when we think, Who would want to find a community with white supremacist online bigots, anyway? And we cringe again when we realize that, despite all that self-degradation, it doesn’t even work.

What Johnson is really lampooning here is not this one ephemeral situation in an online controversy, soon forgotten. Nor is he making the case that this would-be “influencer” is somehow less racist than the others because she’s trying to use racism for self-advancement rather than expressing an internally felt ideology. Is a bigot who would feign bigotry for Machiavellian self-advancement less morally compromised than the one whose bigotry comes from reading Mein Kampf?

Instead, Johnson is pointing out something about fallen human nature that’s especially on display right now in our time. The craving for significance—proven in the approval of other human beings—is so strong that some people will pretend to be even more depraved than they actually feel in order to appeal to people for whom the depravity is the price of belonging.

We see this all over the place in the political arena, as people morph themselves into sounding like demagogues of the left or the right, people who don’t really mean it, and who end up losing not only their integrity and their own self-respect but—ultimately—even the respect of those to whom they seek to pander.

And we see it in the church by those who seek not to learn how to teach the Bible, counsel the hurting, or evangelize the lost, but to be significant by how shockingly viral they can be in hating the people other people want them to hate. This is often, in our day, called the aspiration to be an “edgelord,” a person who aims to be known for saying shockingly nihilistic or taboo things to gain an audience. Sometimes, this is because someone they respect is egging them on, someone who will discard them the minute they are no longer useful.

Usually, with most people, this temptation is not so extreme; but it is, as Scripture says, “common to man” (1 Cor. 10:13, ESV throughout). Human beings fear being put “out of the synagogue”—however they define that gathering of people whose approval they want. And this is rooted, the Bible tells us, in a pull to love “the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God” (John 12:43).

We typically think that this temptation is for glory from people in general, or from “the culture” in general (whatever that is). In reality, it’s usually much more specific.

People want to fit into not a culture but a subculture—a group of people who will absorb them and protect them from feeling alone and insignificant and alone. When those people demand they prove their worth with edginess or craziness or bigotry—well, that’s just as alluring as the demand of those who demand brilliance or wealth or success or sexiness or urbanity or anything else.

One gets free of this, as with every other temptation, by recognizing it for what it is—a pitiful pull to Esau’s pottage (Heb. 12:16–17)—and by replacing the fake glory with what’s real: the glory of Christ, which brings us into community by first reducing us down to one (Matt. 18:12) and grants us significance by first having us sacrifice every claim to it (Phil. 2:5–9).

Within the church, in this age as in virtually every other, most people seek to build up the church in the ways of Christ by quietly learning to exercise their spiritual gifts. Right now, some young person called to ministry is in an empty room practicing a sermon or seeking counsel from an older sage on how to study the Bible. Some young person called to counsel those who are hurting is learning how to “read” people and what to do in certain crisis situations. Someone is memorizing where he should stand at an usher station, how loudly she should project her voice in the Scripture reading. To some, that seems boring and a waste of time.

And yet, God works—invisibly, slowly, effectually—through fidelity and not through vitality, by disciples and not by edgelords. Anything else—no matter how it seems to “work” in the moment—is, in the long run, so sad it’s not even funny.

If a Book Bores You, Leave It (with One Exception)

As I’ve mentioned here and on the podcast, readers/listeners often ask about “strategies for reading,” and I almost always refuse to give one. “Read what you want,” I usually say. What I mean by that is not that all books are the same, or that, somehow, it doesn’t matter what you read as long as you read. What I mean is that each book is not meant for everybody. Reading books that bore you usually helps neither you nor anybody else.

I found a kindred spirit on that a few weeks ago, reading a quote from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who said:

If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is Paradise Lost—which is not tedious to me—or Don Quixote—which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don’t read it; that book was not written for you.

The exception I would make, of course, is with books of the Bible, but that’s precisely because of how the Bible differs from other books. The Bible is “living and active” (Heb. 4:12) and, through it, Jesus himself is speaking by the Holy Spirit. That means you need all of it, not just the parts that are of interest to you.

In the case of a book of the Bible, treat it the way you would if you were actually following Jesus around Galilee, listening to him talk to you. If he said something that you felt was boring or irrelevant, you probably wouldn’t think, “I’ll just go back to checking my Instagram.” You would probably think, “Wait—is this about something I will need to know later, or maybe it’s something I need to know now, but I’m just too dazed to understand it?”

Sometimes, a part of the Bible bores you because you don’t understand it. Spend some time consulting people or resources you trust to see if you can better discern the meaning. If the ark of the covenant getting captured just seems like an old military skirmish, you aren’t getting what’s going on there. If the destruction of the temple seems like just a building demolition, you aren’t actually hearing the text. If one of Jesus’ parables seems like an obvious truism, then you definitely aren’t reading him right.

Sometimes, it’s boring to you because it doesn’t seem to be relevant to you. In those cases, I would counsel that you keep reading, but while reading, to pray like the young prophet Samuel: “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears” (1 Sam. 3:9–10).

If you persist in reading Scripture, and you do so seeking to actually hear from God, you will find that you usually don’t move from boredom to interest, the way you might in reading a novel that drags at first. You’ll find that, like Jesus’ hometown synagogue, when you actually start to hear what the Bible’s saying to you, you will feel offense (Luke 4:28), maybe even a sense of threat to the way you want your life or the world to be. Or you might feel a growing perplexity that causes you to see all the more that you need to seek wisdom from God.

With any other book, though, I would say, if you start reading it and it bores you, put it down and read something else. Maybe it’s not for you. Or maybe it is, but you’re not ready for it yet.

And how do you know what to even start reading? Look to people who interest you—maybe it’s someone you know or maybe it’s just someone you read. Look and see what those people are reading and check those things out until you come across something that grips you.

I read only what I want to read, but what I want to read is shaped by other stuff I’ve read. The same might be true for you.

Yuval Levin Meets Charles Spurgeon

On this week’s podcast, I talk to my friend Yuval Levin about his new book American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation and Could Again. As always, I left the conversation both enlightened about our history and our current predicament and more hopeful for how things could be. I think you will find the same.

Near the end, I asked Yuval what I ask all of my guests these days: What five books of the Bible would he choose to have with him if he had to spend the rest of his life alone on a desert island? (Not a bookshelf, not a playlist, but a Desert Island Canon, I guess.) He surprised me with his choice of Nehemiah, and that led to a conversation about his love for the imagery of building the wall with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other (Neh. 4:17).

I told Yuval that this precise imagery was what the 19th-century British Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon used to name his periodical. The projects are different, of course, but the underlying metaphor is the same. We defend in order to build.

You can listen to the episode here.

Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Rebecca Stuhlmiller from Federal Way, Washington. Here are Rebecca’s annotated picks:

“Me and Bobby McGee” by Janis Joplin: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” by Mr. Cowboy: I’ve moved thirty-five times and call Montana home, but the school district where I live now has 100+ languages spoken. Some guy was playing this song in his car while waiting in the drive-thru. It’s a small world, after all. (Watch the video and I dare you not to smile.)

“Gone at Last” by Paul Simon with Phoebe Snow: My favorite singer/songwriter and Snow’s voice. This one gets you moving.

“Smooth” by Santana (ft. Rob Thomas): The instruments, the voices.

“Run-Around” by Blues Traveler: I just like it.

“Incense and Peppermints” by Strawberry Alarm Clock: Reminds me of being a little kid. This one would make me get up and dance on a desert island, the only place I would do that.

“Green Onions” by Booker T. & the M.G.’s: Just so fun!

“Modern Love” by David Bowie: I discovered Bowie in the 1980s. A genius.

“End of the Line” by The Traveling Wilburys: Like picking five favorite singers all rolled into one. Best road trip song ever.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by The Band: I’m not taking sides here (been both a Yankee and a Southerner), but Levon Helm could sing the phone book, and I would listen.

“Heard It in a Love Song” by the Marshall Tucker Band: Doug Gray’s voice, along with the flute, guitars, and piano. A favorite since it came out in 1977.

“Little Wonders” by Rob Thomas: Onward and upward. An evening prayer.

Thank you, Rebecca!

Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.

Quote of the Moment

“I have just read two books by an American ‘scientifiction’ author called Ray Bradbury. Most of that genre is abysmally bad, a mere transference of ordinary gangster or pirate fiction to the sidereal stage, and a transference which does harm not good. Bigness in itself is of no imaginative value: the defence of a ‘galactic’ empire is less interesting than the defence of a little walled town like Troy. But Bradbury has real invention and even knows something about prose.”

—C. S. Lewis, in a 1953 letter to Nathan Comfort Starr, cited in Remembrance: The Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury, ed. Jonathan R. Eller (Simon & Schuster)

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Onward,
Russell Moore