I’m done addressing KJV-Onlyism at the popular level on December 31, 2024 (with a few little exceptions I mention in my wrap-up video), so I’m clearing out my files—and posting a few scripts that never made it to the channel.
Two insights from a Substack writer I deeply appreciate, my former colleague at Crossway for a brief time, Samuel James. These insights might help someone out there who has been afflicted by KJV-Onlyism in their youth.
First
First, James writes,
I would like to pioneer a new genre of personal essay. I call it: “My Parents Did Their Best Raising Me and Of Course They Got Some Things Wrong But I Don’t Blame My Problems on Them Because I Don’t Want My Kids to Blame All Their Problems on the Mistakes I Will Inevitably Make.” Basically this kind of essay would follow all the familiar patterns of a typical piece wherein the author awakens from the cruel hypnosis inflicted upon them by their strict/overbearing/religious/nosy parents. But instead of ending with the author being enlightened and the family being exposed, it would end with a terrifying realization: that even my parents’ mistakes were valuable, that my grown-up problems were not reducible to them, and that the most mentally and spiritually healthy attitude I could have toward my childhood is gratitude for the many good things, and forgiveness for the bad.
The tragic irony for many people my age is that the kind of mental health that we desperately need is almost always predicated on decentering the self, which is precisely the very thing we have been educated not to do in the interest of mental health. Our windows to the world are mirrors. Many of the most popular “self-care” techniques are really just analog-era recreations, which suggests what we really need is just one hour where we’re not staring at our own psychological state. Decentering the self is not just implausible in the Age of the Mirror, it’s actually condemned as immoral through the way we articulate which personal narratives matter and which ones don’t. The narratives that don’t matter include:
- I realized how much I’d been given and how evil only living for myself would be.
- I was miserable trying to curate my own identity and this was cured when I gave myself completely to this spouse and these children.
- I thought me and my desires were the same thing, but then I realized that denying those desires gave me more joy.
- I was convinced people who disagreed with my core convictions were wicked, but I was wrong.
Thankfully, escapees from KJV-Onlyism typically, in my experience, do not usually stumble into atheism or secularism or self-helpism. The people who do that don’t want to talk to me anyway, because I’m clearly not there. I stand with their KJV-Only parents against their unbelief.
But those who must come to disagree with their own parents’ views on the KJV would do well to see what a fast-moving train their culture wants them to jump onto: the victim train, in which everybody is wholly virtuous and all their enemies are wholly evil. That’s just not Christianity.
Second
Of course, I could tell you stories about the evil done in the name of KJV-Onlyism that would make your blood boil.
But an insight from Samuel James is one reason I don’t do this. He talks about the way knowledge itself becomes tribalized in an online atmosphere. He has profound things to say about the way both right and left have committed epistemological sins. Here James describes (and does not endorse) the way the game is played:
To win the reality game, you must outlive, outflank, and out-virtue your opponent. The straightest way to do that is to make the bad stuff your opponent says or believes an intrinsic expression of their nature, and the bad stuff you or your tribe say or believe to be an aberration (or perhaps even not that bad at all). If the people you count as an enemy link to something, denounce it; if the people you count as an enemy have something on somebody else, back away.
One reason I don’t want to win by sob story is that it feels to me like naked tribalism. It feels so dirty to me when pro-LGBT pastors use this tactic: they tell of a boy who is persecuted or rejected by his ogre-like conservative Christian parents just for asking questions about his sexuality.
I won’t even deny that some Christian parents handle such questions poorly—just as I won’t deny that some KJV-Only leaders are truly wicked.
But I take an insight from a major favorite book of mine One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn helped take down the Soviet gulag through that book, and he did so not by describing its many terrible horrors in gruesome detail but by describing the very best day prisoner Ivan ever had in the gulag. That day was bad enough. The point was made.
I, too, wish to engage the very best KJV-Onlyists—like Dan Haifley and Chuck Surrett and many others I could name. I believe I have consistently done this on my channel. I have almost completely avoided the crazies. And even among the crazies, I have picked on only the very most influential ones (I did one video on Peter Ruckman and one on Brandon Peterson).
Another reason I don’t tell sob stories about the effects of KJV-Onlyism is that I truly believe that the fall affects my tribe, too, and I don’t want to start a sob story competition. I don’t think my side would lose, but it might. Surely wicked things have been done in the name of anti-KJV-Onlyism, too. My side is not perfectly virtuous. I think both sides lose when we go the sob-story route. I’d like to keep the focus on the merits of the case.
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