Before You Call Out Heresy
Calling out heresy online thrives on the feeling that you already understand the belief system you are about to judge. Christian YouTube and social media are built to produce that feeling. This kind of false proximity makes strangers feel empowered. It makes us believe that we have a right to publicly call out heresy, without pastoral charge, and without the slow process the church has historically required before anyone is named a heretic. In this essay, I want to talk about the dark side of Christian YouTube and some of the pitfalls involved in it.
The Echo Chamber of Fake Accountability
Public platforms are built to sort you into an echo chamber, both as a user and a participant. Based on what you click, the algorithm learns your irritations, your theological perspective, and the conclusions you already favor. Then it fills your feed with voices that sound like those conclusions, or with reaction videos calibrated to provoke your predictable emotions. In the apologetics world, you start to learn who the good guys are and who the blasphemers and compromisers are.
But here’s the problem: The echo chamber cannot give you discernment to make proper theological judgments. It mostly confirms a verdict you were already inclined to reach. When a doctrinal claim appears in a video and strikes you as important or serious, the tools for response are immediate and public. You can hop in the comments and shoot off a response as long as the book of Jude explaining why you think the content creator is right, wrong, or almost right. Then, other people can react to that comment. Perhaps they share your view, or maybe they think you’re way off. Response videos might ensue.
The problem is, few of these people actually know each other in real life. Even fewer have the knowledge, experience, and background to comment in a competent and informed way. In most cases, the comment section is a dumpster fire of personal opinions, stories, accusations, and people with marginal amounts of expertise masquerading as accountability.
Local First
The pastoral epistles entrust teaching and correction to elders who are known by their congregations and accountable both to God and to those they shepherd. This means the first line of defense against false teaching is the content creator’s own local church. The church discipline process, then, has a relational context.
Historically speaking, the ordinary pattern in the early church was local before it ever became wider. If a person started to teach a compromised view of Scripture, the local pastor (priest) engaged in private conversations first. The hope was to help the person obtain a more excellent understanding of the Scriptures. Perhaps the error was an innocent mistake and not the result of intentional heresy. After multiple private attempts to help him come to a better mind, if the person actively persisted in the error, neighboring bishops were drawn in and eventually a larger council might be needed to adjudicate the matter.
The case of the priest Arius provides a good example of this process. Arius was preaching that the Son was a created being. Around 318–319, his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria, first dealt with him directly. Alexander described repeated conversations and admonitions before any public proceeding. Only after Arius refused to stop teaching heresy did Alexander convene a synod of Egyptian bishops, which deposed him and circulated letters to other churches informing them about the situation. Those letters pulled in bishops such as Eusebius of Nicomedia (who sheltered Arius) and Hosius of Cordova. The dispute reached the Council of Nicaea in 325 only after local correction and provincial synods had already failed.
Against that pattern, it is distinctly 21st-century American Protestant thinking to assume that, as an individual, I have the right or responsibility to hold accountable someone with whom I have no real-world relationship for beliefs I consider heterodox or heretical. That responsibility belongs first to their pastors/priests, denominational oversight (e.g., bishops), and to councils. I am none of those things. Yes, the Reformation recovered the priesthood of all believers and the clarity of Scripture. But it did not appoint every reader with the authority of an ecclesiastical court. Protestant churches still ordain elders, still gather in assemblies, and still practice discipline through recognizable bodies. Treating my individual conviction as a substitute for those structures.
From a Handful of Voices to a Cacophony
I believe that the rise of YouTube and social media has increased the scale of this problem over the last ten to fifteen years. In the 1980s, before the internet, the landscape of trusted ministries was small. If you needed help with the cults, you listened to Walter Martin. If you needed general apologetics, you listened to Greg Koukl. There were, in practical terms, a handful of go-to voices in the apologetics space. That limited atmosphere had its own flaws, but it also meant the field was trackable. A person could roughly know who was speaking, from where, and with what public record. Today, the number of voices has multiplied without any corresponding accountability structure. Everyone is competing for the same listeners and making their own declarations about who is compromised and who isn’t. The result is not a richer common culture. It is a cacophony in which it is genuinely difficult for the everyday Christian to tell a careful biblical teacher from a performer.
My mentor Ken Samples used to distinguish between top apologists, pop apologists, and slop apologists. A good popular teacher, he thought, still needed to be able to do the higher-level work: read the sources, write out a position, and defend it in public. This doesn't mean that the person must have a PhD. But it does mean that the researcher must be able to show his work for peer review, even contrarian voices. Without that ability, popular work can easily degenerate into slop. The slop apologist knows a little about a topic, presents it as a settled issue, and is not yet aware of the nuanced distinctions that would complicate his conclusions (something that top-level apologists know). That is the Dunning-Kruger problem in public form. Confidence gets ahead of competence, and the everyday Christian has little way to tell the difference.
Slop apologists love to talk big on YouTube. And, in my candid opinion, this is what the vast majority of discernment posts actually are: AI slop, apologetics slop, and theology slop. They will often take the sensibilities of one denomination, or even one person, and set up that narrow band as the standard. Everyone else is then measured against that rule. An idea gets labeled “heretical” or “compromised” because it fails one circle’s test of soundness. The feed then rewards the speed of the verdict. It has little use for the slower work of setting a teaching in context before anyone decides what, if anything, must be judged. They leave out the longer history of doctrine, which claims were settled early, which were debated for centuries, what the boundaries of orthodoxy are, and how the church has answered new errors without collapsing every disagreement into heresy or compromise.
And then the collective voices of YouTube act as though they constitute some kind of an ecumenical council, identifying blasphemers and compromisers and treating their disagreement as a case that requires a verdict. The noise becomes something worse than confusion. It becomes a counterfeit of the very governing body that Jesus installed: local church elders. Pastors, denominational authorities, and councils exist, in part, so that discernment does not become a contest over who can record, edit, and upload the fastest.
Why I Stepped Back and Why I Came Back
By the early 2000s, I felt that a lot of the apologetics world was about apologists winning arguments against each other––evidentialism vs. presuppositionalism and what-not––rather than actually engaging in real-world case-making to those outside the Faith. I found the whole thing discouraging and largely unfruitful.
This is why from roughly 2005 to 2020 (I did do one public talk in 2019), I didn’t really participate in public apologetics. I worked behind the scenes at a national ministry and began teaching small classes at my local church in 2014 to people I was actually in life with. I became convinced that the work of apologetics holds up best when you are walking an actual stretch of road with someone.
I began podcasting more intentionally and speaking in 2020 because the women’s apologetics space was fairly new and relatively unified. This time, my content had a different aim. Women wanted to apply apologetics to ordinary situations: children, friends, households, churches. I saw value in that vision. I tried to build my platform as a vehicle to disciple women in the essentials of the Faith so they could disciple others. I was not engaged in a contest for attention. I was trying to be faithful in the little things and trust God for the results.
That intention has not removed the pressure of the medium. The proliferation of competing voices—and the habit of treating those voices as a kind of floating judiciary—has made the whole arrangement feel less like service and more like noise. To be honest, I feel disillusioned with it, and that disillusionment has made my continued participation in it increasingly difficult.
Sometimes I wonder whether content creators become susceptible to moving in a harsh direction when they aren’t actively discipling anyone in the real world. Without ordinary relationships, it is easy to forget how much patience maturity actually takes and how much nuance can be involved when discussing a tricky doctrinal issue. Someone walking with a growing believer can tell a badly phrased sentence from a settled rejection of the faith. Merely watching a short clip lacks that personal context. In this way, in-person discipleship can act as a guardrail for the people who make the content, not only for the people who watch it. The slower work of walking with actual people makes more nuanced discussions harder to ignore, something that a feed can’t cultivate.
The public apologetics space ought to be, in principle, a place where hard questions can be discussed. In practice, however, it is a space that is full of ordinary sinners. Pride, defensiveness, and the desire to be seen as the clear-eyed one turn a good deal of the work into prolonged public argument. Social media lowers the cost of those vices and raises the reward: more clicks.
God’s design is slower and narrower. The church is a household of faith with named shepherds, not an open mic with unlimited prosecutors. Souls are watched over by people who will give an account, not by audience members who can unsubscribe at any moment. Pastors are given their charge because proximity and recognized office are conditions of the work. Social media can inform, illustrate, and even warn. It cannot substitute for the people who actually share a life with the person being corrected.
An Audience Is Still an Audience
A few years ago, a very influential apologist asked me why I would not publicly call a prominent pastor and YouTube personality a heretic. My answer was simple: I am not his pastor, a board member, or an ecumenical council. That’s not to say that I wasn’t troubled by the allegation. I was. But I also had not taken the time to examine it carefully. I was not going to get behind a microphone and apply the label of heretic after simply reading some social media posts or watching a few clips. At minimum, I would have needed to engage with primary sources and a long stretch of reading. A written essay I was willing to defend in public would also be nice. That is how I would want to be treated. Even then, the ultimate adjudication doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to that man’s oversight board. If his board was failing, that was a problem for his leadership and donors to reckon with.
I generally handle controversial issues by describing what Christians have historically believed on a matter. Sometimes, I describe the core beliefs of an issue (e.g., doctrine of creation) and then explain where various streams of thought differ (e.g., age of the earth). In cases of an emerging or fairly recent idea (20 years old or less), I will often take significant time to study (months to years) before sharing my professional perspective about where I think an idea lands on the spectrum of orthodoxy to heresy. Occasionally, I divulge my personal opinion about a recent or emerging idea, sharing where I am at in my current thinking on a matter, while also bookending it with a comment that my mind could change with further study. And it is not uncommon for me to say in public, “The answer to that is easy. I don’t know.” But over the years I have become increasingly cautious about making an authoritative declaration concerning an emerging idea as a final adjudication about whether or not it may or may not be heretical. In my opinion, some kind of inter-denominational ecclesiastical body is needed for that (e.g., The International Council for Biblical Inerrancy).
Healthy online discourse is possible when the people speaking remember the difference between explaining the faith and prosecuting one another, and when they remain willing to do the slower work in the places where they can actually be known. This is why my most frequent recommendation to people is to join a solid, healthy, Bible-believing church. Know your pastors and let them know you. Weigh public teaching, including the teaching on your own feed, and bring serious concerns first to the people who share your life.
When the urge arises to treat a stranger’s doctrinal failure as your case to prosecute, remember what you are not.
You are not that person’s pastor. You are not a denominational leader. You are not a council.
Neither am I. We are participants in one another’s audiences. The internet can carry good teaching. It cannot replace the local church that must live with the results.
