Well, there was supposed to be Presidential candidate debate tonight. But not anymore.
I have a better idea: What about watching a civil-minded discussion among two Christian leaders, who take very different positions on the 2020 U.S. Presidential election? Eric Metaxas and David French offer a good model for how Christians can engage in a difficult conversation on a controversial topic, without descending into vitriol, which seems to be the norm these days in social media. Recorded just a few weeks ago at John Brown University, a Christian college in Arkansas. We need more discussions like these, as it will help us as believers to have better conversations on the most important matters of all, namely, that of sharing the Gospel of Christ with a needy world.
Veracity 
October 22nd, 2020 at 3:57 pm
Was not expecting this viewpoint from John Piper. Worth thinking about:
“this is a long-overdue article attempting to explain why I remain baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly……
….. In fact, I think it is a drastic mistake to think that the deadly influences of a leader come only through his policies and not also through his person.”
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/policies-persons-and-paths-to-ruin
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October 24th, 2020 at 1:57 pm
C. Michael Patton contra John Piper. A thoughtful counter-perspective:
https://credohouse.org/blog/could-trump-be-a-christ-figue-a-response-to-john-piper-about-trump
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November 6th, 2020 at 8:55 pm
Just learned this today. Apparently 80 Pro-Life candidates in the Democratic Party won their respective races, during Election Day earlier this week (pretty much all at the state level). Never would have guessed that! :
https://runprolife.org/true-blue-list/
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January 14th, 2021 at 12:41 pm
David French has a lot to say about the kind of stupidity and deceit Evangelicals have endorsed in recent years. Character counts and the truth matters, always. https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/only-the-church-can-truly-defeat
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April 25th, 2023 at 11:25 am
Glad to see Ministry Watch challenging certain Christian spokespersons who perpetuate lies on a public forum without accountability:
https://ministrywatch.com/truth-matters-huge-fox-news-settlement-raises-stakes-for-christians-who-promoted-election-lies/
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May 3rd, 2024 at 5:00 pm
This whole episode is more than just embarrassing for Eric Metaxas. It might prove to be really expensive for him.
https://ministrywatch.com/suit-against-eric-metaxas-moves-forward-despite-free-speech-concerns/
For the record, I am not a fan of Eric Coomer’s defamation lawsuit against Metaxas for platforming Joe Oltmann. Coomer and Dominion Voting Systems won their big lawsuit against Fox News, and that should have just settled the matter. I think it is just best to move on from this silliness.
But Metaxas really messed up by uncritically platforming Oltmann in the first place on his podcast show. If you dish it out, you need to be willing take it on the chin.
The episode has damaged Metaxas’ credibility, which really is a far worse punishment.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-eric-coomer-dominion-election-2020-468638739657
For years, I had thought that Eric Metaxas was about the closest you could get to a thoughtful Christian public intellectual, who was not talking over people’s heads, who was pretty well self-measured and modest. He was a featured writer/speaker with the Colson Center, an organization which I highly respect.
I have criticized Metaxas before a few times here on Veracity. But I always felt that Metaxas was reasonable enough to eventually come around to shave off some of the quirky misjudgments he sometimes made. As the culture continues to drift away from Christian moorings, Eric Metaxas had seemed like someone who could speak into culture intelligently. I still appreciate his biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, despite the fact that Metaxas made a few errors along the way in that book. At least he brought Bonhoeffer to the attention of a new generation of evangelicals, which was a great thing for Metaxas to do.
But something cracked with Eric Metaxas in 2020 which sent him over the edge into the wacky world of right-wing conspiracy thinking. Metaxas could have rightly highlighted problems in election fraud, particularly with the irregularities of the 2020 election, without going down the Joe Oltmann rabbit hole.
Nevertheless, Metaxas went down the rabbit hole anyway. Ever since then, he has been trying to dig himself out of the mess. Metaxas for the past four years has been in damage control mode, trying to distance himself from the kooky world of the Joe Oltmanns. What is weird is that there are still people who believe the stories Metaxas was selling back in 2020, despite the fact that Metaxas has been working hard to try to recover his reputation, and to return to what he is really good at (well…. sort of…. I mostly see mixed results).
Perhaps Eric Metaxas will eventually recover. I hope he does. But this has been a painful lesson for him.
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