When You're Wrong

What you do when you find out you were wrong is who you are.

This is Clusterhuck, my newsletter about faith, culture and a flourishing future for all! I’m glad you’re here. I can only do this through the support of my readers, and I’m grateful for every one I’ve got. If you’d like to join, just click here. You’ll get a free seven-day trial, including access to all the archives. 

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It must be nice to be a professional media pundit. Your predictions can never fail, but only be failed. Professional prediction-makers brashly and wrongly asserted everything from WMDs in Iraq to a Hillary blowout in 2016 to Biden staying in this year’s race without the slightest dent to their careers or reputations. Maybe if there were only a few of these guys, the rest of us could keep them all straight and stop paying any attention to the ones who never get anything right. But there are so many of them with so many identical predictions that it’s hard to tell one from the other with any confidence.

“Well, so what?” you might say. “The simple solution is to stop paying attention to these would-be fortune tellers.” No argument! I mostly have stopped paying attention to pundits, and it’s great. I am free. But it’s indicative of another, seedier societal bug that’s a little harder to turn off: the unwillingness to admit when we’re wrong. 

I saw this online last week, with the brief “controversy” popping up around Algeria’s Olympic boxer Imane Khelif. As you probably saw, an Italian boxer got rocked by Khelif, and this raised some eyebrows about a mysterious Russian “sex test” Khelif failed last year. JK Rowling, JD Vance, Logan Paul and other such luminaries took to Twitter to excoriate the Olympics for allowing a “biological male” like Imane to fight women in the ring, assuming that their ongoing trans panic grifts could map onto Khelif’s boxing career. 

Of course, subsequent information would show that Khelif is not a trans woman or a “biological male” or anything of the sort. She is a girl who was raised as a girl and now competes in the Olympics as a girl. The “sex test” she failed at an international competition in 2023 was conducted by an organization that has since been kicked out of the Olympics for corruption and has never been released to the public. I went into all this in a thread here. 

This information was all widely available, but Rowling, Vance, Paul and even Christianity Today’s Mike Cosper were all too swept up in the “they’re letting girls plays sports with boys!” culture war to take a second to check their sources. And once shown the error of their ways, how many of these people went back to Twitter to admit they were wrong? Only one, and it might surprise you! 

And then there’s Shepherds for Sale by Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham. I’ve been hesitant to wade into this one, because Basham and I have some unpleasant internet history and I don’t want it to sound like I’m holding a grudge. We’ve crossed swords a few times, most notably last year, when she excoriated me for an article I did not write that got published at an outlet I no longer worked for. When I explained her simple mistake (and also pointed out that the article itself was unobjectionable) she doubled and tripled down, and my mentions were never really the same. 

That was then. Now she’s released her new book in which she drags Russell Moore, Phil Vischer, J.D. Grear, Marvin Olaskey, Francis Collins, Gavin Ortlund, Kristin du Mez, the late Tim Keller and a host of other influential Christians (who she called “Big Eva”) for selling out evangelicalism for political and cultural gain. I’m in an interesting position here because, on the one hand, I’m the last person you need to convince that evangelicals are selling out for political and cultural gain. But Basham’s contention is that evangelicalism is actually in a dangerous leftward slide, and that it’s guys like Ortlund, Keller and, most of all, Moore who’ve hastened the skid. Her argument is that the fidelity of evangelicalism can be graded by its adherence to the Republican party, and insofar as Moore and the rest have deviated from the GOP, they’re leading Christians astray. 

I don’t think anyone reading this needs me to explain why I find her argument, uh, unconvincing. But I have been surprised at the avalanche of glaring mistakes that evangelical fact-checkers have leveled against Shepherds for Sale. You can read reviews and threads from respected, well-liked evangelicals here, here, here and here and see the extent to which Basham has stepped in it. Suffice to say, quotes stripped of context, misattributed messages, botching denominational distinctions and naming a woman who credibly accused the president of the Southern Baptist Convention of sexually assaulting her are just a few of the serious errors people have highlighted. 

I’d like to think all this rigorous fact-checking led Basham and at least some of her online fans to own up to their mistakes and take this as an opportunity to rethink their convictions, but I haven’t seen any evidence of it. 

What often happens — and what happened here — is that people who’ve been shown that they’re wrong will save face by ceding ground on one front and then advancing on another: “Yes, I may have been factually wrong but my point is still existentially correct.” That was Cosper’s contention when it was pointed out that the boxer he’d called a biological male was not, in fact, a male (“The point stands,” he said.) It’s also been the reaction of many of Basham’s fans (see this tweet and its replies here.) It’s an attitude @InternetHippo summed up in a tweet:

All of this wrangling — this insisting that we’re right even if we’re mostly wrong — takes a huge toll on our character, our reputation and even our own selves.

I’ve never quite known what to do with this passage in Matthew 15 where Jesus has a briefly contentious debate with a Canaanite mother. This woman follows Jesus and his disciples, begging for help in casting a demon out of her daughter. Jesus ignores her (the text says that he “did not answer a word”) and the disciples say he should send the woman packing because she’s being annoying. He apparently agrees with them, and tells the woman to beat it. 

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” he says. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” 

This is all pretty out of character for Jesus, from brushing off a person asking for help to comparing a lady’s demon-possessed daughter to a dog. But what really bakes my noodle is that this queen pushes back: “Yes it is, Lord,” she says. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” 

This would have been a good opportunity for Jesus to push back. “Who said anything about crumbs?” “Look, lady, it was just a metaphor.” “My point stands!” 

But instead, we have what New Testament scholar Joanna Dewey calls “the only instance in the extant tradition of Jesus being taught by someone, and that someone is a woman who should not properly be speaking to him at all.” We have Jesus conceding the point. 

“Woman, you have great faith,” he says. “Your request is granted.” The Bible says the woman’s daughter was healed in that moment. 

I have a lot of questions about that story, but here’s one thing that seems inarguable: the healing couldn’t begin until someone admitted they were wrong. It’s not fun to admit when you’ve factually blown something but, in my experience, it’s quite a bit less fun to keep twisting yourself in pretzels in order to explain how you were actually right. Your failing argument becomes a prison, and you are your own jailer. Be free.

Applecore: A Journey Through Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of All Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here.

Here’s parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten.

63: The Jimi Hendrix Experience — Are You Experienced?

No amount of familiarity ever quite prepares you for the opening riff of “Purple Haze.” Two ugly, discordant notes banging against each other like dueling chainsaws, jolting even the most attentive listener to a higher state of deliberate listening. And then, boom, the whole song settles into a psychedelic tempest, a mean stew of guitar and drums with the man himself bellowing out from the center of it all like a wild prophet calling down thunder from the center of a storm. It’s a soundtrack to the collapse of the Swingin’ 60s. It’s the announcement of a new era of manic instability and paranoia. And it was our introduction to Jimi Hendrix, perhaps the greatest guitarist in the history of rock and roll.