From the very beginning, the church has had to guard her gates like a city under siege. Not from armies with banners and swords, but from men who speak the right words just long enough to earn trust, then quietly begin rearranging the furniture while nobody’s looking.

That hasn’t changed and it never does.

Jesus Christ warned that many would come in His name. Paul the Apostle told the Ephesian elders that wolves would rise up from within their own ranks. Not outsiders and not pagans kicking down the door. But men who are already standing in the pulpit. Already trusted and platformed. And history, if you bother to actually read it, just keeps proving the point.

Roll the clock back a few centuries and you run straight into the same disease just wearing older clothes. The Cambridge Platonists. The Latitudinarians. Men who decided the problem with Christianity wasn’t sin. The problem was too much clarity.

Too sharp. Too defined. Too…exclusive.
So they shaved it down.

Doctrine got trimmed down. Convictions and rhetoric got softened. Boundaries became fuzzy. The goal was to make the church plausible and palatable. To make it sound reasonable enough and maybe the world will stop hating you. But it never works. It just hollows everything out.

Fast forward, and the names have changed, but the instinct hasn’t. The Gospel Coalition crowd and all its various allies, the broader spectrum of Evangelical talking heads—what we coined the “Evangelical Intelligentsia” years ago—they’ve been playing the same game for years now. Not open denial. That would be too obvious. Too easy to spot. No. This is cleaner.

The language changed and new categories were introduced. Categories like “Same-sex attracted Christian” or “faithful celibacy.” Phrases that feel orthodox at a glance, but carry just enough ambiguity to smuggle in an entirely different framework.

And for a while, it looked like it was working.Because it sounds serious. It sounds sacrificial. It sounds like someone wrestling honestly. And people want to believe it.

They want to believe you can hold onto identity language that Scripture never grants, manage sinful desires instead of putting them to death, and somehow walk the narrow road without ever really stepping off the wide one.

But then reality shows up, and it doesn’t ask permission.

Perhaps you’ve already seen the news floating around. The recent situation involving Sam Allberry didn’t drop out of nowhere like some random lightning strike. It followed a pattern. The same pattern you see every time a system is built on managing sin instead of killing it.

An “inappropriate relationship with another man.”

That’s the carefully chosen phrase to describe what happened. It’s surgically vague with just enough detail to acknowledge failure but not enough to expose the full weight of it.

Then comes the investigation. Then more information surfaces. Then the reopening. Then the conclusion… a “serious breach of trust.”

Disqualified from ministry.
Collapse.

And suddenly all the polished language, the conferences, the books, the carefully framed categories, gets dragged into the light and tested against something far less theoretical.

Did it hold? Did it restrain anything? Did it produce holiness?

Because at some point, you have to stop talking about frameworks and start looking at fruit. The writing has been on the wall—or the pages of The Dissenter and our colleagues—for years. We’ve been warning about this very thing. Specifically, of Sam Allberry and his “same sex celibacy” theology.

Allberry has been telling us who he is for years, but nobody wanted to pay attention. Here at CBN, he described himself as having “sexual, romantic, and deep-emotional attractions” to other men.

And should anyone who affirms “gay pride” be in any position of leadership in the church, especially to lecture the church on sexual ethics and identity?

The thing is, Scripture doesn’t hand out identity badges tied to sinful desire. It doesn’t invite people to organize their lives around patterns of temptation and call that maturity. It calls for death. Mortification. A war against sin that doesn’t negotiate.

The problem with the TGC approach is that it tries to build a stable structure on top of something God said must be destroyed. And you can dress that up with all the careful language you want, but eventually, the cracks don’t stay hidden. They widen, spread, and then they give way.

What we’re watching unfold right now isn’t shocking to anyone with a modicum of discernment. It was completely predictable. It’s what happens when Evangelicalism starts flirting with the same instincts that drove mainline liberal denominations. It strips away sound doctrine and softens our stand for holiness. It makes room where God didn’t.

And the talking heads behind all of this are never clear about anything except about how sinful criticism is. But things like this force clarity whether they want it or not, because reality has a way of cutting through abstraction.

And when it does, all that’s left is the question the church has been asking since the first century:

Are these men guarding the truth? Or are they wolves quietly reshaping it into something else?