Our social media habits have made slander so prevalent, so normal, that we’re willing to overlook its pernicious effects as long as it helps our cause or confirms our narrative. We no longer see this sin as disqualifying. We no longer even see it as sin. I fear we’ve normalized this form of worldliness to the point that the righteousness described by James (“peace-loving, gentle, . . . full of mercy”) now gets reframed as soft, or squishy, or compromised. These dynamics should scare us.

What does it mean to be worldly? I still find David Wells’s definition unbeatable: “Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.”
Wells emphasizes the perniciousness and pervasiveness of worldliness. We get so accustomed to sin we don’t see it. And that means we should always ask, What sins appear normal today? What sins are so common we hardly shrug at them?
The more I contemplate this question in a digital age, the more I’m convinced we’ve entered an era marked by the normalization of slander.
What Is Slander?
Slander is spreading untruth about someone else so their reputation is damaged. These untruths are sometimes flat-out lies designed to inflict maximum harm, but often slander takes the form of deceptive inferences, assuming the worst of others instead of the best, or deliberately crafting a preferred narrative out of conveniently edited facts.
God hates slander (Prov. 6:16, 19) because he is the Truth. Satan loves slander because he’s the father of lies. Jon Bloom remarks on “its poisonous power” as “one of the adversary’s chief strategies to divide relationships and deter and derail the mission of the church. . . . He knows that slander deadens and splits churches, poisons friendships, and fractures families. He knows slander quenches the Holy Spirit, kills love, short-circuits spiritual renewal, undermines trust, and sucks the courage out of the saints.”
The antidote to slander is found in the Westminster Larger Catechism’s description of keeping the ninth commandment against bearing false witness. Faithful Christians will be inclined toward these actions: “the preserving and promoting of truth between man and man, and the good name of our neighbor, as well as our own, . . . a charitable esteem of our neighbors; loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their good name; sorrowing for and covering of their infirmities; freely acknowledging of their gifts and graces, defending their innocency; a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them.”
Instead, we often demonstrate a propensity for slander. The Puritan writer Thomas Manton believed the source of slander is self-love and the desire for human praise. Slanderers feel contempt toward someone with a sterling reputation. “They blast their gifts with censure, aggravate their failings, and load them with prejudice, that upon the ruins of their good name, they might erect a fabric of praise to themselves,” he says. Slander and censure go together, ever blasting outward, never looking inward. “Self-lovers are always bitter censurers; they are so indulgent to their own faults, that they must spend their zeal abroad.”
Slander’s Poisonous Effects
Matthew Lee Anderson describes the soul-sucking nature of slander by pointing to the New Testament’s framing of this sin in terms of consumption. Galatians 5:15 warns against the tendency to “bite and devour one another,” which echoes the psalmist who speaks of people with teeth like “spears and arrows” and tongues like “sharp swords” (Ps. 57:4). Anderson also quotes a medieval text that describes a woman “slandered, eaten away at, gnawed at, by the people, for the grace that God performed in her of contrition, of devotion, and of compassion.” He writes,
Slanders and defamation limit the sphere of the victim’s action: they constrict his agency and move them to the margins of the community. To that extent, they impose a form of poverty, as they are designed to remove the social conditions necessary for that person’s flourishing. In stripping away the person’s “good name,” slanders, detraction, and defamation hollow out their social identity and reduce the person to whatever interior resources they have left to survive.

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After removing the stone, Jesus called with new creation power, “Lazarus, come out.” The heart that stopped four days before pulsed with new life. Lazarus walked out of his grave. Lazarus’s resurrection and gives a picture of what it is like for God to resurrect people who are dead in their sins spiritually. God takes what is dead and morally repugnant from sin and makes it into something alive and beautiful.

Like any other six-year-old, I lived life to the fullest. I climbed the cherry trees, played on the playground with my sister, and built my Legos. One day, a sense of dread and sadness began clouding my carefree days. I didn’t know what was wrong. I explained how I felt to my mom. She gently said, “You need Jesus.” At that moment, something extraordinary happened. I believed in Jesus. I did not have all the theology worked out in that moment of newfound belief. But I knew I needed Jesus. Desperately.
There is nothing more beautiful in the world than a person trusting and clinging to God for grace. True belief is the result of God’s effectual calling. And this effectual call is the dawning of new creation life.
It is often thought that systematic theology is abstract and theoretical. This is far from the case. The great truths of theology help us make sense of everyday life. We experience the truths of theology in life. Theology is systematic because each doctrine is dynamically connected. Effectual calling is organically related to the Trinity, election, creation, the doctrine of sin, atonement, eschatology, and all the other doctrines. Two theological relationships that continue to capture my attention are effectual calling and the new creation.
God’s Call and New Creation
God’s work in the heart is nothing less than a new creation. If God doesn’t do this work, people hear of the death and resurrection of Jesus and respond with anything but saving faith. Apathy, curiosity, mockery, or hostility are common responses to the gospel. But a person will only respond in saving faith if God calls that person and opens the heart to believe.
Just as God spoke and created the universe and everything in it, God speaks to the human heart and creates something new (2 Cor. 4:4). The God who said, “Let there be light!” says, “Let there be faith!” While the gospel is preached or shared, God creates something new in the heart of the person who responds in saving faith.
In systematic theology, the effectual calling, this new creation call, is also known as new birth or regeneration. Jesus taught that people must be born again to believe the gospel with saving faith (John 3:3–8). The Holy Spirit was active in the creation of the world. He formed it, brought order from the chaos, and made it beautiful (Gen. 1:2). The Spirit is also active in the new creation of the believers. Through the power of the gospel, the Spirit causes them to be born again, bringing order to their chaotic and dead hearts and making them spiritually beautiful.
God will one day restore the cosmos and make all things new. This new creation call to the individual through the gospel is the downpayment of resurrection life that will one day overtake all creation.
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We contend against wokeness not just for the sake of the church but also for the sake of the world. True justice, true unity, true reconciliation, true authority, is found in the Word of God. It is the Word of God that renews the world. In its patterns for justice, unity, reconcialition, authority, you find the life that flows from the gospel: the good news that Jesus saves from sin and misery by grace. 

I want to encourage my readers to read a book entitled “Christianity & Wokeness” by Owen Strachan. I just finished the book a couple weeks ago and it helped me to put together a lot of what I have seen in online discussions, in academia, and even in the Church over the course of the last 12 years since I began college and travel. I am told that Voddie Baucham’s book “Fault Lines” is also sound.
It is important for modern day Christians to be aware of wokeness and a Biblical response to it (which is why the above books were written). Wokeness is defined in our culture as being “awake” to the injustice that is going on around us. It is connected with social justice movements and debates over race and ethnicity. The teachings of Marxism play an important role in wokeness.
I will attempt a definition of “wokeness” here from what I have read and observed. Wokeness defines truth by feeling more than fact. Wokeness places a core sense of identity in external things like nationality and race. Wokeness defines justice, less by a set of rules and regulations external to oneself, but defines it more by the local culture and the feelings of the person who has observed an injustice. Wokeness rejects authority. Particularly God’s authority and the order that He has set in place for creation in Genesis.
Having grown up in a church where I went to worship shoulder to shoulder with Christians from Africa and Asia, I sometimes struggled to understand some of the racist or maybe sometimes ignorant comments I heard from other professing Christians. Christians should condemn racism, Christians should be compassionate, Christians should be generous in every way. And yet, the flip-side is almost as bad or worse, where some Christians start to feel guilty for having a “white” church even when the local geographical area is culturally European in background. Just because you are white and you attend a church that is 99% or more white, that doesn’t make you a racist.
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