(2023-02-15) Guinn They Fought The Gyre And The Gyre Won

Rusty Guinn: They Fought the Gyre ... and the Gyre Won. It is hard for me to imagine a message any more innocuous than the one promoted in the last few months by He Gets Us, a media initiative of a charity called Servant Foundation.

Maybe you think they’re pointless and saccharine, unlikely to be helpful in a cynical world.

for the most part, the conversation and coverage of the campaign has not been about any of those conclusions. The narrative of the He Gets Us campaign has been completely dominated by the question of who funded it and what they must be up to

Thing is, The Wrong People aren’t the wrong people to everyone. Much of the remaining enchilada, therefore, can be largely accounted for by a smattering of folks framing the campaign as being not about the literal Nazis who funded it but about those damned woke progressives who used it to impose their politics on a Gospel message.

since the beginning of 2023, the density of fiat news language – language meant to tell you how to think about the news – was three times higher for coverage of “He Gets Us” than for the average news article in our dataset

simultaneously absorbed by our two disparate tribes as fascist and woke, respectively?

the reason the He Gets Us campaign got caught up so fully IN the widening gyre isn’t because it was too woke or funded by fascists. It is because its primary purpose was to extract the Gospel FROM the widening gyre

The widening gyre is our term, borrowed from Yeats, for the political environment created when we move from a coordination game to a competition game, which we believe took place in 2016, if not somewhat earlier

The He Gets Us initiative is not only aware of the extent to which the Christian church in America has become enmeshed in this Widening Gyre. It is explicit that its core goal is to take it back. Their agenda – and they correctly and honestly call it exactly that – is to turn Jesus from “a tactic used to intensify our deep cultural divisions” back to “the world’s greatest love story.”

Strange as it may sound to those unaffected by it, division in the church over opinions about governments and leaders has caused more pain and separation in my life than almost anything else in the last two decades.

the tribal impulse to win within the widening gyre has corrupted so much that was good about us.

You can’t fight the Widening Gyre by trying to pull something you want to salvage out of it. You fight the Widening Gyre by rebuilding the thing you want to survive outside of its pull. (route-around?)

Like everything else worth saving from this idiotic period in history, the solution will not come from the top down. It will come from the bottom up.

forging a new tribe built around the ideas worth saving.