Here is a thought-provoking article on the Mere Orthodoxy website today: https://mereorthodoxy.com/why-evangelical-gender-discourse-is-unserious
In my view, the problem which the author discusses is not limited to discourse around gender. The problems of double-standards and gate-keeping seem to be pervasive in online Christian discourse today.
This, of course, would "only" mean that Christian discourse online is infected with and following the ways of the world: we are reflecting trends in wider society. Issues are polarised, gate-keepers are appointed, required orthodoxy is quickly defined down to the smallest degree, and in a way that soon becomes divorced from historic orthodoxy, without people appearing to notice or be unduly troubled, and "heretics" are identified, tarred, brushed and feathered (or often, "cancelled").... but, as I say, with blatant double-standards in how that's being done.
What does this mean? To me, the best explanation I can find is that it is the subjugation of theology, brotherly discourse and practice to politics and the culture wars, and perhaps the desire to gain personal followers by positioning oneself as more faithful, more bold, less wobbly, than other potential rivals for people's attention. The driving dynamic often seems to be the feeling that allowing "our side"'s position to be anything other than crystal clear, down to the minutest details, without anything of significance up for debate, is dangerous.... dangerous to our chances of winning the culture war, building big-enough political alliances, and/or dangerous to our personal empire-building projects. And thus, areas of complexity must not be either acknowledged or discussed, because this risks handing "the other side" weapons with which to gain advantage over "our side". The energy expended in preventing this from happening, either by policing boundaries or dedication to not seeing any elephants in the room, betrays the role which politics has been given.
On the Internet in the 2020s, writing things like the above is likely to get responses along the lines of "so, what you're really saying is....", followed by some complete non-sequitor and flaming straw-man, which assumes the existence of only the two positions down those minute details; or the bold declaration that "anyone talking this way is on a slippery slope, and in a few years' time they'll be aggressively recruiting toddlers for sex changes and openly worshipping Baal", accompanied by examples of people who went on that journey.
This, though, ultimately represents a failure to love God with all our minds, a failure to love the people he made, and a failure to deal with the complexity of created-and-fallen reality. Some things, of course, are quite clear; the Bible has plenty of clear teaching about legitimate and illegitimate human sexual practices. It also has plenty of clear teaching about protecting the vulnerable and standing for them. In the above linked article, the author laments that it seems that increasingly the gate-keepers of discourse insist that we choose between these two options, and be treated as an enemy if we don't. But why? To what end? Subjugating the glory and honour of God to temporary political battles, or attempts to gain personal followers, is no part of genuine discipleship, but quite opposed to it.
There are some larger, "meta-issues" going on here, some of which are touched upon in this other article - https://mereorthodoxy.com/the-state-of-the-internet-2026 - which is framed around AI, but I don't want to focus on that aspect. The particularly relevant larger issue is the place given to the Internet in modern life, which as a whole can't be avoided even if someone avoids many parts of it personally. The search and desire for instant feedback, the willingness to build primarily online communities and seek for virtual followers, the ease of switching between such communities compared to physical ones, the using of the state of things online as the basic framing for how we approach issues off-line, etc., are all part of this. It seems to me that we have to start asking ourselves at what point we don't simply try to "sit loose" to some of what's going on online, but be more active, deliberate and explicit in our resistance to it. Of course, in some things, that's been the case already for many years - to give an obvious example, men and women in churches need to have such things as online pornography directly and repeatedly addressed in teaching. But do we not also need to be warning more openly and directly about the unhelpful polarisation that online community has brought to us? Again, this is hardly a new observation, and it's been out there for many years. But, as per the above two articles, it does feel to me like there's some sort of tipping point around, and also a point at which many people are more open to considering a different way, and not just being passive about it. There is perhaps currently more openness, for example, to pointing out and agreeing what many online builders of personal platforms are doing, and that it's not good for us.
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