Vibes Theology
A response to “How the Evangelical Left Lost Me”
Matthew LaMaster’s recent piece, “How the Evangelical Left Lost Me,” lays out seven fronts on which he’s broken with what he calls the “evangelical left”: cultural naïveté, mystical sophistry, toleration of Marxism, Trump derangement, theological drift, family values, and respectability. It’s a candid, well-written piece — genuinely one of the more self-aware entries in the “why I left X” genre, especially in its closing admission that the pull toward respectability is something he has had to actively resist in himself.
But read closely, the essay is almost entirely a document of posture rather than argument. Across seven distinct disputes — several of them squarely theological — Scripture is invoked exactly twice, and both instances land in the final paragraph, in service of the meta-point that the church should be unified. Not one of the seven substantive disagreements is argued from a biblical text. The case is instead built from personal anecdote, a college reading of Marx, a sociologist’s book, and an appeal to “confessionalism” as a structural safeguard.
I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because the phrase gets thrown around loosely. By “vibes theology,” I don’t mean intuition or lived experience — those are legitimate inputs to any moral reasoning. I mean something narrower: arriving at a theological or cultural conclusion primarily through inherited instinct, tribal loyalty, or aesthetic reaction, and only afterward reaching for theological language to justify a position that was never actually derived from the text. The tell isn’t that someone has strong feelings. It’s that the argument could be fully restated without losing anything if you deleted every reference to God, Scripture, or the church.
That’s not a knock on LaMaster specifically — it’s the default mode of a lot of contemporary religious commentary on both sides of every aisle. The purpose of this piece isn’t to litigate whether he’s right. It’s to do the thing his essay skips: state, in his own terms, what he’s actually claiming in each section, and then lay out the biblical texts that are in play — without weighing in on which way they cut.
1. Cultural Naïveté
LaMaster’s claim, in brief: evangelicals who engage sympathetically with secular institutions get manipulated into abandoning their convictions, because the culture doesn’t operate toward Christianity in good faith.
This is really a dispute about the posture of engagement with the world, and Scripture has quite a bit to say on both the “engage” and “separate” ends of that spectrum:
Matthew 10:16 — “be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves,” Jesus’s own instruction for engaging a hostile world.
John 17:14–16 — Jesus prays that his followers stay in the world without being of it.
Romans 12:2 — the call not to be conformed to the pattern of this world.
2 Corinthians 6:14–17 — the “unequally yoked” and “come out from among them” language, often invoked in debates about partnership with unbelieving institutions.
1 Peter 2:11–12 — live such good lives among the pagans that they see your good deeds — a text that assumes ongoing proximity to outsiders, not withdrawal.
James 4:4 — friendship with the world described as enmity with God.
Notice that these texts pull in different directions rather than settling into one clean posture. “Shrewd as serpents” assumes real engagement; “come out from among them” assumes real distance. Any position on cultural engagement has to account for both impulses, not just the one that feels more natural.
2. Mystical Sophistry
LaMaster’s claim, in brief: evangelicals are unusually gullible marks for pseudo-spiritual frameworks — his example is the Enneagram — that promise insight into a “secret self” while ignoring the cross.
Colossians 2:8 — the warning against being taken captive by hollow philosophy and human tradition rather than Christ.
Deuteronomy 18:9–14 — the prohibition on divination and occult practice among Israel’s neighbors.
1 Timothy 4:7 — the instruction to “have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales.”
2 Timothy 3:6–7 — a description of people “always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.”
Jeremiah 17:9 — “the heart is deceitful above all things,” often cited in debates about self-knowledge frameworks that treat introspection as reliable.
1 Corinthians 2:14 — the natural person not accepting the things of the Spirit, sometimes invoked regarding secular psychological frameworks applied to spiritual formation.
Taken together, these texts raise a genuine question about the source of self-knowledge without settling how far the warning extends — whether it rules out any use of extrabiblical frameworks for understanding personality, or only ones offered as substitutes for Scripture. That line is exactly where the actual disagreement lives.
3. Toleration of Marxism
LaMaster’s claim, in brief: having read Marx in college, he sees Marxist categories — oppressor versus oppressed — as the hidden structure behind evangelical thinking on race, gender, abuse, and immigration, and considers BLM a Marxist movement even while granting Floyd’s death was a tragedy.
This is the section of LaMaster’s essay with the least explicit theological reasoning of any — the argument runs almost entirely through Marx’s Manifesto rather than through a biblical alternative. But the underlying question — how should Christians think about justice, power, and the treatment of the vulnerable? — has an extensive biblical footprint:
Micah 6:8 — “act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
Leviticus 19:15 — the instruction not to pervert justice by favoring either the poor or the great — a text cited on both sides of debates about partiality.
James 2:1–9 — the prohibition on favoritism, specifically toward the rich, in the gathered church.
Isaiah 1:17 — “learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.”
Amos 5:24 — “let justice roll on like a river.”
Galatians 3:28 — “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free... you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Deuteronomy 15:7–11 — instructions for economic care of the poor within Israel.
These texts establish that justice and the treatment of the vulnerable are inescapably biblical concerns; what they don’t settle is whether any particular modern analytical framework for understanding oppression is compatible with, or foreign to, that concern — which is the actual crux of the disagreement LaMaster is naming.
4. TDS (Trump)
LaMaster’s claim, in brief: despite real reservations about Trump’s character and policy, evangelicals should credit his administrations with genuine wins for unborn children and traditional marriage, and he’s troubled that some evangelical-left friends can barely tolerate his name.
Romans 13:1–7 — submission to governing authorities as instituted by God.
1 Timothy 2:1–2 — the instruction to pray for kings and all in authority, “that we may live peaceful and quiet lives.”
1 Peter 2:13–17 — submitting to human institutions, including “honor the emperor,” addressed to Christians under a genuinely hostile Roman government.
Daniel 2:21 — God as the one who “sets up kings and deposes them.”
Matthew 22:21 — “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
But submission is only half of the biblical material on how God’s people relate to rulers. The other half is a long tradition of prophetic confrontation:
2 Samuel 12 — Nathan’s confrontation of David over Bathsheba and Uriah, delivered directly to the king.
1 Kings 21 — Elijah’s confrontation of Ahab over Naboth’s vineyard.
Mark 6:17–20 — John the Baptist’s public rebuke of Herod’s marriage, which cost John his life.
Acts 24–26 — Paul reasoning about righteousness, self-control, and judgment before Felix, Festus, and Agrippa, unwilling to soften the message for rulers with power over his fate.
Acts 5:29 — “we must obey God rather than human beings,” often invoked as the limiting principle on the submission texts above.
Held together, these two sets of texts mean the Bible doesn’t offer a single posture toward political power — it offers both a strong presumption of submission and a standing tradition of prophets who confronted kings to their faces. Any biblical case for how Christians should relate to a given leader has to reckon with both halves, not just the one that supports the conclusion already reached.
5. Theological Drift
LaMaster’s claim, in brief: evangelicals untethered from a historic confession are more prone to drift, sliding from soft complementarianism to egalitarianism to full LGBTQ affirmation, while confessionally rooted churches — even egalitarian ones — hold the line better.
This is the one section that most directly concerns exegesis, and it’s also the one where LaMaster’s essay engages no specific biblical text at all — leaning entirely on “confessionalism” as an institutional safeguard rather than the passages themselves:
1 Timothy 2:11–14 — Paul’s instructions on women’s teaching authority, central to the complementarian/egalitarian debate.
1 Corinthians 11:3–16 — headship language and the discussion of head coverings.
1 Corinthians 14:34–35 — instructions regarding women speaking in the assembly.
Galatians 3:28 — again relevant here, on the “no male and female” unity language, frequently cited by egalitarian readings.
Genesis 1:27; 2:18–24 — the creation accounts, cited in arguments about created order and complementary design.
Ephesians 5:22–33 — the household code on marriage, headship, and mutual submission (5:21).
Jude 1:3 — the call to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people,” often cited as grounds for confessional guardrails.
2 Timothy 1:13–14; Titus 1:9 — holding to “the pattern of sound teaching” and being able to refute false teaching.
This is the section where the absence is most conspicuous: it’s an argument about theological faithfulness that never opens a single one of the texts actually governing the doctrine in dispute. A confession is, after all, only as good as its exegetical grounding — which means the confession can’t substitute for the argument LaMaster is claiming to make.
6. Family Values
LaMaster’s claim, in brief: having kids shifted his priorities rightward, and he sees the unwillingness of some evangelical-left peers to marry and have children as rooted in an unwillingness to sacrifice, not legitimate constraint.
Genesis 1:28 — “be fruitful and multiply.”
Psalm 127:3–5 — children described as a heritage and reward from the Lord.
Genesis 2:18–24 — the institution of marriage.
1 Corinthians 7 — Paul’s extended discussion of marriage and singleness, including his statement that singleness can itself be a good gift (7:7–8) — a text that complicates a purely pro-marriage reading and is often raised in response to arguments like LaMaster’s.
Malachi 2:15 — God seeking “godly offspring” from marriage.
Ephesians 6:1–4 — instructions to parents and children.
1 Timothy 5:8 — providing for one’s own household.
The tension worth sitting with here is that Scripture treats both marriage-with-children and committed singleness as legitimate callings, not merely as a default and a deviation — which means the biblical case for prioritizing family can’t simply assume that every instance of delayed or foregone marriage reflects the same underlying motive.
7. Respectability
LaMaster’s claim, in brief: he’s long been anxious about what people think of him, and he suspects the evangelical left’s credibility in popular culture comes at the cost of a witness that’s been bent to secure approval it will never fully have.
Galatians 1:10 — “if I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.”
John 12:42–43 — religious leaders who believed in Jesus but wouldn’t confess it, because they “loved human praise more than praise from God.”
Matthew 5:11–12 — the beatitude on being persecuted and reviled.
1 Thessalonians 2:4 — speaking “not to please people but God.”
John 15:18–19 — “if the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.”
These texts converge more than most of the others in this piece — nearly all of them warn against shaping one’s message around human approval. Where the real question lives is downstream of that agreement: whether seeking a hearing from a skeptical culture is itself a form of people-pleasing, or simply what witness requires.
The Two Texts He Does Cite
LaMaster closes with John 17 (Jesus’s prayer that his followers “may be one”) and Ephesians 4:1–6 (Paul’s appeal to “make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit”). Both are genuinely central unity texts. It’s worth noting, though, that they’re doing meta-level work — arguing that disunity itself is bad — rather than adjudicating any of the seven disputes above. A companion text worth having in view here is Romans 14, Paul’s extended discussion of “disputable matters” within the church, which is frequently invoked by people on all sides of intra-evangelical disputes to argue that their particular disagreement belongs in the “disputable” category — or, just as often, to argue that it doesn’t.
Why This Matters Beyond This One Essay
None of this is to say LaMaster’s conclusions are wrong. It’s to say that an essay organized entirely around theological and cultural rupture — announcing a break with an entire wing of the church on seven separate fronts — makes almost no use of the text that both wings claim as final authority. That’s worth noticing not because citation-counting settles anything on its own, but because it’s a symptom of something broader: a lot of intra-evangelical argument right now runs on cultural instinct dressed in theological language, where “biblical” functions as a vibe-signal rather than a claim staked on an actual text that could be examined, contested, or overturned by a better reading.
Vibes theology isn’t unique to the evangelical right or left. It’s the default mode whenever a writer already knows the conclusion and reaches for Scripture, if at all, as garnish rather than grounds. Before deciding who’s right, we should at least agree on where the argument lives. If two Christians both name Scripture as their highest authority, the conversation ought to begin there — not arrive there, briefly, in the closing paragraph.