Daily Verse | Exodus 35:2
For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the Lord.
If Wednesday is the middle of the week, does that make it the mean? Is Thursday above average? We’ll find out tomorrow.
I made good on my promise to leave Facebook, but with a modification. I left my account active but am no longer posting, reacting, accepting new friends or inviting others to connect. The reason for that is that I had more than a couple of people suggest that I slow the off ramp since Facebook’s competition is still maturing and I don’t have the same robust number of connections on the new sites. Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed. For now I’ll be a lurker but the plan is to eventually leave the platform completely.
In the meantime, my primary posting platform is MeWe.com. If you’d like to join me there, just click this link. If you don’t have an account yet, you’ll need to set one up. (For any bots out there, I do vet those who ask to be connected.)
One of the other platforms I’m beginning to experiment with is Gab.com, which aims to be an alternative to Twitter. While I’m finding it more challenging to gain traction with that account, I came across an interesting article by Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab.com, called, “The Silent Christian Secession.”
He starts by telling us that Gab.com has suffered what many alternative sites have experienced in recent weeks.
Over the course of the past week Gab has been deplatformed by one of our banks, a business we were working with to source new server hardware, third-party infrastructure analysis software, and even our accountant.
This isn’t anything new for us. We’ve been deplatformed by 25+ service providers including both app stores, PayPal, dozens of payment processors, hosting providers, email services, and more.
When this happens I rejoice and praise God because I know that He is working to separate the wheat from the chaff. This deplatforming inevitably reforms Gab into an even more resilient community, business, and platform. We don’t just sit around and whine when these things happen, we immediately get to work.
We aren’t victims, we are builders. (my emphasis)
Newsflash—he’s an outspoken Christian! News to me anyway.
Torba goes on to suggest that Christians need to withdraw their money from the world and retreat into our own world.
At this point we have no choice but to “build our own” everything. That starts by supporting those who are already building and share our values. It’s not about simply building our own social networking platforms anymore, it’s about building our own Christian economy. One without cancel culture. One that doesn’t embrace the demonic and degenerate cult religion of critical theory. (my emphasis)
I agree that conservative Christians—and conservatives in general—will find it increasingly hard to do business in our country after what we’ve seen in the last few weeks. The mask is off Big Tech and it is frightening. They have more power than the president of the United States. They have created a surveillance state that is linked to the progressive Left in almost every way you can think of, including education, politics, media and business.
Torba’s conclusion mirrors The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher, in which he
announces that conservative Christians have lost the culture war and that a new dark age is approaching. […] In response, Dreher calls Christians to withdraw strategically and form communities modeled after the sixth-century monastic, Saint Benedict, who, in order to preserve Christian culture and values safe from the cultural demise following the fall of Rome, started a monastic community at Monte Cassino in Italy.
While I agree that unless there is a miraculous intervention by the Spirit of God Himself, our culture will continue to rot and fall apart, I’m not sure that Christians separating themselves from the culture and developing a parallel society with its own economy is practical, preferable, probable or (at least currently) necessary.
Having said that, it’s never too early to start preparing for what seems inevitable. When it comes to Christians preparing themselves, I’ve long supported the development of home fellowships led by the laity, especially since traditional brick-and-mortar churches will be in the crosshairs should the cultural Marxists prevail.
Building a digital platform that tries to operate on tried and true values is another way to prepare. I admire Torba’s effort to create a platform that is committed to freedom of expression which, in our current climate, is a gift. For now, I’ll continue to build a presence there and watch how it develops. You can join me there if you’d like. Just type “DLEIGHO” in the search bar and invite me to connect.