Close your eyes and picture a “good Christian.”
What image comes to mind?
For most people, it’s a gentle, soft-spoken soul. A harmless neighbor who is, above all else, agreeable. In the eyes of the world a “good Christian” is accommodating, quick to apologize, and terrified of offending anyone. This is the caricature drawn by our enemies and praised by the very culture that despises our faith.
We can even give this archetype a face and a name: Ned Flanders. Flanders was never just a silly cartoon character. He was a very small piece of a much larger cultural programming and weaponized fiction operation designed to neuter Christianity. The goal was to render us ridiculous, harmless, and socially acceptable precisely because we were perceived as spiritually impotent clowns. The world is perfectly comfortable with a million Ned Flanders, because they are not a threat.
Sadly this is how many Christians have learned to view themselves. We have embraced the caricature, mistaking politeness for piety and cowardice for kindness. We have accepted a pathetic inversion of the masculine, unapologetic, world-confronting faith that laid the foundations of Western civilization.
The moment a Christian stops acting like Flanders, the world loses its mind. The cognitive dissonance is immediate and violent. The degenerate culture that demanded you be “loving” is enraged when you love people enough to tell them the truth. The world that preached “tolerance” becomes viciously intolerant of your refusal to bow to its idols. They loved the caricature because they could control it. They hate the real thing because they cannot.
As you stand your ground speaking a hard truth without apology the enemies of Christ will look you in the eye and say, with a condescending Reddit-tier smirk: “You know, you really should try to be more Christ-like.”
What do they actually mean by this? What does “Christ-like” look like in their minds? Our enemies have spent a century creating a counterfeit Christ in the cultural imagination. Their Christ is this soft, ethereal, endlessly affirming hippie Mr. Rogers figure. Their Jesus is a divine social worker who would never flip a table, only set up a committee to discuss its placement.
This is the “Christ” they demand we imitate.
But the moment we model the actual Jesus Christ of the Gospels, the mask slips.
When you show righteous anger at the profanation of what is holy, remember that He braided a whip of cords and drove the money-changers from the Temple.
When you publicly rebuke the powerful hypocrites leading people astray, remember that He looked the apostate Jews in the eye and called them a “brood of vipers” and “whitewashed tombs.”
When you speak the hard, exclusive truth that divides families, remember that He declared, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Suddenly, their tone changes. A look of panic flashes in their eyes as they are confronted not by their harmless made up modern mascot, but by the King of kings and Lord of Lords. They recoil in horror. They don’t want you to be like the real Christ. He is terrifying and makes demands. The want you to go back to being the useful caricature they created for you.
This model of holy confrontation was the standard for the early Church. Were the Apostles passive men seeking the approval of the establishment? Dust off your Bible and read the Book of Acts. You will find Peter and John, before the Jews that murdered their Lord, declaring, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” You will find Stephen, fearlessly indicting the apostate Jews as stiff-necked murderers before they stoned him to death. You will find Paul, confronting sorcerers, casting out demons, and boldly proclaiming that Jesus is the one true King in a first century world that bowed to Caesar.
These men were not “agreeable.” They were dangerous. In Thessalonica, the apostate Jews agitated crowds and stirred them up before the city rulers, shouting, “These who have turned the world upside down have come here too… acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying there is another king—Jesus.” The charge was not that they were too nice, but that they were turning the world upside down by declaring ultimate allegiance to a higher authority.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. Our surrender to the Flanders Fallacy is a symptom of a deeper spiritual rot in the Church. We have a fundamental inversion of authority. For centuries the West understood that Christianity was its bedrock. Society was judged against the standard of Christian truth. Today that has been flipped on its head. Christianity is now judged by how well it serves the secular religion and globalist regime. It is a totalizing religion, and it demands every other belief system bend the knee.
The “good Christian” in the eyes of the world is the one most useful to the globalist project. The “good church” flies the rainbow flag and replaces sermons on repentance with therapeutic platitudes about social justice. They are auditioning for the world’s approval, quoting Scripture that supports their ideology while ignoring the parts that speak of holiness and judgment.
The problem isn’t only on the left with the secularists. We must also reject the definition of a “good Christian” offered by the Zionist heretics who have captured so many of our churches. They command us to bow to the golden calf of a foreign nation-state and a people defined by their 2,000-year rejection of the Messiah. They preach a false gospel that usurps the Church’s identity as the true Israel and hands our spiritual birthright to those who deny the Son.
The Zionist heresy diverts the energy of God’s people and commands them to secure the borders of a foreign land while the spiritual and cultural borders of our own Christian nations collapse. We are called to disciple all nations, most especially to claim our own lands and our own people for the dominion of Christ, not to serve as political chaplains, an on-demand bomb squad, and a piggy bank for a foreign ethnostate and a people that stands in direct opposition to Christ’s throne.
Our faith is not one ideology among many, competing for a seat at the table. It is the throne of reality. Christ is not a consultant, He is the King who judges all nations. We are not here to make the world comfortable in its rebellion against God. We are here to call the world out of its rebellion and into allegiance with its rightful King.
Reject the inversion. Stop seeking a passing grade from a failing system. The era of appeasement is over. It’s time to shed the ridiculous costume the world has tailored for us, find our spines, and speak with the authority of the King we serve.
If the very people who celebrate degeneracy and mock God are praising you, you are doing something wrong. But if they accuse you of turning the world upside down, then you know you are finally on the right track.
A good Christian, a true Christian, is someone who serves the King of kings and thus will not bow to anyone or anything else. He is a soldier whose only marching orders come from the throne of Heaven. He is a builder whose only blueprint is God’s Word. His mission is not to be liked, but to be faithful. He doesn’t want to win the approval of a dying culture, but seeks to forge a new one from its ashes in the name of Christ.
He wields the truth as a sword and is the sworn enemy of every lie that props up the kingdom of darkness, whether it flies a rainbow flag or the star of a foreign power. He is a patriot of the Heavenly Kingdom, and therefore the best patriot for his own nation, because his entire life is dedicated to bringing his home, his people, and his culture under the dominion of its one, rightful King.
This is the good Christian the Apostles would recognize and the Christian our enemies truly fear. The one who doesn’t just believe the world can be turned upside down, but by the grace and power of God is the one doing the turning.
Andrew Torba
CEO, Gab AI Inc
Christ is King
