Sometimes, a viral video can explain a cultural moment higher than a stack of sociology journals. This is one in every of those times. Standup comedian Josh Johnson expertly explained the ironies of the recent double-cancellation of a racist-talking TikTok “trad wife.” His larger point is one we want to listen to right away.
Johnson explained in his set the background of all of this: the growing trend of ladies who bill themselves as “traditional wives,” instructing other women through cooking and other types of videos on how you can be “higher” at being women. One of those content creators enraged the web with a use of probably the most notorious racial slur while seasoning some chicken. The comedian was intrigued not by that controversy but by what happened next.
The trad wife, he said, doubled down on the racist talk and, after being fired from her job, began dropping the slur repeatedly in her videos. She tried to affiliate herself with other alt-right white nationalist “influencers.” It didn’t go as she planned.
“She just doesn’t quite have the juice,” Johnson said. “Like, while you’re watching her, she’s saying bad things, they usually’re annoying, but I’m not offended—she just doesn’t have the oomph to get me there.”
She kept using increasingly more slurs, Johnson recounted, increasingly more frantically, within the hopes of getting an audience with neo-Nazis and other bigots, “just attempting to prove how terrible she is.”
“The neo-Nazis start rejecting her as a psyop,” Johnson said, “because they feel what I feel. They see the video they usually’re like, ‘Um, you don’t mean it, though.’” That’s when the turn comes. The neo-Nazis, Johnson explained, start finding and posting things the girl had tweeted years ago, calling out racism.
“So now she’s getting canceled by the neo-Nazis for old not-racist tweets,” Johnson said. “Then she’s over here fighting for her life, trying, like, N-word, F-word, every little thing, just throwing all of it on the market, attempting to see what sticks,” but all that just makes the white nationalists angrier.
“She doesn’t have enough of the true. You can tell she’s not really racist. … You can just tell she doesn’t have the fireplace in her,” Johnson said, a lot in order that her awkward, frantic attempts to slot in were actually making racist people uncomfortable.
“That’s not the way you do it,” Johnson said. “If you really need to be any individual as a racist, for those who really intend to make waves as a bigot, you begin out slow, you begin with a bunch of slow and regular dog whistles over many years.”
Johnson’s routine makes the audience laugh, in fact, because he recognizes the pathetic nature of the ironies of all of it—the profession woman who makes videos pretending to be a trad wife, the climber who tries to be a star by pretending to be a bigot. We cringe when we predict, Who would want to seek out a community with white supremacist online bigots, anyway? And we cringe again after we realize that, despite all that self-degradation, it doesn’t even work.
What Johnson is admittedly lampooning here is just not this one ephemeral situation in an internet controversy, soon forgotten. Nor is he making the case that this would-be “influencer” is one way or the other less racist than the others because she’s attempting to use racism for self-advancement quite than expressing an internally felt ideology. Is a bigot who would feign bigotry for Machiavellian self-advancement less morally compromised than the one whose bigotry comes from reading Mein Kampf?
Instead, Johnson is mentioning something about fallen human nature that’s especially on display right away in our time. The craving for significance—proven within the approval of other human beings—is so strong that some people will pretend to be much more depraved than they really feel with a view to appeal to people for whom the depravity is the worth of belonging.
We see this all over within the political arena, as people morph themselves into sounding like demagogues of the left or the proper, individuals who don’t really mean it, and who find yourself losing not only their integrity and their very own self-respect but—ultimately—even the respect of those to whom they seek to pander.
And we see it within the church by those that seek to not learn how you can teach the Bible, counsel the hurting, or evangelize the lost, but to be significant by how shockingly viral they could be in hating the people other people want them to hate. This is commonly, in our day, called the aspiration to be an “edgelord,” a one that goals to be known for saying shockingly nihilistic or taboo things to realize an audience. Sometimes, it’s because someone they respect is egging them on, someone who will discard them the minute they are not any longer useful.
Usually, with most individuals, this temptation is just not so extreme; nevertheless it is, as Scripture says, “common to man” (1 Cor. 10:13, ESV throughout). Human beings fear being put “out of the synagogue”—nevertheless they define that gathering of individuals whose approval they need. And that is rooted, the Bible tells us, in a pull to like “the glory that comes from man greater than the glory that comes from God” (John 12:43).
We typically think that this temptation is for glory from people on the whole, or from “the culture” on the whole (whatever that’s). In reality, it’s often way more specific.
People need to fit into not a culture but a subculture—a bunch of people that will absorb them and protect them from feeling alone and insignificant and alone. When those people demand they prove their value with edginess or craziness or bigotry—well, that’s just as alluring because the demand of those that demand brilliance or wealth or success or sexiness or urbanity or anything.
One gets freed from this, as with every other temptation, by recognizing it for what it’s—a pitiful pull to Esau’s pottage (Heb. 12:16–17)—and by replacing the fake glory with what’s real: the glory of Christ. This glory brings us into community by first reducing us right down to one (Matt. 18:12) and grants us significance by first having us sacrifice every claim to it (Phil. 2:5–9).
Within the church, on this age as in virtually every other, most individuals seek to accumulate the church within the ways of Christ by quietly learning to exercise their spiritual gifts. Right now, some young person called to ministry is in an empty room practicing a sermon or in search of counsel from an older sage on how you can study the Bible. Some young person called to counsel those that are hurting is learning how you can “read” people and what to do in certain crisis situations. Someone is memorizing where he should stand at an usher station, how loudly she should project her voice within the Scripture reading. To some, that seems boring and a waste of time.
And yet, God works—invisibly, slowly, effectually—through fidelity and never through vitality, by disciples and never by edgelords. Anything else—irrespective of the way it seems to “work” within the moment—is, in the long term, so sad it’s not even funny.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
