Inspired by the “Moscow Mood” Debate
In a shocking 1961 study, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram would don an official-looking white lab coat and tell a volunteer to administer increasing shocks to another “volunteer” in an adjacent room strapped into an “electric chair” just out of sight. The shocks were incrementally raised such that the volunteer in the chair could be heard begging for it to stop, until he fell unresponsive. The administered shocks rose up to 450 volts—enough to kill the man in the chair—if they had been real. The other “volunteer” was an actor and the purpose of the study was to see how many people would obey instructions to torture and eventually kill another person. Sixty-five percent of participants complied to the full, fatal 450 volts.
What kind of person was most likely to electrocute their neighbor to death? The agreeable ones! Agreeable personality types want to be seen as nice, accommodating, winsome, like K-Love: positive and encouraging. Agreeable people are usually averse to conflict, and do not like saying “no.” They want to please the guy in the officious lab-coat, even when he is encouraging murder. That sort of behavior may be agreeable, but it is not necessarily kind. Agreeableness can be counterfeit kindness that is coldly vicious to others.
Of those two qualities, Christian leaders are to be kind but not necessarily agreeable. Notice how two requirements for an elder—including pastors—in 1 Timothy 3:3 imply that the kind of men being drawn to leadership in the apostolic churches were often not agreeable personality types. They were surely kind. They bore the fruit of the Spirit. They just weren’t K-Love-esque. First, they were not to be “strikers” (πλήκτης), “not violent but gentle” (in the ESV). The word literally means a “brawler,” prone to fist-fights. If the pastor is a Bama fan, he should not get into bar fights when someone yells “War Eagle.” It refers to someone who is excessively confrontational or hot-tempered: he can’t let an opinion he disagrees with go unrebuked, often rebuking in the most abusive ways. So obvious we might miss it, this also means Paul’s candidates for eldership had to be warned not to hit people they disagreed with.
They had to be warned not to be “contentious” (ἄμαχος). The root word (μαχος) means “battle.” A μᾰ́χη was combat or a quarrel, strife, or dispute. The alpha-privative (ἄμαχος) means to be the opposite of that, an uncombatant, unquarreler. The agreeable have used this to shoehorn in their aversion to conflict. Their interpretation would disqualify every prophet, apostle, and the Lord Jesus Himself. But that’s not what Paul meant. He meant to avoid the kind of profitless, on-going arguing that characterized the twice-divorced KJV-onlyist Peter Ruckman. By his own description, he took part in “knock-down, drag-out arguments in the home sometimes running as long as three days.” He bruised at least one wife after a violent argument. He was a striker and contentious. He was unqualified for ministry. Yet, if he had been able to master his vigor and passion, filled it with the fruit of the Spirit, and added wisdom to his learning, he would have been the kind of man Paul was telling Timothy to look for in a pastor. And this is my point: does anyone today think your average evangelical pastor—from the megachurch guru type with the untucked shirt and jeans to the more traditional with his nondescript suit and tie—needs to be warned not to punch people in the course of his pastoral care? What kind of men were Paul’s churches attracting as elders if they needed to be reminded not to take a swing at their fellow church members? Not, necessarily, the agreeable.
The qualifications for church leadership in 1 Timothy 3 do not forbid the masculine, robust, even disagreeable. They merely regulate it. He can be passionate. He shouldn’t be violent. He should be full of convictions. He shouldn’t be addicted to arguing. Indeed, that Paul warns against violence and argumentativeness suggests that the kind of men he wanted leading the church were those who might have those weaknesses, not that they are spineless, theological windsocks blowing whichever way the prevailing winds point them.
Peter Leithart and I have different convictions about baptism. If I visited Theopolis HQ and we talked bluntly about baptism, we might say tough words about each other’s views, but I’m confident Dr. Leithart wouldn’t punch me. While the standard evangelical approach to avoiding this direct conflict is to employ “theological triage” and minimize open conflict, the tendency of modern evangelicalism towards agreeability turns triaging into avoidance of open conflict when possible. “Contentious” has come to mean, a la the agreeable, any forceful, masculine assertions of secondary or tertiary beliefs.
In a 2022 9Marks conference at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Mark Dever caused a delayed internet sensation by claiming his convictions on church practice were the key to keeping churches orthodox.1 Put like that, you might wonder what’s the big deal. Doesn’t every Christian think his or her tradition is best? What made Dever’s claim so sensational was the masculine, testosterone-fueled manner in which he asserted it. Many would have preferred a timid proposal of ecclesiological preference, as if they’re on the level of liking Mexican food over Chinese food. The agreeable don’t like robust assertions of superiority. Unfortunately, Dever himself apologized for his forcefulness in an episode of “Pastor’s Talk,” lamenting his use of the phrase “I’m tired of . . .” as juvenile. (I think it was, rather, the inaccurate but excusable lapsing into common idioms when speaking extemporaneously and only the most unfair critic would have thought it reflected poorly on Dever’s character.) Dever did a sort of penance for the sin of not being nice: an evangelical Maoist struggle session.2 Proper pastoral tone, we were told, is nice, always agreeable. The 9Marks staff thought the episode was such an epitome of spirituality, they held it up as the best “Pastor’s Talk” of 2023. I’m a great admirer of Dr. Dever and appreciate the humility required to publicly apologize. But the apology wasn’t necessary.
Last year Kevin DeYoung (KDY) criticized “the Moscow Mood,” referring to Douglas Wilson and friends in Moscow, Idaho. I disagree with Wilson on some doctrines and opinions but I don’t fault him for being a punchy writer, a vivid and forceful communicator. The masculine mood isn’t the problem. KDY was also the chief complainant to Dever, as if he was surprised that Dever had views on baptism like mine. If KDY prefers mild language, that’s fine. But I appeal to him to let us who might need to be reminded, from time to time, not to be strikers or contentious, to be men; sometimes to even be not nice.
This counterfeit kindness—agreeableness—has seized control in some Christian circles. Some editors of evangelical magazines enjoy my articles but pass on them because they dislike my entirely unrelated posts on X. One apparently follows me, bookmarks any posts he cringes at, and when I send him a pitch, he replies with a list of what are, to him, the cringe-worthy. I don’t mind if he—or you—are agreeable. Just let us employ punchy rhetoric, as long as we’re not dishonest or vicious. Stop the tyranny of the agreeable. Stop upping the voltage.
C. S. Lewis foresaw this tyranny in That Hideous Strength wherein the instrument of oppression is N.I.C.E (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments). The aim of N.I.C.E. is creating human beings with “with less and less body,” empty of sentiment and passions, especially those that make the agreeable uneasy. They will agreeably electrocute fellow volunteers if the man in the lab-coat dictates, but they don’t want to tell him his polity is deficient.
Being kind doesn’t always mean being agreeable. We need, as in Paul’s churches, men who aren’t strikers, not because they’re too effeminate to ever be tempted to throw a punch but because they’re convictional men with self-control and true kindness.
John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.