The Age of the Impostor.

When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, he didn’t show up denying God’s existence. He didn’t mock the Scriptures or call the prophets bigots. He quoted Psalm 91 and then asked Jesus to act on it in a way that would have destroyed His mission.

That should tell us everything we need to know about American Christianity is headed.

For the last twenty years, American Christian has faced an enemy who had the decency to wear a uniform. The secular progressive movement announced itself (and its opposition) openly. It called our convictions bigotry. It labeled our theology transphobic. It had the audacity to tell us that our faith was a relic of a less enlightened age: fine for private comfort, irrelevant to public life.

And for a while, the onslaught achieved its desired effect. The cultural pressure to comply was enormous. Cancellation was real. The implicit bargain was simple: keep your beliefs confined to your private spaces, and we’ll tolerate your existence. Bring them into the public square, and we’ll destroy you, your livelihood, your family.

But something happened on the way to that progressive, inclusive utopia. Women began losing scholarships and podium spots to biological men, while being forced to share their prison cells. Doctors who performed irreversible surgeries on confused adolescents started facing legal consequences. The border crisis was revealed for the demographic shell game it truly was. Roe was overturned as advancing technology made it impossible to deny what many already knew: life begins at conception. And Gay marriage sent us down a slide that now has male couples suing to be considered infertile in order to gain access to IVF coverage, registered sex offenders acquiring unrelated children through surrogacy and foreign billionaires using purchased eggs to manufacture dozens of children simultaneously.

The verdict, still being delivered, is striking: maybe there was some wisdom in the ancient convictions after all. Maybe the traditions we were told to abandon were load-bearing walls, not decorative relics.

This is very good news. But it comes with a warning.

The Age of the Impostor

The next wave of opposition to the church will not come wearing a enemy’s uniform. The new name of this new season of warfare is sabotage, subversion from the inside. The impostor willingly wears your uniform, speaks your language, sits in your pews. He works not to defeat (outright) your faith but to repurpose it.

The overt secular progressive was an enemy. Disorienting, aggressive, sometimes devastating but identifiable.

What I believe we are entering now is the age of the impostor.

The Oldest Trick in the Book

This should not surprise anyone who has read their Bible carefully.

The serpent in the garden did not announce himself as an enemy of God. He asked a question: “Did God really say...?” He reinterpreted. He reframed. He introduced just enough doubt to make disobedience feel like wisdom.

Satan in the wilderness took it further. He quoted God’s own Word. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down — for it is written: ‘He will command his angels concerning you.’”

Direct quote. Psalm 91:11-12. Technically accurate citation. Diabolical application.

What Jesus did next is the key to everything I want to say. He responded with the intent of Scripture. He knew what the text meant, not just what it said, and that knowledge was His defense.

The pattern has not changed. When the enemy knows we have a deep respect for our faith, he is savvy enough to walk through the front door to help us exit the house entirely.

The New False Prophets

The examples are multiplying. Each follows the same pattern: take a genuine piece of Scripture, strip it of its context, and deploy it in service of a conclusion that 2,000 years of Christian thought would call heresy.

On the Sanctity of Life

“Life begins at breath.” Genesis 2:7 (God breathing life into Adam) was recently used by Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico to argue the unborn are not alive. But it rips a passage about the unique creation of the first man from the dust and turns it into a universal biological claim that contradicts the entire witness of Scripture on life in the womb, from Psalm 139 to Jeremiah 1 to Luke 1. The intent of Genesis 2 is to declare that life is a gift from God. The impostor uses it to argue that some life doesn’t count.

“Mary consented.” The Annunciation is recast by Wheaton professor Amy Peeler and others as a reproductive rights proof text. Mary said yes, so she could have said no, so reproductive choice is biblical. One of the most sacred moments in Christian theology (the willing submission of a young woman to the sovereign plan of God) flattened into a modern autonomy narrative. It is not exegesis. It is appropriation.

“Love your neighbor” means fund abortion access. Gavin Newsom ran billboard ads quoting this to promote abortion in California. The greatest commandment reduced to a rubber stamp for whatever policy the speaker wishes to baptize.

On Gender and the Body

“Made in the image of God” means approve of gender transition. President Biden posted that transgender children are “made in the image of God.” Andy Beshear invoked the sacredness of every child to defend funding irreversible gender surgeries on minors. The doctrine of imago Dei, the teaching that God intentionally created each human being, used to justify the chemical and surgical alteration of the bodies God created. The very theology that says God made you deployed to argue that what God made needs to be unmade.

On Marriage and Sexuality

“Sodom and Gomorrah was about hospitality.” The made by Matthew Vines and others, draws on Ezekiel 16:49, which mentions the arrogance of Sodom, while explaining away Jude 1:7, which explicitly names sexual immorality and "unnatural desire." Some take it further, arguing the sin was not same-sex desire but the desire to commit rape, as if narrowing the sexual sin to its most violent expression erases the broader sexual ethic Scripture clearly teaches. This is not competing interpretations. It is selectively quoting one passage to nullify another, then reframing whatever remains until it no longer says what it plainly says.

On Immigration and Borders

“Jesus was an illegal immigrant.” The Holy Family’s flight to Egypt (written about here and here by Russell Moore claim Jesus was “illegal” and a “refugee”. Despite the ironically legal contradiction, the argument has been used to call for mass amnesty and the prevention of any immigration enforcement (I wrote in depth about this here). But Joseph and Mary were Jewish subjects of Herod’s client kingdom under Roman authority. Both Judea and Egypt were under Roman control. A Jewish family traveling from one to the other was roughly the equivalent of an American driving from North Carolina to Virginia, different local governance, same overarching political authority. They weren’t sneaking across a border. They were exercising a freedom that belonged to them within the Roman system. And they returned home when the threat passed. The passage is not about immigration policy. But it sounds compassionate, and that’s the point.

The Reinterpretation Only Flows One Direction

Here is the tell. When Scripture is reexamined and creatively reread by these voices, the conclusion never lands on more disciplined sacrifice and restraint (sexual or fiscal). It never leads to stronger protections for the unborn, higher barriers to divorce that harms children. It always, without exception, lands on the loosening of a biblical standard that conflicts with a contemporary adult desire.

I’d love to see it just once... Just once, I want a reinterpretation of Scripture to conclude that we should have less premarital sex, fewer abortions, should stop sterilizing children, or enforce all of our laws. But it never happens. The hermeneutical innovation only ever loosens. It never tightens. And the pattern reveals its source.

How the Impostor Operates

The impostor does not reject Christianity. The impostor redefines it.

The core move is always the same: take a genuine Christian virtue (love, grace, compassion) and hollow it out. Remove the parts that are costly and countercultural. Refill it with a meaning that only moves in one direction: affirmation. Then tell Christians that this softer, emptier version is what Jesus actually meant all along.

Love becomes affirmation. Grace becomes moral suspension. Listening becomes silence. Compassion becomes complicity.

The target for all of this is not the theologian who can parse the Greek. It’s the everyday believer with a good heart and not enough time to sort through the distortion. The impostor is not trying to convert the whole church. The impostor is trying to peel off enough of the compassionate middle to break the Christian consensus, to weaponize the believer’s own virtue against them.

What Comes Next

We need to recognize the era we are entering. The overt enemy is losing ground. The impostor is taking his place. And the impostor is far more dangerous, because you cannot defend against what you do not recognize as a threat.

Jesus said, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.” The emphasis is on the clothing. They look like you. They sound like you. They quote the same book you do.

So be equipped. Like Christ in the wilderness, know Scripture well enough to reject the interpretations that push us away from God’s intentions: that the strong sacrifice for the weak, that life is sacred from conception, that sex is bound within marriage to a partner of the opposite sex, that law and order are good, and that compassion and justice are not enemies but partners.

We have been handed an ancient wisdom that has endured for millennia, not because it was easy, not because it was popular, but because it was true. Have confidence in it. Stop apologizing for it.

And stop letting people who learned our language yesterday tell us what our faith has always meant.

The serpent is no longer hissing from outside the garden. He’s inside, quoting Scripture: “Did God really say...?”

Yes. He did.