#2396: Trevin Wax

We have had the opportunity to deal with several fundamentalist pastors who claim that pop and rock music are tools of Satan to lure young people into depravity and damnation. Trevin Wax’s position is really the exact opposite, yet he manages to be almost equally silly about the issue of popular music and Satan. According to Wax, Satan is going around killing popular singers because music is a gift from God, and if people like the music, there’s a huge chance they’ll trace it back to the God that gave the person in question the gift of being able to sing. The artists must therefore be eliminated. The deaths of Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston all have something in common, and it’s not the obvious factors but the evil hand of Satan, no less: “The Evil One not only hates it when people find joy in God [but] … he also hates it when people find joy in God’s gifts,” says Wax, and Satan works hard to eliminate such “signposts that point us to the God who loves the world enough to shower us with gifts of common grace”, leading people to squander the good gifts from above.

Trevin Wax is otherwise a pastor and managing editor of The Gospel Project at LifeWay Christian Resources, as well ascontributing editor to Christianity Today. He has also written some books, including Counterfeit Gospels (which argues that misinterpretations of the gospel are an even bigger threat to the church than persecution and the rise of Islam) and Holy Subversion.

 

Wax is unsurprisingly critical of gay rights and sexual freedom, and his tortured reasoning is actually worth having a look at as an example of the ridiculous knots opponents of such things manage to tie themselves into in their attempts to come across as reasonable. According to Wax, gay rights is a threat to freedom: “There is no such thing as absolute freedom when it comes to sexuality,” says Wax, for “[t]he moment we celebrate or endorse certain behaviors, we curtail freedom in other areas. This is the nature of freedom.” This is not the nature of freedom. Wax’s illustration is that 100 years ago, it was OK for men to be openly affectionate toward other, whereas now it is not, apparently because gay marriage is legal and homosexual relationships have become more accepted. Yes, it’s just a desperate, random and contradictory association of thoughts. That seems to be how things usually go in Trevin Wax’s attempts at reasoning. 

 

He is, of course, also a creationist, and has written articles in which he is “exposing the fundamentalist narrowness of scientists, not creationists” and arguing that science is based on faith just as much as religion, and therefore the Biblical account of creation is just as good as the scientific story. 

 

Diagnosis: Relatively typical fundamentalist purveyor of nonsense and mindrot. That people able to open doors by themselves actually listen to him and think he has anything to offer, is flabbergasting. And no, your hateful message doesn’t get any less hateful if you smile while you deliver it.