I originally wrote this as a YouTube comment under a video about leaving Christian Hedonism, but the comment was removed. Christian Hedonism, for those unfamiliar, is John Piper’s branded theological framework built on the slogan “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.” Like MacArthur’s branding of “Lordship Salvation,” it became one of those identity-marking systems that shaped an entire online wing of Reformed culture. Rather than let these reflections disappear, I’m sharing them here. I know many people have lived through the same spiritual anxiety, fear cycles, and internet revivalist culture that shaped me. If this helps even one person untangle their faith from dread, it is worth it.
I resonated deeply with the video. I came out of the Paul Washer / “illbehonest” / online Calvinistic revivalist world too, and looking back, the whole thing operated like a sophisticated machine built on spiritual insecurity baiting.
Every normal human struggle becomes evidence against you. Marriage tension? “Examine yourself.” Discouraged? “Maybe Christ isn’t in you.”Recurring sin? “Cry out until your repentance is real this time.”
It becomes a dread based spiritual pressure chamber, the more fear you feel, the more “serious” they say you are. What looks like holiness is actually ambient shame conditioning, wrapped in the very Reformed theology many of us once treated as our inner circle’s badge of seriousness.
And the scriptural maneuvers are honestly deceptive, almost like a well rehearsed stage parlor trick performed the same way at every conference, sermon clip, and YouTube upload, designed to dazzle you into accepting the illusion before you realize what just happened. Matthew 7 gets turned into a universal guillotine even though Jesus is condemning people appealing to their works, not a crowd of Christians trying to cling to justification by faith alone. Washer flips it: if your works aren’t strong enough, maybe Christ doesn’t know you.
It becomes a theological funhouse mirror masquerading as exegesis, shaping you into someone who professes faith alone on the outside while inwardly being conditioned to suspect you are a doomed imposter, trapped in a judgment day script you are never allowed to disprove.
1 Corinthians 6 says “such were some of you”, but they twist it into “such may still be you if you are not sufficiently terrified.” They say you “cannot inherit the kingdom,” then demand you constantly check your internal spiritual temperature to “prove” Christ is in you, which is the exact opposite of Paul’s point. Paul actually ends that whole section with assurance: “but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified” — a reminder that Christ truly is in the people he is addressing, not a threat that they might secretly be imposters.
And this ties directly into how these same preachers abuse passages like “examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith” or “make your calling and election sure.” When Calvin wrote about election, he framed it as a deep comfort meant to anchor trembling believers, not as a psychological cudgel to keep Christians in a state of perpetual self suspicion. But the neo Calvinist and neo Reformed crowd flips that into another fear cycle: instead of encouraging assurance, they turn examination into an endless, self cannibalizing loop where you are never allowed to rest in Christ, only to interrogate whether you truly have Him.
The irony is staggering. Calvin originally wielded these doctrines to dismantle Rome’s sacramental system of penance, confession, and perpetual uncertainty, arguing that Scripture freed believers from living in a state of anxious, works based self scrutiny. Yet these modern neo Reformed types invert that entire project, building a kind of non sacramental sacramental system, a reversed replica of the very structure Calvin dismantled. Instead of priestly absolution, you get internal interrogation. Instead of sacramental penance, you get psychological penance. Instead of assurance, you get a worldview where you can never know who is truly saved, not even your pastor, not even yourself.
The College Age Exploitation Nobody Talks About
One of the things that hits me hardest now is realizing when so many of us got swept into this. For many young men, it happens right at the moment when they finally have mental breathing room after thirteen straight years of public school structure, when life slows down just enough for real questions to surface for the first time. That late teens to early twenties window is often the very first time you can actually think for yourself.
And ironically, that is exactly when you are most vulnerable. You are away at college, or working, or just starting adulthood, and you desperately want to believe the right things and live faithfully. You want clarity. You want truth.
That is the moment these online preachers swoop in.
And the wild part is this: these are men we will never meet, yet we were conditioned to treat their:
- articles
- sermons
- commentaries
- “studies”
- and even their personal opinions
as if they belonged on the same shelf as Scripture itself. Piper’s Desiring God articles become your devotional life. Washer’s sensationalized warnings carve fear grooves into your brain. MacArthur’s massive “body of work” turns out not even to be written by him, yet you are told to build your entire theological universe around it.
It is a subtle but powerful form of outsourced spiritual authority, where impressionable young men hand over their conscience to celebrity preachers who will never know their names and will never bear responsibility for the psychological and spiritual damage they cause.
And there is an even stranger phenomenon tied to all this: there are numerous stories of young men making what are essentially pilgrimages to see Paul Washer in person, traveling across states to attend his conferences, standing in long lines, hoping for a moment of personal interaction, and in many cases trying to speak with him directly about their salvation. Some go seeking a definitive spiritual verdict, a final “yes” or “no” about whether they are truly in Christ, spoken by someone they believe carries a weight their own pastors do not. I have even personally heard of one instance where a young man drove across multiple states specifically to sit down with Washer and consult him about his salvation.
But the most publicly visible example of this broader dynamic comes from outside the Reformed world: the widely circulated Liberty University incident, where a young man rushed the stage during Jordan Peterson’s address, sobbing that he needed help and desperately trying to reach him. It revealed the same phenomenon, broken young men looking to a distant public figure as if their psychological or spiritual survival depended on validation from someone they have never met. When a movement produces that kind of pilgrimage like desperation, it reveals not spiritual vitality but spiritual crisis.
The Horror Movie Psychology They Never Admit
One of the most damaging aspects, something these preachers never acknowledge, is the existential spiritual dread they cultivate. It is like being trapped inside a private, psychological religious thriller where you are both the protagonist and the victim.
You carry around this constant sense that a hidden plot twist is coming, that at the end of your life, the camera will pan, the music will swell, and God will suddenly reveal:
“I never knew you.”
This creates what can be described as divine solipsism. Your entire internal world becomes a suspense film where every stray emotion, every moment of numbness, every lapse in motivation is interpreted as a clue that doom is coming. You cannot rest, because the “villain” in the story might be you.
It reframes spiritual life as a psychological horror genre, a perpetual jump scare where you are always bracing for the final twist.
The Outcome
It strips you of dignity. You stop relating to God as Father and instead relate to Him like a cosmic supervisor running an eternal performance review pipeline.
That is why this video hit me so hard. It names the system. There is an entire generation who internalized this high pressure, shame soaked internet revivalism and mistook it for maturity, when it was actually a fear based spiritual economy that feeds on insecurity.
If anyone reading this is still trapped in that world, the constant dread is not proof that you are “serious.” It is proof the system is working on you. You are allowed to walk out of the horror movie.
If you have experienced any of this, the spiritual dread, the constant self examination, the fear of being a false convert, the confusion caused by online preachers, or the emotional collapse that gets presented as “holiness,” please know this: you are not alone, you are not defective, and you are not imagining the harm. Many of us have walked this same road and found real, lasting healing on the other side. There is a form of Christian faith that does not feed on dread. There is a way to believe without constantly accusing yourself. And you do not need fear to stay faithful.
Ethereal Truth 