Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry Crowd
The new and vicious areligious fundamentalism seeping across the Internet
On July 8th, 1741, Jonathan Edwards stepped up to his pulpit in Enfield, Connecticut to unleash one of the most influential sermons in all of history: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
That fire-and-brimstone sermon still resonates with a lot of modern Internet fandom. Even if those new queer-friendly, ostensibly progressive Internet fundamentalists would likely scoff at the idea of organized religion, deep down - whether they know it or not - they’re running off Edwards’ same preordained ideas about damnation and salvation.
But first! A history lesson.
The point of “Sinners” is this: every single person alive has angered God. How could we not? God’s grace is perfect, and we all know how far any of us fall from perfection. And God’s power is infinite; nothing can reliably predict death, nothing can prevent death, except for God.
Which means the only reason you’re not boiling in Hell right now is because God wills it.
If that seems dour, the religion “Sinners” is steeped in gets worse. See, the modern religions mostly revolve around a quasi-transactional relationship. You do your best to follow God’s rules, and if you follow them well enough then God decides “Hey, this dude’s cool! Let’s not burn him.”
But in Calvinism, that’s… not how it works.
In Calvinism, God’s so all-powerful He has determined whether you’re going to Heaven or Hell long before you were born. You don’t go to Church to please God; you go to Church to find out if you might be one of God’s chosen, who tend to be righteous folks, but not always.
From one perspective, Calvinism neatly sorts people into two boxes: Good and Bad. If you’re Good, nothing you do can displease God; you won the lottery of divine love. And if you’re Bad, well, all the good works you amassed while you’re breathing don’t count, sorry, you’re going straight to the boiler room of Hell, all the way down.
In other words, what you do literally does not matter. You’re either Good, or you’re Bad.
If you’re Good, you don’t have to do anything to prove it.
If you’re Bad, nothing you do can cleanse that stain.
Does that… sound familiar?
Does that sound like toxic Internet culture?
Dragon Break!
Before we delve back into this cultural darkness, I will remind you that my new book The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma - i.e. “Tiger King, but with baby dragons” - is out! If you ordered it and read it, thank you! The reviews have been coming in all positive, saying the book is as fast-paced and funny and, yes, occasionally serious as I’d hoped - and if you’re one of those reviewers, then I am grateful.
If you haven’t spent the $2.99 to get Dragon Kings, well, it’s less than a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee.
And if you have, don’t forget that the sequel The Fae Lords of Oklahoma is out in a month, and it’s just as good as the first one - or so my wife says, anyway.
It’s fun, quick reading! Unlike, uh, today’s essay, which isn’t. So get you some laughter now before we get darker, okay?
Back to Business.
The reason I’m writing about this distorted fundamentalism is because I read a very insightful Tumblr thread discussing how the Isabel Fall incident was the last chance for fandom to turn back. (If you wanna read that thread instead of my six-paragraph summary below, you’ll probably be better informed.)
If you’re not familiar with Isabel Fall, alas, she’s no longer with us - oh, someone who used to go by the name of Isabel Fall is still floating around. But the identity she once held - the person she once was - got obliterated in a tide of Internet hatred.
Her crime? Writing a great short story.
Isabel Fall wrote “I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter,” a layered, nuanced look at how trans identity might be coopted in the context of military violence. It was an uncomfortable read…
And a lot of trans and trans-adjacent folks on the Internet got furious at the title, decided Isabel Fall was a straight person mocking queers, and descended on her in numbers so great that she had to check into a mental hospital.
Except Isabel Fall was trans. And the story was not mocking queer identity; it was exploring her own experience in uncomfortable ways. And that discomfort -
- here it comes -
- made the angry reactivists decide that Isabel Fall was Bad.
And here is where Jonathan Edwards’ bilious DNA is spliced into a culture that, on the surface, has nothing in common with the sex-hating, gender-essentialist agenda of the Calvinists. Much of fandom is, on the surface, pro-queer, pro-freedom, pro-women - all that good stuff we healthy liberals value.
Yet the trick about being Bad on the Internet is that it’s like sinners in the hands of that angry God: Once it has been determined that the target in question is Bad, there is nothing the target can do to expunge that Badness.
In this world view, being Bad is not a set of actions that may have stemmed from misunderstandings, lack of education, mental illness, or - God forbid - even people misreading what was said, as happened in the case of Isabel Fall.
Bad is not something you do; it is something you are.
And once you’re viewed as Bad by these new fundamentalists, there is no context in which anything you have ever done can be considered Good. Were they kind to someone once? Well, that person is a Predator, sometimes Predators do random nice things - but only to stock up good will so they can enact future harm. Has that Bad Person once said something wise and heartfelt? Well, they were just mimicking what Good people say to infiltrate Good places.
There’s no overlap between Good people and Bad people.
There is literally no valid reason a Good person should want to associate with a Bad person.
More importantly, anything you’ve ever said can be used as evidence of Badness. Did you shitpost a problematic opinion ten years ago, when you were fourteen and at your dumbest? No takebacks! Your worst day is the only day that counts.
(You saw a glimmer of that fundamentalism in 2016, when some progressives refused to vote for Hillary because she’d once opposed gay marriage. I was a gay marriage fan in the early 1990s, and lemme tell you, almost no politician was stepping up at the time. Yet there were folks who refused to believe that Hillary might not have the same opinions she had twenty years ago.)
Anyway. You may think I’m exaggerating; I’m not. People like this exist. This isn’t all Internet fans, nor even everyone participating in so-called “Cancel Culture.” But the cycle of “someone gets tagged as a Bad Person, gets avalanched into oblivion” is a regular event on the Internets, and all too often it’s the new Internet Fundamentalists doing it.
It’s not everyone doing it. It’s just enough of them to drive people - Bad people - off the Internet and into psychiatric wards.
The flip side to that Good/Bad mentality, however, is that Good people are inherently Good until proven otherwise. If you’re Good, then Good deeds will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely…
Which means that Good people get to make snap decisions - because they don’t make mistakes, except maaaaaybe in failing to root out Bad people in time. (But don’t worry, most of the time it’ll be retconned so the Good person in question never really liked that Bad person or their work.)
In this context, the frightening thing is that there are no mistakes. Good people never choose the wrong target, Bad people never do anything without malicious intent.
Who gets to be Good and Bad? Well, they’re all chosen by someone. The Internet Fundamentalists just skip the “pretending that God decides” part and skip straight to the “self-serving group of people decides” part.
Here’s the truth: people want to believe that Good is what defeats Bad. But history shows that’s not true. The Crusades thought they were Good. The Spanish Inquisition thought they were Good. The McCarthyists censoring Hollywood thought they were Good.
You know what actually defeats Bad?
Thoughtful introspection.
Because if you were to ask me, the biggest cause of Bad in the world is folks deciding unilaterally that they’re Good, and never looking back. Monsters are not bred from pits of black evil - they’re bred from justification.
And nothing justifies evil more than a morality that needs never question itself. You can commit the cardinal sin of failing to act in the face of Evil because hey, things can’t be that bad, we’re Good. Yet even if you take up arms for a just cause, without introspection, eventually, well… you live long enough to become the villain.
But hey, let’s be honest, Ferrett. Aren’t you a Bad person? Didn’t you have your own awful takes? I mean, crap, haven’t you purposely and permanently posted a mea culpa/apology on the front page of your site?
Don’t you benefit from Bad being a mutable concept?
Yeah. I do. But you know what I also benefit from?
Having a fan base.
A fan base is a thumb on the Good/Bad scales that most people lack.
One of the reasons I left the Internet sphere (and have only returned to these small-audience Substack essays to promote my book, really), is because I had a cadre of people who had determined I was Bad based on a handful of bad takes, and a cadre of people who had determined I was Good based on a handful of Good takes…
And the best way to survive in fundamentalist spheres is to rally enough “He’s Good!” people to shout down the “He’s Bad!” people.
Look, you think the Good people don’t have bad takes? Dubious behaviors? Unhealthy relationships? Of course they do! They’re frickin’ human! If you pressed your ear against the rumor networks, you could exhume behavior that could absolutely be used as evidence that they are Bad…
Unless they can find enough people claiming they’re Good to erase those bad behaviors.
If someone is known to be Good, then those behaviors happened, sure… But they don’t count. Knowledge of these awful actions hangs out at the fringes, a cloud of dreadful receipts preserved and handed around by a subset of devoted haters who burn to reveal the Badness of this person to a willing crowd -
And should there be any dip in this person’s perceived Goodness, perhaps they’ll plunge below the threshold into Bad, and then the switch will flip on. At which point all those bad things will suddenly become very relevant.
Ever wonder why you don’t hear about some artist’s crappy behavior until the gossip floodgates open and all the sewage spills out? It’s not that those things weren’t public knowledge - someone was saying them, often for years - but rather, the preordained notion that this person is Known to be Good rendered those complaints invisible.
You wanna know the real damage of Internet Fundamentalism? Part of it, of course, is the people who get mobbed for making uncomfortable statements - folks who try to express nuanced thoughts to people who support non-binary genders but do not support non-binary morality.
But the other harmful part of this Internet Fundamentalism is hiding people’s mistakes - and don’t get me wrong, some people are predators. On some level, the fear is correct: there are sociopathic people who work the system, and they harm they cause are not mistakes.
Yet other mistakes are genuine: folks who aren’t good with social cues, privileged folks who were swaddled away from the negative feedback they needed to learn the proper lesson, or folks who made, you know, a couple of boneheaded moves in the process of becoming a better person.
But nine times out of ten, the casual fan won’t hear about any of those incidents until they hit critical mass enough for someone to get labelled as Bad.
And since everyone makes mistakes - seriously, everyone - then the best bet of surviving in this new and brutal world is to gather a crowd of hangers-on, or the protection of a person with a crowd, all so your mistakes will be overlooked…
And by no coincidence, the quickest and most reliable way to get in with the Good crowd is to make a public sport out of hammering any perceived Badness in the most entertaining ways.
I’m a fan of callouts. But in these circles, calling out someone becomes a zero-sum game that gets played for social credit. Every person they take down adds to their protective layers of being perceived as Good. Morality is no longer the primary motivation; posturing is.
(Side note: the other survival skill in this environment is “having zero shame.” Trump survives because he has never once apologized, which leads people to rally around him because they confuse a psychopathic “doesn’t feel shame” with “did nothing shameful.”)
Ironically, the problem I have with Internet Fundamentalism is not public shaming, or even removing people from public discourse. I think there’s some bad takes that deserve a bit of shaming; some folks have screwed up consistently enough that I’m fine with deplatforming them. (Hell, as noted, I’ve mostly deplatformed myself.)
The end goals of this fundamentalism - to create an actual safe space for minorities, to encourage people to take more moral actions - are something I actually support.
Problem is, this new Internet Fundamentalism obscures the evidence we’d need to make those moral decisions with compassion and humanity. If none of us are truly human - if we’re all mistake-free machines chosen to be Good or Bad - then evidence either gets ignored or accumulated, and hardly ever gets presented in a nuanced light. And Internet Fundamentalists hate nuance; it’s all paranoid readings (view that Tumblr thread!) designed to determine the thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
The ability to hear things in context - to determine whether a malicious actor is consistently making “mistakes,” or whether this is a genuinely flawed human being who screwed up a couple of times and has since committed themselves to improvement - is utterly lost. The ability to draw a distinction between predatory behavior and teachable errors is utterly lost. The ability to comprehend that we may misunderstand the situation is utterly lost.
And in the end…. Our understanding that we contain both Bad and Good is utterly lost.
I think if we’re honest - and being honest would be terrifying - we’d have to look at ourselves with insight and realize that a lot of what we did was Bad, and what we do now may be Bad. We’d have to understand that everyone, Good and Bad alike, is capable of inflicting permanent harm upon innocents. We’d have to accept that even Good people can rip permanent scars into someone’s psyche and never notice the damage done, for that is both the benefit and the detriment of privilege.
And if we acknowledged all that, we might have to give people a space to recover from their missteps. (Which would be even more terrifying because sometimes you gift someone the space to grow and they use that to commit more evil. How can you do anything in a world without certainty?)
But the system we have isn’t working. It’s not actually finding bad actors and rooting them out - in many cases it’s shielding bad actors from public scrutiny because they know how to look Good for a while. And in some cases the folks that Good people claim to want to nurture are being condemned because they tried to speak discomfiting nuance to a crowd of people who thirsted for cozy oversimplification.
I’ll be honest: One of the reasons I had so many wretched takes back in my LiveJournal days is because I thought the Internet would reveal our sins so thoroughly that we’d have no choice but to be reveal our innermost thoughts. I was certain that one day we’d all look back and go, “Shoot, that was an awful opinion I posted - and in this newer, more transparent world, we have proof that all of us have done something regrettable. How can we combine compassion and accountability to focus on education instead of punishment?”
That didn’t happen. Instead, we got new Good people and new Bad people - and more modern forms of excommunication.
I can’t help but think that, had Jonathan Edwards stepped up to his Internet pulpit in this day and age, a Jonathan Edwards steeped not in dour religion but dank memes and TikTok activism, he would have probably cheerfully sipped his coffee and went, “This is fine.”
Whoo, that was fun, wasn’t it? Need something enjoyable to wash the taste out of your mouth?
Coupla things here I didn't wanna say in the newsletter itself:
1) I really hate name-checking Isabel Fall, as if she's anything like me I suspect they'd be a lot happier if everyone just forgot she'd ever existed. That said, the incident is enough of an ur-example that I felt I had to mention them - but I tried very much to veer away from a discussion of them ASAP.
2) Some older gay people refused to vote for Hillary because she hadn't stood with them when it counted. That, I understand. But a lot of the people I'm discussing re: Hillary weren't even of voting age when all that went down.
3) Anyone who goes "It's just the Internet! Just ignore them!" should realize that a) not everybody can shrug off criticism so easily, and b) "It's just the Internet" really fucks up queer and neurospicy people who, largely, have found their friends not in real life, but through the Internet. Having your support circle turn against you overnight is psychologically devastating - and if you don't understand how that could send someone into emergency therapy, I would encourage you to shut the hell up and just know that it's bad even though "It's just the Internet."
4) And an essay that could be a whole essay in and of itself: If you have a community where nothing will be forgiven, some people will be drawn to communities where everything is forgiven.
I watched folks of meterfilter go from praising and criticizing the helicopter story in ordinary ways to deciding that the author was Bad. At least they had the decency to realize they were wrong.
What happened to Justine Sacco shows that the rot was in place very early, if not from the beginning. I recommend Joh Ronson's _So You've Been Publicly Shamed_. He was in that first twitter mob, and he's very clear that the motivation was the thrill of the hunt, not any desire to make anything better.
Point 3 in your comment: It's not just the internet, not only because most people don't handle a deluge of insults well, but also because internet mobs take it to the real world by threatening people's jobs.