A. Democrat party is out of control.

The Democrat party has gone so far to the left that I am surprised Christians would have even thought about voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 or for democrats in the 2026 mid-terms or especially the future democrat nominee in 2028 (assuming the party remains on the left, which looks more and more likely). At this time in American politics Christians can no longer advocate the Third Way, which says to take a little bit of ideas from the right and left. Or it says we should not take a strong stance on politics or the social issues. We might offend a segment of society we are trying to reach in our churches.

In reply, note how I did not refer to pastor Tim Keller (d. 2023), but see below. The issue is bigger than he. Those who want to correct my definition above and apply nuance should consider that Third Wayism seems inevitably to drift towards liberalism and then to leftism.

B. Climate change as an example.

Are you all for electric vehicles? Living on small farms? Trashing the economy to stop the oceans from warming up 2-3 degrees Celsius over the next 50-100 years (as if this would really happen, and as if predictions so far into the future are always right)?

In reply, click on “World Climate Declaration.” Note how over 2000 real scientists and science adjacent types (not just concerned citizens or celebrities) declare: THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS. Many people don’t know about this recent declaration because the leftwing media (= the mainstream media) do not report on it. It does not fit the narrative, which is that leftwing solutions are always and obviously right. No. They are obviously wrong.

C. Mass migration as an example

What about mass migration, to the tune of millions in four years? (Legal immigration, yes. But not this.) Sojourners website or the organization, to cite only this one example, is all about rescuing immigrants from oppressive ICE because this is justice, according to it . No doubt the Feds have made mistakes (and there are numerous lies reported, too), but they have also deported real-life criminals.

And it’s a sure thing that Sojourners (and other lefty religious organizations) has started looking for 300,000 kids that have been lost in the darkness during the mass migration. I imagine the kids are not living the American dream. ICE raided a marijuana farm in central California, where children were working, and there were at least two adult pedophiles in the group. Sojourners celebrates the rescue, right? Sojourners celebrates the deportations of rapists, murderers, and pedophiles, right? They have written about this at their website, giving these positive reports equal time, right?

No doubt Sojourners and other social justice warriors celebrate the fact that as of December 7, 2025, Tom Homan, leaders of ICE, says his organization has rescued 62,000 children from human trafficking\ so far. Let’s hope we hear more positive news.

The fact is that Mexico has the 12th largest economy in the world and 120 million citizens. They should be able to handle no- or low-skilled workers in their own nation. Mexico has a leftwing president, and for the left sending government checks to such unemployed (and probably unemployable) workers is the answer.  Apparently not, however. The leftwing government allowed millions of them to crash our gates and migrate up here. Now they are our problem. (I can easily imagine the Mexican politicians high-fiving each other behind closed doors when they saw all the low-skilled or no-skilled workers walking northward.)

The Biden administration orchestrated this cynical ploy to change the vote towards its own party, in the near future. It was an American democrat power grab, as the left is prone to do. It was never about economic justice and compassion.

D. Defective understandings of Third Wayism

Australian vicar and evangelist Glen Scrivener, on his channel Speak Life, now ministering in the UK, offered a misunderstanding of Third Wayism. He mentioned extreme examples (e.g. the white supremacy of Nick Fuentes). Conservatives correctly move away from it towards the center (but not necessarily landing on the center). But Third Wayism is not about setting up a straw man or an extreme position and rejecting it, Just because I move away from far rightwing white supremacy and away from leftwing Antifa does not describe Third-Wayism. It’s not a free-for-all of movement from here to there; it’s not up in the air. Rather, it is a dispute with the Democrat party and their policies, which used to be not as extreme as it is now. In the old days conservatives could negotiate with them.

Example: Pres. Bill Clinton and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a firm conservative, worked together to reduce taxes and trim the budget, including getting millions of people off welfare. Newt was even willing to trim the military budget. As a result, we had the slightest budget surplus in 1998 or 1999. That’s the Third Way. It worked when democrats were reasonable.

Though I did not know Charlie Kirk personally, I have seen him in action. And he was not a Third Way advocate, as Glen Scrivener claimed, if Third Wayism is rightly understood, and not any position that moves away from any other position, as Scrivener seems to believe. I define Third-Wayism more narrowly.

Scrivener’s post:

Charlie Kirk Did Third Way — So Should You

Gavin Ortlund, on his channel Truth Unites (see his website here), says that the Third Way is not about the middle ground, but applying the Bible to contemporary conservativism and discovering that the Bible does not support conservatism. (The excerpt is found in the link to Glen Scrivener) Maybe or maybe not, but why critique conservatism? Why not leftism? And as I read Scripture, the Bible is more conservative than otherwise. (I have written about this in the category BIBLICAL ETHICS on the front page. Find the category at the top and in all caps.) I don’t believe in hyper-skepticism about applying the Bible to our current society. We can apply it, judiciously.

Megan Basham was right to point out that Dr. Ortlund went all in on climate panic, from a 2007 Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Has Dr. Ortlund noted how the environmentalists, who impose extreme solutions on non-problems or small problems, now call their concern “climate change”?. It used to be global cooling in the 1970s. Then it became global warming, in the 1990s (Al Gore’s main claim. The earth has a fever!). Either one is subject to challenges that destroy the alarmism. So the environmentalists extra-cleverly call it “climate change.” Now they cannot be wrong, no matter what the climate does. Their belief is unfalsifiable, a bad place to be for science.

According to a three-person panel discussion on Glen Scrivener’s youtube channel (link above), Tim Keller may have rejected abortion and same-sex marriage, but that is not enough. Any Christian can do that. It does not make him one of the sons of Issachar, a man who understands the times and knows what to do (1 Chron. 12:32).

And I have observed that the Third Way inevitably leads its practioners towards leftism, as I hope that I demonstrated in my two examples, above, which were not about same-sex marriage or abortion.

This inevitable drift leftward, for me, is the problem. This is why I stopped reading Christianity Today. I read it for a while, just to be fair and open, but over time I could not take its slant. The articles were not balanced but off putting. I lost interest because I could not correct or challenge its leftward drift. Time wore me down.

II. Conclusion

A. Read the times

We no longer live in the 1980s or 1990s when many democrat politicians were gentlemen or shared certain common values. Consider the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. It proclaimed that marriage is between one man and one woman. The Act was supported by democrats and Bill Clinton. However, The Respect for Marriage Act (2022) canceled DOMA and says marriage is between any two persons. It was supported by certain Republicans and of course the democrats. Biden, when he was cognizant, signed it into law.

I can’t claim that Third Wayism is responsible for ROMA, but it shows how far society has drifted. Third Wayism is either superfluous to requirements or worse, confusing and hence destructive.

Third Way-ism, as it is actually implemented nowadays, as distinguished from the theory or formal definitions, must be abandoned because it seems to always drift leftward.  Far from negotiating with the left (I distinguish liberals like Clinton from leftists), the left must be stopped because their “solutions” are destructive or foolish or unworkable or extreme.

Progressivism Is Bad for the Church