Lukewarm

How the Church and Christian Media Traded Prophetic Courage for the Comfort of the Crowd

• FAITH & CULTURE

Not long ago, someone told me he was “just a guy trying to serve the Lord”—as an explanation for why he wouldn’t take a position on anything. I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Because I don’t think the Lord sees it that way at all.

I had questioned a Christian media figure about why his platform was posting content from teachers who openly contradict each other on central matters of faith—one claiming that the assurance of salvation is “the biggest lie of the devil,” the next offering the opposite view—with no comment, no discernment, no indication of which way Scripture actually lands. His answer came without hesitation. “I’m just a guy trying to serve the Lord.”

It sounded humble. It was designed to sound humble.

What it actually was, was a business decision dressed up in the language of grace. The calculation is not complicated: the more positions you take, the more people you risk losing. Present everything. Offend no one. Let the audience sort it out. Call the confusion a conversation.

I have been in and around ministry long enough to recognize this pattern, and it is not limited to one platform or one person. It has become the operating philosophy of a significant portion of the American church and Christian media. Not because these people don’t love God. Many of them do. But somewhere between the calling and the platform, fear moved in and courage moved out. And the people paying for that exchange are not the ones with the microphones.

WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY

Researcher George Barna has been tracking American Christianity for four decades. His 2025 American Worldview Inventory is not a partisan document or a theological argument. It is survey data from 2,100 nationally representative adults. And what it shows should stop every pastor and every Christian media figure cold.

15M

Americans left the Christian faith between 2020 and 2025. Christian identification fell from 72% to 66%.

13%

of born-again Christians hold a genuinely biblical worldview. For all American adults, that number is 4%.

66%

of Americans reject absolute moral truth—including 61% of mainline Protestants and 69% of Catholics.

16%

of Americans—including regular churchgoers—say God is the most important element of their life.

Sit with those numbers for a moment. Not the people who walked away from Christianity—though 15 million in five years is staggering. The ones who stayed. Sixty-nine percent of Catholics in the pews on Sunday morning do not believe truth is real and binding. Thirteen percent of people who call themselves born-again read life through the lens of Scripture. Only one in six Americans who attend church regularly says God is the most important thing in their life.

This did not happen because of hostile culture alone. It happened because the institutions and voices responsible for teaching God’s people stopped teaching. Not all at once. Gradually, carefully, one avoided subject at a time, one both-sides shrug at a time, until the cumulative effect is a generation of people who identify as Christian and have almost no idea what that means or why it matters.

Hosea 4:6. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” God was not speaking to pagans.

THE REAL QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ANSWERING

Here is who I am actually talking about. Not the theologians. Not the seminary professors or the platform builders. The ordinary people—and they are everywhere, in every church and every comment section—who are carrying questions they cannot ask out loud without risking judgment, and who have been waiting, sometimes for years, for someone with a voice and a platform to love them enough to answer directly.

“I struggle with cussing. I know I shouldn’t. Does that mean I’m not really saved?”

“I have sinful thoughts I can’t seem to shake no matter how hard I try. What does that say about me before God?”

“Someone who dealt drugs and hurt people their whole life turns to Jesus and becomes a celebrated testimony. I’ve been fighting the good fight most of my life. Does God see that?”

“I have doubts. Honest ones. Do my questions condemn me?”

“Can I actually be secure in my salvation, or do I spend my whole life on a bubble wondering if one bad day undoes everything?”

“Is abortion really a line that cannot be crossed, or has the church just made it political?”

These are not trick questions. They are not hostile. They are the cries of people trying to follow Jesus faithfully in a complicated world, who came to the church and to Christian media because they needed a real answer, and found instead a carefully managed silence or a both-sides presentation that left them exactly where they started—confused, afraid, and wondering if the faith is actually capable of addressing their real life.

When a drowning person asks you to throw them a rope, the answer is not a seminar on competing theories of water safety. Throw the rope.

TWO KINDS OF FAILURE

The silence is one failure. There is a second one, and it is almost more damaging because it disguises itself as boldness.

There is a growing category of Christian media figure who is not silent at all. Prolific, in fact. Millions of followers, millions of views, constant output. But nearly all of that output is aimed in one direction: at other Christians. Other pastors. Other teachers. Other ministries. The content is labeled discernment. It is framed as accountability. Sometimes it begins that way. But when a platform’s primary product, week after week, is the takedown of fellow believers, something has gone badly wrong with the mission.

The algorithm loves this. Research confirms it—platforms and producers profit from internal Christian controversy because conflict drives engagement. The more heated the accusation, the more clicks. The bigger the target, the larger the audience for the attack. There is an economic engine behind the fighting, and it runs whether the fighters know it or not.

Meanwhile, 15 million people have walked away from the faith. Millions more are sitting in darkness with questions nobody will answer. The house is burning, and some of the most-followed voices in Christian media are arguing with each other about whose theology is more deficient.

Paul saw this in Corinth and addressed it without patience: “For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not mere human beings?” (1 Corinthians 3:4). His point was not that doctrine doesn’t matter. It was that the field is the world, the harvest is urgent, and fighting over credit and territory while souls are lost is a betrayal of the whole enterprise.

There is a difference between a surgeon who operates to save a life and a person who simply enjoys the knife. Both involve cutting. Only one is healing. You shall know them by their fruits—and a ministry whose consistent fruit is wounded believers, fractured fellowships, and audiences trained to distrust every other Christian voice is not bearing the fruit of the Spirit. Galatians 5 lists division as a work of the flesh. Not a side effect of courageous truth-telling. A work of the flesh.

FEAR SELLS BETTER THAN HOPE—AND SOME PEOPLE HAVE NOTICED

Here is a fact that any YouTube content creator in the Christian space can confirm: hell videos get more views than heaven videos. Significantly more. A testimony about torment, demons, and eternal suffering will outperform a testimony about God’s love and the beauty of His presence by a wide margin, almost every time. The algorithm rewards fear. It always has.

Some Christian creators have looked at that data and made a decision about what kind of content to produce.

It starts with the content itself—leaning into darkness because darkness drives clicks, amplifying the most frightening spiritual claims without theological scrutiny because frightened people share content and return for more. But it does not stop there. Because once you understand that fear and controversy are the metrics, the next logical step is to find whatever is already working on someone else’s channel and bring it to your own.

This is what is actually happening in corners of Christian YouTube right now. A creator finds a video on another channel that performed well—a guest interview that got half a million views, a testimony that went viral—and one of two things follows. Either that content gets lifted directly: clipped, re-uploaded, repurposed into a new video on their own channel with minimal transformation and no permission. Copyright law exists precisely to prevent this, but enforcing it requires the original creator to have the resources and the will to pursue it, and many don’t. Or the creator contacts the same guest and interviews them again, producing what is functionally a copy of someone else’s successful content—not because they have something new to contribute to the conversation, but because they want the views that conversation already proved it could generate.

Neither of these is ministry. Both of them are content arbitrage. And the fact that a Bible verse appears in the thumbnail does not change what the underlying practice is.

We have reached a moment where secular business ethics have functionally surpassed the ethics of Christian social media. That sentence should be embarrassing to every believer with a platform.

A secular content creator who steals another creator’s work or systematically duplicates their most successful videos risks their channel, their reputation, and potentially legal action. The broader creator community polices this aggressively because they have built something worth protecting and they recognize theft when they see it. Meanwhile, in the Christian media space, the same behavior gets a pass—or gets defended—because the stated purpose is spreading the gospel.

The stated purpose does not sanctify the method. Paul addressed this in Romans 3:8 when he confronted the idea that doing evil so that good may result is somehow justified. The logic that “God can use it” has been stretched to cover a remarkable amount of behavior that no secular professional would find acceptable in their own industry.

The question worth asking every Christian creator with a platform—including myself—is the one Jesus put plainly in Matthew 6:24. You cannot serve two masters. At some point the channel and the calling come into direct conflict. What you do in that moment is the only honest answer to the question of which one you are actually serving.

ABORTION AND THE THINGS WE WON’T NAME

Fifty-seven percent of pastors avoided preaching about abortion in 2024. Fifty-seven. And Christian media mirrors this precisely, because the calculation that keeps the subject off the pulpit is the same one that keeps it off the platform: someone might leave, someone might unsubscribe, someone might push back.

But consider what happened at one political party’s convention—a bus parked outside, performing abortions on demand, as if the killing of an unborn child were simply another medical service to be offered at a civic event. That is not a political act requiring careful nuance. That is a moral catastrophe. And the church’s job is not to be measured about moral catastrophes. It is to name them.

The same logic applies to sexual ethics, to end-times, to the exclusivity of Christ, to hell, to sin. These are the subjects that cost something to address. They are exactly the subjects the church was given a voice to speak to. A church that goes quiet on these things to preserve its comfort—its tax status, its mainstream credibility, its follower count—has traded the only thing that made it worth listening to in the first place.

One pastor said it better than I could: “The church is the immune system of the culture. If the church goes silent in the face of error and evil, the immune system is down, and society can die of anything.” We are watching that happen in real time.

THE JESUS NOBODY BUILT A PLATFORM AROUND

The version of Jesus that contemporary Christian culture has assembled—gentle, non-confrontational, infinitely affirming, never rocking any boats—is not the Jesus of the Gospels. It is a Jesus designed to be palatable. Which is to say, it is not Jesus at all.

The actual Jesus said this:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother… and a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”

— Matthew 10:34–36

He called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs and broods of vipers. To their faces. He overturned the Temple tables not once but twice. He told a rich young man a truth the man didn’t want to hear, watched him walk away, and didn’t soften the message to call him back. He stood in the synagogue at Nazareth, read from Isaiah, told them the Scripture was fulfilled in their hearing—and the congregation tried to throw Him off a cliff. He kept going.

His truth-telling is precisely what got Him killed. Not His gentleness, though He was gentle. Not His compassion, though He wept. It was His absolute refusal to subordinate truth to the comfort of His audience.

And then He addressed lukewarmness directly. Revelation 3:15–16: “I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” He was not speaking to pagans. He was speaking to a church. And the charge was not gross immorality or outright heresy. The charge was comfortable, risk-averse, controversy-avoiding, follower-preserving mediocrity.

I have stood in the presence of Jesus. I know something about what He is like. And I can tell you with certainty: He is not impressed by our risk management.

I died in 2005. I was clinically dead for over thirty minutes and stood in the presence of the living Christ before being sent back with a purpose I did not choose and have never fully escaped. I do not say this to claim special authority. I say it because it changed what I am willing to be afraid of. The Jesus I encountered is not the one who shrugs at hard questions to keep the room comfortable. He is the one who walked back out of a sealed tomb while Roman soldiers stood guard outside. He is not worried about your subscriber count.

WHAT COURAGE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE FROM HERE

None of this is a call for combativeness. Courage without love is just aggression with a Bible verse attached. The fact that some voices in Christian media are harsh and attacking and more interested in tearing down fellow believers than in building anyone up is not a license to fight dirty in return. We are called to speak truth in love, and both words are load-bearing. You cannot remove either one.

But the opposite failure—removing truth from love entirely and calling what remains pastoral sensitivity—is no less a betrayal. It just comes with better optics.

What it looks like practically: a pastor who addresses the questions his congregation is actually carrying, not the ones that are safe. A media figure who has thought through what Scripture teaches and says so—clearly, with grace toward those who disagree, but without the fog of manufactured neutrality. A platform that exercises discernment rather than outsourcing it to the audience.

Paul to Timothy: “Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Timothy 4:2–3). That time is here. The response Paul prescribes is not more careful neutrality. It is faithfulness that holds its position whether the room applauds or empties out.

The people in your pew and your comment section and your inbox are not asking for perfection. They are asking for honesty. They want someone who loves them enough to tell them the truth—about salvation, about sin, about abortion, about doubt, about the questions that have kept them awake at night wondering if anyone in a position of authority will ever address what is actually happening in their real lives.

They came to you because they were drowning. The rope is in your hand.

The underground church in Iran meets tonight in someone’s apartment with the curtains drawn, risking prison to read the same Bible we leave on the coffee table. Chinese house church believers are being arrested for holding worship services we would cancel if it rained. Nigerian Christians are being killed at an average of thirty-five a day for a faith that many of us are too careful to defend in a social media post.

In the same moment, a significant portion of American Christianity is focused on not offending anyone, not taking positions, not touching anything that might cost a follower or empty a seat.

The fence was never safe. It was just comfortable.

And Jesus, who came not to bring peace but a sword, who was crucified for telling the truth, who said He would rather you be cold than lukewarm—He is not standing at the fence. He never was.

Randy Kay

Randy Kay is the founder of Randy Kay Ministries and host of Heaven Encounters with Randy Kay and The Last Call with Randy Kay. In 2005 he was clinically dead for over thirty minutes and encountered Jesus Christ before returning to life with a call he has spent the years since trying to honor.

New book: Heaven Encounters: 140 Near-Death Experiences Revealing the Afterlife — available now on Amazon.