Forrest Frank Finds His Voice, and the Internet Responds

 

On Wednesday, Christian music singer Forrest Frank shared a video expressing concern about some posts he was seeing online. He introduced his comments by anticipating that he’d probably lose many of his social media followers because of what he was about to say, which, for white evangelicals, is a time-tested way to actually gain social media followers.

Frank went on to say that he tries “to stay out of politics, but sometimes I feel it’s important to speak up.”

He then grieved over comments he saw after Tuesday’s elections that received high levels of engagement. They included folks making jokes about inventing new genders, “transing” kids, and having abortions now that Democrats have taken back the legislative branch of the federal government and many statehouses.

“Guys, you don’t want to mess around with this,” he said earnestly, as mood music swelled in the background. “Do not mess around with God. Do not mess around with the family. The final verse in the Old Testament reads, ‘He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers. Or else I will destroy the land.’”

Frank then asked his followers to “be activated.” He encouraged them to “pray, discern, read the Word [and] hold your family tight,” because “God is the victor. He wins. And at the end of the day, every knee will bow to Jesus Christ.”

 

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For many, Frank’s comments were both unsurprising and infuriating. Replies and posts asking, “Where have you been during the violence and cruelty of the second Trump administration?” abounded. Many suggested Frank didn’t understand satire and explained how those posts he saw were intended to expose the comically extreme way conservatives speak about gender, sexuality, and reproductive issues.

 

 

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Strategy

I believe it is a mistake to paint Forrest Frank as a clueless, naive bro who completely missed the humor implicit in those posts. Instead, we should be aware of the calculation involved in his comments. Although large audiences don’t always follow intelligence (see: Kardashians), it is hard to amass the size of platform Frank has without being savvy about communication strategies, at least on a subconscious level.

I’m not saying he’s a genius. I’m merely suggesting he knows exactly what he’s doing, which is why it is important to call it out whenever possible.

Frank is one of those figures who fills stadiums and sells millions of records for years before the broader culture outside white evangelicalism ever hears his name. And yet he represents a segment of American religious life that, I believe, is more responsible for the cruelty inflicted by the Trump administration than any other group.

For years, I have written about how the hard-core, rally-going MAGA adherents are not the most dangerous people in our country. They are weird and often clueless, but they occupy a small, albeit extremely visible, portion of the Trump coalition. And the thing I appreciate most about them is that they aren’t asking you to guess where their loyalties lie.

The same goes for Trump’s team of evangelical lapdogs like Franklin Graham, Paula White-Cain, Robert Jeffress, and the growing network of New Apostolic Reformation churches such as Mercy Culture. Their glowing admiration for Trump is shameful, but we know where they stand.

It’s the white evangelical Christians who have remained silent amid ICE killing people in the streets, U.S. bombs falling on schoolchildren in Iran, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by cuts to USAID who are most responsible for these atrocities.

The reason is that their sheer numbers could have stopped it.

What Could Have Been

History will treat Trump’s Republican enablers in Congress as just as responsible as Trump for the horrors of these past two years. But they enabled him with their silence, and voters in their districts both implicitly encouraged and rewarded it.

In my own city, there are a handful of churches that consist of thousands of adults from whom our elected officials take their cues. Forrest Frank is a member of one of those churches.

If, at any point during the past two years, the pastors of those churches had spoken up with specificity about Donald Trump’s reign of terror on our streets and around the world, they may have lost some members. But many in their congregations would have perked up, knowing that what they were seeing with their eyes and feeling in their hearts was not an aberration, but an offense against God. Others would have woken up to what they had not seen before.

There would have been enough of them for our U.S. representative, Pete Sessions, to push back on Trump’s authoritarian policies.

Imagine what would have happened if Forrest Frank had gotten online last winter and told his 7 million Instagram followers, “Listen, I’m pro-life and very conservative on issues regarding gender and sexuality. But what we are seeing in Minneapolis is not right, and it must stop.”

I’m confident two things would have happened. First, it would have been far more difficult for loony-liberal Christians like me to question whether or not Frank is actually pro-life. Second, it would have activated an army of young, influential voters to stand in the gap for the most vulnerable among us. Lives would have been saved as congressional leaders, who know how to count votes, would have located their spines and stood up to the administration.

Changing Course

But Frank saved his voice so he could speak out against the real atrocities going on in our country — snarky internet comments. And when he did, he employed the stirring tools of emotional music and a pained look on his face to let his audience know just how serious all this is. Those who accuse others of forming their beliefs on the basis of emotion rather than the “plain truth” of the Bible sure do get all up in their feels when they want you to know what is really important to them.

I’m not a fan of “whataboutism,” the method of argument that answers everything with, “Well, what about this other thing?” However, many of us begged our Christian siblings to say something, anything, while the deaths piled up and they focused, instead, on revivals and saving souls from hell.

As we (hopefully) begin the long process of repenting of this cruelty, we must let them know we see them and know what they are doing, and invite them to a better way.