NYT Highlights Prominent Pastor’s Son for Anti-Christian TikToks

Editor

April 13, 2021

What started as a benign presence on the video sharing app TikTok — his first post was about a puzzle — has earned the son of prominent Christian theologian John Piper a headline at The New York Times.

The retired pastor’s eldest son, Abraham, has posted a multitude of videos since dropping his first TikTok in November of last year. Many of them, The Times noted, are “irreverent critiques of evangelical Christianity aimed at others who have left the faith.”

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Abraham, who has amassed just shy of one million followers on TikTok, has addressed a host of topics in his videos, ranging from critiques on the belief in a literal hell, to youth mission trips, to Christian education.

“Is it even possible for the universe to have a meaning?” he opined in one video. “For anything to matter, we have to matter to ourselves first. And if we all matter to ourselves, then there can’t be one single ultimate meaning.”

The pastor’s son went on to assert “ultimate meaning … doesn’t exist.”

“For instance, threatening hell for not believing in the Christian God proves that it’s our own fear of pain that motivates us,” Abraham said. “We are the most fundamental things that matter to ourselves. Even if we choose to behave as if something is more valuable than us, we’re doing it because it’s what we feel like doing, so we’re still what matters most to ourselves.”

That conclusion, of course, flies in the face of the foundational Christian belief that Jesus — and His redemptive work on the cross — is at the center of our existence and that our “ultimate meaning” as God’s creation is to glorify the Lord.

In another TikTok, Abraham responded to someone who asked him why his “content has turned more and more to attacking Christianity,” writing, “It’s getting really hard to believe the ‘love everyone’ you teach.”

“I don’t attack Christianity,” he replied. “I berate evangelicalism, fundamentalism. It’s a destructive, narrow-minded worldview. And one of the most destructive, narrow-minded aspects of it is that its adherents feel as if they are the entirety of Christianity rather than the tiny sliver of it that they actually are.”

He went on to say “fundamentalism” is “bizarre [and] anti-intellectual.”

Both Abraham and John Piper, the former pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, declined to comment on The Times’ story. Faithwire has reached out to one of the preacher’s other sons, Barnabas, for comment.

This latest story, however, is not the first time Abraham has made headlines for rejecting the Christian faith with which he was raised.

In 2009, John Piper addressed Abraham’s initial falling away from the faith, which happened when he was just 19 years old. John Piper said the elders of Bethlehem Baptist Church “pursued” Abraham, adding he even offered “to take a leave of absence or resign” unless and until his son returned to the faith.

John Piper, who said at the time he wanted to make sure he wasn’t out of step with the biblical duty of managing one’s household, didn’t leave his role as senior pastor of the church, although the elders did move forward in excommunicating Abraham. Soon thereafter, Abraham returned to Christian belief — a turn of events for which John Piper said he was “thankful” — before ultimately abandoning it altogether.

Barnabas, for his part, spoke with writer Jonathan Merritt in 2014 about the saga surrounding Abraham’s faith.

Discussing his book, “The Pastor’s Kid,” Barnabas told Merritt it would be “too strong a word” to say he “supported” the excommunication of his older brother “because it was too sad to be supportive of.”

“In all, I understood why it happened based on the church’s membership standards, but I always felt the sense that it had to do with the ‘manage your household’ criteria out of 1 Timothy, too,” Barnabas said. “And that made it feel like something unique to a family in our position.”

He also explained that, had he not been the son of a very prominent Christian preacher, the excommunication wouldn’t have evolved as it did.

“If a child of a regular member had been excommunicated, it may have been voted on by the church, but outsiders would never know about it,” Barnabas said. “The pastor’s family, especially that of a nationally known pastor, is always under scrutiny. It makes hard things more pronounced and amplifies pressure.”

Barnabas has not weighed in on The Times’ report at this point. He did, though, post a tweet Tuesday morning in which he condemned “Christian voyeurism.”

“‘Christian’ voyeurism couched as concern is sin and accomplishes nothing for anyone’s soul,” he wrote. “It’s gossip fuel and fodder for pride and judgement of others. If you’re concerned, pray, and ‘your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.'”

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