The Big Eva bogeyman never matched reality. I earned $20,000 per year when I began working at Christianity Today in 2003 and never earned more than $30,000. Even that salary my supervisors at the time told me was exorbitant. Yet because I worked for the magazine founded by Billy Graham in 1956, and because I edited the column written by Charles Colson while also overseeing the news section, I must have been part of Big Eva. I couldn’t afford a meal more expensive than Chipotle once a week, but my imagined power to make and break careers, to silence critical voices, was a threat. It certainly never felt that way to me.

Not much changed when I joined The Gospel Coalition in 2010. We designed our website’s homepage on a spare sheet of printer paper. We couldn’t find two pennies to rub together. Our first fundraising campaign yielded a total of one donor. Somehow with only one staff member we hosted a couple large conferences. The same year TGC met on the South Side of Chicago, I helped edit a book, Four Views on the Spectrum of Evangelicalism. I share the “confessional evangelical” view defended in the book by Albert Mohler. But John Stackhouse and Roger Olson landed their punches. You can—even should—assert what it means to be an evangelical. But you can’t mandate your view for others. You can’t control the movement. At best you might be able to protect the integrity of your own college, or publisher, or denomination, or church, or mercy ministry in the eclectic collage known as evangelicalism.

If anyone still believed in the Big Eva bogeyman, the 2016 presidential election should have been the Scooby-Doo reveal. Turns out not many evangelicals ever cared what Big Eva did or said. College presidents and magazine editors and megachurch pastors couldn’t tell evangelicals how to vote. In more than eight years since that election we’ve been subject to a cynical game of populist ressentiment. Ministries and churches claim to be aggrieved by Big Eva in their tiny Wheaton College academic offices. Yet somehow the moniker doesn’t apply to other ministries with highly compensated leaders, with large and successful fundraising staffs, with frequent White House access, and friends who control every branch of government in the most powerful nation of all human history.

Now Carl Trueman has turned his attention to Gig Eva, where “anyone with the time to spend living online can become a celebrity without having proved himself beforehand in any real service to any church.” Or worse, I would say, as some turn to Gig Eva under looming church discipline, or after a discouraging and even damaging tenure in church leadership.

Anyone familiar with Saul Alinksy’s 1972 Rules for Radicals can recognize the Big Eva/Gig Eva framing and tactics. The internet gig economy makes Alinsky’s rules that much more effective. At little cost, radicals can execute their coordinated tactics with help from the X algorithm. Consider: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” And: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” And, most importantly: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

Gig Eva depends on projecting the power they accused Big Eva of wielding. If Big Eva could effectively silence dissent, then Gig Eva is justified in effecting the reverse. Coordinate the Signal chat. Pick the biggest Christian leader. Label him Big Eva. Attack his alleged prejudice toward the commoners. Pit urban elites against flyover normies. Assert the numerical dominance of the not-so-silent majority. Declare the Era of Big Eva dead. Long live the vox populi and our new Influencer Overlords.

Does this tactic work? Absolutely. In a media economy, power is the influence you project, the influence you convince the world you possess. Trueman is right that some Big Eva leaders wanted the world to think they dictated who got published and who got the big stage. To a certain extent they did, and still do. Any organization that includes some must exclude others as they decide on leaders and initiatives.

But as we learned from our Four Views book, no one can tell evangelicals what to do. No one can tell them not to read Doug Wilson. No one can stop Wilson from starting his own publishing house to promote books on Christian Nationalism. No one can stop his denomination from planting churches in Washington, D.C. No one can stop The New York Times from profiling him. By the same token, Wilson can’t stop the Groypers from casting him aside as OK Boomer. Gig Eva of yesterday becomes Big Eva of today.

How exhausting. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag,” Alinsky told ’70s radicals. Big Eva or Gig Eva, the names of yesterday’s conflicts are forgotten today. How much less seriously would we take ourselves if we remembered the “name that is above every name” (Phil. 2:9)? Someday soon we’ll just be content to take a knee. And all will be “exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Heb. 4:13).