Much of Jared Wilson’s Lest We Drift: Five Departure Dangers from the One True Gospel reads as a chronicle of the “gospel-centered” movement’s rise and decline. Interestingly, it was written by one of its most vocal proponents, who is now numbered among its survivors. Notably, the book is neither triumphal nor cynical. Wilson is confident about the implosion of his generation’s evangelical renewal, yet his analysis remains enclosed within the same framework that produced the collapse.

He sees the “drift” but cannot honestly identify its root cause, which leads me to ask, “Is this just reinventing the wheel?” 

Wilson’s reflections and analysis are both personal and theological. The danger, he insists, lies in “taking our eyes off the center.” He quotes Hebrews 2:1, “We must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it”, and concludes that failure is the result of distraction. “The failure is not with it, but with us,” he writes.

In that single sentence, the entire book turns inward.

For Wilson, the movement’s collapse is not due to institutional factors or failures. It is spiritual, not doctrinal; private, not public. The real drift is always within the heart.

But this is the first error of gospel-centrality itself. By reducing institutional breakdowns to private misalignment, Wilson repeats the theology that insulated the movement from accountability in the first place. When celebrity pastors fell, it was chalked up to personal sin, not to the structure of celebrity evangelicalism. When entire networks imploded, the problem was deemed one of “losing the gospel as reality.” This is convenient. It absolves the system by individualizing its failures. It fostered what could be called a “disembodied ecclesiology,” treating spiritual life as a set of private affections rather than embodied worship under ordained oversight.

Wilson’s historical memory is strongest when recounting the events that, according to him, marked the movement’s decline. His timeline includes: the 2012 Sovereign Grace lawsuits, Driscoll’s resignation in 2014, the end of Together for the Gospel in 2022, and Keller’s death in 2023. Yet when the narrative reaches the political and cultural crises of the past decade, like debates about race in America, Christians and Donald Trump, and COVID, Wilson’s posture narrows. He describes the fracturing of evangelical unity but attributes it to external pressures. “Lines were drawn. Statements were drafted. Suspicions proliferated,” he writes, before claiming that detractors (wrongly) argue that “on every test, the gospel-centered movement was determined a failure.”

His sympathy clearly remains with those who “did their best to navigate uncharted waters,” not with those who saw the ship sinking because the gospel-centered movement’s leaders demanded unbiblical (woke) approaches to navigating those choppy waters.

This inward focus produces moral clarity but practical blindness. Wilson admits that many found gospel-centrality “too neutral (and thus too neutered) to be of any help in the real world of culture wars.” He mocks Douglas Wilson’s argument that “the gospel, which is at the center, must be at the center of a big circle, not a teeny one,” calling it humorous because others had accused the movement of making the gospel too broad. Yet this deflection reveals the fundamental inconsistency: Jared Wilson cannot see that his own circle, circumscribed by the pieties, posture, and tone of “Big Eva” institutions and their therapeutic ethos, was always the smaller one.

Doug Wilson’s “center of everything” may overreach, but it at least attempts to reassert the totality of Christ’s lordship. The gospel-centered circle shrank until it fit inside the individual conscience. In doing so, “the gospel as center” became almost exclusively a psychological category of peace, grace, and rest, while ignoring the kingly reality of Christ’s reign. This is why it was not only unable to resist cultural pressures but bowed before them.

Contra Douglas Wilson, Jared Wilson prefers Ray Ortlund’s maxim (no, not his “Never Trump. This Time Harris. Always Jesus” maxim) but his phrase, “Gospel doctrine creates a gospel culture.” For Wilson, this appears as an ideal vision: a community of sweetness, grace, and harmony. But that culture, in practice, became the soft aesthetic of the movement’s decline. The doctrine remained, the culture curdled.

Wilson also references Ortlund’s phrase, “When the doctrine is clear and the culture is beautiful, that church will be powerful.” In reality, the culture of the gospel-centered movement became sentimental, the doctrine muddled, and the prophetic voices of the churches that adopted it impotent. Wilson’s own book shows this, even as he cannot name it.

The gospel-centered church traded the courage of conviction for tone. It became the pastoral wing of American “niceness.” The gospel-centered movement emphasized grace at the expense of the application of the Word, sacraments, and discipline, hollowing out the very means through which the gospel takes root in communities. Wilson, amazingly, ignores all of these factors.

It is telling that Wilson often quotes John Calvin as an authority for his gospel-centered framework. One wonders whether, if Calvin were alive today, or if Wilson were writing in 16th-century Geneva, Calvin would be a subject of Wilson’s criticism as divisive, or whether he would escape notice simply because his reforms were too culturally engaged. After all, Calvin, who reformed law, worship, and political order, would fall under Wilson’s rebuke of those who bring Christianity to bear on culture. If Calvin were alive today, it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t be grouped with the Christian nationalists Wilson now caricatures. The selective appropriation is not incidental. Wilson wants Calvin’s gravitas without Calvin’s public theology.

Wilson has no difficulty rebuking what he calls the “Reformed evangelicals who spend the bulk of their time online LARPing as prophets.” But his criticism runs in only one direction. He does not address Ray Ortlund’s promotion of Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. He says nothing about Matt Chandler’s race-based hiring methods. He will not confront Tim Keller’s use of identity politics. I could list hundreds of examples like this.

These men were central architects of the movement he now eulogizes, but they remain above critique because they represent the tribe. The prophets that Wilson dislikes are only the ones to his Right. Moreover, he never seems to make any connection between the decline of the gospel-centered movement and the myriad of compromises within his own movement and among his mentors and friends.

Maybe, just maybe, those who have rejected the movement weren’t disillusioned with the Gospel. Perhaps they were disillusioned with the endless lectures on white guilt, the performative repentance for ancestral sins, the soft egalitarianism, kid-glove treatment for the LGBT agenda, and the therapeutic tone that replaced conviction with emotional management, all delivered by the very men who once claimed to recover the glory of grace.

Maybe those who see the failures of the gospel-centered movement realized they were being sold an entire bill of soft-progressive goods smuggled into the church under a “gospel” wrapping. It’s notable how Wilson and his kind managed to make all of their political preferences a matter of gospel-centrality while more right-wing political preferences were labeled “gospel distractions.”

On this note, his posture toward political theology is consistent with this inconsistency. Wilson’s comments on BLM, Trump voters, and racism follow the same Young, Restless, and Reformed moral framing: sin on the right is pathology, sin on the left is pastoral complexity. The movement’s instinct was not silence but one-sided speech, wrapped in biblical language and directed only at those whose convictions extended beyond therapeutic neutrality.

But the deeper problem is theological. Gospel-centrality reduced Christology to a private consolation and used it to avoid questions of law, culture, politics, justice, and power. The incarnation, kingdom, and lordship of Christ were flattened into a posture of inward renewal. The heart became the only legitimate terrain of application. In the name of protecting the gospel, the movement evacuated from the public square and institutions, resulting in a form of cultural antinomianism. To quote my friend ⁨David Mitzenmacher⁩, the problem is not “too much Christology but rather, too little Christology (and the wrong kind). What the gospel-centered movement has led to is a truncated Christology that divorces Christ’s person and work from His offices as Lawgiver and Lord of nature.” In an effort to affirm Christ’s centrality, the movement actually “removed” Christ from the very realms over which He reigns, confining His authority to the conscience but denying it to the polis.

Wilson’s polemic against harshness fits the same logic. He cites John Piper’s advice to Doug Wilson that there should be “more obvious tears” in his work and extends it into a general rebuke of those whose Christianity is too sharp, too public, or too political. He calls them “a subset…who think sitting in the seat of scoffers is the place of the blessed.” Yet the target is clear: the growing movement of men who found in classical Protestantism and ordered community something firmer than what’s been called “gospel culture.” Wilson’s chapter on “spicy bits” and “prophetic sarcasm” reads as a coded dismissal of the post-evangelical right; those who have outgrown the winsome stage and turned toward the harder claims of Scripture on public life.

The irony is that Wilson’s own narrative confirms their critique. The gospel-centered movement was designed for a stable, “neutral world” that no longer exists. Its theology of grace was detached from questions of polity, law, and nation. When the world pressed back, its adherents could only speak of “heart drift.” As he puts it, “We are well acquainted with the danger of drift; we seem less acquainted with our own susceptibility to it.” But the drift was not merely a matter of spiritual susceptibility. It was an ecclesial project that mistook cultural acquiescence for humility and social irrelevance for faithfulness.

The book’s pastoral tone is genuine. I have no doubt Wilson wants his readers to love Christ. He warns against “Christianity as performance art” and laments how churches treat sermons as “packaged content.” He writes that “Christianity as performance art is the natural consequence of the gospel being supplanted by the idol of cultural relevance.” This is true. But he cannot see that the “gospel-centered” brand itself was the perfect product of that same thing—the rebranding of historic Protestant doctrine for the attention economy. The conferences, blogs, and podcasts were the form of the movement.

Lest We Drift captures the fracturing and fatigue of post-Young, Restless, and Reformed evangelicalism and the melancholy of men who discovered that sincerity is not structure. Wilson’s prose conveys a sense of healing, yet the book remains a eulogy for an idea that never learned to govern, build, or endure. Gospel-centrality, as practiced, could not produce a reformation. It produced groups of people fluent in grace but strangers to order, courage, and conviction. I commend and agree with Wilson’s final lesson that we ought to “pay closer attention” to the Gospel. But it’s clear that we disagree on what that actually looks like in real life.

Wilson’s book, for all its pastoral sincerity, remains a salvatory sermon to the self.