Surviving the Fringe

A Short Reflection on a Long Journey

From the time I was a kid, my mind ran toward the strange and the shadowy corners of the world. I ate up Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World and Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of. Later it was Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings. But it wasn’t just TV. Back when the library was the closest thing we had to the internet, I practically lived in it. I checked out any oddball book I could find. By twelve I had already plowed through Erich von Däniken, and a year later I grabbed Graham Hancock’s first book. Ancient aliens, lost civilizations, Bigfoot, alternate histories, you name it, I read it. Probably more than anyone else I knew.

By high school, I loved batting around theories about JFK, the moon landing, and Roswell. Stuff people talk about casually today in a post–Joe Rogan world, but back then you had to go hunting for it.

Then I got saved midway through high school, right before junior year. My interest in the fringe didn’t dry up; it just changed shape. I got into apologetics and the strange corners of church history. I read books on how cults formed. I dug into theories about where the Ark of the Covenant might be, or Noah’s Ark. And of course I got fixated on the “sons of God” in Genesis and Job. I used to mail-order cassette tapes from Christian ministries, especially Chuck Missler’s stuff.

But around 1999, I started running into experiences that slowly cooled all of this down. The shift wasn’t immediate. It stretched out for years.

First, the whole “laughing revival” scene was full of phonies. Friends admitted to me, after I pressed them, that they fell over because they felt pressured to. They faked speaking in tongues. Some swore their fillings had turned to gold. None of it made their actual lives any holier or more stable. I couldn’t escape the conclusion: a lot of the sensational stuff in the church wasn’t real. It was playacting.

Second, the run-up to Y2K was a circus. Missler wrote a whole book predicting wild prophetic events that never happened. He wasn’t the only one. Everywhere you turned, someone was calling Y2K the rapture, or the start of the tribulation, or the dawn of some golden age. All these big, confident predictions… none of them came true. It was just one in a long line of failed prophecies.

Third, I watched people I loved get swept up into this world. Some were older men I respected. One family I knew followed a teacher named Monty Judah. They bought livestock, built an extra barn, put what was basically a bunker underneath it, and locked themselves inside on New Year’s Eve, 1999. The father was a smart guy, an architect, stable, a man who had always encouraged me. When nothing happened, the fallout was sobering. And they weren’t the only ones.

Over the next decade, I watched a lot of folks who chased fringe ideas, Christian or not, ping-pong from one obsession to another. Most of them weren’t well-rooted people to begin with, and the instability just got worse. A shocking number ended up broke, embittered, or divorced.

That stretch of years taught me something simple and hard: you don’t have to be dumb to get pulled into fringe theories. Smart people fall for them all the time. But most of the folks who live there, who build their identity around the sensational and the “secret”, don’t flourish. They drift. They unravel. And sooner or later, it catches up with them.

Somewhere between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, I stumbled onto a handful of writers who pushed me to question mainstream thinking. E. Michael Jones was one. Lew Rockwell was another. Their work pulled me into reevaluating all sorts of established stories: claims about the Holocaust, Lincoln and the Civil War, the Federal Reserve, the world banking system, and everything in that orbit. And, like usual, I dove in headfirst. I spent a couple years reading, cross-checking, and chasing footnotes into the weeds.

But as I stayed in those circles, the same pattern started to show up again. A lot of these guys made bold, sweeping claims, but they couldn’t defend half of them when pressed. It’s not that everything they said was wrong, far from it. Some of their critiques hit dead center. It’s just that they often stretched those critiques into grand, unified theories that didn’t really match the evidence. So, while I still hold to a toned-down version of a few of their strongest points, it’s a much smaller and more realistic version than what they were selling.

And once again, I noticed the same thing I’d seen in the charismatic world. Mixed in with a few steady, sensible people, there were a whole lot of folks who were gullible, jumpy, and easily carried away. They’d latch onto whatever fed the narrative they already liked. Different topics, same personality type. The names changed, but the instability didn’t.

In the early 2000s, my interests shifted to the smaller, stranger corners of Reformed theology. I read everything I could get my hands on: head coverings, exclusive psalmody, Auburn Avenue theology (what people call Federal Vision now), preterism, theonomy, postmillennialism. I spent way too many hours lurking on the Puritan Board and a handful of niche blogs. And, like everyone else back then, I let a lot of it spill into comment threads and the early days of Facebook.

What stood out to me wasn’t the doctrines themselves, some of them had real weight, and some still do. It was the people who were swallowed up by them. The ones who didn’t just study these views, but built their whole identity around them. They were almost always odd, brittle, and ready to break fellowship over the smallest point. Not because the point was essential, but because they needed it to be. I want to be clear: holding any of those positions doesn’t automatically make someone like that. But the way many of these folks held their views, the intensity, the inflexibility, the hair-trigger divisiveness, made the whole scene feel off.

Around that same time, I started reading some of the early blogs that later got lumped under the “manosphere” label, though nobody called it that back then. These were writers talking about sexuality and male–female dynamics in a way that pushed back hard against feminism. Some of it was genuinely insightful. Some of it clarified things that pastors and Christian writers were too timid to say out loud. But mixed in with that were pockets of outright weirdness—and in some cases, things I’d call vile. There was always someone trying to justify polygamy or some other form of sexual immorality.

Most of these guys used pseudonyms, so it was impossible to know whether they were actually living the things they bragged about, or if they were just internet philosophers with too much free time. Years later, I met a handful of them in real life. More often than not, they turned out to be men who pontificated about things they had never practiced or even experienced. That’s another theme you see over and over: people who build elaborate idealized worlds on paper, worlds no one can ever verify, and speak about them with total certainty.

Reading all of this, someone could easily get the impression that I spent my entire life buried in fringe material. So it’s fair to ask: why was I drawn to the strange stuff in the first place?

Well, first, this is just one slice of what I read. The backbone of my reading has always been pretty traditional. I love Shakespeare. I love Southern Gothic. Flannery O’Connor is probably my favorite writer.

Theologically, my anchors have been Matthew Henry, John Calvin, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I’ve worked through shelves of solid commentaries by trustworthy expositors.

On the historical side, I’ve read the steady, reliable names... David McCullough, Paul Johnson, Philip Schaff. Politically, the most influential voices for me were mainstream ones like Rush Limbaugh and Thomas Sowell. And the truth is, I’ve never been much of a political junkie anyway.

My point is simply this: I didn’t spend my whole life marinating in the obscure or the unhinged. I’ve read widely and deeply across the classics, theology, history, and cultural commentary. The fringe drew my curiosity, but it didn’t shape the core of my thinking. It was more like a side trail I kept wandering onto, not the path I lived on.

Depending on the topic, I’ve got twenty-plus years of watching the kinds of people who get pulled into this stuff. It’s why, even though I’m sympathetic to a lot of outsider ideas, and you can catch pieces of that in my writing, I never go all the way in. You never go full fringe. I’ve just seen too many patterns repeat. I’ve watched lives collapse because someone let a little healthy questioning turn into doubting everything.

I’ve seen men have one “awakening” after another until their friends are worn out, their marriage is wrecked, and their kids don’t know what to believe anymore. I’ve watched guys bounce from charismatic to Reformed Baptist, from Reformed Baptist to Presbyterian, from Presbyterian to Roman Catholic, and from Rome to no faith at all. It’s the same story over and over.

And it’s not just theology. I’ve seen men get curious about biblical sexuality and end up trying to justify polygamy. I’ve seen guys start with a solid belief in creation and end up flat-earthers. I’ve seen Reformed purists shrink their world down so far that they end up in a living room with four people, convinced they’re the last true Christians on earth. I’ve seen all of that more than once.

I’ve lived long enough on the fringes to know how that world works, and by God’s mercy, I’ve grown out of it. I’m not naive or mainstream for the sake of being mainstream. I just recognize that a lot of conventional wisdom survives because it works. It’s something like the 80/20 rule: follow the established path 80% of the time, and leave a margin for the unconventional, but don’t flip those numbers.

What’s strange now is watching all the niche ideas I was reading about in my teens and twenties suddenly become mainstream. Part of me understands why. But another part of me worries we’re headed for a wave of burnout and some truly bizarre, cultish detours. I’ve seen where that road leads, and it’s not pretty.

This is mostly just me reflecting on my own path, but if it spares a few of you from stepping on the same land mines, good. These topics, whatever the flavor, will always have their pull. But the times we’re living in are already shaky enough. You don’t need to stack more instability on top of it.

Keep a margin for exploring the odd and the unfamiliar. It’s fine to think, to question, to look into things most people ignore. Just don’t let that become your whole diet. Make your home in what’s stood the test of time. Let the solid, proven stuff do the heavy lifting. The rest is seasoning, not the feast.