Wicked is good—but not simple

God grant us all better media literacy skills

Note: This piece has been updated to reflect that the review of Wicked referenced here was published by The Gospel Coalition, not Christianity Today as previously stated. I regret the error. Luckily for me, everything I said about the reductive, incurious, and agenda-driven tendencies of Christianity Today applies doubly to TGC.

I stopped reading The Gospel Coalition some time ago as a part of a resolution to stop hate-reading. Life is short, and deliberating driving myself into a frenzy with content I continually found to be reductive, incurious, and—despite its protestations—agenda-driven started feeling more and more like a waste of time. I’ve spent too much of my one wild and precious life doomscrolling through Twitter, clicking on every talking head’s half-baked take on the Discourse of the Day, and then yelling (tweeting) out into the void about how stupid what I just read was—all the while dropping coins into these publishers’ pockets through the ad revenue from my clicks and th…