I’m Tired of Watching Christians Tear Each Other Apart – the Kirk Cameron Controversy

When Kirk Cameron recently came out as an annihilationist, the evangelical response was swift and uncharitable. Demands for repentance. Blocking dissenters. Silencing debate. But the controversy has exposed something troubling about how we handle theological disagreement in the church today.

The Problem: Gatekeeping Instead of Engagement

The response to Kirk Cameron wasn’t about careful Biblical exegesis. It was about conformity. “The church has always believed this, so you need to repent.” But that’s not theology—that’s conformity policing.

Where was the engagement with the actual Biblical arguments for annihilationism? Where was the wrestling with passages like Matthew 10:28, where Jesus says God will “destroy both soul and body in hell”? Where was the discussion about what Greek words like apollumi (destroy) and aionios (eternal/age-lasting) actually mean in their first-century Jewish context?

It wasn’t there. And that’s the problem.

Theological Triage: Which Hills Are Worth Dying On?

Gavin Ortlund, in his book Finding the Right Hills to Die On, gives us a helpful framework called theological triage. He breaks doctrines into three categories:

First-order doctrines are essential to the gospel itself. The deity of Christ. The resurrection. Salvation by grace through faith. The Trinity. The authority of Scripture. If you deny these, you’ve left Christian orthodoxy.

Second-order doctrines are important enough to create boundaries between different church traditions, but they don’t determine whether someone is a Christian. Baptism. Church governance. These matter, but a Presbyterian and a Baptist can both love Jesus and be saved.

Third-order doctrines are issues where Christians can disagree within the same local church and still have meaningful unity. The timing of the rapture. Views on the millennium. These are real theological questions, but they’re not worth dividing over.

The nature of hell? It’s not a first-order issue. Faithful, Bible-believing Christians disagree on this. John Stott was an annihilationist. So is N.T. Wright (in a qualified way). These aren’t liberals denying Scripture—they’re evangelical scholars who have come to different conclusions about what the Bible actually teaches.

When the Majority Is Wrong

John Stackhouse makes a crucial distinction between traditional views, historical views, and Biblical views. Sometimes these three categories align. But sometimes they don’t. And when they conflict, which one wins?

For Protestants, the answer should be obvious: Scripture wins. Every time. That’s what Sola Scriptura means.

The majority has been catastrophically wrong before. For over 1,800 years, most Christians believed slavery was Biblical. They quoted Scripture to defend it. And they were utterly, horrifically wrong.

The abolitionists were the minority. They were accused of being unbiblical, of letting cultural trends influence their theology, of abandoning what “the church has always believed.” Sound familiar?

The fact that the majority has been wrong before doesn’t mean the majority is always wrong. But it does mean we need to be Bereans—examining the Scriptures daily to see if what we’ve been taught is true (Acts 17:11).

Unity Without Uniformity

Jesus prayed in John 17:21, “I pray that they may all be one.” Unity. Not uniformity.

Unity is grounded in the essentials—the first-order doctrines. We’re united because we all confess Jesus as Lord, believe in His death and resurrection, trust in Scripture as God’s Word.

But uniformity demands that everyone believe exactly the same thing on every theological question. And that’s not Biblical unity. That’s tribalism.

Paul says in Ephesians 4:2-3, “Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.”

Bearing with one another. That means making space for disagreement on secondary issues. That means practicing theological triage—knowing which doctrines are essential and which ones allow for charitable disagreement.

Watch the Full Video

This controversy is a mirror showing us that we have a unity problem. We’ve made conformity the test of orthodoxy. We’ve confused unity with uniformity. And we’ve forgotten how to charitably disagree while staying committed to Scripture.

Watch the full video to dive deeper into theological triage, what we do when the majority is Biblically wrong, and how we can practice unity without sacrificing truth.