Abraham Piper deconstructs his dad
A TikTok star is from a famous Evangelical family
On TikTok, an odd, androgynous man was posting jokey videos about the meaningless of life. Was this Abraham Piper—the son of John Piper?
A New York Times profile and a lot of commentary ensued. I was left thinking about the nihilist jester whose father is the severe, sex-punishing moralist of the Evangelical world.
In the Evangelical world, sons are sacred.
In the religion, the human male is God’s vehicle on earth. A man’s sons are seen to be his key contribution to life. His guidance of them is his most important religious work.
John Piper, the Baptist pastor in Minneapolis, had four sons. He dedicated his 1991 book The Pleasure of God, to them: “If there is any legacy I want to leave you, it is not money or house or land; it is a vision of God…”
His third son, Abraham Christian Piper, was born on December 12, 1979. His spirit seems ancient, but he’s not. I flip through media mentions of his life. In 1989, he’s in a newspaper spread about what kids worry about.
Age 9, he offers: “I worry when I’m waiting for my mom to hear about something wrong I did.”
John Piper was getting famous for ‘morality’.
He set the tone for the faith on issue after issue, insisting homosexuals afflicted AIDS on the planet, insisting women be subservient, etc.
Piper’s family photos tend to be quite strange. I typically think his wife Noël looks unhappy and even desperate. Piper writes in 2007: “Today we still hold hands. Often it is a sign of truce.”
In 2010, Piper took a sudden leave of absence, he said, to work on a marriage he signaled was failing. He’d only explain that “there is no whiff of unfaithfulness on either side.”
Commenting on the marriage in 2022, Piper strikes the typically odd note: “The warfare has been intense.”
As a teenager, Abraham lost his “faith.”
He was bored with school and church, but not bored with alcohol, rock music, and sex. Around 1999, when he was 19, he later writes, “I decided I’d be honest and stop saying I was a Christian.”
For his father this was a crisis. Evangelicals widely read the Bible passage of Titus 1:6 to say a church’s elders must have “faithful” kids. As the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, John Piper was on the chopping block.
But he had a solution to bypass the “rules.”
In an unusual move, Piper asked his church to ‘excommunicate’ Abraham, i.e. to declare him dead.
In a 2012 interview, Piper recalls his conversation with his church: “Here’s the situation. I think my son needs to be pursued by the elders as far as you can, and then he needs to be excommunicated if he doesn’t respond.”
They did it. In another interview the same year, Piper recalls:
“The night after that excommunication, I called him at 10:00 and said, ‘Abraham, you knew what was coming.’ He said, ‘That’s what I expected you to do. That has integrity. I respect you for doing it.’”
Abraham traveled as a rock musician.
His father recalls his efforts to reach out. He’d take him to lunch, he said, “every time he came back to town, trying not to preach at him.”
Abraham seems to have floated in and out of college. A 2017 CNBC profile notes: “It took him 11 years to graduate from college — he took time off four times, including once to learn how to make guitars.”
As John Piper recalls the period:
“…he was walking away from the Lord, trying to make a name for himself in disco bars as a guitarist and singer, and just doing anything but destroying himself. We were praying like crazy that he wouldn’t get somebody pregnant, or marry the wrong person, or whatever.”
In 2001, a fellow musician recalls first seeing Abraham in a local bar singing Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.”
Abraham writes in 2010: “Four years of this and I was strung out, stupefied and generally pretty low. Especially when I was sober or alone.”
He wasn’t blaming anyone for being “a ridiculous screw-up.” He adds: “My parents, who are strong believers and who raised their kids as well as any parents I’ve ever seen, were brokenhearted and baffled.”
He found Jesus while drinking beer at a gas station.
On the prompting of a girl he liked, he’d been reading the Bible’s book of Romans. He writes: “The best way I know to describe what happened to me that morning is that God made it possible for me to love Jesus.”
His father described it as Abraham “coming back to the Lord,” and a big ceremony was held at the church. Piper recalls: “He wept his eyes out in front of the church and was restored.”
Now re-Christianized, Abraham got married and had his first child around 2005. He’d have three more. He was a tech whiz. He’d work on his father’s website, ‘Desiring God’, and then launch several of his own sites. He had an expert eye for quirky news stories and clickbait.
Before long, he was rich and moving to L.A.
He returned to Minnesota, and left Evangelicalism—again.
In one of his new TikTok videos, Abraham recalls the shift happening “well over” ten years ago. His key teacher seems to have been Alan Watts, the New Age religious commentator.
Meanwhile, Piper family drama seemed on the verge of spilling out into public. In 2014, Abraham’s brother Barnabas wrote a memoir, The Pastor’s Kid, that wanted to be a tell-all book — that never told. He writes:
“My father sees one way of connecting and relating to God. My brothers and I have seen others and pursued them. Working through such tensions can be painful.”
Barnabas got back on the wagon, using his father’s tricks to evade “the rules” when necessary. Getting divorced, he framed it as his wife dying, even though she didn’t.
Abraham began his own TikTok ministry.
He seemed like a character out of Fargo on acid, a quirky Minnesotan with eccentric fashion, the owner of a company that made puzzles—who talks religion a lot. And he was John Piper’s son.
Abraham doesn’t like the term “atheist.” It’s only because he doesn’t like to define himself in terms of not believing. “I am a passive non-believer,” he explains.
He seems to have developed an idea of life being a puzzle no one can put together. He telegraphs even in his eccentric hats the idea that there’s no “matching”—no patterns that are anything but personal choices.
For all the supposed expertise in the world, does anyone really have any—about anything? He offers on Twitter: “Isn’t it interesting how literally no parents really know what they’re doing?”
He calls Evangelicalism “a desperate need to make sense, even if it doesn’t.”
His filming style, ever whirling, reflects an idea of “meaning” in constant motion.
Identifying his commentary as “deconstruction,” he sets out to disorient all categories of identity—from ‘Christian manhood’ on up, or down. His personal presentation could read as feminine, even transgender.
If he questions all Christianity, then Evangelicalism is particularly in his sights. He says:
“I berate Evangelicalism, fundamentalism. It’s a destructive narrow-minded worldview. And one of the most destructive, narrow-minded aspects of it is that its adherents feel as if they are the entirety of Christianity rather than the tiny sliver of it that they actually are.”
He calls Evangelicalism just one child in the Christian family—the one that’s “being kind of a brat.”
And he laughs.
He doesn’t specifically comment on his dad.
But his characterization of ‘Evangelicalism’ feels like a family portrait—of John Piper. Abraham writes on Twitter:
“Woke up from a dream the other morning feeling sorry for evangelical god. Like actual pity. And the more I think about it, the more it tracks. That fucker’s in a bad place. So stuck. So trapped in his own self. Can’t ever change. So absolutely alone he’s just making everything up”
John Piper hasn’t commented lately on his wayward son. The religion noticed, however, and his standing dropped a few notches. “Weak men make weak sons,” as Protestia puts it.
As Abraham continues talking.
“Nothing really matters,” he explains. “And this is what gives us the freedom to feel our own meaning, and feel it with ease, instead of a sense of fear or guilt. This, my friends, is the motherfucking gospel. You like ‘good news’? The universe doesn’t give a shit.” 🔶
