This past weekend, we had a watch party for the first two videos of Alpha Course. Alpha Course is a venerated onboarding class that newbie Christians take to learn about the basics of evangelicalism. And oh boy is it awful. I knew going into it that it wouldn’t present any Read more
For years now, pastors’ wives have been on my emotional radar. So when I saw an intriguing note about the upcoming Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Annual Meeting, it got my attention right away! There, a “biblical counselor” plans to offer ministers’ wives up to 90 minutes of free counseling. It’s Read more
Over the past five years or so, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has been fighting more and more over their Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). This relatively-new subgroup of the SBC has become a proxy for the fight between the denomination’s two factions. One of those factions, the hardliner Read more
Years ago, I wrote about Bill Schnoebelen as part of the Cult of Before Stories series. The Cult includes that vast collection of fake, bombastic Satanism-and-witchcraft-themed testimonies that hucksters peddle for attention and profit to evangelicals. These fake testimonies hit their peak around the late 1980s before petering out in Read more
Somehow, evangelical pastors have figured out how to make their end of Christianity even worse—by implementing the ‘Moses Model’ of church leadership. It really is remarkable how they’ve turned an essentially dysfunctionally-authoritarian flavor of religion into such an extreme worst-case-possible scenario. But the Moses Model lets them make that transition Read more
Many years ago, evangelicals wielded apologetics as weapons against their worst enemies: atheists. They lost not only their battles but the entire Keyboard Wars themselves, then retreated into their current walled-garden enclaves on social media. But a community member noticed a video that might just mark the return of those Read more
Recently, Calvinist pastor and G3 Conference founder Josh Buice got caught operating eight sockpuppet accounts over at least a couple of years. He used them to anonymously criticize and attack other evangelicals. So far, he’s lost his G3 leadership position at least. But he’s not the first Calvinist leader caught Read more
No matter how hard evangelicals try in their evangelism, they can’t help themselves. Fear will always peek out through their entreaties to convert. Fear is always the endgame for evangelism. It can’t be any other way—not for them, anyway. Today, we check out Taylor Standridge, who really want evangelism to Read more
Evangelicals love to claim having a superior morality to heathens. They insist that their faith produces real changes in believers that lead them to greater moral heights than we poor heathens could ever manage. But their own behavior betrays those claims. Today, we’ll see how one evangelical denomination, the Southern Read more
Tradcaths, a super-vocal, super-conservative branch of Catholicism, have been extra weird since Pope Francis died. I can see why, too: Most of them converted into Catholicism from extremely conservative hardliner evangelical groups, so they expect Catholicism to work like their old faith—just with extra incense and chanting. Nor do they Read more