The Public Religion Research Institute just released a new study they completed about Christianity in America. It is eye-opening and genuinely shocking, and not only for the reasons that Christians are seeing. There are some hidden messages in this study that they’re not seeing, encoded thuds of Moria drums that foretell a catastrophe for the religion that is coming–and quickly.
Last time we met up, we were talking about Christian Mingle: The Movie. It’s a rom-com about a young Christian woman who pretends to be very fervent on the dating site Christian Mingle in order to catfish herself a very fervent Christian man who is not what he seems either. Hilarity ensues. Today, having gotten some rest and plenty of water, I’ll show you how this movie backfired on its makers by showing us a side of Christianity that Christians really should not want non-believers to know exists.
I noticed this movie Christian Mingle: The Movie show up on Netflix the other day and was intrigued–and commenters have mentioned it off and on as particularly cringeworthy. So why not spend a glorious day watching it?
Located on a site called Bible Reasons and called “25 Reasons Why The World Hates Christians And Christianity,” his screed didn’t exactly inspire me to trust its level of accuracy. Christians don’t tend to have a very firm grasp about how non-Christians see them and their religion. But it did provide some insight about just where right-wing Christians in particular are deceiving themselves.
I’ve always been fascinated with how people construct communities for themselves. Certainly many atheists have wrestled with how to create communities without the trappings and shackles of untrue supernatural claims. Well, this past weekend I got to enjoy one way that people are finding to connect with each other without religion.
You’re probably noticing a common thread running through the messages and media aimed at fundagelicals these days: this idea that they are in the very beginnings of a desperate and dire time of dreadful persecution. And we’re not talking about this persecution happening in some third-world theocracy, either, but right here in good ole Murrka! This fantasy American Christians have concocted has them teetering on the very threshold of the end of the world.
Christians are fighting tooth and nail to get their indoctrination into schools whether it’s legal to do it or not, but there’s a truly cosmic-level irony at work here that they’re just not seeing.
We might laugh about or mock Christians who have entirely too high an estimation of themselves or too dramatic or fictionalized an interpretation of their experiences, but the problem of inaccurate self-perception is real–and it doesn’t go away upon deconversion from religion.
If we really want to help people, then we need to do something that the Christians of God’s Club simply can’t do.
Last time we talked about the Oncoming Bus Gambit–that popular Christian thought experiment–because the movie God’s Club is built around this trope. The story centers around the efforts of protagonist schoolteacher Michael Evans to proselytize kids at his public school, the pushback he receives as a result of his “help,” and how he overcomes this persecution.