This response is something I’m starting to call the Oncoming Bus Gambit. Chances are you’ve heard it many times yourself–it’s very common among Christians of an evangelistic bent, who employ it to rationalize their mistreatment of other people. And it fails just like all of their other rationalizations. Today I’ll show you what the Gambit is, how to spot its variations, why it fails, and how to defuse it.
The central idea in the Christian movie God’s Club, which we reviewed recently and have been discussing off and on, is a very common talking point believed by right-wing Christians all over America: that they are facing unprecedented levels of persecution in this country, and thus are in great danger of losing their religious liberty–and from there getting imprisoned and even executed for their beliefs. Non-Christians may well feel baffled about why so many Christians cling to this idea as hard as they do–and why they seem to genuinely think that they are in real danger.
I’d be hard-pressed to point to a more glaring illustration of that discrepancy than the disgraceful spectacle of Christians making movies presenting themselves as they really truly believe they are–while remaining completely (and, one increasingly suspects, willfully) oblivious to how others see them.
The movie God’s Club hammers constantly at the idea that the fictional town of Echo Grove, Vermont is some bastion of godlessness. But where is it? And is this idea of godlessness equating to immorality correct?
I’ve been doing reviews of Christian movies for a while now. And unsurprisingly, I have been uniformly unimpressed because Christian media is uniformly awful. But to hear Christians themselves talk about “their” movies, these are all masterpieces. Epics. Perhaps marginally flawed here and there, but essentially wonderful. Everyone else is left to wonder if they’re even seeing the same movies these Christians are praising. I’m not surprised at all to see this lopsided reception.
In that last post, I mentioned how Bumble and Mr. Captain were locked in a battle of wits all evening long. Today you’ll hear the story of that battle, who won (for now!), and how. A few folks were wondering, so here we are! Human versus feline. Place your bets now….
In ‘God’s Club’, we learn that Jesusing fixes everything—including serious mental illness.
In its scant 140-ish characters, this carefully-crafted, polished tweet manages to check off just about every single item on the list of features of a perfect Christian not-pology.
With a national Presidential election looming ever closer for Americans, this question of why one of our political parties is so shot through with racism is starting to gain more prominence–as well it should.
For a group of people who really hate evolution, fundagelicals sure have evolved on their views of Donald Trump. And we’re not talking about micro-evolution, here. We’re talking about mega-huge macro-evolution. Except macro-evolution isn’t a thing, or so they say. Anyway, I was so struck by this story that I decided we needed to run a special off-day edition of Roll to Disbelieve.