Over the years, I’ve heard many, many accusations about the causes of my deconversion. It could practically be a religious genre by now: Cold-reading attempts to guess strangers’ motivations regarding religious choices. But only one thing actually caused my deconversion. Strangely, Christians never light upon that one. Today, I’ll share Read more
Well, everyone, I’ve finally found the definitive, surreally-otherworldly evangelical narrative about evangelism. We can stop looking. I’ve found it. I’ve found the worst dialogue ever constructed by an evangelical. It’s so weird that I half-suspect that it might be some Poe’s Law invention meant to make evangelicals look insectoid space Read more
Not long ago, I ran into an article about Dean Inserra, a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pastor, and his thoughts about evangelism. Specifically, Inserra identified one group of people who were virtually impossible to convert to his brand of tribalistic white evangelicalism: “Good people.” In his opinion, “good people” resisted Read more
A 2022 seminary article about a pastor’s evangelism exhortation got me thinking about how evangelicals relate to other evangelicals who don’t believe what they do. More specifically, I wondered how feasible his exhortation is nowadays. The pastor, Dean Inserra, wanted his audience of seminary students to concentrate their evangelism on Read more
For years, we’ve had some good laughs over evangelical leaders’ ongoing attempts to strong-arm their flocks into performing more evangelism. Basically, the flocks just don’t wanna. And nobody can make them, not even their dysfunctional-authoritarian leaders. It’s just so funny to me that evangelicals and their leaders have these farcical Read more
As we close out the month of October, I want to close Spooky Month out with what evangelical leaders are saying about the end of an evangelical marriage. For many years, both evangelicals’ troubled marriages and their divorce rates have been the subjects of observation from onlookers. For years now, Read more
Last time we met up, I told you about a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pastor named Chris Gore. Of late, he and his little Oklahoma church have been deeply entangling themselves in the divorce of one of their menfolk. (But to be fair, what else is there to do in Read more
More than ten years ago, the Christ-o-sphere was rocked to its foundations over divorce. As it turned out, evangelical couples divorced each other more than those from any other religion. Worse still (from their standpoint), atheists divorced at a lower rate than any other religious group! In the intervening years Read more
About ten years ago, when the trickle of deconversions began to flow into a river, evangelicals began getting all heated up about what they called unequally yoked couples. The term means a mixed-faith marriage, particularly one in which one partner is evangelical and the other an atheist. Evangelicals began slavering Read more
Many years ago, just before the whole David Koresh cult exploded into news in April 1993, I almost joined a cult in Waco just down the road from those guys. That entire period of my life feels almost like a fever dream. I was operating along mental lines then that Read more