It feels like I’ve known about Carey Nieuwhof for ages and ages now. He haunts the Christ-o-sphere offering panicky evangelical pastors surefire tips about making their churches grow again. Such advice represents the newest post-Christian-America cottage industry, it seems. Though he has written perhaps hundreds of blog posts discussing church Read more
Last time we met up, I showed you a bunch of reasons to believe in Christianity. Alas for their very hopeful bearers, they all sucked. But I found one list that contained every single kind of bad reasoning, threats, come-ons, and emotional manipulation we know and expect from these inept Read more
Last week, we talked about how hardline evangelical and Tradcath Christians engage with atheists who don’t accept or believe their claims. As it turns out, one of their favorite tactics is plugging their ears with their fingers and chanting LA LA LA LA ATHEISTS DON’T EVEN REALLY EXIST until their existential Read more
One of the few remaining marketing claims Christians can (sometimes) use honestly involves the social and community-building functions of church affiliation. If someone was really intensely involved in their church, leaving it can feel like they’ve severed their entire sense of belonging and community! But even that claim is constantly Read more
Evangelicals have zero clue how to approach atheists. That’s just the facts, ma’am. Last time we met up, we talked about evangelicals’ weird redefinitions of atheism. With those redefinitions, they create a strawman caricature of atheists, which they have a much easier time dismantling and defeating. Today, I want to Read more
Years ago in the 2000s and 2010s, evangelicals tangled with atheists all the time. This squabbling formed part of what we now call internet blood sports. Nowadays, though, the landscape of the Christ-o-sphere looks very different. Out-and-out squabbling and entanglement aren’t as popular as they once were. Gen Z and Read more
A recent Barna survey shows churches having trouble finding pastors: first, because there are simply fewer Christians in each successive age cohort, and second, because the young adults who still affiliate with Christianity are seldom doctrinally pure enough for their elders.
In the book Before You Lose Your Mind, various progressive Christians—many exvangelical as well—discuss their deconstructions. Though written in very lofty language indeed, they all talk about feeling a deep, enormous sense of love after deconstruction. One writer in particular, Jason Elam, contributed such an interesting chapter that I had to Read more
Earlier today, I got a good laugh out of this post about evangelism from Relevant (a website/magazine site aimed squarely at Millennials). In it, Richard Coekin pretends to ask why that site’s readers are “so bad at evangelism.” The answers he offers for his strawman questions reveal that evangelicals aren’t Read more
Scholars have long known that conservative politics and media distort and mischaracterize reality. This distorted reality insulates right-wing media consumers from contradictions and challenges to their beliefs. As a means to power, conservative politicians see this as a feature, not a bug.