When an abusive evangelical pastor, Christian Watts, tried to downplay his grooming of a teenager decades earlier, he described his predation as ‘my past sin.’ That’s a time-honored tactic for people caught in his exact circumstances. Let’s take a closer look at this tactic to see why it works so well in evangelical culture.
This time around, evangelical leaders want Gen Z evangelicals to do a lot of friendship evangelism. But they also want to train older evangelists in how to better bamboozle young adults.
In a lot of ways, this chapter really exemplifies evangelicals’ inability to engage meaningfully with the dealbreaking flaws in their flavor of Christianity—like the Bible’s amazing ability to twist and contort to fully support any opinion that any Christian could ever possibly have.
To save his job, Christian Watts clung hard to a time-tested, long-honored evangelical get-out-of-scandal-free card: calling upon Christianese to escape the writing on his wall.
Something in Rachel Gilson’s childhood led her straight to the worst, cruelest, most evil and inhuman flavor of Christianity in the entire shit-tastic Christian rainbow. Through sheer necessity, she’s figured out a way to reframe her tribe’s infamous bigotry-for-Jesus. But it doesn’t have to fool anybody else, and I don’t think it even fools her at times.
Let’s check out yet another pair of Rapture hucksters today, the howlingly self-described ‘Prophecy Pros,’ and see how they build upon evangelicals’ existing folk-beliefs about the end of the world.
Recent stories indicate that the evangelical-backed He Gets Us campaign is still going strong. But the evangelicals responding to it have missed an important point that destroys whatever goodwill they might be fostering through their endless billboards and carefully-placed ads: their god does not have a brand, but his followers Read more
The writers offer the hands-down dumbest reasons imaginable to leave evangelicalism. And then, having done that, they offer the dumbest reason imaginable to resolve this supposedly-drastic problem.
This book has been unparalleled entertainment for me ever since I started it. But this chapter in particular felt like revisiting a great 80s comedy film.
Last week, we talked about the Christians who do their best to avoid their rightful burden of proof. In a way, though, that strategy might be better than the one we’re talking about today. When Christians actually try to pony up support for their claims, we can see just how Read more