In a lot of ways, this research really asks about how American Christians engage with the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil asks how suffering can possibly exist in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-good, and all-loving god. It shouldn’t exist at all, and yet here we are, in a world full of suffering.
The natural inclinations of awful people tend to be awful. And such people can make an innocent visit to a neighborhood church into a horror story those guests will remember for years.
The evangelicals I knew back then thought fundamentalists were dangerous zealots and wingnuts who’d missed the entire point of Christianity in their mad dash to theological super-correctness. Meanwhile, fundamentalists thought evangelicals were lukewarm weaklings who couldn’t handle the real deal of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ — and thus would fold and accept the Mark of the Beast the moment the Endtimes began in earnest.
Toxic Christians have a lot of similar methods of easing their consciences and keeping themselves feeling smugly superior to others. In a lot of ways, we could even call their self-soothing methods substitutionary atonement for their real-life behavior. Today, let me show you what I mean.
Still, 53 recruits is 53 recruits. Who else is having this kind of success in the SBC right now? Almost nobody, that’s who. J.D. Greear coasted on similar success straight to the SBC’s presidency. I can well imagine Jordan Easley doing the same thing in a few years.
Something has to give, when it comes to panicking businesses in decline. They must pick something to cherish and do it right. Sometimes that’ll mean forging ahead with a new customer base they can actually please and which can actually support them as a business. Other times, it’ll mean taking extra-good care of their existing customers. And evangelicals haven’t yet figured out where to land there.
Ronnie Floyd tried his darndest, bless his li’l cotton socks, to pretend that the EC totally cared about the literal hundreds of victims that we knew about so far, thanks to secular journalists’ refusal to let the story die.
Next to the sheer white-knuckle excitement wingnuts feel at their faux-discoveries, how can charity, kindness, forgiveness, endurance of wrongs, and submission — which are, again, their god’s direct orders — compare? They just can’t.
By the time I joined evangelicalism (in the mid-1980s), I learned to feel downright guilty for not injecting enough Jesus-ification into my life. I couldn’t just read a fantasy novel for the sake of it, go to a movie, or enjoy music that didn’t mention Jesus even once.
Today, let’s meet the toxic Christians who consider their loss of dominance to be literally a fate worse than death.