If you ever found yourself teetering on the fence about this religion, then this post is for you–because that problem and Thom Rainer’s solutions to it represent exactly why many thousands of people every day reject it, and also why they should.
This type of business, church revitalization, might well be one of post-Christian America’s most lucrative cottage industries. Today, I’ll show you what revitalization is–and why it’ll fail just like everything else Christians do to try to regain their onetime cultural dominance.
Here, we continue our examination of Frank Peretti’s somehow-bestselling fantasy novel This Present Darkness. In Chapter 5, we discover some startling facts about angels. Today, Lord Snow Presides over an ethnography that Christian culture warriors never forgot.
Thom Rainer just retired from LifeWay. Immediately afterward, he plunged full-time into his new old hustle. That hustle will benefit exactly one person: himself. I’ll show you what he’s up to and why it won’t help Christianity at all–and why he probably won’t care either way.
We’ve talked about all kinds of stuff about the novel and its historical context. Today, we examine the book’s setting: the tiny town of Ashton. As with the book’s other elements, Peretti chose this one–and then set it in undeniable decline–for a reason. And we can tell what that reason was.
Written at the height of the Satanic Panic back in the 1980s, this novel provides us a glimpse into the mindset of today’s Christian culture warriors. It captures the forces that created those culture warriors. Now, we turn our gaze to the stereotypes in the book that concern women. Today, Lord Snow Presides over a rainbow of mischaracterizations and strawmen–er, strawwomen!
From all the Daddy God blathering to the Heavenly Father crowd, Christians can’t resist comparing their imaginary friend to a real live father. And more than that, in their viewpoint, he’s not just exactly like a real live father–he’s better than any human father could ever be. Today, let me show you why that idea is both nonsensical and insulting to decent fathers everywhere.
In this installment, we discover Magical Christian Jesus Powers that only TRUE CHRISTIANS™ can possess–and the mystical evil heathen powers deployed in turn by the Cabal of Satanic Wiccans (or Wiccan Satanists, Whatevs) (CSWWSW). Today, Lord Snow Presides over a pair of confrontations that reveal the insecurities–and the most feverish fantasies–of the Christians who loved this book.
This poorly-written book helped elevate the Satanic Panic in Christian imaginations–and shaped their conceptualization of spiritual warfare for many decades to come. It did even more than that, though! Today, Lord Snow Presides over the way that This Present Darkness drew battle lines for culture warriors through the manipulation of their persecution fantasies.
Today, I offer up a recent blog post from none other than Thom Rainer, one of the biggest names of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). He wrote about how pastors should handle anonymous complaints. And y’all, his post reveals one of the most serious disconnects in the minds of authoritarian Christian leaders–and maybe even gives us a hint about why their churches have been doing so poorly for so long.