Spotted recently: This August 27th think piece in The Economist about how AI is changing religious believers and what religious leaders think of that shift—and how they want to control it. It’s an incredible self-own in a number of ways on their part. They know they can’t defeat it, so Read more
There’s a new sex abuse database on the block: Protestant Accountability. As the name suggests, it gathers and compiles information about any Protestant minister accused of sex abuse or the shielding of sex abusers. Especially now that the biggest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), has apparently decided to Read more
Years ago, John Loftus shared his groundbreaking idea, the Outsider Test for Faith. The Outsider Test for Faith asks religious people to consider their own religion as if they were outsiders to it—in effect, testing it the same way they would all those others that they already think are untrue Read more
For years now, evangelicals have not been keeping up appearances with their prophecies. Gone are the exciting days when a big-name pastor could mangle basic astronomy and bellow about the SUPER BLOOD WOLF MOON, or play Bible anagrams to predict the RAPTURE for sure this time. Their predictions for 2025 Read more
Christians nearly universally believe that their god never lies to them. He only tells them the absolute truth. In fact, he’s compelled by his nature to tell only the truth. But if he never lies to them, then they have a lot of hand-waving to do to rationalize away the Read more
America is in a weird space these days, in terms of religion. By now, the cultural and membership decline of Christianity in America has lasted so long that younger Christians can’t remember a time when their religion wasn’t in decline. Dreams of revival have become ever more important to their Read more
Recently, people have been talking about evangelism in crowded spaces with no way to exit—evangelism to captive audiences, in other words. The evangelists in question do it on purpose, of course. They even gloat about how much they love the fact that nobody can leave the venue. But their gloating Read more
Hi friends! I’m still struggling with health issues, but I wanted to share something with you that made me smile today. I’m researching a post about evangelists looking for captive audiences, and thought of something a community member said the other day: If someone tried to preach at him on Read more
In the past, we’ve talked about evangelicals’ modern fixation on inerrancy—the doctrinal belief in the Bible as a divinely-ghostwritten, error-free, literally-true document. We’ve even talked about how inerrancy functions as the ultimate high-control authority source for dysfunctional hardline groups. But today, I want to show you why believers in inerrancy Read more
As we wrap up our look at Alpha Course, one fact stands out above all others: This isn’t a very persuasive series. We’ll bring everything home now by summarizing the entire thing, then evaluate it for effectiveness. (This post first went live on Patreon on 7/28/2026. Please support my work—see Read more