One of the biggest markers of modern Christianity–and one of the reasons it is eventually going to fall apart–is that its adherents are incapable of testing and evaluating their ideas in a credible way, which leads them to do really harmful things to themselves and others as they flail around with their magical thinking in hopes of fixing problems that magical thinking just can’t fix.
We are in the midst of a vast change in morality that is every bit as epochal as the Great Vowel Shift that brought us modern English pronunciation. This Great Morality Shift is sweeping us into a new era of Christianity, defining its adherents’ behavior and goals for years to come. Like most huge changes, though, this is one that is difficult to see while it’s happening. It took me a while to notice it myself. But now I see clear indications of where the religion is heading. I’ll show you one of the biggest indications of that change here today.
I’ve been noticing for some time that Christians’ morality appears to be shifting–very subtly, but it definitely is. The Christianity I behold today sometimes seems like it has only its name in common with what I experienced as a young person. I’m seeing a lot of Christian leaders remarking upon a new study that’s come out about morality, but they’re getting something very wrong about that study.
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the strange shift in right-wing Christians’ morality over the last ten years. As I read, I found myself wondering how that shift has applied in realtime to the various Christian leaders who’ve been caught misbehaving. I began to look for information about what they’ve been doing since their various downfalls, and began noticing a trend. See if you can see it too.
Well, gang, it’s the beginning of a new year–which obviously means that all the Christian charlatans are coming out of the woodwork with their new crop of false prophecies! But wait, they haven’t even looked at their 2016 prophecies yet to see how accurate they were! Fine, fine–we’ll do that for them today, and I’ll even show you why Christians of a certain type really get into prophecy.
I caught this little local news snippet yesterday and thought it was interesting–both for what it says, and what it doesn’t say. It’s about a Creationist coming to a local church in that area to give a lecture about his branch of fundagelical pseudoscience. What this church doesn’t realize is that their guest speaker is part of the reason for their religion’s dwindling numbers, relevance, and credibility.
Last time, I showed you that a person can have love, or they can have culture wars–but they can’t have both. Unfortunately, a huge number of Christians want both. Such people truly believe that they can totally be loving while they try to rip other folks’ lives apart, rob them of their rights, and discriminate against them–as long as they do it all with a big ole Jesus smile on their faces! But something is changing in the world of religion, and we saw evidence of that coming change this very month. It has to do with Christians’ tendency toward criticism avoidance.
Sometimes it’s downright painful to see a Christian skate right up to the edge of understanding and then skitter and windmill away from it again. Richard Krejcir has managed that stunt in a post he wrote for an evangelical church leadership site, reminding me yet again that culture-war-loving Christians really don’t have a good solution for their current membership crisis.
Do more of that, and harder. It’s a mantra by now. It hasn’t actually worked yet, but it’s literally all the religion’s leaders have in their toolbox for coping with a crisis that nobody–most especially themselves–ever saw coming.
One of the most fascinating bits of fallout from the ongoing secularization of America is that we’re starting to ask some questions now that would have been completely unthinkable 20 or 25 years ago. One of the most provocative of those questions centers on whether or not we should start taxing churches and making them responsible for all of their own activities and upkeep. What would have been shocking and quickly rejected out of hand is now getting some serious attention from all kinds of places!