An April headline announced that ‘Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers.” After many years of right-wing Christian men’s complaints about the ‘feminization’ of Christianity, one would think they’d be happy to hear this news. After all, that means their pastors now have a lot more time to cater Read more
On June 7th, Paul Pressler died (archive). For many decades, he’d functioned as the Kingmaker of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). But he died in near-obscurity. Nobody quite seemed sure of what to do about his so-called legacy: the Conservative Resurgence of the SBC that turned it forevermore ultraconservative. You Read more
Paul Pressler, possibly the most influential evangelical in modern times, recently died. As evangelicals are wont to do when their leaders die, they are already hard at work analyzing his legacy. Well, sort of. One official Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) site seems eager to forget he ever existed. But they Read more
It isn’t easy to assess miracles when someone lives in what Carl Sagan once called a demon-haunted world. That kind of world operates with way different rules than our real one does. However, it’s nice to see some Christians trying to analyze miracles for divine meddling. Today, let’s see how Read more
The 2024 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), or #SBC24, just ended. Its attendees, called messengers, had a full plate this year: drilling down harder on the red herring of fetal personhood, condemning churches that dare to hire women as pastors, and generally posturing at each other about Read more
The 2024 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) looms right around the corner. Officially, it begins tomorrow. However, SBC leaders have been busy setting the stage for it for the past week. The day beforehand, as well, Southern Baptists hold a very special magic ritual. In Christianese, they Read more
Yet again, Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leaders have revealed that with their sex abuse crisis, the rot goes all the way down to the roots and all way up the ladder of power. Recently, federal prosecutors discovered that several SBC seminary leaders deliberately concealed information about one of their students Read more
Recently, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) released a long report that functions as a referendum on their Conservative Resurgence. Most SBC-watchers already knew it was a failure, but now it’s official knowledge. Here’s why it was a slap in the face to that hijacking movement—along with some speculation about why Read more
Church hospitality is usually another way of saying being nice to church visitors. And for some reason, evangelicals fall down hard at doing this one simple thing. Sure, they know they’re supposed to be nice to their own members and to the visitors who show up. But there’s a big Read more
Evangelicals like to pretend that evangelism is just a formality they perform. They think their god strong-arms people into belief, merely utilizing the evangelist as a conduit. But nothing could be further from the truth, as one denomination reveals in a lengthy writeup. Southern Baptists talk a big game about Read more