Christian leaders themselves can spin-doctor the latest bad news as much as they like (and oh, they have been!), but reality is unfolding in their ranks whether they like it or not. Their flocks don’t have the luxury of denial. They’ve had to come up with strategies for dealing with the new reality of Christianity’s demographic shift, most of it in direct defiance of their leaders’ demands.
The Public Religion Research Institute just released a new study they completed about Christianity in America. It is eye-opening and genuinely shocking, and not only for the reasons that Christians are seeing. There are some hidden messages in this study that they’re not seeing, encoded thuds of Moria drums that foretell a catastrophe for the religion that is coming–and quickly.
Located on a site called Bible Reasons and called “25 Reasons Why The World Hates Christians And Christianity,” his screed didn’t exactly inspire me to trust its level of accuracy. Christians don’t tend to have a very firm grasp about how non-Christians see them and their religion. But it did provide some insight about just where right-wing Christians in particular are deceiving themselves.
You’re probably noticing a common thread running through the messages and media aimed at fundagelicals these days: this idea that they are in the very beginnings of a desperate and dire time of dreadful persecution. And we’re not talking about this persecution happening in some third-world theocracy, either, but right here in good ole Murrka! This fantasy American Christians have concocted has them teetering on the very threshold of the end of the world.
We might laugh about or mock Christians who have entirely too high an estimation of themselves or too dramatic or fictionalized an interpretation of their experiences, but the problem of inaccurate self-perception is real–and it doesn’t go away upon deconversion from religion.
This response is something I’m starting to call the Oncoming Bus Gambit. Chances are you’ve heard it many times yourself–it’s very common among Christians of an evangelistic bent, who employ it to rationalize their mistreatment of other people. And it fails just like all of their other rationalizations. Today I’ll show you what the Gambit is, how to spot its variations, why it fails, and how to defuse it.
The movie God’s Club hammers constantly at the idea that the fictional town of Echo Grove, Vermont is some bastion of godlessness. But where is it? And is this idea of godlessness equating to immorality correct?
With a national Presidential election looming ever closer for Americans, this question of why one of our political parties is so shot through with racism is starting to gain more prominence–as well it should.
It’s not uncommon to see Christians point to 1945-1960 (loosely, “the 1950s”) as some kind of Good Ole Days that were wrecked by mean ole liberals who hate fun. The mythology these Christians believe is that people were much happier back then and that society was much safer and more law-abiding because everyone “knew their place.” Such Christians feel that modern society is making people unhappy–and public spaces more unsafe–because now everything’s all jumbled up and confused. But one book puts the lie to that illusion.
One weird bit of right-wing fundagelical Christianity is their growing obsession with survivalist-style food hoarding. In this new trend, the worlds of apocalyptic fantasizing, awful food, eagerness to gloat, and sheer financial greed collide–and the results aren’t appetizing.