Last year we covered the scandal erupting around the Duggar family when eldest son Josh turned out to be a child sex abuser. Things aren’t getting much better for the parents or their son–but in a way, these developments are kinda good news for the rest of us.
People in thrall to a broken system often believe that if they follow the system’s rules, they’ll be safe from victimization. You’ve likely heard the rationalizations: if you don’t want trouble, then simply show respect to those in authority. Don’t cause waves and you won’t go aground on rocks. Those people who were hurt must have done something wrong, but if you don’t do anything wrong then you’re safe.
Australia, like most countries do, holds a census every so often to figure out how their population is changing over time. One of their census questions asks about respondents’ religious affiliation. And that is the beginning of a story that seems too weird to be true–a story that tells us one reason why the concept of church and state separation is so important.
Today I’ll show you some of the things that particular bunch of Christians do that drive home their awfulness. And I don’t mean the low-hanging fruit like “bless your heart,” gloating about hell, or the eternally-creeptastic “Daddy God” blithering. Rather, I mean the more subtle nastiness that they think is terribly clever but actually backfires on them–the stuff that totally mortifies their kinder, more compassionate Christian brethren (who are a lot more like us than they may realize).
Christians’ bigotry has cost them countless adherents as well–adherents who take with them when they leave an inestimable amount of money, time, and support. Today I want to set our phasers to “deep-fat fry” and show you exactly why their newest tactic regarding LGBTQ outreach is nothing but a smokescreen meant to disguise how unpersuasive their essential message is.
Josh Harris is one of the scions of the homeschooling and courtship fringes of the Christian Patriarchy movement. He wrote one of the single most destructive books ever published on the topic of evangelical Christian relationships. And he’s got an announcement.
In his book People to Be Loved, Preston Sprinkle presents two-and-a-half options for gay people. Today we’ll be talking about one of those options. Well, half of one, anyway. And we’ll be debunking it hopefully well enough for even die-hard fundagelicals to understand why people outside their bubble condemn it so unequivocally.
We’ve been talking lately about how, when Christians write about non-Christians, they often end up with a picture that doesn’t look terribly familiar to us–but which looks remarkably like the image of us that Christian culture paints. Today I want to dissect that picture.
Using very positive language to describe a very negative situation or feeling is a tactic at least as old as Christianity itself. People who have power use this sort of language to make the powerless folks they (want to) control more comfortable with being controlled–and to sell a product that nobody in their right mind would ever want to buy if its nature were accurately described. It is at its heart a very, very Christian form of dishonesty.
I’m not sure it’s ever a great week to be a fundagelical bigot-for-Jesus lately, but this has been a particularly bad week for that crowd.