In the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), their leaders depend upon the flocks to donate lots of money to their Cooperative Program. Somehow, in the past decade those flocks have managed to just about maintain their level of giving despite their overall numbers plummeting. I never thought that level of giving Read more
By its very nature, evangelism is confrontational. It almost can’t be anything else. But in recent years, evangelicals have been questioning why it has to be that way. Some of them even offer other methods to let the more shy and awkward sheep in the fold ways to meet their Read more
Over the years, I’ve heard many, many accusations about the causes of my deconversion. It could practically be a religious genre by now: Cold-reading attempts to guess strangers’ motivations regarding religious choices. But only one thing actually caused my deconversion. Strangely, Christians never light upon that one. Today, I’ll share Read more
Well, everyone, I’ve finally found the definitive, surreally-otherworldly evangelical narrative about evangelism. We can stop looking. I’ve found it. I’ve found the worst dialogue ever constructed by an evangelical. It’s so weird that I half-suspect that it might be some Poe’s Law invention meant to make evangelicals look insectoid space Read more
In this blog’s first year, I spent a while outlining all the different elements that went into my deconversion. I haven’t formally talked much about it since. Now, here, I want to share my story with you. Today, let me show you how—and maybe importantly why—I deconverted from Christianity. (This Read more
Not long ago, I ran into an article about Dean Inserra, a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pastor, and his thoughts about evangelism. Specifically, Inserra identified one group of people who were virtually impossible to convert to his brand of tribalistic white evangelicalism: “Good people.” In his opinion, “good people” resisted Read more
A 2022 seminary article about a pastor’s evangelism exhortation got me thinking about how evangelicals relate to other evangelicals who don’t believe what they do. More specifically, I wondered how feasible his exhortation is nowadays. The pastor, Dean Inserra, wanted his audience of seminary students to concentrate their evangelism on Read more
For years, we’ve had some good laughs over evangelical leaders’ ongoing attempts to strong-arm their flocks into performing more evangelism. Basically, the flocks just don’t wanna. And nobody can make them, not even their dysfunctional-authoritarian leaders. It’s just so funny to me that evangelicals and their leaders have these farcical Read more
Recently, a rising star in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Matt Queen, fell to earth in the most singularly SBC way imaginable: By lying to the FBI about a sex assault that had occurred on the SBC seminary campus where he worked. After news of Queen’s guilty plea broke, one Read more
A few months ago, we talked about how Matt Queen and some of his seminary associates outright lied to the feds about a sex assault on their campus, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). I suppose nobody told these Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) guys that the FBI’s investigators have zero chill Read more