Last time we met up, I briefly mentioned an instance of truly predatory evangelism. Someone on the r/TrueChristian subreddit had tangled with what sounds like the slimiest evangelist in a pack of overqualified contenders. And our OP still has no idea in the world why this slimy recruiter is acting Read more…
It’s not a new book, but that’s okay. Its advice hasn’t gotten old yet.
Confirmation bias is a helluva drug.
‘Before You Lose Your Faith’ keeps pushing a vision of community that categorically does not exist and can’t ever exist in their flavor of Christianity.
Something in Rachel Gilson’s childhood led her straight to the worst, cruelest, most evil and inhuman flavor of Christianity in the entire shit-tastic Christian rainbow. Through sheer necessity, she’s figured out a way to reframe her tribe’s infamous bigotry-for-Jesus. But it doesn’t have to fool anybody else, and I don’t think it even fools her at times.
That tribe cannot and will not change its collective opinions about marriage and family. That’s why it’s so much easier for its Mark Ballenger types to dump all this emotional ego-searching on the people who can’t fit into that life script.
A long time ago, I talked about the way that evangelicals redefine common words. Their redefinition of love figured prominently on that list. That was nearly ten years ago. And today, I see that they’re still redefining that word.
Authoritarians hate a lot of people. But they hate apostates far more than anybody else. An apostate is a threat and a danger, one which must be eliminated immediately and with as much force as can be mustered.
The reason evangelicals invented complementarianism was to win a denominational slapfight. That’s it. The architects of it just wanted to demolish feminism. So they simply did not care how complementarianism would play out in the everyday lives of their increasingly-authoritarian flocks.
Studies have repeatedly shown that when we have an emotional feeling about a claim, we tend to react to it way differently than if it’s neutral for us. In particular, if the claim challenges our worldview or makes us feel criticized or less-than, we tend to reject it out of hand no matter how much evidence it has to support itself. It’s really hard for us to engage with an idea that makes us feel that way, and even harder for us to change our mind about it.