‘Everyone needs Jesus’: When Southern Baptists misspell recruitment

In a recent Baptist Press opinion post (archive), a Southern Baptist asserts the absolute necessity of his tribe’s product—but he keeps misspelling the name of it as ‘Jesus’ and other similarly-beloved evangelical buzzwords. This post illustrates a singular truth about his end of Christianity: Southern Baptists wouldn’t be able to talk or write at all if they couldn’t use Christianese! This jargon permeates their entire community and worldview. With it, they can obscure their real meanings and intentions. And from there, they can continue raking in money to support what they’re really doing. Let’s dive into a Christianese-loaded post from an evangelical leader whose ambitions are very, very earthly. MINOR CORRECTION: This post mentions the SBC squeaking out of a federal investigation. In fact, Jonathan Howe misspoke. A Baptist Press article the next day revealed that the Department of Justice is still investigating something or other. (This post originally went live on Patreon on 3/7/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there as well and is publicly available!)

SITREP: A Southern Baptist C-list leader writes a post about recruitment

Recently, Tim Dowdy wrote a post over at Baptist Press. He’s the vice-president of evangelism over at the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) North American Missionary Board (NAMB). NAMB is the skeevy kid brother of their far more illustrious—and less scandal-ridden—International Mission Board (IMB). And yes, their acronym is beyond cringe. Dowdy titled his post “Three upcoming opportunities for a special focus on evangelism” (archive). Ooh! Special opportunities! What could they possibly be? Oh wait, they’re for evangelism. Cancel the party, because that’s just Christianese for recruitment. Naturally, as someone whose job focuses on recruitment within an organization tasked with recruitment that operates in one of the least interested parts of the world, Dowdy wants to encourage more of it from Southern Baptists. These three “upcoming opportunities” are:

• Personal Evangelism Commitment Day on March 24, when Southern Baptists will be guilted and shamed into promising they’ll totally try really, really hard to recruit someone
• Easter Sunday on March 31, when Southern Baptists will be guilted and shamed into inviting normies to their special Zombie Jesus Day celebrations—whereupon the flocks will try their hardest to recruit them
• Baptism Sunday on April 7, when Southern Baptists will be guilted and shamed into finding someone—anyone—to dunk as a sign of recruitment success; see also Dowdy’s recommended hashtag #fillthetank, which refers to pastors making sure their baptismal tubs are full for once

Of course, Dowdy makes sure Southern Baptists know that NAMB stands at the ready to help. They’ll help by selling the flocks products they promise will make these three “upcoming opportunities” a roaring success. For example, their “3 Circles Evangelism Kit” (archive) costs USD$35 and contains everything a reluctant salesperson needs to get out there and SELL SELL SELL WITHOUT MERCY. With 13M members in the denomination still, I’m sure at least a few will pick this up in (vain) hopes of increasing their chances of recruiting normies to their denomination.

Hiding the bleak truth behind Jesus slogans

Amid Dowdy’s relentless Christianese, I found myself interested in how he hides his real goals behind evangelical jargon. In his post, he uses talking points and catchphrases that weren’t really true even when I myself was evangelical in the 1980s-1990s! Let’s go through them: First, Dowdy tells readers that ‘Everyone needs Jesus.’ Yeah, evangelicals thought that back in the mid-1980s, too. When I was evangelical myself, I heard it all the time. In a hard-sales environment like evangelicalism, salespeople never allow customers to reject their product. Alas, back then I also saw how untrue this talking point really is. No matter how often evangelicals told normies they ‘needed Jesus,’ normies always seemed unfazed by this information. The only people I saw it work on were people who had emotional issues that pushed them to seek attention and drama, or people with a very poorly-developed sense of identity. (Guess which of these I suffered from as a teenager. If you said porque no los dos?, you win!) Then, Dowdy advises evangelicals of the necessity of ‘sharing the Gospel.’ This just means making sales pitches to recruit people. That is all that it means. By the Gospel, they mean their general recruitment spiel: Join our churches and obey our leaders, or else our imaginary wizard-friend will set your ghost on fire forever after you die. And finally, to send his 1-2-3 punch right into the sky, Dowdy laments the ‘estimated 281 million lost people just in North America.’ Lost people is Christianese for people who have not been recruited, but it especially means people who have rejected evangelicals’ recruitment attempts. This group includes not only atheists and Nones (none-of-the-above folks who are unaffiliated with any religion), but also non-evangelical Christians. Evangelicals consider a progressive Christian to be just as “lost” as a lifelong atheist. Naturally, they also believe that their imaginary wizard-friend will set the ghosts of “lost” people on fire forever after they die.

Recruitment has nothing to do with Jesus

The product that Southern Baptists sell is not Jesus. It’s not even faith in Jesus. They call it Jesus, but it’s really active membership in the salesperson’s church or denomination. Jesus does not pay a church’s bills. Its recruits and members do. Nor will Jesus purchase any of these multi-level marketing-looking guides that NAMB has created. In fact, Jesus doesn’t do much at all nowadays—for some strange reason. That’s not a bad thing, though, at least in terms of Southern Baptists’ recruitment efforts. They need real people to warm church pews with their butts and fill tithe envelopes—and recruit others in turn to do the same. To get evangelicals recruiting, they must buy into the necessity of it. They must also be taught to view it as divinely-blessed. That’s where Christianese comes in for Tim Dowdy and his like-minded Southern Baptist leaders. Even when I was evangelical, I noticed that some people were vastly better at recruitment than others. For example, I sucked at it. I wasn’t exceptionally light on my feet verbally, and I resented using what I knew were hard-sales techniques to save souls. It seemed distinctly un-ethereal to me. But at the same time, other evangelicals plunged right into the mission field (that’s Christianese for a target-rich environment) using these same techniques. My then-boyfriend and later husband Biff was one of those. He didn’t care what finally recruited someone, as long as they got recruited. Even if he had to lie or break rules and social norms, he would do it. One might even say he was evangelical in the first place because he got to do that stuff! And perhaps, so were the others I saw who were like him. I see echoes of Biff’s sentiments in modern-day evangelicals all the time. Their recruitment approach doesn’t vary at all from the hard-sales techniques used by an Amway guy who’s panicking about the ongoing disintegration of his downline. (Amway recruiters, it must be noted, used to use a similar “circles” diagram [archive] to bamboozle potential recruits. They still might use it, for all I know. For some reason, I guess authoritarians’ minds just turn off when they see circles drawn in front of them.)

The problem with recruiting behind a Jesus smokescreen

But if Southern Baptist leaders tell the flocks to “go recruit new people to our church” instead, that sounds distinctly un-ethereal as well. What they prefer is hiding behind Christianese to persuade marks that Jesus totally exists and will totally set their ghosts on fire after they die if they disobey him, and then to persuade the marks that they will only escape the ghost-on-fire-forever fate if they join an SBC church and obey its leaders. As a result, Southern Baptists must make two recruitment pitches, one after the other. First, the salesperson must successfully persuade a normie of the necessity of Jesusing with circles and hard-sales techniques. Then, they need to convince that normie to purchase and start using their actual product: active membership in their church. It does the recruiter no good at all if the mark joins a progressive church or none at all. That won’t help their churches survive. That’s why I’ve heard evangelicals cry out sometimes: They joined the wrong church! And they’re right to be upset. They sold Jesus to that recruit, obscuring their real product. And the recruit bought a competing group’s product instead. Whoopsie doodle! Back in the 1980s in Houston, I saw Wiccans getting similarly upset about newcomers to their faith who decided to practice Wicca without a coven. But at least they didn’t think the Triple Goddess was going to set these solitary Wiccans’ ghosts on fire forever after they died.

Convincing normies they have a need for Jesus when they don’t see any need for him at all

Evangelicals tell themselves and each other a lot of lies. One of the biggest lies they tell is the necessity of ‘Jesus’ in people’s lives. Without a Jesus at the center of their religion making their claims work, what they call ‘Jesus’ is really just their Jesusing. It’s practicing various devotions, affirming various tribalistic beliefs, and living a particular lifestyle in the company of the tribe. In essence, what evangelicals actually do to demonstrate their beliefs isn’t much different from what a K-Pop fandom community does, right down to the infighting and constant dramas—but with way less sexual abuse, I’ve noticed. So this supposed need for Jesus is really a need to express Jesusing within a group. As I mentioned, even when I was evangelical, I noticed that most people didn’t seem to feel any need for Jesus at all. If I tried to tell them they really did too need Jesus, as the first part of the classic evangelical recruitment approach, they denied it. My churchmates all thought these denials were lies. They thought normies were lying about not needing Jesus. No, they totally did too need Jesus; they just couldn’t face that fact because [insert ridiculous cope reason here, like “they just wanna sin” or the hilariously un-self-aware “they hate real accountability”]. Alas for the recruiters, normies have never felt any obligation to play along with this manipulation. Evangelicals play these presumptuous games for their own benefit and nobody else’s. After the normies get exasperated and leave the gaming table, evangelicals can point after them and marvel: See? That’s what they do! The poor things need Jesus and don’t even know it!

This manipulation has nothing to do with Jesus

This blithe rewriting of other people’s decisions and motivations has been going on for a long time in evangelicalism. In the 1870s, Charles Spurgeon was doing the same exact thing (archive). That’s when this famous evangelical leader delivered a sermon called “The Great Jail, and How to Get Out of It.” He liked this analogy a lot (archive). I’ve even read book-length bad evangelical metaphors along the same lines. If you can’t tell from Spurgeon’s sermon title, in it he informs listeners/readers that all the “lost” people in the universe live in a packed prison. But see, they don’t realize it! And they won’t ever realize it—until some thoughtful evangelical recruiter happens along to tell them so. Even then, some prisoners will insist on remaining in the prison. They’ll even get angry with the evangelicals seeking to liberate them from it. Evangelicals can’t get distracted or discouraged by normie anger and annoyance. They must keep insisting that the normies are in a prison and that only their product Jesus can free them from it. The problem that’s always plagued aspiring evangelical recruiters is that the marks really don’t perceive this jail at all. They can perceive neither its walls, nor its locked doors, nor its cells, nor its wardens. Evangelicals face the same problem when trying to convince their marks that, say, an oncoming bus is hurtling right toward them, or that the plane they’re riding in is about to crash. Without some outward sign of the situation, it’s just a scary story evangelicals tell to more easily bypass the marks’ usual thinking skills. That exact line of thinking is why evangelicals just love the movie version(s) of Left Behind. In fact, they were positive that this Rapture/Endtimes movie would be such a scary story that their marks would finally buy some product. To its makers’ credit, the movie was indeed a much more emotionally-manipulative experience than its book version. In turn, the book version of Left Behind was considerably more emotionally-manipulative than evangelicals’ usual sky-is-falling blog posts and sermons. All of it’s probably better at manipulating marks than anything on NAMB’s recruitment-assistance page. Evangelicals can’t offer anyone a good reason to believe their claims. So they go for broke on manipulation. They always have.

The need for laypeople to recruit has never been greater for evangelical leaders

Once someone gets bamboozled enough to buy an evangelical recruiter’s product, that’s when the sale concludes. However, that new recruit must continue to actively participate in their new church, financially support it, and obey its pastor(s). If they stop doing any of that, that’s money no longer flowing to their church. And in the case of the SBC, it’s also money no longer flowing to their state-level conventions, and from there no longer flowing to the denomination-wide efforts the SBC operates. What, you expect Jesus to keep his own churches running? Ain’t never gonna happen. I bring this up because the SBC took some major financial hits over their sex abuse crisis. Recently, they squeaked out of a federal investigation into their bungling of it (archive). Who even knows how that happened, considering the apparent collusion and complicity we’ve seen going straight to the top levels of leadership there. But this squeakery came at an astronomical price tag, as their Executive Committee’s interim leader, Jonathan Howe, revealed:

In September 2023, EC interim President/CEO Jonathan Howe told trustees the EC’s reserves have been reduced from $13 million to just over $4 million in the past two years. “Nothing has been more humbling at the Executive Committee in recent years than our financial position.”

Really, I’d have expected the investigation to be more expensive than that. They have hardly even begun to address what that investigation revealed, but the investigation alone seems extensive enough to justify a $9M price tag. Money isn’t a limitless resource for evangelicals. Similarly, the billion dollars evangelicals are spending on their sinister-seeming marketing campaign “He Gets Us” is money they can’t use to buy Republican pandering or influence legislatures around the world. What they spend on scandals and wishy-washy marketing is also money they cannot use for direct recruitment. That’s why they need the flocks to get up off their church pews and SELL SELL SELL WITHOUT MERCY. They can’t afford to pay professionals to do this recruiting. So now it’s up to the Junior Varsity team to do it for free. Well, at least to do it for free after buying some SBC-produced strategy kits. And tithing. And giving that visiting minister a love offering (archive), and and and…

If Jesus were real and people really needed him as their god, recruiters wouldn’t need all this manipulation

When I see evangelical leaders like Tim Dowdy pushing the flocks to do more recruitment, it just reminds me that evangelicals do not and have never had anything really divine in their religion. I would never expect to see this level of emotional manipulation otherwise. They wouldn’t need it. They’d just need to tell people what their god and religion are all about, then show evidence for their claims. Back when I was pagan, I accidentally turned more people on to Greek reconstructionist paganism than I ever recruited as a Pentecostal, and easily more than Biff ever did. Yes, you heard me: The star evangelist in my old evangelical peer group won fewer recruits after many years of prolonged, concerted emotional manipulation than I did by just mentioning my faith system in the space of about a year. For that matter, the person who turned me on to it only mentioned it as well. Like I saw others do later, I jumped on that mention: “Wait, what now? People really do worship Artemis? How does that work? How do I find them?” But then again, Greek pagans don’t generally try to claim that Apollo’s demigod son Asclepius can cure cancer, or that Zeus stands ready to listen to his followers’ prayers and rearrange the universe at their demand. Nor do Greek pagans threaten a ghost-on-fire-forever fate for those who don’t join up. They don’t tend to think about the afterlife much, which was mind-blowing to me to learn at the time. I wish evangelicals could see how ridiculous they look using hard-sales techniques in lieu of facts. But they’re also working against the poor quality of their church communities. Even barring the entire false-claims problem, if those communities were worth joining on their own, then no evangelical recruiter would ever need to do more than announce its existence. Evangelical manipulation makes up for a wealth of systemic and group problems that none of them can ever solve. It also demonstrates that nobody really needs what they’re calling ‘Jesus.’ If evangelicals stopped recruiting tomorrow, we’d soon see just how much anyone needs their imaginary friend. NEXT UP: Let’s explore the 3 Circles evangelism diagram! I never used this as a Pentecostal, and I never saw any evangelicals using it either. It’s all new to me, but you know me: I do love diagrams. So we’ll see what it’s all about!

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