In all of Christianity, perhaps one of the funniest sights you’ll ever encounter is Christians accusing other Christians of following a counterfeit Jesus. It’s downright comical. But in its way, this much-beloved, near-eternal argument just marks one of Christianity’s biggest problems: There really is no objective way to establish which Jesus is the correct one.
Call it the Problem of Counterfeit Jesuses. Just make sure you capitalize that P, please, to mark just how impossible this one is to solve. Today, let’s dive into the newest accusation, see why no Christians can establish their flavor of Christianity as the only correct one, and explore why this is such a big problem for all of the flavors.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 3/14/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
Watch out! A counterfeit Jesus is on the loose!
Today’s story comes to us from a recent post over at Baptist Press. But really, it could come from any authoritarian flavor of Christianity. This is just the place I spotted it most recently. The post is titled:
WEEK OF PRAYER: The real Jesus in a city of counterfeits
Ruh-roh! That sounds serious. What’s happening here?
Underneath a photo of a storefront church, we get this caption:
There may be no more unexpected sight in downtown Provo, Utah, than Mosaic Church. Provo, population 130,000, is home to almost 400 Mormon congregations and, according to North American Mission Board church planting missionary David Gaskins, only five evangelical churches. “We knew when we came that planting a church here would be a tall order,” David says. “But we’re here because we love the Mormon people and want them to know the real Jesus.”
Ohh, okay. So these self-appointed TRUE CHRISTIANS™ are trying to run an evangelical church in possibly the most Mormon city in America. And they’re making their case by appealing to one of the most power-hungry and self-important impulses in the entire evangelical psyche: Insisting that their style of Jesusing is the correct one, while the Mormons’ style is all wrong.
How to tell a counterfeit Jesus: Happiness levels
Right out of the gate, church planter David Gaskins assures us that the well-manicured façade of Provo, Utah is just that:
“Our [town’s] nickname is Happy Valley. Every lawn is perfect. Every home is immaculate. But that’s the wild thing – Happy Valley is a sarcastic nickname because almost nobody is happy here.”
Gosh, that sounds terrible. Why are all these Mormons so unhappy in Provo?
“Their system of belief is essentially legalism on steroids,” David says. “They believe every single aspect of your life needs to be perfect before you can earn the love of God and that attitude of perfectionism influences everything here. [. . .] But behind all these people trying so hard to be perfect is pervasive lostness and sadness. This is a dark, dark city where the joy of the true Gospel is not present.”
Oh, okay. So it’s because Mormonism is legalistic, while evangelicalism is not legalistic at all. So TRUE CHRISTIANS™ might be messy inside and out, but you know their Jesus is the real deal because they’re just so happy!
Yes, TRUE CHRISTIANS™ are never, ever unhappy people. Their groups certainly aren’t hotbeds of misery, untreated mental illness, infighting, and control-lust. And they’re totally not hung up on LAW LAW LAW LAW LAW. Nope, not authoritarian at all.
In fact, TRUE CHRISTIANS™ agree: Any Christian who isn’t a member of their particular flavor—whatever it is—might think they’re happy, but they’re wrong. They’re fake happy.
Counterpoint: The absolute state of these folks
Evangelicals suffer from a lot of blind spots in their thinking, but none are as pernicious as their insistence that any fool can find happiness if they just follow the correct form of Jesusing. We see this delusion everywhere in the right-wing end of Christianity. Any time someone says they were miserable as a Christian, their misery will be blamed on incorrect Jesusing. Alas for these chirpy diagnosis-deciders, every single flavor of evangelicalism contains miserable people.
To be sure, some evangelicals exist happily within the very constricting world of evangelicalism. But most don’t. They learn very quickly to pretend they’re happy no matter how they really feel. In fact, their Dear Leaders coach them to do it.
They must, too. Because happiness figures so prominently with recruitment, unhappy evangelicals are a big problem. Unfortunately, they’re everywhere: in every church, in every denomination, at every level of power. They create church communities that are, as one Christian wrote in 2020, full of friendly people who never make actual friends.
As for façades, evangelicals have plenty of those, too. Since they can’t honestly reveal their true opinions and feelings, they must fake that stuff. Here’s one evangelical woman’s 2019 account of systemic and deeply disturbing abuse. Here’s another asking a poignant question: “Since when did pretending we are okay actually make us okay?” (Naturally, she suggests correct Jesusing as the key to real happiness.) And here’s someone on Quora who has spotted the deception.
So yes: No matter what flavor of Christianity someone thinks is the perfect, truest, bestest one, it will contain people faking all kinds of things to fit in, and it will contain miserable multitudes. Then, these miserable evangelicals take their hurt out on others.
How to tell a counterfeit Jesus: Followers are total meaniepies to apostates
Next, Gaskins tells us about how awful Mormons are to people who leave their ranks:
“When someone leaves the Mormon church here, it’s a really big deal,” David says. “It’s less about leaving a religion and more about leaving a community, and when you walk away from that community, you walk away from everything. We’ve had people get cut off from their family. We’ve had people lose their jobs. We’ve had people get kicked out of school. For me, it’s truly humbling. I’ve not lost half as much as some of the people at Mosaic have by coming to Christ.”
Man alive, you can just tell how superior Gaskins’ flavor of Christianity is to that ickie Mormonism. They never, ever kick their kids out for deconverting or cut ties with lifelong friends over it. They certainly don’t penalize apostates by getting them fired from their jobs or kicked out of school. And they don’t snidely gossip about them behind their backs or turn the apostates into sermon topics to warn the rest of the flocks against too much doubt.
No, that never happens in TRUE CHRISTIANITY™. TRUE CHRISTIANS™ are so amazingly loving and Jesusy that they can love their deconverted friends and family through anything. That’s how you can tell they’re the real deal, in fact!
Counterpoint: Nailed to the pew with fear
Amusingly, the guy in this Baptist Press post and the writer of the post itself are backhandedly praising evangelicalism for not being so cruel to apostates—while slamming Mormonism for retaliating viciously against theirs.
Yes, nowadays evangelicals aren’t as cruel. But they sure used to be. And they delighted in it.
In the 2010s, when the first big wave of deconversions hit evangelicalism, the penalties for leaving Christianity were intense and shocking. I’d deconverted long ago under circumstances that made leaving easier. For the most part, I had gotten over or around most of the worst fallout. I lost all of my friends, which most definitely wasn’t fun. But that was about it.
When I joined an ex-Christian forum in the early 2010s, I watched with horrified eyes as newer ex-Christians talked about what they faced in this newer, far more polarized age.
One man’s wife insta-dumped him when he told her he no longer believed, then made his life a living hell in the hopes it’d drive him back to faith. Another told her longtime husband that she wished he were alcoholic or physically abusive—as long as he was still Christian. A hairdresser in a small town talked about losing every single one of her evangelical customers—which had a dramatic effect on her income and livelihood. Multiple young adults talked about losing their college funds or having to leave home. A couple who deconverted together learned that their beloved former pastor attacked them behind their backs in a sermon right after they parted ways with their church.
Back then, shunning was the least that a deconverting evangelical could expect. Online, on older sites you can still see the echoes of apostates’ fear.
Things are different and considerably better now, of course. But the reason why they’re different and better is, itself, a slam on evangelical culture. Deconversion and her sister, deconstruction, are so common nowadays that evangelicals simply can’t retaliate effectively against any one target. In most areas, only the biggest names merit the tribe’s concentrated attention—as Beth Moore and others have discovered.
The extreme nature of Mormon shunning tends to be worse than anything evangelicals can usually muster, simply because Mormons tend to belong to tightly-knit, active, Mormon-dominated communities. When evangelicals belong to similar communities these days, they face the same backlash.
The new hotness flavor of Jesusing offers euphoria, but I wonder how long it can last
In the post, we get a few examples of just how overwhelmingly euphoric Gaskins’ new converts are about Jesusing. They sing very loudly, they seem very eager to learn about their new faith, and they’ve all come through the worst ostracization that Mormonism can offer to be there.
What happens in a couple of years, though, after that new relationship energy (NRE, a polyamory term) has died away?
Back when I was Pentecostal, I knew several people who converted into evangelicalism—and for that matter Pentecostalism—from extremely weird flavors of Christianity like Mormonism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They acted as David Gaskins describes for a while. Oh yeah, their sheer enthusiasm could have put lifelong Pentecostals to shame, had they any to spare.
But before too long, these converts got weird again. When someone seeks outside of themselves for what can only be found inside, eventually they realize it ain’t happening with their new thing. Once they do, they start resorting to whatever soothed them before their religious switch. To my knowledge, only one remained evangelical a few years later, and she might just have stayed because she still held out hopes of marrying an evangelical pastor. (She didn’t. I don’t think she’s still evangelical now.)
Hopefully, they eventually figure out to look inside for what they need. But if they don’t, they might just switch religions a few more times before giving up and finding something else they hope can feed them.
Accidentally revealing the truth about the counterfeit Jesus
Under one of the pictures in the post, we get this quote:
“I don’t want to destroy a Mormon’s faith in Jesus,” David Gaskins says. “I want them to believe in the real Jesus.”
But he’s just demonstrated all through his puff piece that there’s no real difference between his flavor of Jesus and that of Mormonism. If he ever does persuade someone that the Mormon Jesus is a counterfeit, what’s to stop them from using the same logic on his preferred flavor of Jesus?
Indeed, if you talk to Mormons, you’ll discover that they think evangelicals are worshiping a counterfeit Jesus. Though the internet contains way, way, waywayway more anti-Mormon stuff from evangelicals, you can still find evidence of their opinion. They think their “restored gospel” holds special power to heal and fix people, and since evangelicals don’t buy into that idea they can’t get the same help.
So they’re both making the same accusations!
But I can see why evangelicals might target Mormons. As I noticed decades ago, Mormons are socialized with an eye toward missionary work and recruitment. Evangelicals don’t tend to like that stuff. But they sure do admire anyone in their tribe who does.
Counterfeit Jesus: The argument from nuh-UH, YOU!
A couple of years ago, apologist J. Warner Wallace wrote admiringly of Mormon fervor and diligence. Toward the end, he laments that their “commitment and passion is attractive, even if it’s misplaced.” Gosh darn it, he cries: “Mormons will do more for a lie than Christians will do for the truth, and it’s heartbreaking to see so many well-intentioned, loving people so deceived.”
Yes, well, Mormons feel the same way about evangelicals. They are quite transparent about considering their flavor of Christianity “the Gospel,” which means—just as it does in evangelicalism—that any other flavor’s take on the matter is wrong.
Earlier today, we saw that Mormons think their “restored Gospel” can fix and heal people. But they think it also brings happiness to converts! In discussing why Mormons try to convert people who are already Christians, one Mormon wrote:
They [Mormons] know they have something that will make you happier than the latest diet or best new television program and they care enough about you to risk rejection in order to bring you happiness. It is something they have put to the test and found to be the very best path to happiness and so naturally, they want to help others get where they now are.
That said, Mormon recruiters seem most interested in talking to people who are already Christian. At least they have a little common ground with that crowd. And if the recruiters hit really hard on the happiness angle, they might catch an evangelical on a bad day and bagsie them.
Alas for Mormons, the exact same process works in reverse—as this evangelical guy in Provo, David Gaskins, is discovering. I wonder how long it’ll take for his shiny new converts to realize their new faith isn’t an improvement over the old? Or for them to encounter the same fakers, abusive leaders, and happiness hucksters they thought they’d left behind forever?
The end of the line for counterfeit Jesus
It doesn’t matter what flavor of Christianity one observes. The more authoritarian the flavor, the more likely its members think they are the only ones Jesusing correctly.
But Christians all say that about all the rest. That’s why these groups so rarely join together. It’s also why so often fly apart at the smallest doctrinal argument. The one thing you can count on is that all of them think Jesus is very lucky that their particular group came along to fix Christianity.
None of them have any objective reason to feel superior to the others. So the only way they can poach members from other flavors is to hit them as hard as they can with emotional manipulation and logical fallacies. If the new flavor feels more authoritative to the marks, then it might just get some new recruits!
NEXT UP: As the cherry trees start to bloom, little trickles of data come out about the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Next time, we’ll check out a fascinating analysis of the denomination’s continuing decline—and check out a new diagram that sent my sides into orbit! See you soon!
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Lies for Jesus abound in reporting Southern Baptist decline - Roll to Disbelieve · 03/21/2025 at 4:00 AM
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