Prepare Yourself: The Easter Christian Torture Porn is Coming.
Easter is here! ‘Tis the Season–for Christian torture porn, that is! Are you ready?
Easter is here! ‘Tis the Season–for Christian torture porn, that is! Are you ready?
With one of the biggest holidays in the entire Christian calendar coming right up our butts, this seems like a good time to describe altar calls.
It seems fitting, however, to return to this topic of power now as we look at the Christian glurge movie/book The Shack and observe its main teaching: that independence is to be distrusted and rejected.
The Shack, the latest popular Christian glurge to get made into a movie, pretends to be a serious answer for the age-old question plaguing Christians: why does their god, who is supposed to be omni-everything as well as loving and gracious, allow terrible things to happen in his created world?
The Shack, the latest in a long line of Christian glurge movies and books, lives in that weird middle ground where Christians think they’re being progressive and yet turn out to be as locked in systemic racism as any of their peers.
I’m torn between mocking them to within an inch of their lives for flouncing away, and pitying them for not understanding that our modern values of consent and liberty are exactly what will prevent their visions from ever coming true.
The Shack is one of a very long line of Christian glurge media that recreates reality for believers, giving them the thrill of “seeing” their beliefs mesh at last with the real world. But for everyone else, stories like this one simply make the religion sound worse.
In comments last time we met up, we learned about yet another set of those guesses, all presented as amazing new ideas that would totally work to convert people without backfiring and making evangelicals look like pickup-artist creeps.
Sometimes we’re surrounded by something before we realize just how much of it there is. That happened to me today: I suddenly noticed just how many Christians there are who have firm ideas about why people–especially younger people–are leaving their churches. Those ideas tend to run along one of two lines, and both of those lines are totally wrong.
I’ve seen pastors try off and on to stop their congregants from accessing the internet, but this new book that just came out, What Falls from the Sky, really takes the cake on that score.