Out of every strange practice in Christianity, spiritual warfare might just be my favorite of all. Just hearing a Christian use the phrase puts a great big silly happy smile on my face and laughter in my heart. Spiritual warfare is one of those super-context-dependent Christian practices. When removed from its very specific context its practitioners look like they’re playing a Happy Pretendy Fun Time Game — which they always were.
Last week, popular Christian rapper Brady Goodwin, aka Phanatik, announced his deconversion. He released a video on his Facebook account describing how it happened. And his extimony perfectly illustrates a concept I call the faith pool. Today, let me show you what this concept means and how it worked for Phanatik.
Many Christians seem to love the idea of humans being hardwired for belief. By this phrase, they mean that their god placed in each human’s heart a desire to worship something supernatural. Unfortunately, their god didn’t finish the job.
In 2012, the RCA began to break apart over homosexuality. One faction –the more mainline end — wanted inclusion. The other — the culture warriors — wanted to the denomination to be bigots-for-Jesus. That breakup completed this month, with 43 congregations full of culture warriors leaving. They’re joining a new denomination, ARC (Alliance of Reformed Churches). All this, over a culture war evangelicals lost over a decade ago!
The other day, I was thinking about Christian conversion testimonies. In a lot of ways, they function as narrative stories. However, their similarity to well-told tales mostly ends at having a general three-act structure. They can’t actually stand as good stories because they don’t reflect anything real in the human situation — and they’d be bad that way even if their tellers didn’t try to work miracles into them so often.
I’m guessing that Catholic leaders’ massive misogyny, entrenched sexism, and endless horrific bigotries are indeed quite a dealbreaker for younger adults. I’d worry about someone who didn’t consider that stuff a dealbreaker.
Christian leaders know that abuse allegations will open them up to a lot of uncomfortable questions and scrutiny. In demanding silence, they simply act to protect their livelihoods and reputations.
With the base cunning of a narcissist, Biff recognized — probably very quickly — that boring testimonies don’t exactly open doors in evangelicalism.
For years now, America has been teetering on the very edge of a downright breathtaking cultural shift: Christianity’s stunning decline in members, credibility, and cultural power. This astonishing development shows no signs of stopping any time soon, either. Recently, I Read more
I can understand why Christians try so hard to claim a monopoly over Christmas: nothing about the holiday really speaks to Christianity. No, Christmas speaks to something much, much better.