Gospelbound: Recruitment Through Jesus Auras (Still Won’t Work)

Yesterday, I showed you an episode of Gospelbound, a new-ish podcast from The Gospel Coalition (TGC). In that episode, a pair of hard-right evangelicals talked about how they could totally rescue their failing religion from utter irrelevance. And they proposed two prongs to their approach: showing off their Jesus Auras to impress potential recruits, and grabbing more control over the dwindling number of recruits they get nowadays. Today, we’ll look at how Jesus Auras work in TRUE CHRISTIAN™ mythology, and why this style of evangelism fails so hard.

An Ex-Christian Evaluates a Gospelbound Podcast

Gospelbound’s own marketing claims that it will give listeners ‘firm faith in an anxious age.’ We checked out their most recent episode, about a TGC-produced book called Before You Lose Your Faith, and we weren’t impressed. But hey, maybe they just forgot about their target audience because they were talking about their own book. So I wanted to check out what else they were telling potential doubters. Today, let’s evaluate another of their episodes — from the point of view of a Christian who desperately needs a jolt of ‘firm faith in an anxious age.’

Bespoke spirituality: Another try at ‘Last Ideology Standing’

This past week, we had a really good time examining Brett McCracken’s post on The Gospel Coalition (TGC) (archive link). In it, he accidentally demonstrated how very little he understands of deconversion. He also offered up what might be the three most ridiculous reasons ever concocted to stick with Christianity. We covered the first and second of those already. Today, we’ll tackle his third reason: ‘bespoke spirituality’s loneliness.’ Gosh, ya’ll, the suspense is killing me! Will a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ finally manage to win his tribe’s beloved game of Last Ideology Standing? We’ll find out today.