Not long ago, some evangelicals broke my heart. They were the family of a vibrant, impressionable, trusting, inexperienced young woman named Micah. In 2009, her husband murdered her. That husband, Thomas Pate, had pretended to be a true-blue evangelical to win her and her parents’ hearts. And he succeeded. It Read more…
Recently, the United States government finished the first part of its investigation into federally-funded boarding schools that abused Native Americans. As you might expect, it’s a dark read. Primarily, it reveals that for 150 years, the American government used these schools to systematically destroy Native Americans’ culture. Worse, the government Read more…
For a couple of years now, Francis has taken increasingly-strong steps to rein in the founders of New Catholic Movement groups.
By painting himself as the poor widdle victim of a meaniepie leak, while entirely denying/ignoring the fact that the leak was about his abuse of his own wife, Tom Buck clearly hopes to escape the scrutiny that cost Paige Patterson his job–and not hinder his faction leader, Tom Ascol, from reaching the heights of SBC power.
The reason evangelicals invented complementarianism was to win a denominational slapfight. That’s it. The architects of it just wanted to demolish feminism. So they simply did not care how complementarianism would play out in the everyday lives of their increasingly-authoritarian flocks.
These stories are related. They both reflect an endemic issue within Christianity: its broken systems’ inability to recognize basic human rights.
I want to introduce y’all to Christian leader Bill Gothard. He’s got a folksy good-ole-boy crooked smile; he’s just the right age where an old white dude gets a lot of cachet in certain fundagelical circles, and he’s a rock star in the homeschooling/”purity culture” crowd that thinks the best Read more…