When last we met up, we talked about a YouTube video concerning an abuse scandal that Bethel Church helped cause. Mike Winger, who created the video, painted the scandal as a purely Charismatic evangelical problem. But as we soon found out, his own denomination (Calvary Chapel) has the same scandals Read more
On January 17, Mike Winger released a nearly six-hour-long video about the Shawn Bolz scandal erupting in Bethel Church right now. Winger thinks that the Bolz scandal indicates huge problems within Charismatic evangelical culture. But he’s wrong. The rot goes completely to the core of hardline, right-wing conservative Christianity itself—including Read more
We’ve mentioned Bethel Church of Redding, California a few times around here. It’s the kooky-for-Jesus-Puffs evangelical group focused on spiritual gifts like magic healing and prophecy. They’ve landed in some real hot water recently because of their silence regarding one of their endorsed (but false) prophets, Shawn Bolz. And they Read more
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.
It seems like there is a never-ending litany of miserable stories about abusers, predators, and scam artists lurking around Christian churches. If I wanted to write one of those blogs that concerned itself chiefly with exposing and discussing these people, I’d have to seriously step up my schedule–because there are that many stories, and each is more nauseating and horrifying than the last. But for some strange reason, Christian churches rarely engage with the problem they’ve created for themselves and perpetuate through their cultural practices and beliefs, and today I’ll touch on why that might be.