Once again, right-wing Christian leaders are spinning bad news straw into gold, and as always it’s gloriously daffy. With churches emptying and scandals piling up, let’s unpack the bad news they can’t face—and how they’re lying to their flocks about winning the culture wars (This post first went live on Read more
Evangelical leaders’ attention was always fated to shift from Millennials to Gen Z. Millennials utterly failed to secure a turnaround in the tribe’s fortunes. So now those leaders look to Gen Z to save their bacon.
Yesterday, we checked out the illustrious career of George Barna. He makes a good living by telling Christians whatever makes them open their wallets for him. And what works best to open wallets? Inducing fear and dread in his target audience. Now, let’s check out how George Barna used his style of marketing most recently. He’s doing his best to make his TRUE CHRISTIAN™ marks pony up the bills by making them scared that a new fake kind of Christianity is taking over America. Today, let’s see how he does it — and if it’ll work.
Hi and welcome back! This past week, we’ve been talking about toxic Christians‘ efforts to regain dominance in America. Among other topics, we covered George Barna and his grand plans to forcibly indoctrinate babies and toddlers. Today, we’ll look at an interview he did with some other equally toxic Christians regarding Read more
This past week we were talking about the 2011 book You Lost Me by David Kinnaman. The book was about why modern Christian evangelical churches were losing so many young-adult members, and how they could possibly reverse that trend. Christians either agreed wholeheartedly with this book’s ideas or they hated every word of it. Either way, however, nothing whatsoever changed in the modern Christian evangelical church as a result of it. Today I’ll show you why nothing changed, and why nothing ever actually could.
There’s another magic spell he wants to teach Christians to cast here, and that spell revolves around reframing unpleasant and negative ideas so that churches won’t have to change anything they’re doing with regard to all the stuff that people cite as reasons to steer clear of Christianity.
To say the least, we haven’t been, um, impressed by it a whole lot. And the funny thing is, a lot of his fellow fundagelicals aren’t either. It seems like for every fan of the guy’s ideas, he’s got a couple of detractors–all of whom have their own pet ideas about What the Big Problem Here Is and How to Fix It.
David Kinnaman’s central idea is that The Big Problem Here is that modern churches aren’t properly discipling their youth and that if this starts happening properly, young people will stop leaving and maybe even return to the groups they’ve already left. Today I’ll teach you what this confusing term means–most of the time anyway–and why this author is totally wrong.
David Kinnaman always couches Prodigals’ disbelief in terms of how they came to disbelieve. The exact stuff we don’t believe doesn’t interest him nearly as much as how we related to our last Christian group–and how we might relate to another in the future.
This book is a good example of how wishful thinking and self-deception makes Christians incapable of seeing what’s happening in their religion, much less acting to change anything for the better.