One of my very favorite Christian pretendy games is spiritual warfare. For years now, we’ve marveled at just how important this game is to right-wing Christians. The more loudmouthed the Christians, the more control-hungry, the more they love spiritual warfare! There’s a reason for this love, of course. Today, let’s Read more…
Next week, Matt Queen finds out what his penalty will be for lying to federal investigators about a sex assault cover-up at a Southern Baptist seminary. Through his lawyer, Queen is trying to make himself seem like a TRUE CHRISTIAN™. Yes, he just made a little bitty oopsie-doodle-boodle! He was Read more…
You’d think that evangelicals would have learned a decade ago just what awful optics it is for anyone to vociferously defend slavery. BUT NO. Here we are yet again, staring down at the abyss of atrocity apologetics. In recent months, I’ve seen a serious uptick in hardline evangelicals defending what Read more…
Over the years, I’ve heard many, many accusations about the causes of my deconversion. It could practically be a religious genre by now: Cold-reading attempts to guess strangers’ motivations regarding religious choices. But only one thing actually caused my deconversion. Strangely, Christians never light upon that one. Today, I’ll share Read more…
Well, everyone, I’ve finally found the definitive, surreally-otherworldly evangelical narrative about evangelism. We can stop looking. I’ve found it. I’ve found the worst dialogue ever constructed by an evangelical. It’s so weird that I half-suspect that it might be some Poe’s Law invention meant to make evangelicals look insectoid space Read more…
In this blog’s first year, I spent a while outlining all the different elements that went into my deconversion. I haven’t formally talked much about it since. Now, here, I want to share my story with you. Today, let me show you how—and maybe importantly why—I deconverted from Christianity. (This Read more…
Not long ago, I ran into an article about Dean Inserra, a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) pastor, and his thoughts about evangelism. Specifically, Inserra identified one group of people who were virtually impossible to convert to his brand of tribalistic white evangelicalism: “Good people.” In his opinion, “good people” resisted Read more…
A 2022 seminary article about a pastor’s evangelism exhortation got me thinking about how evangelicals relate to other evangelicals who don’t believe what they do. More specifically, I wondered how feasible his exhortation is nowadays. The pastor, Dean Inserra, wanted his audience of seminary students to concentrate their evangelism on Read more…
For years, we’ve had some good laughs over evangelical leaders’ ongoing attempts to strong-arm their flocks into performing more evangelism. Basically, the flocks just don’t wanna. And nobody can make them, not even their dysfunctional-authoritarian leaders. It’s just so funny to me that evangelicals and their leaders have these farcical Read more…
Recently, a rising star in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Matt Queen, fell to earth in the most singularly SBC way imaginable: By lying to the FBI about a sex assault that had occurred on the SBC seminary campus where he worked. After news of Queen’s guilty plea broke, one Read more…