In the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), their leaders depend upon the flocks to donate lots of money to their Cooperative Program. Somehow, in the past decade those flocks have managed to just about maintain their level of giving despite their overall numbers plummeting. I never thought that level of giving 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…
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…
A few months ago, we talked about how Matt Queen and some of his seminary associates outright lied to the feds about a sex assault on their campus, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS). I suppose nobody told these Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) guys that the FBI’s investigators have zero chill Read more…
More than ten years ago, the Christ-o-sphere was rocked to its foundations over divorce. As it turned out, evangelical couples divorced each other more than those from any other religion. Worse still (from their standpoint), atheists divorced at a lower rate than any other religious group! In the intervening years Read more…
About ten years ago, when the trickle of deconversions began to flow into a river, evangelicals began getting all heated up about what they called unequally yoked couples. The term means a mixed-faith marriage, particularly one in which one partner is evangelical and the other an atheist. Evangelicals began slavering Read more…
Last week, a remarkable story unfolded at the New York Times about the growing absence of women in evangelical churches. This in itself is not too surprising. Just a few months ago, we covered the beginning of that story. Women are, indeed, finding their freedom from that oppressive system in Read more…