This time around, we will be told that we’re not allowed to entertain doubts or form opinions without hearing all the testimonies that Thaddeus Williams thinks demonstrate the validity of his tribe’s culture wars. Unfortunately for him, they’re nowhere near as persuasive as he thinks they are.
In Chapter 8 of Before You Lose Your Faith, contributor Jay Kim continues the book’s fine tradition of trying to set the rules of engagement for evangelical doubters. This time around, deconstructors are not allowed to use ‘hammers’ to dismantle their beliefs. Now, they’re supposed to use only ‘precise tools.’ And what are those tools? Oh, just the same ol’ emotional manipulation, dishonest reframing, and apologetics bullshit that probably got those people doubting in the first place.
After years of hearing evangelicals declare that their political opponents are, in fact, evil, I got a kick out of seeing Samuel James condemn that exact mindset as the result of improper Jesus-ing
This time around, evangelical leaders want Gen Z evangelicals to do a lot of friendship evangelism. But they also want to train older evangelists in how to better bamboozle young adults.
In a lot of ways, this chapter really exemplifies evangelicals’ inability to engage meaningfully with the dealbreaking flaws in their flavor of Christianity—like the Bible’s amazing ability to twist and contort to fully support any opinion that any Christian could ever possibly have.
To save his job, Christian Watts clung hard to a time-tested, long-honored evangelical get-out-of-scandal-free card: calling upon Christianese to escape the writing on his wall.
Something in Rachel Gilson’s childhood led her straight to the worst, cruelest, most evil and inhuman flavor of Christianity in the entire shit-tastic Christian rainbow. Through sheer necessity, she’s figured out a way to reframe her tribe’s infamous bigotry-for-Jesus. But it doesn’t have to fool anybody else, and I don’t think it even fools her at times.
Let’s check out yet another pair of Rapture hucksters today, the howlingly self-described ‘Prophecy Pros,’ and see how they build upon evangelicals’ existing folk-beliefs about the end of the world.
Recent stories indicate that the evangelical-backed He Gets Us campaign is still going strong. But the evangelicals responding to it have missed an important point that destroys whatever goodwill they might be fostering through their endless billboards and carefully-placed ads: their god does not have a brand, but his followers Read more
The writers offer the hands-down dumbest reasons imaginable to leave evangelicalism. And then, having done that, they offer the dumbest reason imaginable to resolve this supposedly-drastic problem.