I’d be hard-pressed to point to a more glaring illustration of that discrepancy than the disgraceful spectacle of Christians making movies presenting themselves as they really truly believe they are–while remaining completely (and, one increasingly suspects, willfully) oblivious to how others see them.
I’ve been doing reviews of Christian movies for a while now. And unsurprisingly, I have been uniformly unimpressed because Christian media is uniformly awful. But to hear Christians themselves talk about “their” movies, these are all masterpieces. Epics. Perhaps marginally flawed here and there, but essentially wonderful. Everyone else is left to wonder if they’re even seeing the same movies these Christians are praising. I’m not surprised at all to see this lopsided reception.
I just noticed a movie pop up on my Netflix thing that sounded so ludicrous that I had to run a review on it as soon as I could. The movie is God’s Club.
In its scant 140-ish characters, this carefully-crafted, polished tweet manages to check off just about every single item on the list of features of a perfect Christian not-pology.
Preston Sprinkle, in his book People to Be Loved, expresses some truly atrocious ideas. Arguably the most offensive of the lot is his suggestion that gay people should marry straight people. Today I’ll show you why he thinks that’d be a great idea, and why he’s wrong.
I’ve been thinking lately about something I’ve noticed about many Christians trying to evangelize non-believers: they try to paint our various worldviews as very similar to their own, only inferior. Sometimes the lengths to which they’ll go to establish this commonality seem downright nonsensical. If you’ve ever wondered why that is, then strap into your seat because today we’ll be talking about the Law of Conservation of Worship.
Do you folks remember Anthony Waller? He’s a youth pastor I discussed about a year ago who got caught with a lot of child pornography on his computer. At the time, I considered his story to be yet another entry in the ever-growing list of ways that Christianity is failing its own young people. There are some noteworthy updates to the tale that I want to briefly touch on today.
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.
Last time I talked about a recent conference held at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. At the time I was concentrating more on a speech given there by Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader Al Mohler regarding reparative therapy. Today I want to delve more deeply into the errors of the conference itself because I think it serves as a firm declaration by evangelicals that despite being consistently defeated in every single way imaginable, they still aren’t ready to give up on the idea of bigotry-for-Jesus.
In the same way, it is simply bizarre to me that people who have built up this total conspiracy theory around all these “Bible codes” and arcane secret societies and government plots seem to be so incapable of coming up with what really should be one of the easiest parts of their predictions: what’s going to happen, exactly, and when. But that’s not even the worst part of these constant streams of Rapture scares.