evangelical christians / evangelicalism / evangelicals

The anatomy of doublespeak: That ACBC conference

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.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

The Twin Selling Points of a Fundamentalist Rapture Scare.

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.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

Bible Verses Are Not “Magic” Cards.

It’s amazing to me that Christians can take a book compiled over thousands of years with dozens of mostly-anonymous authors, a book of (revised) history and (imagined) science, of folk magic and supposedly-divine intervention, of petty racism and soaring nationalism, of beautiful poetry and stunning brutality, of–yes–transcendent language and startling insight at times, and reduce it down to sound bites they can select, warp, and then fling at their pleasure to score points against those they view as inferior opponents. To me it seems extremely disrespectful for a Christian to treat their holy book in such a simplistic and reductionist way, but I see it all the time regardless.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

The Unequally Yoked Club: Fireproof’s fatal assumption

While someone might see this movie and assume–as I did repeatedly–that it was hawking a particular marriage advice manual, The Love Dare, that’s not entirely true. The characters repeatedly reference the book and laud how amazing it is and how much it’s helped their marriages, but the movie is quite clear about exactly what really saved Kirk’s marriage in the movie.

By Captain Cassidy, ago

The Handbook: The ‘original Greek and Hebrew’ (is still nonsense).

Back in my Pentecostal days, there was a phrase I heard non-stop: “the original Greek and Hebrew,” used to describe my denomination’s doctrines and creed. The idea was that our denomination, unlike those of all those other inferior Christians doing everything wrong, had gotten our ideas from “the original Greek and Hebrew” and therefore were closer to what our god wanted out of his followers than all those other Christians were. I notice that Christians still love that phrase, so I want to talk about it today.

By Captain Cassidy, ago