It feels like I’ve known about Carey Nieuwhof for ages and ages now. He haunts the Christ-o-sphere offering panicky evangelical pastors surefire tips about making their churches grow again. Such advice represents the newest post-Christian-America cottage industry, it seems. Though he has written perhaps hundreds of blog posts discussing church Read more…
Last time we met up, I showed you a bunch of reasons to believe in Christianity. Alas for their very hopeful bearers, they all sucked. But I found one list that contained every single kind of bad reasoning, threats, come-ons, and emotional manipulation we know and expect from these inept Read more…
Last week, we talked about how hardline evangelical and Tradcath Christians engage with atheists who don’t accept or believe their claims. As it turns out, one of their favorite tactics is plugging their ears with their fingers and chanting LA LA LA LA ATHEISTS DON’T EVEN REALLY EXIST until their existential Read more…
Evangelicals have zero clue how to approach atheists. That’s just the facts, ma’am. Last time we met up, we talked about evangelicals’ weird redefinitions of atheism. With those redefinitions, they create a strawman caricature of atheists, which they have a much easier time dismantling and defeating. Today, I want to Read more…
Years ago in the 2000s and 2010s, evangelicals tangled with atheists all the time. This squabbling formed part of what we now call internet blood sports. Nowadays, though, the landscape of the Christ-o-sphere looks very different. Out-and-out squabbling and entanglement aren’t as popular as they once were. Gen Z and Read more…
Earlier today, I got a good laugh out of this post about evangelism from Relevant (a website/magazine site aimed squarely at Millennials). In it, Richard Coekin pretends to ask why that site’s readers are “so bad at evangelism.” The answers he offers for his strawman questions reveal that evangelicals aren’t Read more…
Last time we met up, I showed you how evangelical leaders are dealing with ongoing declines in church attendance. Mostly, they’re just insisting up and down that church attendance is not optional, people! Hey, that approach works in apologetics! So why shouldn’t it work everywhere? But an apologetics-consuming audience is Read more…
Church attendance continues to tank across America. Downward trends already in place before the pandemic declined even further in the wake of it. It’s a tough time to be a business offering only one product—active church membership—in a country that increasingly doesn’t want it. In reversing the decline of their Read more…
Out of every Christian lie, the one about Jesus’ magical transformation ability might be the worst. This lie tells Christians that belief in Jesus—along with adherence to a great many asterisked terms and conditions that only get revealed long after conversion—will transform them into better people. This transformation supposedly allows Read more…
Endtimes believers tend to have very short memories for their own predictions. But today’s example was surprising, even by their very expansive standards. Today, we’ll trace an interesting shift in how Endtimes hucksters sell their products to worried evangelicals. (Some evangelicals prefer to write the term as separate words: the Read more…