Even before evangelicals realized they were in a full decline, they pushed hard on the idea of the offense of the gospel. This is the idea that somehow, their religion’s message massively offends normies. But ‘the gospel’ isn’t offensive at all. It’s evangelism that is offensive, and evangelicals have no Read more
Conservative Christianity is largely performative in nature, and it must be. Conservative Christian leaders ache for their flocks to be transformed by a powerful, consuming faith, but almost nobody in their flocks actually has that, much less gets transformed by it. And they’ve known this for years, although they do Read more
Last month, we talked about evangelicals’ illusions of a massive revival going on with Gen Z, who are people between the ages of about 13-28. Even at the time, those claims seemed largely to derive from evangelicals’ fantasies. But if anything, these fantasies have only gotten more insistent within that Read more
Among evangelical these days, their fondest hope is for revival. They want Jesus to send them a massive new influx of fervent converts and re-stoke their own zeal with divine strength. Right now, their current belief is that there’s a quiet revival happening across the western world, particularly among Gen Read more
Now that Gen Z people are reaching adulthood in great numbers and Gen Alpha is poised to enter it, evangelicals are starting to panic. And I mean really panic. For years, their largely-Boomer leaders have panicked about Millennials. Then, they panicked about Gen Z and still are, as we’ll see. Read more
An April headline announced that ‘Young Women Are Leaving Church in Unprecedented Numbers.” After many years of right-wing Christian men’s complaints about the ‘feminization’ of Christianity, one would think they’d be happy to hear this news. After all, that means their pastors now have a lot more time to cater Read more
Evangelicals like to pretend that evangelism is just a formality they perform. They think their god strong-arms people into belief, merely utilizing the evangelist as a conduit. But nothing could be further from the truth, as one denomination reveals in a lengthy writeup. Southern Baptists talk a big game about Read more
Last week, I introduced you to a real live ‘Gen Z expert,’ Tanita Maddox. As I noted at the time, Maddox has been very busy writing articles and recording videos about her subject matter for other evangelicals, who apparently know absolutely no Gen Z people. One of her articles of Read more
In recent years, we’ve talked a lot about evangelicals’ utter inability to appeal to Gen Z. But the latest approach I saw at Christian Post (archive) might take the cake for potential hilarity. Opinion post writer Tanita Tualla Maddox has made a few suggestions that sound like they will backfire catastrophically Read more
Last week, I showed you the 4-14 Window. That phrase means that if Christians don’t successfully indoctrinate a child between the ages of 4 and 14, that child is very unlikely to convert to Christianity in adulthood. Evangelicals in particular have been panicking about this concept for decades now. So I Read more