Earlier today, I saw a story about religious coercion from Religion News that just sent chills through me. A pair of sheriff’s deputies baptized a Tennessee woman against her will. As she put it, the officer who pulled her over told her that she had to allow him to baptize Read more
So far, Hillsong has lost 9 of its 16 American campuses. It’s a swift comeuppance for a church that seemed too big to fall. But Hillsong has shown, through these constant scandals, that their dazzling and trendy image is distinctly at odds with their lived reality.
I’m not even half surprised by any of these revelations. For years now, I’ve noted unsettling trends in this publication. Once again, then, we learn to our detriment that evangelicals cannot have authoritarianism and institutional sexism without it breeding scandals and abuse.
Tim Keller’s claims about ‘original Christianity’ are quite common in his end of the religion. Here’s why.
Toxic Christians have a lot of similar methods of easing their consciences and keeping themselves feeling smugly superior to others. In a lot of ways, we could even call their self-soothing methods substitutionary atonement for their real-life behavior. Today, let me show you what I mean.
If people have a stated morality that they’re not actually living, then they’re being inauthentic. Inauthenticity is not a symptom of sin nature. It’s just being human. For such people, the real morals by which they live can be found elsewhere. Whatever they’re living day-to-day, that is their moral code — not what comes out of their mouths.
SBC-lings like to imagine that their denomination is a loose federation of churches that govern the denomination from the bottom up. Yep, they’re all just big ol’ Jesus-ers who Jesus together — and, coincidentally, pool material resources to convert and control the whole world. The opposite is actually the case, as the EC demonstrated in spades that week.
Today, Lord Snow Presides over the praying Christian hypocrites who reveal all their tribe’s cards to their enemies.
In the various reactions to this mini-scandal that we’ve seen, possibly the worst hot takes of all come from his political enemies in evangelicalism: the Old Guard, whose members work to make the SBC even more regressive, racist, misogynistic, and cruel than it already is. Indeed, their reaction to Sermongate reveals a seriously misplaced set of priorities. Today, let’s check out their reaction — and see how they destroy their own claims to possessing a superior set of morals and ethics over all other flavors of Christianity.
Today, let me show you evangelicals’ guesses about why pastoral plagiarism happens, the reasons for it that evangelicals can’t discuss, and most importantly why they can’t discuss this truth.