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…
When I said last time that evangelicals really did not like Hume’s attempt to wrangle miracles into coherence, I was not kidding around. Hume completely pissed in miracle claimants’ coffee cups. He raised the bar for miracles so high that no Christians could hope to clear it. No wonder they hate him!
Usually, evangelicals have a hate-hate relationship with mental-health counseling. And they should. Counseling puts the lie to their entire conceptualization of Jesusing their troubles away. But yesterday, one evangelical guy gave a speech to Asian Southern Baptists that sought to reposition counseling as a responsibility church congregations have toward each Read more…
You’d think someone might have told the guy much earlier that his ideas perpetuated some really sickening and toxic dynamics between spouses. But nobody did. Really, nobody could have.
In Chapter 8 of Before You Lose Your Faith, contributor Jay Kim continues the book’s fine tradition of trying to set the rules of engagement for evangelical doubters. This time around, deconstructors are not allowed to use ‘hammers’ to dismantle their beliefs. Now, they’re supposed to use only ‘precise tools.’ And what are those tools? Oh, just the same ol’ emotional manipulation, dishonest reframing, and apologetics bullshit that probably got those people doubting in the first place.
Something in Rachel Gilson’s childhood led her straight to the worst, cruelest, most evil and inhuman flavor of Christianity in the entire shit-tastic Christian rainbow. Through sheer necessity, she’s figured out a way to reframe her tribe’s infamous bigotry-for-Jesus. But it doesn’t have to fool anybody else, and I don’t think it even fools her at times.
It’s been very interesting to see how dysfunctional authoritarians approach deconstruction in other Christians, especially with regard to how they’ve dealt with doubt over the past 10 or 12 years.
The tagline TGC created for Gospelbound claims it offers listeners “firm faith in an anxious age.” Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Instead, it offers the usual authoritarian blahblah from the most toxic elements in their entire end of Christianity. I’ve saved the most alarming of that blahblah for last: their oh-so-very Calvinist plan for churn reduction. They think more control over congregants means less churn from their churches. Today, I’ll show you what that means — and why it’s such a laughable contradiction of the supernatural claims of authoritarians.
TGC’s people think that churches need to step up to be safe harbors for Christians struggling with their faith. That’s an impossible demand, but also a very safe one for them to make.
Hi and welcome back! Recently, we covered a post by Brett McCracken on The Gospel Coalition (TGC) (archive link). In it, he slammed deconversion and ex-Christians in the most hateful and contemptuous ways imaginable. But at least he demonstrated nicely that evangelicals have finally begun to notice the process of Read more…