Evangelicals have no shortage of advice about becoming a good listener. It’s one of their main evangelism strategies, after all! Being a good listener involves a number of soft skills, however, and evangelicals really can’t practice any of them without serious challenges to their beliefs. They find themselves, therefore, in Read more
This year at the Southern Baptist Annual Meeting (nicknamed SBC26 by the flocks), the faithful attendees got quite an interesting eyeful along the road: A billboard offering Bible verses that support women’s ordination to church leadership positions over both men and other women. Nothing is funnier than Christians dueling about Read more
For years now, I’ve kept an eye on evangelicals’ growing distress over what they call ‘Biblical illiteracy’ —the flocks’ growing ignorance of doctrines and Bible stories that their leaders consider essential knowledge. But as America continues to secularize, non-Christians are losing familiarity with the Bible as well. A recent Washington Read more
When we looked at the 2025 performance metrics of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), I realized that what we’re seeing in their baptism metrics is very likely rebaptism at work. Rebaptism is exactly what it sounds like: Someone who’s already been baptized once doing it again. Unsurprisingly, the SBC doesn’t Read more
In Alpha Course #9, we began quite a strange pivot into Charismatic-specific flavors of Christianity. That’s no accident, either. As we’ll see today, the masters of Alpha Course might say it’s ecumenical, but this course really aims for one specific destination in converting viewers. We’ll trace the origins of this Read more
In a recent opinion post, Thom Rainer frets about people age 65+, who are apparently leaving evangelical churches in great numbers. And lately, more evangelicals like him are noticing that older Americans, once the mainstays and so-called “anchors” of churches, are leaving their clubhouses in greater and greater numbers. Unfortunately, Read more
No longtime gamer has failed to notice how much easier video games are nowadays compared to their early days. The New York Times Magazine recently speculated that today’s easier video games may be a reaction to the increasing difficulty and chaos of modern life. More to the point, we can Read more
In Alpha Course’s seventh video, we find some of its creators’ most fanciful guesses yet about exactly how their god and religion operate. This one covers divine guidance, which almost all Christians believe their god offers believers as a perk. Despite its nearly-universal status, however, they can’t actually tell us Read more
On September 2nd, Pew Research released yet another blockbuster post about secularization. It reveals that the process of secularization tends to begin with lowered participation in religious rituals, followed by fading of religious identity and eventually even de-prioritizing even affiliation in name only. This study has got to be worrying Read more
In Alpha Course #6, Christians try very very hard to make the Bible sound utterly relevant and important to everyone’s lives. They fail, of course, just like every other video so far has failed to accomplish its own stated goals. But as usual, it’s how specifically they fail that should Read more