Thom Rainer functions as a living, breathing, nonstop rebuttal to evangelical claims. Back in Ye Olden Daies of evangelical power, he reigned as the leader of Lifeway Christian Resources, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) propaganda and publishing arm. During that time, Lifeway tanked in sales. Once he scare-quotes ‘retired,’ he Read more…
If you ever found yourself teetering on the fence about this religion, then this post is for you–because that problem and Thom Rainer’s solutions to it represent exactly why many thousands of people every day reject it, and also why they should.
This type of business, church revitalization, might well be one of post-Christian America’s most lucrative cottage industries. Today, I’ll show you what revitalization is–and why it’ll fail just like everything else Christians do to try to regain their onetime cultural dominance.
Normally you’d think that inaccuracies in Christians’ perception of others is just their problem. But their cultural flaws have a tendency of creating headaches for other people, too, not just for themselves. While they’re making strawmen about non-Christians and wrestling with their fictional creations, they’re getting an entirely wrong idea of what we’re really like and why we reject their claims and sales attempts. Today I want to talk about why Christians misrepresent us so often.
We’ve been talking lately about how, when Christians write about non-Christians, they often end up with a picture that doesn’t look terribly familiar to us–but which looks remarkably like the image of us that Christian culture paints. Today I want to dissect that picture.