Reading Time: 15 minutes We’ve been having fun this week snarking a post in The Federalist to eensy-weensy little pieces. But who could blame us? The Christian who wrote it managed to outshine all his pals in finding the most WTF explanation possible for why his religion’s losing so many adherents and so much credibility and influence in the eyes of the world. That isn’t easy to do nowadays!
2014 Religious Landscape Study
Posted inReligion
Monster Trucks in the Nightlife: The Ballad of the Bad Christians
Reading Time: 14 minutes Here, then, is the brutal truth about both evangelicalism and Bad Christians.
Posted inReligion
The Ongoing Crisis in Christianity Continues Apace
Reading Time: 11 minutes I thought it was hilarious that this news comes out now, amid a Gallup poll showing that belief in Creationism is at its lowest point since Gallup began asking that question of Americans. But that’s not the only bad news for Christians. Come see the newest developments!
Posted inReligion
Christians’ Dominance Is Ending, But Not Without a Fight.
Reading Time: 8 minutes We’ve been talking lately about the various ways that Christianity rose to power as the dominant Western religion in the 2nd to 5th centuries. But the fun couldn’t last, and now that power is declining sharply with every passing year. As Christians began losing the power to force people to comply with their demands, they also became increasingly desperate to regain that power.
Posted inReligion
Christians’ Dominance Is Ending, But Not Without a Fight
Reading Time: 8 minutes We’ve been talking lately about the various ways that Christianity rose to power as the dominant Western religion in the 2nd to 5th centuries. But the fun couldn’t last, and now that power is declining sharply with every passing year. As Christians began losing the power to force people to comply with their demands, they also became increasingly desperate to regain that power.
Posted inReligion
NOT Looking for Group: Takeaways from the New PRRI Religion Survey.
Reading Time: 11 minutes The Public Religion Research Institute just released a new study they completed about Christianity in America. It is eye-opening and genuinely shocking, and not only for the reasons that Christians are seeing. There are some hidden messages in this study that they’re not seeing, encoded thuds of Moria drums that foretell a catastrophe for the religion that is coming–and quickly.
Posted inReligion
Persecution Complex: God’s Club and the “Religious Liberty” Scam
Reading Time: 10 minutes The central idea in the Christian movie God’s Club, which we reviewed recently and have been discussing off and on, is a very common talking point believed by right-wing Christians all over America: that they are facing unprecedented levels of persecution in this country, and thus are in great danger of losing their religious liberty–and from there getting imprisoned and even executed for their beliefs. Non-Christians may well feel baffled about why so many Christians cling to this idea as hard as they do–and why they seem to genuinely think that they are in real danger.
Posted inReligion
Looking for Boaz In All the Wrong Places.
Reading Time: 9 minutes One of the viral things going around lately is this Washington Post op-ed called “Fat. Single. Christian. In church, being overweight and dating feels like a sin.” It’s by a Christian woman who is approaching middle age without ever having been married. She’s saying something important about how a cataclysmic demographic shift is starting to impact individual Christians’ lives.
Posted inReligion
How Lying for Jesus Became So Common.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Last time we talked, I mentioned three examples of blatantly obvious lies told by Christians who clearly expected everyone to nod, smile, and let them get away with their dishonesty. These lies weren’t accidents or simple errors in judgment. They (and all the ones like them) happened because right-wing Christian culture has become a mixing-bowl full of noxious elements that have combined to produce a mindset that finds dishonesty acceptable and even laudable. Today we’ll go over what some of those elements are and how they fit into what we’re seeing in the news lately.
Posted inReligion
Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin: An Essential Disconnect
Reading Time: 9 minutes There are a great many discrepancies between the goals Christians say they want to achieve, the ones they actually appear to want to achieve, and the ones they actually are achieving. These discrepancies form disconnects where their line of reasoning breaks down and their stated vs. actual goals vs. achieved goals can be observed. Obviously, one can see such breakdowns in a lot of places–it’s not just a religious thing, for sure! But this is a religion blog, so we’re going to look at a religious situation in which this disconnect is obvious. Yep, today we’re going to talk about one of their all-time favorite mantras.