Reading Time: 10 minutes This past week we were talking about the 2011 book You Lost Me by David Kinnaman. The book was about why modern Christian evangelical churches were losing so many young-adult members, and how they could possibly reverse that trend. Christians either agreed wholeheartedly with this book’s ideas or they hated every word of it. Either way, however, nothing whatsoever changed in the modern Christian evangelical church as a result of it. Today I’ll show you why nothing changed, and why nothing ever actually could.
american history
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Without Tax Exemptions, Christianity Will Collapse. (Sort Of.)
Reading Time: 10 minutes One of the most fascinating bits of fallout from the ongoing secularization of America is that we’re starting to ask some questions now that would have been completely unthinkable 20 or 25 years ago. One of the most provocative of those questions centers on whether or not we should start taxing churches and making them responsible for all of their own activities and upkeep. What would have been shocking and quickly rejected out of hand is now getting some serious attention from all kinds of places!
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
Recasting the Movie: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Edition.
Reading Time: 9 minutes Today, we’ll look at how a dead German philosopher came into a resurgence of popularity–only to play an unexpected role in the Christian Right’s ongoing love affair with its own ego.
Posted inReligion
Prohibition: Being Doomed to Repeat It
Reading Time: 12 minutes I recently watched a documentary that said some stuff that really touched a chord in me. Thanks to it, I’m noticing some very uncomfortable parallels between the ideas it’s discussing and what I see happening in society itself: that Christians today are trying to manage other people’s morality the same way they tried to do it in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and failing for the exact same reasons that they failed back then.
Posted inReligion
Rapture Night: Party Over, Oops, Out of Time
Reading Time: 11 minutes I’ve written about the 1988 Rapture scare that I went through as a teenager, the one that scared me into joining a Pentecostal church, but I want to mention briefly what it was like for me to be a teenager during a Rapture scare because I think we’ve kind of forgotten the harm that these […]
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
The Myth of Christian Persecution
Reading Time: 9 minutes Christians in America really have no idea what martyrdom is anymore–but they’re sure that they’re being persecuted enough to qualify for the term.