Reading Time: 11 minutes Sure, it might seem like Brett McCracken is just insulting his tribal enemies. And he is. But he’s actually not talking to us, not really. Let me show you what Brett McCracken is telling his tribemates under his breath, and what he accidentally reveals about his entire belief system.
Churn rate
Posted inReligion
The Southern Baptist Convention Still Struggles With Its Tainted Brand
Reading Time: 9 minutes J.D. Greear’s swung into action to suggest that the SBC informally adopt a nickname that sounds better. Today, let’s see what the SBC’s name change involves — and ask if it’ll work.
Posted inUncategorized
The Exodus of Single Women From Christianity Continues
Reading Time: 6 minutes Hi and welcome back! One of this blog’s central concerns remains the decline of Christianity in America, especially what I’ve come to call its churn rate. For many years, that decline has resulted in a decided gender skew in churches. Nowadays, most of them consist mostly of women! But now, it looks like that tide has […]
Posted inReligion
Unchurched: An Overview of Friendship Evangelism
Reading Time: 9 minutes Today, I’ll show you what friendship evangelism is — and what lies its practitioners tell themselves to justify inflicting it on others.
Posted inUncategorized
Promise and Peril: Lyman Stone’s Galaxy-Brained Solutions to Decline
Reading Time: 10 minutes Yesterday, we examined a big report by conservative culture warrior Lyman Stone on behalf of American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He had a lot of things to say about the decline of Christianity in America, and I detected a constant theme of fearmongering and potential exaggeration throughout his work. We’ve already covered what his assertions are. Now, here’s my assertion: Lyman Stone needs his target audience to be scared enough to buy his product, because ordinarily they’d recognize what a bad idea that’d be.
Posted inReligion
How Ed Stetzer Created a False Belief in Christianity
Reading Time: 10 minutes Ed Stetzer accidentally created a false belief! And ever since he popularized this idea, it’s assumed a life of its own. Here is how he did it, why he did it, and most importantly what it means for his religion’s future.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Evangelical Churn: Why Christian Leaders’ Orders Never Change
Reading Time: 13 minutes It took Christian leaders some time to recognize that yes indeed, they were facing not just a temporary situation, but rather a serious and devastating long-term decline in membership and cultural clout. They’ve finally come to a widespread recognition of the problem. They still don’t quite know why it’s happening, though–much less what they can do to reverse it. I’ll show you their main stopgap solution today–and even better, I’ll show you why it absolutely will not work.
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
Changing Course in a Broken System.
Reading Time: 9 minutes Sometimes I see something happening in the real world and compare it to how things work in religion. That happened this week as I watched a drama unfold around a gaming company’s big new update to their flagship game.
Posted inReligion
A Little Bit Like Mourning: So Much For Your Happy Ending
Reading Time: 10 minutes Losing one’s faith can feel a lot like mourning the passing of a loved one. There’s so much emotion bound up in a deconversion that it can be hard to unpack exactly what’s happening. I’ve been thinking about the topic lately because we’ve been touching on the topic in comments here and there. Strangely, it was an old song that really crystallized and solidified some of my thoughts.