Reading Time: 6 minutes That’s what I saw in that one video that I wish I could find again. In the context of apologizing, an influencer got up on stage and began talking about her own apparent requirements for granting forgiveness. She told her audience that if someone comes to her admitting their mistake and owning up to it, then she forgives them. Ta-da! Very clearly, she was ordering her audience to do the same for her.
dogwhistle terms
Posted inReligion
Deconversion: Brett McCracken gets it completely wrong
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.
Posted inReligion
How Evangelical Husbands (Don’t) Repair Their Troubled Marriages
Reading Time: 8 minutes Evangelical men get taught completely impractical rules for marriage, and then — once everything goes completely pear-shaped — take disastrous advice to fix their ruined relationships. Today, let me show you some of that disastrous advice — and why it absolutely doesn’t work, and what evangelical husbands learn as a result.
Posted inGeneral
Joe Battaglia: Let’s All Jesus Harder to Fix America!
Reading Time: 9 minutes Yes, we’ve found ourselves yet another Christian who thinks he’s figured out the way to fix everything wrong in America. And that way? Everybody just needs to Jesus harder. Today, let me show you this popular non-solution — and more importantly, let me show you why his crowd likes it so much.
Posted inReligion
#SBC2019: Distraction Tactics Hit Their Peak
Reading Time: 8 minutes This time around, the SBC’s 2019 Annual Meeting has a slightly different flavor. And some of the stuff happening this year might well be unprecedented in the denomination’s recent history. Join me today for a look at what’s going on–and why it might be important to us.
Posted inReligion
Plot Twist: Even Faith-For-No-Good-Reason Has Very Big Reasons
Reading Time: 11 minutes See, faith-for-no-good-reason doesn’t really exist. People who believe things that aren’t true actually have reasons for believing. They’re just not really compelling reasons to people who don’t share the same worldview. I’ll show you what I mean today–and why it’s important to sift through to those real reasons, even if it’s just about our own beliefs.
Posted inLGBTQ
False Persecution and Dogwhistles: Mike Huckabee Gives Away the Game
Reading Time: 12 minutes Mike Huckabee’s latest attempt was a few days ago, when he was appointed to–and then resigned from–the Country Music Award Foundation’s board of directors. The whole affair is such a beautiful microcosm of false persecution that I find myself drawn to it now. Here, today, is what happened and why it’s important as part of Evangelical Churn.
Posted inReligion
The Dark Origins of the Anti-Abortion Culture War
Reading Time: 10 minutes Last time we covered the mismatch between those two types of goals in apologetics. But that’s not the biggest mismatch there is. That honor belongs to the Christian culture war against abortion. I’ll show you what the mismatch is, how Christians bought into one of the cruelest, most hypocritical, most patently-dishonest, and most callously-engineered causes imaginable, and how you can tell that their culture war has nothing to do with what they say it’s about. Today we’ll start with just how this culture war got started.
Posted inReligion
Jerry Falwell Jr. Thinks Evangelicals are Forgotten People
Reading Time: 14 minutes Sometimes I see something a fundagelical wrote and just laugh, because it’s either that or get angry. Today’s laugh is provided by Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University. And I know that Liberty University generally provokes that kind of reaction from everyone except fundagelicals, for whom it is Most Serious Bizniss, but this was more WTF […]
Posted inReligion
Pick a Gear: Selling Contradictions.
Reading Time: 11 minutes The marketers in broken systems have this unfortunate tendency to sell two different and diametrically opposed things to potential consumers. It’s not just a Christian thing; it happens in most broken systems. People in them don’t see that they’re doing it, and the people they’re selling to may not even realize that’s why they distrust the sellers and reject their product. But it happens all the same.