Reading Time: 5 minutes Christian evangelist Franklin Graham told a victim of domestic violence that she ought to return to her husband and downplayed her allegations of abuse, according to a jaw-dropping story in the Washington Post. The story revolves around Naghmeh Panahi, the wife of Saeed Abedini, a Christian pastor who was imprisoned in Iran in 2012 in […]
Domestic violence
Posted inSex & Gender
When men’s mental health becomes a political weapon, everyone loses
Reading Time: 8 minutes When I was a kid, comedians and pundits still felt comfortable joking about how terrible women would be in political office because they menstruate. Hormones, get it? As if only half the population has them, and testosterone has no complex interactions for human bodies. As a child, I absorbed all kinds of reductive claims about […]
Posted inReligion
Measuring Evangelical Hypocrisy in ‘The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience’
Reading Time: 8 minutes Yesterday, I showed you an overview of a classic evangelical book from 2005: The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, by Ronald J. Sider. Its author sought to persuade evangelicals to start pretending they took Jesus’ commands more seriously — because they commit hypocrisy to an extent and to a degree that suggests that they believe someone’ll set them on fire forever after they die if they don’t. Today, I’ll show you some of Sider’s findings that condemn evangelicals, and his response to it all in the end.
Posted inReligion
Paige Patterson: When Halfway There Isn’t Good Enough
Reading Time: 9 minutes Poor Paige Patterson. The fallout continues for this domestic-violence-advocating Southern Baptist leader. Why, the SBC denomination itself has begun tearing at its own flanks. Two sides square off for a Battle Royale. And possibly the most tragic figures of all in the fight are the right-wing Christians who don’t understand how the conservative movement they love so much has led their end of Christianity directly to this pass. Today, I’ll show you what I mean.
Posted inReligion
Paige Patterson Is Helping the SBC Out of Its Slump (LSP #40)
Reading Time: 10 minutes Paige Patterson, a bigwig with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), gave a speech in 2000 to a bunch of his fellow Christians about how women should respond to domestic violence. Someone remembered those comments recently. His predictably-toxic advice is a very potent reminder today about why those pews need to be emptied, now, STAT, completely. Today Lord Snow Presides over how not to reverse a serious organizational slump.
Posted inReligion
When Murder is Less Unthinkable Than Divorce
Reading Time: 10 minutes Over the years, quite a few pastors’ wives have been murdered by their husbands–and for an especially nefarious reason. I’ll show you some of those crimes today, and why they’re going to keep happening.
Posted inReligion
Clearly This Hypocritical Pastor’s Jesus Aura Was on Point.
Reading Time: 7 minutes Today we’re going to take a brief segue before we plunge into the murky world of Christian prognostication to check out a story that features all the aspects of fundagelicalism that we’ve come to know around here: blatant hypocrisy, illicit sex, and a denouement that is by turns horrifying and baffling. But there’s more going on here than just standard-issue Christian hypocrisy. This story is part of the overarching narrative about exactly why Christianity is failing.
Posted inReligion
(Christians Are Not) The Designated Adult.
Reading Time: 11 minutes (CN: Domestic violence, abuse, gaslighting.) Hi and welcome back! We’re cruising right into the weekend, aren’t we? Last time we talked, I touched briefly on the way that Christians often insist on adjudicating and judging people’s lives and personal decisions. In response to a blogger who wrote that Christians’ hypocrisy was no excuse for not […]
Posted inReligion
It’s So Romantic.
Reading Time: 10 minutes (CN: Religious abuse, domestic violence, stalking.) Today we’re going to talk about one of the most sickening aspects of modern Christianity: this idea that the Christian god “woos” people by abusing and hurting them. “To woo someone” means to seek the romantic favor of that person. Normally this is done by doing sweet and thoughtful […]
Posted inReligion
Christian Charlatans.
Reading Time: 14 minutes The other day I discovered that one of this site’s favorite charlatans and bullshit artists, Joyce Meyer, has a book out about how to break bad habits, and it tied in with some stuff I’ve been thinking about lately about charlatanism in Christianity. I wanted to talk about my own experiences with that topic. When […]