Reading Time: 8 minutes Today, let me show you how good advice goes bad in the cargo cult of evangelical marriage counseling.
Love Dare
Posted inReligion
A Mean God for Mean People: Performative Piety Fools No One (Else)
Reading Time: 7 minutes Today, let me show you why nobody will ever convince evangelicals to be less cruel: they’ve found a performative brand of piety that lets them believe their own marketing about themselves without having to do all that tough work that goes along with real self-improvement.
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 inReligion
J.D. Greear Knows How to Solve the SBC’s Misogyny Problem, Too!
Reading Time: 11 minutes Poor J.D. Greear. Dude literally just got elected the Grand High Lord Poobah of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and he’s already stomping on my last nerve. Last time we touched on his solutions to the SBC’s years-long decline. Today, we’ll look at his non-solution to the problem of misogyny in his blighted, embattled denomination–and why it won’t work at all. And then we’ll look at why that’s the point.
Posted inReligion
Evangelical Churn: The Real Goal vs. the Stated Goal
Reading Time: 9 minutes In Christianity, we’re seeing this situation come into clearer and clearer focus regarding their stated goals. I’ll show you what I mean today–and how to evaluate a group’s behavior to see how it matches up with their stated goals.
Posted inLGBTQ, Religion
Leopards Don’t Change Their Spots: Kim Davis Edition.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Kim Davis is from a family of super-duper-fervent Christians in a super-duper-religious town, but she claims that her new birth only happened a few years ago for the very first time. As a result of her new birth, she is totally changed and a whole different person, and all her transgressions are forgotten. Indeed, it bothers her that people think she’s a total hypocrite. She’s indignant about it–and hates that while “God” has forgotten her past, people keep bringing it up. And I wonder who is fooled by this blatantly self-serving assertion of hers. Fundagelical Christians like her like to say that the second they are converted, anything that happened previously is off-limits. They are “born again,” in a very real sense: new creations, totally different people. Today I want to talk about how wrong this idea is, and why it only serves to further fundagelical interests and promote abuse. I’ll start by discussing Fireproof, that awful Christian movie I reviewed recently.
Posted inReligion
The Love Dare: Repackaged and Warmed-Over Glurge.
Reading Time: 11 minutes I scared up a copy, got reading, and then went through a second time and made notes. Copious, copious, notes. (Looking back over the notes, I can see I was getting progressively more and more frustrated with the thing – my notes started getting more and more editorial and profane as I went.) I ended up with notes that are almost as long as the book itself. More even than what The Love Dare represents in and of itself, though, it doesn’t actually say anything really new at all regarding relationships or how people should conduct themselves with their romantic prospects and partners.
Posted inReligion
Fireproof: Making Love Out of Nothing At All.
Reading Time: 8 minutes This movie echoes something I myself was taught as a young fundamentalist: that by doing loving things, one can create loving feelings in oneself and inspire loving feelings in a target. In other words, just like the old song by Air Supply put it, we were taught that we could make love out of nothing at all.
Posted inReligion
As Seen in Fireproof: The Love Dare, Or How to Get Divorced In Six Short Weeks.
Reading Time: 11 minutes You can’t really talk about Fireproof without talking about the Love Dare, and vice versa. Today I found out why that is.
Posted inReligion
Fireproof: Hunting Bears with an Umbrella.
Reading Time: 9 minutes (This is part of our Fireproof review week–here’s the review itself and here’s where I talk about how the movie assumes that only Christians can make marriage work. Consider this, like all my movie posts, full of ALL THE SPOILERS. Also, I’m popping this into our Unequally Yoked Club series for obvious reasons.) Last time […]