Reading Time: 11 minutes With the base cunning of a narcissist, Biff recognized — probably very quickly — that boring testimonies don’t exactly open doors in evangelicalism.
Mike Warnke
Posted inReligion
Beach Reach Training: How to Craft a Testimony (And Why)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Hi and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been talking about Beach Reach. That’s a short-term mission trip (STM) organized by the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). For two weeks, college-age SBC-lings descend on a beach during American universities’ Spring Break. During their trip, these volunteers offer charity services to a truly deserving group that is desperately in […]
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How the Satanic Panic Led Straight to QAnon
Reading Time: 11 minutes After a couple of years of ignoring the whole thing, evangelical leaders have finally noticed just how many of their flocks have begun chasing after QAnon. And of course the flocks have done that. Thanks to the Satanic Panic years ago, they were primed and ready for just such a time as this.
Posted inReligion
THROWDOWN: Ex-Atheist Testimonies vs. Ex-Satanist Testimonies
Reading Time: 8 minutes Today, I’ll show you the shared features of these two popular testimony styles, and which testimony I think wins the fight for Christians’ attention and money–for now.
Posted inReligion
Trendy Testimonies: Why Christians Keep Saying They’re Ex-Atheists
Reading Time: 10 minutes Christians might want to help ease or (in their wildest dreams) reverse their decade-long decline, but even more than that, they want to do it without changing anything they’re doing. As a result, conjobs in the religion still pursue the same strategies their predecessors did in the 1970s and 1980s. Today we’re going to look at the super-trendy Christian testimony these days, and why it works so grandly at fooling today’s Christians.
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News from the World of Gozer. (Update Time!)
Reading Time: 7 minutes I’ve been reading a lot lately about the strange shift in right-wing Christians’ morality over the last ten years. As I read, I found myself wondering how that shift has applied in realtime to the various Christian leaders who’ve been caught misbehaving. I began to look for information about what they’ve been doing since their various downfalls, and began noticing a trend. See if you can see it too.
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The Cult of Before Stories: Desperate for Relevance.
Reading Time: 8 minutes Bill Schnoebelen is one such storyteller. Once a popular figure in fundagelical Christianity, his narrative long ago lost its cachet. He’s had to reinvent himself–but is finding that once someone’s joined the Cult of Before Stories, that’s really hard to do.
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The Rapture Didn’t Happen in Tim LaHaye’s Lifetime After All
Reading Time: 7 minutes Tim LaHaye, co-author of Left Behind and general Christian reality-denier, has just died at the age of 90. Thus ends a career marked by denial, grandiose ideas, wish-fulfillment, and Endtimes fantasizing–and one that led its owner into positions of great influence.
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The Cult of Before Stories: Shane Hayes, Part 1.
Reading Time: 13 minutes A while ago, Kirk Cameron popularized a fairly-new evangelism technique: claiming that he knows all about atheism because he, himself, was once an (gasp! Shock! OMG!) atheist. He thought it gave him some kind of leg up on authority and credibility to say that he’d once been an atheist, and though the attempt backfired hilariously […]
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The Truth That Wasn’t There.
Reading Time: 11 minutes I have a real fascination with stories of liars who get found out. Today I want to talk about why these denouements are important to tell. Before we start, though, I want you to picture in your mind these things: * Medieval knights * the 1950s * the Wild West Chances are, whatever you’re picturing […]