Reading Time: 7 minutes Recently, a young and fervent Calvinist, Robert Aaron Long, decided that the best way to deal with his personal difficulties was to murder a whole bunch of innocent people. His church, Crabapple First Baptist, immediately distanced itself and is doing its level best to pretend their teachings had nothing whatsoever to do with Long’s decision or his difficulties. But I’d venture to guess that the opposite is true. Calvinism teaches adherents to treat people like things, and it does so through its central tenet.
Permission Slips
Posted inReligion
Ex-Christians and the Myth of the Virtuous Deconversion Excuse
Reading Time: 11 minutes Today, let me show you what a virtuous excuse is, and why you’ll find none of them in the evangelical conceptualization of deconversion.
Posted inReligion
David Harsanyi Just Gave Fundagelicals Their Newest Permission Slip
Reading Time: 8 minutes Today, let me show you how a conservative political opinion site decided to give its fundagelical readers a permission slip to mistreat others — and more importantly, why.
Posted inReligion
Casting the Gospel Spell (And Botching the Roll)
Reading Time: 8 minutes Today, let me show you how evangelicals think ‘the gospel’ can return them to power forever — and what it actually does.
Posted inReligion
Christianese 101: ‘Conviction’
Reading Time: 11 minutes Hi and welcome back! For a long time now, I’ve studied Christianese. That’s the jargon that Christians use among themselves — particularly the really fervent and toxic ones, like fundagelicals and Catholic hardliners. Thanks to Christianese, they can be utterly unintelligible to outsiders — or, conversely, can hold an entire conversation using common words in English […]
Posted inReligion
‘Atheist Overreach’ and the Problem of Wingnuts
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! Lately, we’ve been looking at the 2019 book Atheist Overreach by Christian Smith. It examines the question of religion’s necessity to modern societies. Shockingly, a Christian writer lands on religion being super-duper necessary OMG y’all. One thing I’ve been noticing as I read this book is that it illustrates perfectly the Problem of Wingnuts: how […]
Posted inReligion
John Stott and the Evangelism Goalpost He Moved
Reading Time: 8 minutes Evangelical leader John Stott gave the flocks permission to move the evangelism goalpost so they could keep their strategies intact. Today, let me show you how that happened, and why it’s proven so important to evangelicals’ future plans.
Posted inReligion
Respect: The Song And Dance That Makes Complementarians Content
Reading Time: 9 minutes Respect is such an important concept to understand when one discusses this ultra-authoritarian, misogynistic flavor of Christianity. Hop aboard! Today, we ride the Respect Train right past these control-freaky zealots.