Reading Time: 9 minutes The year is 1973. In January, Richard Nixon is sworn in for his second term as president, the US officially withdraws from its conflict in Vietnam, and an investigation into the Watergate break-ins expands from the burglars to the statesmen. In the coming months, Nixon will orchestrate a cover-up of a cover-up, trying to hold […]
Scandals
Posted inReligion
Why Christian hypocrites describe their darkest deeds as ‘sin’
Reading Time: 12 minutes When an abusive evangelical pastor, Christian Watts, tried to downplay his grooming of a teenager decades earlier, he described his predation as ‘my past sin.’ That’s a time-honored tactic for people caught in his exact circumstances. Let’s take a closer look at this tactic to see why it works so well in evangelical culture.
Posted inReligion
Pastor Christian Watts tried to negate abuse accusations with Christianese
Reading Time: 14 minutes To save his job, Christian Watts clung hard to a time-tested, long-honored evangelical get-out-of-scandal-free card: calling upon Christianese to escape the writing on his wall.
Posted inReligious News
Gracepoint: Yet another ‘discipleship’ church turns out to be abusive
Reading Time: 13 minutes Discipleship might be the answer to the prayers of authoritarian evangelical pastors, but it all too often becomes a total nightmare for their followers.
Posted inReligion
Why Mormons confuse scrutiny and mockery for persecution
Reading Time: 10 minutes The post we’re examining today contains big words like oppressed and persecution. Its writer has misdefined them all.
Posted inReligious News
‘Use as example’: Southern Baptist self-protection in action
Reading Time: 11 minutes The whole document is horrifying reading. But one line in it particularly caught my eye. It read, “Use as example.” Today, we’ll look at this so-called “example” that the SBC’s leaders wanted to stand out as a perfect example of sexual predators in SBC ministerial ranks. Along the way, maybe we’ll see just why the people behind this document wanted to use this particular person, Perez Blackmon, as their ur-example.
Posted inReligious News
What you need to know about the Southern Baptist sex abuse report
Reading Time: 7 minutes Today, let me show you some of the key features of this report and its recommendations.
Posted inReligious News
Sermon plagiarism: why it suddenly matters to some Southern Baptists
Reading Time: 10 minutes The current president of the SBC, Ed Litton, got caught using someone else’s sermon without attributing it. Usually, sermon plagiarism is simply a minor but common sin in evangelical leadership. But this time, Ed Litton’s faction enemies, the Old Guard, began howling for his resignation. Oddly, they didn’t care at all that his predecessor, J.D. Greear, did something considerably worse during his own reign.
Posted inReligious News
How Hillsong is quickly falling apart
Reading Time: 6 minutes So far, Hillsong has lost 9 of its 16 American campuses. It’s a swift comeuppance for a church that seemed too big to fall. But Hillsong has shown, through these constant scandals, that their dazzling and trendy image is distinctly at odds with their lived reality.
Posted inReligion
‘Who’s Your One’ campaign is everything wrong with the Southern Baptist Convention
Reading Time: 8 minutes A traveling evangelist has begun upselling a failed 2014 evangelism campaign called “Who’s Your One?” Today, let me show you what this campaign is, who started it and who adopted it and why, how it failed, and most importantly what it tells us about the Southern Baptist Convention as a whole.