Reading Time: 11 minutes Today, I’ll tell you what happened the night I finally lost my fear of Hell.
Spiritual Abuse (Church-Related Abuse)
Posted inReligion
Gaslighting: How Dare We Expect Evangelicals to Fulfill Their Promises!
Reading Time: 9 minutes Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, I alluded to the mistreatment evangelicals heap upon people who express disappointment with their experiences in the religion. To be sure, it does happen. It happened to me, in fact! Yes, people join these evangelical groups on the basis of a whole bunch of marketing promises, and then they discover […]
Posted inReligion
Purity Culture in Calvinism: Creepiness in Overdrive
Reading Time: 9 minutes Today, let me show you the extreme emphasis of Calvinism on sexual purity — and how young Calvinists are especially vulnerable to this siren call of wingnuttery.
Posted inReligion
Matthew 18: How Christians Shield Abusers With ‘the Lord’s Conflict Resolution Plan’
Reading Time: 7 minutes Hi and welcome back! Hey, you know what never takes long to show itself? Toxic Christians‘ utter hypocrisy. Any time someone reveals some terrible shameful secret about their tribe, they spring into action… to protect the tribe’s reputation. And they do it by leaning very hard on some verses in the Bible that one site actually […]
Posted inReligion
‘Millions of Souls’: the Manipulation Tactic Christian Predators Love
Reading Time: 8 minutes Hi and welcome back! Happy Chocolate Day! We are still snowbound here at Casa Cas. At least this weather lends itself to introspection. Indeed, I’ve had something on my mind for a bit now: the weird manipulation tactic Ravi Zacharias used on his victims, according to the official sexual misconduct report his ministry commissioned. It […]
Posted inReligion
‘Counting the Costs’ is Music to Authoritarian Ears
Reading Time: 9 minutes Before I get into the harm his suggestions do to children, I realized I needed to explain a popular Christianese concept: counting the costs. This phrase figures prominently in Greg Stier’s work, and it certainly did as well in my own life when I was evangelical. Today, let me show you this Christianese phrase, how it’s used, and how it manipulates the unwary into groups and behavior that will only harm them.
Posted inReligion
Thom Rainer’s ‘Autopsy’ Needs Churches to Totally Change Now Please
Reading Time: 6 minutes In essence, ‘Autopsy’ demands that evangelical churches become something besides what they are and always have been: gratification stations for the self-declared chosen elite ambassadors of King American-Jesus Superman.
Posted inReligion, Science
Porn and Christians: Starting Trouble For a Reason
Reading Time: 7 minutes Hi and welcome back! I guess today also represents a bit of a palate cleanser. I ran across a recent article on a Christian site that caught my eye. It describes a study about the effects of porn on fervent Christians. Most of us probably saw most of their findings from a mile away, but part of […]
Posted inReligion
Russell Moore Reveals the SBC’s ‘Abuse of Faith’ Strategy
Reading Time: 10 minutes Recently, I wondered what they’ve been up to on that front. What’s changed since we last checked in on them? As it turns out, the SBC’s leaders have been busy. Today, I’ll show you the SBC’s general strategy for dealing with their sex-abuse scandal and what they’ve managed to accomplish in this past year-and-a-half.
Posted inReligion
Fixing Evangelicals’ Broken Authoritarianism
Reading Time: 10 minutes Recently, we encountered Ronald J. Sider’s 2005 evangelical classic, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience. In it, the author explored what he viewed as evangelicals’ signal failure: their utter unwillingness even to pretend to care about what Jesus told them to do during their finite lifetimes. However, Sider offered a downright galaxy-brained solution to this terrible problem. Indeed, he was completely positive that this solution would totally fix everything. Yes, truly! Today, I’ll show you how Ronald J. Sider totally and permanently solved the problem of evangelical hypocrisy through the simple magic of authoritarianism.