Captain Cassidy – The Pencil Driven Life

Southern Baptist leaders release new analysis of their decline

We don’t get treats like this very often. Savor it.

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY FEB 01, 2024

Overview:

This analysis contains some information we don’t usually see out of the Southern Baptist Convention, including an egregious example of goalpost-shifting to avoid dealing with the metric most indicative of decline.

Reading Time: 8 MINUTES

For years now, Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) members have watched their denomination decline in both cultural dominance and memberships. Recently, the branch of the denomination devoted to information gathering and analysis, Lifeway Research, released some new information about that decline.

In short, that decline’s nowhere near over yet.

How Southern Baptists use the Annual Church Profile—and how they don’t

The Annual Church Profile (ACP) is a yearly survey of Southern Baptist churches. It asks them a variety of questions about:

Baptisms
Total membership
Attendance in-person (and online, since the pandemic)
Sunday School and small group enrollment and attendance (a small group is something like a Sunday School class for adults; members pray together, study the Bible, and have Jesusy discussions)
How much money the church has given to SBC projects

The SBC operates as a kind of mother ship to dozens of state-level conventions. Most American states have one. Some states have so few Southern Baptists that they must combine with other states, while others are so large they have more than one. But generally, each state has its own state convention. Churches operate more or less independently, as do the state conventions representing them. Each state-level convention runs its own ACP.

Note two major facts about the ACP.

First, some state-level conventions sometimes ask questions in a different way than others. Or they may leave out some questions entirely.

Second, it’s completely voluntary. Southern Baptist leaders do not require participation in it. So a church may elect to answer all questions, or just some, or only one, or none at all. Participation has no effect on membership in the denomination.

For the ACP discussed here today, 69% of Southern Baptist churches participated by answering at least one question on the survey.

Sidebar: Now consider why a Southern Baptist church might not participate

Given what we know of the SBC as a whole and about Southern Baptists in particular, we can make some educated guesses about churches that refused to participate in the ACP.

I’m betting that the 31% of churches that didn’t participate weren’t exactly doing great, metrics-wise. If they’d been baptizing people left and right, running stunningly effective evangelism programs, and growing so fast their pastors’ sermons were standing-room-only, no way no how would they forget to tell the mother ship about it, or simply refuse to participate.

It’d be extremely interesting to see what Southern Baptist stats would look like if the denomination’s leaders required ACP participation. But I don’t think it’ll ever happen. When such two-edged proposals come up, Southern Baptist leaders begin sweating greasy droplets of muh autonomous local church.

(That’s also why Southern Baptist leaders in the Old Guard faction don’t want to do anything about the denomination’s sex abuse crisis. They’re just so incredibly concerned, you see, about muh autonomous local church. But of course, when those autonomous local churches decide to be inclusive toward gay people or hire women to be pastors, suddenly even the Old Guard faction finds its teeth; archive.)

What Southern Baptist analysts found in the 2022 ACP

You can find a summary of the 2022 ACP here. It looks like the state-level conventions are still gathering the information together from 2023 to send to the mother ship for last year. On the site for the California Southern Baptist Convention (archive), I found a due date for the 2023 ACP: March 1, 2024. So we’re a ways off from knowing how the denomination did last year.

Usually, though, Southern Baptist leaders release a little tickle in the early spring. They like to do that in the run-up to their big Annual Meeting every summer. So keep an eye out for it around April. For now, we’ve got 2022 to keep us company.

And oh, what company it is!

Overall, this new analysis paints a picture of deep decline that is nowhere near even bottoming-out yet. In almost every single way imaginable, Southern Baptist congregations are in trouble. The pandemic only accelerated their decline.

This is probably one of the most dire graphs I have ever seen out of the SBC:

That can’t have been easy for some poor Southern Baptist graphic artist to make. But it’s truthful. After their disastrous pandemic drop in 2020, Southern Baptist churches rebounded all the way to 180,177 baptisms. And even that’s awful. They haven’t seen that small of a number since around 1920, when churches dunked 173,595 people.

(Info about specific years’ performance comes from Annual Reports on the official SBC site. The reports contain info about the previous year. So the 2023 Annual Report contains info about 2022, and so on and so forth. If I give a date like 2018 for a figure, it can be found in the next year’s report, so in this case 2019.)

This is Southern Baptist info we don’t normally get

Years ago, I ran across a report released around 2014 by the Pastors’ Task Force on SBC Evangelistic Impact & Declining Baptisms. It’s an analysis of the 2012 ACP. It is an absolutely eye-opening document, too. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in evangelical-watching.

And I recommend it for one important reason:

It reveals that Southern Baptist leaders have access to a wealth of information about baptisms that they don’t generally make available to the public. One of the most important metrics they reveal is the age of the people getting baptized. I’ve never seen this exact information provided anywhere else.

In the 2012 ACP report, as the Task Force revealed, 25% of Southern Baptist churches had zero baptisms. 60% of respondents didn’t baptize anyone between 12-17, while 80% reported “0-1 young adult baptisms (age 18-29 bracket).” Worse, the Task Force revealed this damning bit of trivia: “The only consistently growing age group in baptisms is age five and under.”

This new analysis of the 2022 ACP makes a good chaser for it, because it, too, reveals a lot of information that doesn’t usually appear anywhere else. For instance, it mentions that about 43% of Southern Baptist churches had no baptisms at all in 2022, while 34% had 1-5. That’s a lot more coming up empty than did in 2012.

Of note, in 2012, churches baptized about 315k people and counted 15.8M members. In 2022, they recorded 180,177 baptisms and 13.2M members.

I’m extremely interested in knowing how the ages broke out in those 2022 stats. If the mother ship had that info in 2012-2014, then it does now.

And they’re not talkin’, which makes me strongly suspect that most of the reported baptisms are the under-18 children of existing adult members and returning members who want to make a public demonstration of their re-affiliation.

And stuff most people could probably guess about Southern Baptist churches generally

As one might guess, Southern churches saw more baptisms, as did urban churches and new churches (less than 20 years old). Rural areas have a lot fewer potential new recruits living nearby, and well, Southern Baptist churches always did do well in the American South. It’s in the name!

New churches, as well, saw a lot more baptisms than old ones did. A church established more than a century ago is probably pretty stuck in its ways and traditional. It’s had time to attract and then alienate all the people in the area. But a lot of evangelicals’ ears perk up when they notice a brand-new church in their vicinity. They think it’ll be different than the ones they’ve tried. They’re willing to visit and check it out.

Churchless believers, those Christians who believe but have left church culture and membership behind, seem particularly open to trying brand-new churches. Often, they’ve been burned hard by other churches, but many say they want to find a good church to join.

Alas, new Southern Baptist churches often have trouble surviving past about five years. The people they attract might leave, taking their wallets with them, or the church’s leaders might turn out not to know how to lead volunteer groups very well.

As a May 2023 article hints (article), the mother ship’s general strategy for about 15 years now has been to scattershot new churches everywhere imaginable in the frantic hopes that they outweigh the number of churches closing each year. Every one of those struggling churches needs a pastor, even if that pastor will also need a day job.

“I’m glad I’m retired,” said one former Southern Baptist pastor in 2022 (archive) of the entire situation with pastors’ overall short tenure.

Selling Southern Baptist church membership on the basis of real-world social benefits

I’ve noticed lately that Southern Baptists have been talking up the real-world social benefits of joining their churches. That’s a wise strategy, far better than the one they’ve been using:

Convince marks that the Bible is literally true and Jesus is literally a real god who does real stuff in the real world (and will send the disobedient to Hell)
Then, sell marks active, engaged SBC church membership as the only way to Jesus correctly

Pushing harder on real-world benefits will generate a lot more interest, as long as they can deliver on their promises.

And so we see in the 2022 ACP analysis that churches with very active, engaged members also tend to bag the most baptisms. The more people participate in small groups, in particular, the generally higher their baptism rate—but churches that claimed 100% participation tended to have way fewer baptisms on average (5.9) than those claiming 75-99% participation (7.2).

What’s really interesting about that figure is that churches claiming 25-49% participation got 6.4, and those claiming 0-24% participation got 5.5. So that 100% participation figure of 5.9 baptisms is definitely a strange one.

Also, very large churches with 500+ attending weekly worship services tended to be the only ones that increased their number of baptisms between 2017 (5.2) and 2022 (5.6). Most regions were doing well just to maintain their 2017 numbers.

The Southern Baptist baptism ratio still blows chunks

The number that Southern Baptist leaders consider their very most important is what they call their baptism ratio. That’s the ratio of baptized people per existing Southern Baptist members. It asks: How many Southern Baptists’ resources did it take to get one person baptized?

And it’s why Southern Baptist leaders have known about their decline for about 50 years. That number speaks to the effectiveness of Southern Baptist recruiting and retention. Until about 1974, their ratio hovered in the 1:20-1:29 range. They liked it there. But after 1974, it never dipped that low again.

(Note: The SBC’s Conservative Resurgence began in earnest in the 1970s. This takeover by ultraconservative schemers and hypocrites finally ended in the late 1990s with solid victory.)

In 1985, the baptism ratio hit 1:41 at last. Despite Southern Baptist churches doing everything they could think of to fight it back down into the 1:30s again, it hit 1:50 in 2012. I saw a lot of Southern Baptist panicking around that time. It didn’t do any good then, either, because in 2018, it reached 1:60. I heard nothing about it that time, though.

Then, the pandemic blasted that already-struggling baptism ratio to smithereens:

2019: 1:62
2020: 1:114
2021: 1:88

As of 2022, they’d clawed their way back up to 1:73.

Which leads to the most hilarious bit of Southern Baptist goalpost-shifting I’ve ever seen

That is just shockingly bad, by Southern Baptist standards. That gets evangelicals to wondering if maybe Jesus just doesn’t like the denomination or something.

So the analysts behind the 2022 ACP report have figured out a way to move the goalposts!

Now they’re going to give a ratio between baptisms per every 100 people attending worship services. And doing it that way, they get a baptism ratio of 1:20 for 2022!

However, that’s still a decline, as they tell us themselves:

Another way to examine baptisms and rates for churches is by considering the number per worship attendees. Unfortunately for Southern Baptists, that number is also in decline. With worship attendance also falling, that means baptisms are falling at a faster rate than attendance. [. . .]

Among Southern Baptist churches that reported attendance in 2022, for every 100 people attending a worship service in a Southern Baptist church, five people were baptized on average. In other words, it took 20 Southern Baptists to reach one person. While that is the best number in the past four years, it’s still a decline from 2017 (5.9 per 100) and part of an overall negative trend.2022 ACP Analysis, Lifeway Research

Man alive, I really and truly don’t know how Southern Baptist leaders are going to deal with this in the next few years. Sooner or later, someone’s going to remember that the Conservative Resurgence was supposed to fix the decline. That’s how its architects and leaders sold it to the flocks. But it seems to have done the exact opposite.

Worse, pushing hard on the supposed real-world social benefits of joining Southern Baptist churches won’t work unless the people in those churches live up to the hype. And most of them just don’t, which we know because they’re falling apart across the board.

That simple truth may explain the relative success of the largest churches in the denomination: Plenty of stuff to do, plus a much higher chance of finding someone nice to make friends with. But if there’s another group that offers those same benefits for less hassle, watch out!

To grow, Baptists need to up their affability game in ways they have never had to do for their entire existence as a denomination. I just don’t think they’re up for the challenge. And I strongly suspect their leaders would agree with me there.

Cognitive Clarity–The Remnant: That evangelical need to feel picked-on and special

"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.

Here’s the link to this article.

Funny how the remnant looks just like all the other power-hungry, privilege-grabbing hypocrites we’ve ever seen in evangelicalism

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY NOV 21, 2023

Overview:

In Christianese, ‘the remnant’ is a term to indicate the truest of all true Christians: themselves, of course. Other Christians, even other evangelicals, are fakers who are going to Hell. Only the remnant gets a free pass to Heaven.

Reading Time: 14 MINUTES

Avery important evangelical belief centers on the idea of the remnant. No, it’s not a horror movie title—though it very well could be in this case. Rather, it’s the belief that the very truest of all true-blue evangelicals constitute a tiny, utterly embattled and persecuted subset of Christians. Let’s unpack this belief and see where it comes from, how evangelicals use it, and why it means so much to them.

(In the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, “the Remnant” and “Remnant Theology” take on special meaning (archive). Here, we use the term in the evangelical sense.)

Christianese 101: The remnant

The concept of the remnant is upper-level Christianese. It’s an Extremely Important Word for evangelicals that relates to something they hold especially dear: themselves.

In the real world, a remnant in general is whatever’s left over after something has taken everything else away. So a small bit of cooking oil might be the remnant after the rest has been used. The word can also refer to a bit of unsold matter from a larger whole, like cloth or carpeting.

‘Remnant’ is an Extremely Important Word for evangelicals. It relates to something they hold especially dear: themselves.

The Old Testament generally uses the real-world sense of the word:

“But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.” [Genesis 45:7, spoken by Joseph to his brothers]

. . . [the locust] has eaten the remnant of that which is escaped, which is left to you from the hail, and it has eaten every tree which is springing out of the field for you . . . [Exodus 10:5, spoken by Moses to the Pharaoh]

And the remnant of the meat offering shall be Aaron’s and his sons’: it is a thing most holy of the offerings of the LORD made by fire. [Leviticus 2:3, referring to offerings]

And the priest shall make an atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned in one of these, and it shall be forgiven him: and the remnant shall be the priest’s, as a meat offering. [Leviticus 5:13, referring to animals sacrificed as sin offerings]

Occasionally, we’ll see the evangelical sense of the word used, like one of their favorite passages in Isaiah 10:20-22:

On that day the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the house of Jacob will no longer depend on him who struck them, but they will truly rely on the LORD, the Holy One of Israel. A remnant will return, a remnant of Jacob will return to the Mighty God. Though your people, O Israel, be like the sand of the sea, only a remnant will return.

In the New Testament, though, we see this sense of remnant almost exclusively:

And the remnant [of invited guests] took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. [Matthew 22:6, the Parable of the Banquet]

“Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars. I am the only one left, and they are seeking my life as well?” And what was the divine reply to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” In the same way, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. [Romans 11:3-5; divine reply refers to 1 Kings 19:18]

And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven. [Revelation 11:13]

As you can see, it’s a whole thing in Christianity, particularly for evangelical culture warriors. If you see a church called “Remnant,” like the one started by weird fundie weight-loss guru Gwen Shamblin (archive), you can be absolutely assured that it’s an evangelical church whose members are way into the culture wars.

The remnant in the wild

Evangelicals take this remnant stuff very seriously. To them, it means more than being the leftovers or the last bit unused. It’s more about being the only real true believers out of all the rest of the fakey-fake pseudo-believers.

For example, a Calvinist church in Tacoma exhorts its congregation to “think like a Remnant”:

To consider oneself part of the remnant today sounds and feels proud and conceited. To declare oneself part of the faithful minority as opposed to being lumped with the unfaithful majority smacks of arrogance. We remind ourselves it is God who gets to dole out labels.“Thinking Like a Remnant” (archive)

But weirdly, it’s this god’s self-appointed spokespeople who actually do the doling-out. Nobody’s ever heard their god say a thing, most especially including his own followers!

This doling-out isn’t just a fun, overly-flattering little descriptor, either. It’s a statement of condemnation of all other flavors of Christianity and all Christians who disagree with these folks. Out of every single flavor of Christianity over its almost-2000-year-long history, these particular Christians are the only ones who finally got Jesusing right.

“Thinking like a Remnant” also involves feeling super-duper-persecuted for such superior Jesusing, as this church’s site reminds the flocks:

Outnumbered? Scorned? Misunderstood? Disliked? Yes, we are. But we have been redeemed.“Thinking Like a Remnant” (archive)

That’s not why people “scorn” these Christians, of course, nor why they “dislike” them. Their imaginary redemption has nothing to do with that. However, it’s clearly much more comfortable to pin the tail on a strawman than consider the boorish and cruel behavior that actually constitutes the reasons for society’s reactions to them.

The remnant: The best of the best of the BEST, SIR! With honors!

Famous evangelical leader A.W. Tozer (1897-1963) had much the same things to say about the notion of the remnant some years ago:

I am alarmed because it has been true since Pentecost that such a vast number of people who call themselves Christians-the overwhelming majority-are nominal, and only a remnant is saved.“The Remnant. Who are they? Are you part of the Remnant?” (archive)

Tozer didn’t like knowing that many Christians felt perfectly peaceful about their faith. To him, that meant they were fakey-fake fake Christians, not the real true believers who were really going to Heaven after death:

Either we take ourselves for granted and have a sham peace or we get disturbed and then we pray through and find true peace. Most believers take themselves for granted and have a false peace. If they did what the Bible taught, they would be bothered and alarmed about themselves and would go to God with an open Bible and let the Bible cut them to pieces and put them together again, then give them peace. And the peace they had when they had been chopped to pieces by the Holy Spirit and the Sword of the Spirit-that peace, then, is a legitimate peace. [. . .]

So at the second coming of Christ, it will be as it was in the days of Noah; and in those days, Noah, the eighth person, was saved by water, by the ark. The rest of the population drowned.“The Remnant. Who are they? Are you part of the Remnant?” (archive)

Even the comments sound like people who take themselves entirely too seriously and think entirely too much of themselves.

It all reminds me of that hilarious scene from Men in Black, where Jay is trying to work out the purpose of a big meeting:

At least “Captain America over here” had objective reasons for thinking so highly of himself. As a group, evangelicals have none. But somehow, they think even more highly of themselves.

The weighty implications of being part of this glorious remnant

“Thinking like a Remnant” involves being part of the evangelical culture wars, according to Crosswalk:

One of the things we must be aware of is that if you are in Christ you are part of the present day remnant. Jesus calls you salt and one of the functions of salt is to preserve, which is what the remnant does. We are called to preserve God’s standard in the earth regardless of what we see happening in our society.“What Does Remnant Mean in the Bible?” (archive)

It’s also yet another way for Christians to lord their superior Jesusing over others. Over and over again, we see Christians using “the remnant” (archive) to refer to themselves as the real-deal true Christians—while slamming all other kinds of Christians as fakes who are doomed to Hell for their insufficient, incorrect Jesusing:

Today the church serves as God’s chosen people.^{[citation needed]} And like the children of Israel, the church has become a sinful nation, comprised of believers laden with iniquity. They are a seed of evildoers, with children who are corrupter. They have forsaken the Lord and have provoked the Holy One unto anger. ^{[citation needed]} They have gone away backward. But despite the state of the church, God has once again left a small remnant.^{[citation needed]} A remnant that is far from perfect, but a remnant that trust God.^{[citation needed]}“Who is God’s remnant?” (archive)

And, amusingly enough, we also see Christians policing each other’s use of the word itself:

Claiming to be the remnant is a sign of arrogance. To excuse a church’s lack of growth on being a remnant is to claim that we are more right than others. [. . .]

You are not part of the remnant because you have stricter standards than the bigger church across town. You are not a part of the remnant because you are more separated than other churches.“Are We the Remnant?” (archive)

Of course, as that last quote illustrates, being part of the remnant implies a serious obligation to recruit more people into the fold:

This is your message, the vital message, and if you won’t carry it, who will?

We will carry it. We the few, the remnant, the believing church of Philadelphia in the time of the lukewarm church of Laodicea.“A Message to the Remnant of Believers in the World Today” (archive)

Other Christians lean hard on this concept to frighten believers about the Endtimes:

In this generation, we’ve seen the final jubilee that will happen in our generation. The next one to take place during a feast will happen in 500 years. We have seen the last one. Therefore, we are the remnant generation. We are the generation that have seen Matthew 24 to come to pass, the rebirth of Israel, Daniel 12:4 come to pass, we have seen technology and science increase. Most of the people don’t know the times we are living in. Only a remnant does. Why? Because they can read the signs. When you know why these signs are happening, you will have peace and no fear because you know our redemption draws near.“End Times Chosen Remnant” (archive)

As you might already have noticed, Calvinists seem particularly enamored of remnant ideology:

The elect are not many but few—only a remnant. Jesus said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to [eternal] destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13–14). And Paul said, “Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: ‘Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea, only the remnant will be saved’” (Rom. 9:27). We are the remnant; we are not many.“Jesus Prays for Us” (archive)

Using remnant ideology to feel persecuted

One of the weirdest ideas to come out of evangelicalism is the notion that “the world,” meaning everybody but their own narrowly-defined tribe of real true Christians, despises the remnant and wishes to oppress and persecute everyone within it. In reality, if evangelicals actually reliably did even a tenth of what Jesus commanded his followers to do and consistently refrained from doing even a fraction of the stuff he ordered them not to do, nobody’d ever have any problem with them.

But where’s the fun in being kind, respectful, and charitable? In comforting the grieving, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked? Where are the sadistic thrills in turning the other cheek, giving everything you have to the poor, giving someone the shirt off your back when they ask for your coat, and treating everyone, including your worst enemies, with kindness and love? What power accrues while accepting whatever horrible things someone else wants to do to you, and enduring it with nothing but smiles and blessings on your lips?

And if you’re not swanning around ostentatiously Jesusing at everyone, how will they even know you’re Jesus’ very special prettiest princess?

No, anyone involved in modern evangelicalism isn’t there to do all that boring stuff, nor to refrain from doing the gratifying stuff that really revs their motors. They’re there to get a free ticket out of Hell—and to mistreat others with Jesus’ permission.

(See also: Permission slips.)

They’ve declared themselves the best, truest, most incredibly Jesusy Jesusers who ever Jesused the Jesus-Jesus. Along with that declaration, they’ve also decided all other Christians are fakers and the outside world hates them jus’ fer’ bein’ KRIS-chin.

The stage is set for them to assume that literally any pushback at all to any of their control-grabs is actually persecution of the most shocking and egregious kind. Because obviously, fakers and heathens totally hate and fear the purity and godliness of the remnant. Gosh, they’re just far too divine to handle!

Sidebar: The Spiritual Ruler strikes again

Way back in college, I was a sprightly, bright-eyed Pentecostal lass. I had a lot of friends on-campus from a number of different evangelical groups. And because I thought Pentecostals were the remnant, I regarded every one of them as well-meaning but missing the mark (archive), to use the Christianese.

For one thing, every one of them was a Trinitarian. Pentecostals rejected the Trinity, instead embracing Oneness Theology. Back then, my tribe considered Trinitarianism a filthy papist doctrine that incorporated paganism into the one true monotheistic faith.

Only the remnant understood and embraced Oneness. And spoke in tongues just like on the Day of Pentecost in the Book of Acts. And maintained a ferocious separation from the outside world’s secular ways. Etc., etc., etc.

Truly, Jesus was so lucky to have us!

The funny thing, though, is that it’s almost impossible for one Christian to persuade another that they’re dead wrong about a major doctrinal belief. They can both swear up and down that they only want to believe what’s correct and most Jesusy, and they can both pray the same prayers and study the exact same Bible verses. But they’ll only see their own beliefs confirmed and other beliefs disavowed.

Even those papist Trinitarian pagans had entire books full of reasons to reject Oneness Theology, just as Pentecostals did to debunk Trinitarianism.

I came out of Christianity with a real affection for mockingly calling particularly-pompous Trinitarians heretics. But really, every Christian who’s ever lived is a heretic to some other Christian somewhere. There’s no way to win this squabble because there’s no consistent objective standard with which Christians may compare themselves. The Bible is a laughably poor resource in that respect; its many verses can be twisted and turned to suit any interpretation imaginable—as my college friends and I discovered many, many times.

The problems with declaring themselves the prettiest, most important princesses at the ball

We’ve already seen one Christian leader chide his flocks for using remnant ideology to excuse their lack of recruitment success. We’ve also already seen another Christian leader preen and strut about how it’s totally not arrogant at all to declare oneself as the remnant. No, not at all—if he does say so himself!

It’s not just arrogant, though. It’s not just a tidy excuse, either, for a small church’s congregation size.

Posing as the realest, truest Christians ever, the only ones who are actually going to Heaven, has a marked effect on those claiming it. Remnant ideology becomes a satisfying narrative for them. The flocks greedily consume it—and then use it to rationalize their control-lust and tribalistic impulses.

That’s how Mike Johnson, the new extremely evangelical Speaker of the House, can say with such conviction (archive) that the literal only reason why his tribe’s power is being curtailed is because everybody just hates them and persecutes them fer jus’ bein’ KRISchin. I’ll bet you just about anything that the guy thinks he and his like-minded tribemates constitute the remnant.

(Author’s note: Suddenly intrigued by this idea, I went a-searching. And yes. According to Rolling Stone (archive), Mike Johnson sure does think that: “He speaks at length about a devoted Christian “remnant” — or keepers of the true faith — who can help save America from retribution.” If you’re wondering, saving America means evangelicals fully controlling Americans’ lives, Handmaid style. It’s alarming to hear Johnson further claiming (archive) that the separation of church and state is a “misnomer.”)

It’s funny to watch these Christians get mad when nobody else honors them as the pretty princesses they think they truly are.

The politics of the remnant

Once Christians declare themselves the best of the best of the best, SIR, with honors, then they start to look at everyone else as poor widdle heathens in need of fixing up, people far too stupid and naughty to know what’s best for themselves, who need Designated Adults to step in and force them onto the right path (through actual enslavement if need be, according to Pastor Joe Morecraft in 2013), who most of all might not even be fully human or experience normal human emotions due to their lack of correct Jesusing. They use their self-declared label as a rationalization for trying to rob others of their rights.

History is replete with examples of what happens when this process is allowed to go too far. From slavery to the war crimes Japan committed against the people they called “logs,” from separate-but-equal laws to the designation of women as men’s property, nothing but harm and cruelty comes of such thinking.

Members of such a declared superior group invariably start mistreating the ones they consider inferior. And the people they mistreat usually have no recourse whatsoever, and no hope of finding justice in a system dominated by that superior group.

That’s why Paige Patterson lost his cushy seminary presidency in 2018: He systematically silenced sex-assault victims to protect the reputation of his school, and he told female domestic violence victims to meekly endure that abuse so their husbands would get convicted (ashamed, but in a really Jesusy way) enough to stop and become real true Christians at last.

Of course, the rest of that tribe still honors him as a great man and inspirational leader who got rousted unfairly out of his powerful position by lesser Christians who couldn’t understand his Jesus-osity. And boy oh boy, do they ever hate the guy who succeeded him!

The remnant might not actually be in churches anymore

Ten years ago, evangelicals gloated about the relatively faster decline of mainline and progressive churches. It’d never be them, they sneered, since they were so incredibly Jesusy that Jesus would always bless them with growth.

That smugness sure didn’t last. As it turned out, their rigid authoritarianism only held down a few extra butts in pews (BIPs, a measure of evangelical power) for a few extra years. Their rigid authoritarianism had made church membership seem a lot less optional than it really was. As the decline continued, year after year, even the most devoted evangelical BIPs realized that they could leave, and there was just nothing whatsoever that their church leaders could really do about it.

That’s when evangelicals’ decline began to keep up with and sometimes even outpace that of other flavors of Christianity.

Oh, I mean those leaders could write angry blog posts and books (archive) about their congregations quietly melting out “the back door.” Of course, the advice to church leaders was—and still is—always to drill down harder on authoritarian demands (archive) to make membership feel less optional. But in terms of real-world ~~Christian love~~ retaliation, most of those leaving were generally safe for the first time in modern American history.

And, too, those leaders could write angry blog posts and books about how the remaining BIPs were the remnant, the truest of all true Christians, the realest-deal of everyone, while the departing members were the fakey-fake “Cultural Christian” fakers (archive) that everyone was happy to see leave.

But sooner or later, even the BIPs had to question that wisdom. It sure seemed like the people leaving had been extremely devoted. Many of those who’d left were happy to say exactly that. (You can often find them commenting on blog posts discussing that exact situation.) They became churchless believers, Christians who’d left church culture behind because it had first left them behind.

And now, the prettiest of the prettiest princesses!

The most arrogant evangelicals seem now to consider themselves the remnant of the remnant. Out of an already small number of pretty princesses, they’re the very prettiest of the pretty. As one pastor preached in 2015 on YouTube,

Within the remnant there is even those numbers that are even fewer.

So a remnant in the natural means a small portion of the original. Say you are making a dress. Those offshoots are a remnant of the original fabric that you’re using to make that dress. But here, we see God is saying ‘remnant of the remnant’. What is happening here?

See, the mark of a wise church is not how many people go to that church, but how many people fear the LORD and live differently as a result of being in that church. [. . .]

Are you the remnant of the remnant? He is coming back for the remnant of the remnant!“THE REMNANT OF THE REMNANT – PST ROBERT CLANCY” 2015, about 2:50-5:00

Strangely enough, though, this remnant of the remnant always looks like the usual grabby, power-maddened hypocrites we’ve always seen. Calling themselves lofty things doesn’t change who they are. It just makes them look worse. Calling themselves something even loftier only makes things even worse.

What’s next? The remnant of the remnant of the remnant, with honors, sir?

(Don’t ever think that we’ve hit rock bottom with evangelicals. They’ve always got a burning desire to dig ever-deeper. Sooner or later, that phrase will become evangelical reality.)

These remnant evangelicals don’t realize something important, though

If today’s evangelicals are what Jesus really wants, he’s welcome to them. I don’t believe an afterlife exists, but if Heaven did exist it sure wouldn’t be paradise with the remnant of the remnant there.

As for me, I’d rather be part of the vibrant, ever-unfurling tapestry of the human experience than a little piece cut off from it. I want to plunge into those colors, revel in the stitchery, glory in the smooth imperfect perfection of each hand-made stitch. I want to be part and parcel of the tapestry, to be part of the human situation, to be here now. That’s what I want: to mindfully watch its creation and add to it in any way that I can. However its last stitches get added, I want to be part of the whole.

For years now, it has astonished me that evangelicals can look at that tapestry, turn their noses up at it, and insist that they’re separate from it and far better than it could ever be. They’ve been making their own burlap abomination of a fake tapestry for years. They call this fake substitute perfect and praise it nonstop, while the real one flows behind them and past them and beyond them.

It’s just so picayune, so small, so petty. It’s looking at the glorious universe, its billions of years, the Laniakea supercluster, the filament threads flowing through the entire cosmos, and knowing that on a tiny sun-blasted, parched bit of rock, a Johnny-come-lately desert godling has ordered his tiny, ants-to-an-ant mortal followers not to get overly familiar with their own genitals for the 70 years or so that they’ll be alive.

The remnant are welcome to their Jesus, just as he’s welcome to them. I’d rather have reality. On this lovely Thanksgiving week, I’m thankful that so too, it seems, do growing numbers of other folks.

Trump and ‘our religion’ demonstrate evangelicals’ ongoing endgame crisis

Here’s the link to this article.

Donald Trump knows how to get white evangelicals all het up.

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY OCT 31, 2023

Trump and 'our religion' demonstrate evangelicals' ongoing endgame crisis — Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash

Overview:

In recent months, Donald Trump has been talking about bringing back the anti-Muslim immigration ban from his single term in office.

His white evangelical fanbase loves it. Almost ten years into their decline, they are more touchy than ever about losing credibility and cultural power.

Say whatever you like about Donald Trump. If it’s negative, it’s probably true. But don’t say he doesn’t know how to work a sympathetic crowd. In recent campaign speeches, Trump has been telling his crowds of followers about how he plans to handle immigrants from, presumably, Muslim-dominated countries: he’d keep out those who “don’t like our religion” and “hate America.”

This flatly illegal, completely unconstitutional, human-rights-violating promise appears to have played well to his fanbase, who are overwhelmingly white evangelical Christians who claim to adore the rule of law, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. They certainly haven’t rejected him on the basis of that promise! It demonstrates well their priorities amid their religion’s ongoing decline: to defend what turf they can, and grab what temporal power they can before their cultural power fades too much to grab anything with it at all.

Donald Trump and the last screech of white evangelicalism

In his current rallies, Donald Trump looks back on his anti-Muslim travel ban as a “beautiful” and “wonderful” thing, despite the utter chaos it wreaked. He now promises to bring that ban back and institute ideological screenings of all immigrants:

“I will implement strong ideological screening of all immigrants,” the former president vowed. “If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, if you don’t like our religion (which a lot of them don’t), if you sympathize with jihadists, then we don’t want you in our country and you are not getting in.”“Trump Says He’ll Ban Immigrants Who ‘Don’t Like Our Religion’,” Ryan Bort, Rolling Stone

The idea of “ideological screening” should alarm any American who cares about human rights. This is a religion test, which our laws specifically do not allow. But the kind of people who support Donald Trump don’t care. For all their fetishizing of America, its Founding Fathers, its history, and its laws, somehow his fanbase is totally fine with this kind of screening.

I’m not surprised. Donald Trump’s entire existence as a political candidate is predicated entirely on his biggest fanbase’s complete hypocrisy.

Donald Trump is still pandering about ‘our religion’

For months now, Donald Trump has been making the rounds at political rallies. He wants to be president again. That means he needs to raise support in the only real core fanbase he has: white evangelical Christians.

This group comprises somewhere between 5%-35% of Americans depending on who you consult, but they are reliable voters. According to Pew Research, he received 77% of this group’s votes in 2016, then 84% in 2020. Obviously, lots of other sorts of people also voted for him, but they tend to be the understanding sort who don’t mind him pandering so hard to this one group.

In May this year, he went off the rails ranting about immigration. Again. That’s always been a concern for conservatives generally, and white evangelical Christians in particular. Considering their stated beliefs, it’s ironic in the extreme that they’d oppose immigration and despise immigrants like they do. In fact, one 2015 evangelical-run study discovered that 90% of evangelical respondents didn’t base their beliefs about immigration on the Bible at all. (Franklin Graham even drilled down on this exact point in 2017. In response, the Washington Post humiliated him with a Bible study. Other Christians have written similar rebukes.)

Here as elsewhere, evangelicals’ unstated beliefs speak far more loudly than any vocal belief statements they could ever issue. They don’t want a Pastor-in-Chief. No, they want a tribalistic strongman who will prevent more non-Christians from entering the United States, since such immigration only dilutes their numbers and power. They want a ruler who flouts behavioral rules, flaunts his degeneracy and ignorance, and says out loud all the horrific stuff they dare not whisper.

Most of all, they want a ruler who will raise them to the rulership over America that they think they deserve, and one who will punish their enemies until they are strong enough to do it themselves.

As he did almost ten years ago, Donald Trump promises to be that ruler.

When ‘our religion’ is only the religion of a shrinking percentage of Americans

As noted earlier, the percentage of evangelicals in America is very far from a majority. Depending on the definition you use and the authorities and studies you consult, they range from 5% of Americans to 35%. But they vote very reliably. That fact makes them a desirable bloc to own for conservative politicians.

Most desirably of all, they respond extremely well to fearmongering, fake news, and tribalistic jingoism. In their own minds, they’ve got a lot to be afraid of—their own increasing cultural irrelevance most of all.

Christianity itself is cruising quickly toward losing its majority status in America. At present, about 63% of Americans claim Christian affiliation. When Pew Research modeled religious switching in future decades, though, they found that most estimates had that percentage dropping to 35-46% by 2070. Meanwhile, the percentage of “Nones” (the religiously unaffiliated who claim “none of the above” as their religion) only continues to rise. In Pew’s model, they go from 30% currently to 41-52% by 2070.

Add non-Christian immigration to the mix, and white evangelicals become irrelevant even more quickly. So I can easily understand why white evangelicals bitterly oppose immigration, even if it clashes hilariously with their stated beliefs in a literal, inerrant, completely timeless and divine Bible.

Donald Trump knows that white evangelicals don’t want no meltin’ pots

Kristin Kobes du Mez, a brilliant writer whose work I adore, linked evangelicals’ opposition to immigration to “militant masculinity” in 2018. It’s not in me to gainsay her. She’s got a deep understanding of that exact facet of white evangelicalism. As she wrote:

It is incredibly difficult to disrupt a cohesive worldview of this sort, particularly one that is inherently suspicious of opposing views and is fueled by a victimization narrative, one backed by a multi-billion-dollar spiritual-industrial complex, and one that has direct and exclusive avenues of communication to hundreds of millions of eager consumers.“Understanding White Evangelical Views on Immigration,” Kristin Kobes du Mez, Harvard Divinity Bulletin

I’d just add this: That “cohesive worldview” is not just militantly macho. It also reflects white evangelicals’ increasing sense of tribalism.

In sociology, it is not a good thing for a group to behave in tribalistic ways. Such a group tends to be dysfunctionally authoritarian. That means that it cannot fulfill its own stated goals, nor even protect its own members from in-group abuse. Instead, the group is a conduit for power. Its followers cluster around a chosen charismatic leader who dispenses power to those lower on the power ladder. Those below the leader jockey and infight for favor.

To maintain their hold on power, the leaders of these groups need to flex their power often. They do this in a variety of ways:

Betraying those who are no longer useful
Visibly disobeying the group’s rules and allowing favored underlings to disobey them as well
Painting outsiders to the group as their mortal enemies
Stomping on critics and apostates with both feet
Being inconsistent with rule enforcement and creation
Destroying any heretics’ reputations and relationships as they leave the group
Making followers do things they don’t want to do, from church chores to abusive sexual favors

(See also: The lessons authoritarians learn.)

But this flexing works best if group members feel they can’t ever leave. If they’re sure they’ll never recover emotionally or financially from such a move, then they’re far less likely to take the risk.

So in a lot of ways, tribalism in Christianity works best in an environment where the local tribe leaders wield a lot of cultural power. If their power gets too diluted, people feel safer in leaving. And the more non-Christians enter the United States, the more diluted white evangelicals—along with their vision of ideal American culture—become in the population as a whole.

The last thing tribalistic white evangelicals want is a melting-pot America. Rather, they desire a solidly Christian America (full of their own preferred kind of Christian, naturally) that turns non-Christians of all kinds into pariahs until they bend the knee.

Compassion and empathy destroy tribalism

Another serious problem evangelicals have with immigration is simply the way that knowing people from the outgroup can destabilize a dysfunctional-authoritarian ingroup. Right now, Trump can frighten his fanbase by identifying Muslim immigrants as terrorists. He can paint them as scary Others who don’t know how to America right.

But once Americans get to know outsiders, they stop being outsiders.

By now, there are about 3.85 million Muslims in the United States, according to a 2023 Pew Research report. In the past 20-ish years, the number of mosques has grown from 1209 to 2769. (And, as they always have, Republicans tend to think they, as a group, face more discrimination than Muslims do.) Muslims are also running for—and winning—public office. They’re far more visible now than they ever were. A 2017 Pew Research survey even found that most Americans were significantly warming up to Muslims, though the war in Israel might now be changing things for the worse.

Still, that visibility has to be scaring the knickers off of white evangelicals. They don’t want to see Muslims praying on their knees on public sidewalks, or to take college classes alongside women in headscarves, or see their kids making friends with Muslim kids.

(I can’t think of evangelicals encountering headscarves without thinking of that cringey side plot from the first “God’s Not Dead” movie involving a young Muslim convert who adores Franklin Graham—who if you’ll recall is very anti-immigration.)

White evangelicals don’t want any reminders that they no longer represent the cultural standard of America, nor are even its Designated Adults. What they want is quiet, effortless mastery and recognized superiority, not having to share and play nicely with the other children on the playground.

Even if it destroys their witness, to use the Christianese, they can’t let go of their tribalism. Jesus’ direct orders be damned! Bible blahblah is all well and good, but this is real life we’re talking about. Like everyone else, white evangelicals know that when real life starts happening, they have to step into the real world to deal with it.

The new age of evangelical power-grabs

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a sharp change in how white evangelicals present themselves and sell their only product (active membership in their own group).

Just a decade ago, evangelicals tried to engage outsiders in one-sided non-versations. They traveled to schools to deliver sales pitches. They ran pseudo-charity efforts like Beach Reach that were really about indoctrination. Online, they seemed acutely aware that they were selling something. Sure, very few people cared to buy it anymore. But they still felt compelled by Jesus to SELL SELL SELL WITHOUT MERCY.

To an extent, they still do that stuff, yes. But they’ve really shifted their emphasis. Now, they seem much more like an overtly theocratic, totalitarian political group with a thin coat of Jesus frosting. Aware that nobody wants to buy their product on its own merits, they have turned from wheedling and fake non-versations to outright insults and sneers toward those who reject their control-grabs. This behavior seems to bolster their own self-image, even as it wrecks their tribe’s credibility every time they act out.

When I encounter them, I can’t help but think that my first pastor, a genial old Pentecostal leader in our denomination, would have had their hides for mistreating people the way they do.

Again, this is real life we’re talking about, though, not Bible blahblah. Evangelicals may give lip service to Jesus’ sheer power and miracle-working all they like. In the real world, they’re aware that if they don’t punish their enemies, Jesus sure won’t do it for them.

I’ve known this about evangelicals for a long, long time. In a way, I’m glad Trump has come along to unmask them.

I suspect that the further white evangelicals decline in cultural power and credibility, the more and the worse they’ll act out. I just hope the rest of the world is ready to listen when they tell us who they truly are.

Living color: The value of atheism, diversity, and all hands on deck

Here’s the link to this article.

It’s hard to think of yourself as the default when you know so many other counterexamples.

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY OCT 19, 2023

The value of atheism, diversity, and all hands being on deck — Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash

Overview:

Kate Cohen’s excellent essay about the importance of atheists being open about their atheism is exactly right. But maybe we need to extend that sentiment even further.

I’ve been in both situations: a onetime Pentecostal who saw Christianity as the default setting for humanity, and an outsider who was no longer part of the tribe.

Recently, Kate Cohen wrote a moving opinion piece for Washington Post concerning atheism. In her essay, she speaks of a number of reasons why atheists should—if they can—be vocally atheistic. All of them sound perfectly fine. I’d like to add one more: the essential nature of diversity in a society that values human rights and civil liberties. That diversity destroys dysfunctional authoritarians’ perceived base of power even as it opens the door to dialogues between different people.

I learned that lesson myself at a very tender age when I got my first taste of being a despised majority.

PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS

Set your Wayback Machine for about 1990. Grunge was taking over the world, and yet Princess Di still owned our hearts. The best Total Recall adaptation came out that year, along with The Hunt for Red October. One of the most popular songs that year was “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer.

As far as Gallup knew that year, the percentage of Christians in America had fallen from 92% in 1952 to 81% in 1990.

As far as I knew, though, we were damn near 100% of the count.

That year, I was in college and newly married to my Evil Ex Biff. One day, he announced that he would be starting a prayer group on campus with a weird new-convert friend of his named James. Mainly, this was James’ idea, but Biff loved it.

We attended a very large state-funded university that was very generous to student groups. Thus, it cost Biff nothing whatsoever to start this group. They’d give us meeting rooms, audiovisual materials of all sorts almost upon demand, and even a small allowance we could use for campus events. All they really required in exchange for that largesse were three officers who were actively-enrolled students there, and for us to actually use what we requested from them.

Eventually, the group ran afoul of both requirements.

First of all, there simply weren’t three Pentecostals on campus willing to act as active officers of the group. James wasn’t even enrolled anywhere. And I’m female and therefore was ineligible (in our flavor of Christianity) for any leadership over men, even if my demanding school schedule allowed me to be active in any group. After some fuss, Biff discovered a friend from church who attended our school, then calmed his misogyny long enough to ask me to sign me up anyway. With Tim and me willing to pretend to be officers at least, Biff could file the startup paperwork for the group. He titled it PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS. Yes, in all caps. Of course. Before its first meeting, Biff had already drawn up a logo with impressively sharp, gleaming, sword-like edges to the words.

We officers represented the entire membership of the group. Nobody ever joined for what now seem like obvious reasons.

Undeterred, Biff reserved rooms for our group to use for prayer five days a week.

Now, why did three or four individual Christians need a whole meeting room reserved for prayer? Why couldn’t they just pray anywhere in our school’s expansive, garden-like campus that they liked? Or even, dare I mention, at the school’s beautiful nondenominational chapel?

Because our university printed campus-group meeting schedules every day, then posted them all over the place. Biff wanted everyone to see PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS prominently figuring in those schedules.

This desire of Biff’s had nothing to do with evangelism. Maybe that motivated James, but not Biff, who never once mentioned soulwinning as a motivation. What Biff actually said at the time was that he wanted people to see the name and know that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ were on campus.

Biff’s special calling was apparently to combat atheism on campus

In evangelicalism as well as in other flavors of Christianity, Christians believe that Jesus has created every person with a special role to play in his divine, ineffable plan for Earth. They call this role their divine calling. It represents their main purpose in life. It’s the reason they exist, the mission for which they were born.

At some point, Biff got the idea that his calling involved converting atheists and defeating atheism on our college campus. He very mistakenly thought that tons of atheists attended our university, making atheism a valid enemy to Christians like himself.

Being in Texas, most students there were Christian. But there were some outspoken atheists among the student body, and Biff glommed right onto them.

He’d been unsuccessfully evangelizing atheists for two years by the time we married and he started PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS.

Something strange was happening on campus, though. People did notice the group. They just weren’t reacting as I’d expected. Biff, I think, expected all of the reactions he ever got. He was an experienced RL troll (what people sometimes more graciously term a provocateur and less graciously a chain-yanking asshole). But I sure wasn’t, and so I didn’t.

What it’s like to grow up in a cultural bubble

I grew up before everything, it feels like: Before nearly ubiquitous home computers, before the internet, before cell phones, before smartphones, before AI, before the internet of things. For the first two decades of my life, most libraries used card catalogs with actual typed-up 3×5″ cards in long drawers to keep track of their books. Local-area dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) barely began to pop up in major cities when I was in my teens.

Making my world even more insular, I was also a military brat. My family lived on military bases sometimes, in regular houses other times, but we always tended to center our lives on my dad’s work.

So my entire world was Christian. I didn’t need to attend parochial school to be fully immersed in that bubble!

Everybody I knew was Christian. Everything in my world centered around Christianity and its rituals, its myths and folklore, its rules, its culture, its entire worldview. The only real question to ask was what flavor of Christian someone was, not whether they were Christian at all. We all already knew the answer to that.

(This is how I suspect Southerners picked up the habit of asking newcomers to their communities what church they attend. They still do it. Long ago, it was a legit question. Nowadays, it’s much more of a veiled interrogation.)

Until I went to college, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t at least nominally Christian. If I ever ran into anyone who wasn’t, I didn’t even think about them. They were exceptions; they fell out of my mind and memory. Confirmation bias ensured that.

Nowadays, you’ve got to be a religiously-homeschooled evangelical kid with particularly controlling parents to come even close to this level of insularity. Back then, though, it was normal for kids in my area and circumstances. We just didn’t have any counterpoints or other frames of reference.

Well, college fixed that for me in a hurry.

My worldview takes a roundhouse to the jaw

I attended a couple of prayer meetings myself, but very soon I became entirely too busy for it. (I had also gotten weirded out at how non-divine prayer looked and felt when performed in a corporate meeting room.) That was fine, though. The entire idea was really the Biff and James Show, live every weekday at 12:00 noon.

One day while relaxing in a student lounge, I opened our campus newspaper. I was (and still am) a readaholic who must read All. The. Words, so I started with the letters to the editor. A minor funding squabble had erupted on campus over an increase in student fees covering campus groups, so most letters addressed that subject. One in particular stood out to me: A student making the point that that fee covered all students, even those with groups diametrically opposed to the views of any one particular student, and that this was a good thing because it encouraged diverse opinions in an educational setting.

She used PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS as a specific example of what she meant in her own case.

I just stared at that letter for a long time. My brain had gone into vapor lock. My entire worldview had just tilted on its ear and divided by zero.

It’s not like I hadn’t recognized the group’s name as an attention-seeking tactic from my supremely narcissistic then-husband. But the way that student talked, she wasn’t even Christian at all.

Atheism is part of the human situation

By then, I’d been in college for two years. However, I still perceived Christianity as the default state of humanity. When I considered the overall arc of human history, I still put Christianity front and center. Though I’d met any number of atheists and pagans and Muslims (oh my!) by then, I still generally perceived them as pre-Christian. Even the other Christians I met got judged by my own doctrinal beliefs, even if I wasn’t arguing with them for anywhere near as long as Biff did.

Yes, I was exactly that Christian kid in the iconic “Jesus is so lucky to have us!” cartoon:

“Isn’t Jesus lucky to have us!” Tom’s Doubts #14, by Saji

As if by magic, that student’s letter pulled me out of my entire way of thinking. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have any idea who she was. She could have been any woman I walked past on campus. Any woman I walked past on campus, in other words, could be thinking that PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS was dumb, irrelevant, and utterly counter to her own worldview. For that matter, any person period could be thinking that.

With that, my perception of myself began to subtly alter. The arrogance and privilege of my presumptuous placement of Christianity as the default began to fade. It could not survive my sudden realization that lots of people lived in this world and all had their own ideas about religion.

I suspect most people learn similar lessons in childhood. Somehow, I’d avoided that one until I was twenty. But better late than never. My world became a tapestry of living colors as if I was an extra in the movie Pleasantville.

Just a couple of years later, when my slow-burn deconversion began in earnest, I still didn’t know anyone who’d deconverted. For a long time, I thought I was the literal only person in the history of Christianity who’d ever believed what we called the full gospel and then realized it wasn’t true. I didn’t meet another ex-Pentecostal for a long time, and when I did, she had thought the same about herself!

We ex-Christians had to forge a path from scratch, just about, on an individual basis with each one of our deconversions. Nowadays, that’s nowhere near as common a story. There’s such a painful sense of sheer isolation when you’re positive you’re the only one who ever.

It’s not just atheism. The world needs everyone who can do so to be vocal about who and what they are.

As Kate Cohen notes in her essay, lots of people even in America aren’t free to express their beliefs/nonbelief. Anyone who’s done hard time in the Deep South likely knows this truth painfully well. It can be risky to declare one’s status as out-of-step with the lockstep march that evangelicalism in particular demands.

Insular religious communities like those are risky precisely because the members of the perceived majority like it that way. They like there being no other options besides the one they offer. There’s way less chance of someone veering out of step that way.

When someone isn’t keeping the beat, it’s glaringly obvious to everyone else. That poor schmuck stands out! As a result, it doesn’t take much effort from the rest of the group to get that person back into line. Social freezing-out, nasty comments, loss of customers, maybe trouble fomented at school or a little “evandalism” of the black sheep’s possessions: it’s minor stuff that functions as a prelude to the big guns: mysteriously losing one’s job, marriage, kids, and community standing.

But if a solid 25% of the marchers lose step and start veering off-course, the majority suddenly has a whole bunch of problems. Now there are too many targets for the tribe’s usual methods of retaliation. They can’t focus properly on any one person, much less on all of the people requiring their Christian love.

It’s like adding another person to the safety net’s edges to hold it out for the others

Oh, but matters get still worse for the majority. Thirty years ago, a whole bunch of Christians didn’t even know anyone who wasn’t Christian. Now, with so many more non-Christians floating around in the mix, Christians can’t help knowing at least one person who isn’t like themselves. In fact, they probably know a lot of non-Christians by now.

The tribe’s party line about outsiders can hold only when there aren’t a lot of ’em around. The more Christians learn about outsiders, the more they’ll realize the party line isn’t correct at all. Once one false belief gets shaken, let me tell you from painful personal experience along exactly these lines, it’s a lot easier to shake the rest.

Those false beliefs have lasted for many years precisely because the majority group heard next to no pushback about them. The sort of Christians who want to rule over everything, in particular, tend to assume that if they don’t hear any pushback, then whatever they’re doing is A-OK.

So if it’s safe for anyone to start being vocal and open about their worldview, that makes the waters just a tiny bit safer for every other person who wants to do the same, but can’t right now.

(In other words, don’t ever wonder why it’s those Christians who viciously fight against diversity and anti-racism measures.)

Whether someone is simply an ex-Christian, a None, an agnostic, an atheist, a pagan, or whatever else, they have a part in this glorious multicolored tapestry that depicts the human situation. With every new, colorful thread woven into it, it becomes progressively more difficult for the one-time majority to go back to their monochrome world.

The more hands we can get on deck, the better it’ll get for those who must watch quietly from the shore.

Crisis averted! Ken Ham knows why evangelicals ‘lost Gen Z’

Here’s the link to this article.

Indoctrinating children for me, never for thee!

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY OCT 06, 2023

Crisis averted! Ken Ham knows why evangelicals 'lost Gen Z' — Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

Overview:

Ken Ham says evangelicals have ‘lost Gen Z’ because he and his ilk can no longer indoctrinate children in public schools.

We explore his claims and figure out where the blame really rests.

Reading Time: 10 MINUTES

YouTube offered me a Ken Ham short video the other day, which demonstrates that I have completely confused its algorithm. In it, the serial grifter and ur-liar-for-Jesus offers his thoughts about why evangelicals “lost Gen Z.” Let’s go over his video and see if he’s right. Then let’s see where the blame really rests.

A quick introduction to Ken Ham and Creationism

Ken Ham leads a Young-Earth Creationist group called Answers in Genesis. As the label implies, he erroneously believes that his god conjured everything in the universe into existence about six thousand years ago. (I’m sure that was quite a surprise to the civilizations around back then.) Other kinds of Creationism exist, some of which come much closer to the Earth’s real age of 4.5 billion years and the universe’s real age of 10-20 billion years, but here we speak only of Young-Earth Creationism.

Creationism is a relatively new doctrinal stance that arose in the 1970s-1980s thanks to an American law professor named Phillip E. Johnson. It had the marvelous good fortune of gaining popular awareness at a time when American evangelicals were undergoing a massive shift into the hardline fundamentalist-fused culture warriors we know today. The newly-politicized and tribalism-addled group happily absorbed Creationism along the way. By the late 1990s, Creationism was a required belief for them.

Often, Young-Earth Creationists call their belief system “intelligent design.” In this way, they pretend it’s not just another name for Young-Earth Creationism. In the 1990s and 2000s, this dishonesty was absolutely key to their disingenuous attempts to sneak their beliefs into public schools. I will not be granting them this pious fraud.

Ham and his associates also erroneously believe that Christians who don’t accept Creationism are Jesusing all wrong.

He thinks this because of a very childish interpretation of the Bible called literalism. That means they erroneously think that everything in the Bible literally happened the way the Bible’s writers describe it. Their entire faith system depends on this belief being 100% true. So they get very fretful when other Christians have differing interpretations of the Bible. They think that such inconsistency “undermines” a Christian’s beliefs.

As far as I know, they have conducted no research into that assumption. In fact, they haven’t conducted much original research at all since their early years—because their field researchers kept realizing that Creationism was impossible and deconverting from the belief.

Ken Ham insists this is “the FIRST Post-Christian Generation,” y’all!

And now we arrive at Ken Ham’s first error. It occurs in his video’s title.

Ken Ham calls this video “The FIRST Post-Christian Generation – this is how we lost Gen Z.”

But this isn’t the first post-Christian generation. Ken Ham attributes this idea to Barna Group, which has also referred to Gen Z that way.

Researchers began calling America “post-Christian” back in 2013. That puts us very solidly into Millennial territory, since they were born between 1981-1996. The oldest Gen Z people (born between 1997-2012) in 2013 would have been roughly 15. Folks that young aren’t generally pushing the religion needle one way or the other.

Rather, Millennials began—and are still—turning America post-Christian, not Gen Z. That’s the generation that evangelicals panicked about in the 2010s.

Gen Z simply continues the trend of increasing secularity in America.

But okay, Ken Ham. How exactly did you lot manage to lose an entire upcoming generation of adults?

Ken Ham has lost Gen Z, everyone! (Has he looked under the sofa?)

Moving on, Ken Ham tells us in the video:

But now we have the second world view dominating because we have allowed generations of kids to be indoctrinated in an education system that has thrown God out, the Bible out, prayer out, Creation[ism] out. They teach you all came about by natural processes. There is no supernatural, there is no God.

Sorry to say this, but the majority of pastors have endorsed that system, told parents that’s fine, but don’t worry about what they’re being taught. Just come along, we’ll tell them about Jesus. And you see now we’re seeing generations who have a different foundation and a whole different worldview. And Generation Z in particular is called by George Barna, Christian researcher, “the first post-Christian generation” in this nation.“The FIRST Post-Christian Generation – this is how we lost Gen Z,” Ken Ham. Uploaded 5/20/23.

Ken Ham himself posted this video to his own channel. That fact forces me to conclude that he is actually proud of this 36-second burst of poor reasoning and dishonesty.

Christians often accuse others of exactly what they themselves do (or want to do). This time the trope is egregiously easy to see.

So is Ham’s self-interest. Gosh, the products he happens to sell could fix this awful problem! Who could have seen that coming?

Why Ken Ham is fretting about Gen Z

Ken Ham sounds very, very upset that he may no longer indoctrinate children to believe his quirky, dishonest, error-packed li’l take on the Bible. By indoctrination, of course, he means dogmatic claims shoved at people—in this case, children—who must accept them without questions or reservation. He wants to indoctrinate children, so he assumes that schools do the same. His is good, though. Theirs is ickie and evil.

But which children does he mean?

Surely not children attending his flavor of Christianity’s religious schools or being insularly-homeschooled by fellow Creationists. Those children are already being indoctrinated with his beliefs. He can’t be upset about losing them.

No, he’s upset that he can no longer indoctrinate the children attending public, taxpayer-funded schools in America. Those schools are off-limits to people like him. Those children are beyond his reach.

Unless a teacher wishes to present Creationism in the context of why it isn’t at all real science, or in the context of a religious belief alongside others, then that’s the only way children in public schools will learn about his beliefs in that setting. In other words, Creationism won’t be presented the way Ken Ham wants it presented: in science classes as an indoctrination meant to completely undermine the backbone of science, the scientific method, and the basic concepts it helped humans understand, like the Theory of Evolution.

No, if Ken Ham wants to indoctrinate those children, then he must get the explicit permission of their parents. And American law, which protects Americans’ right to freedom of religion, has placed strict rules around when and where such indoctrination may occur in a public-school context.

Alas, Ken Ham doesn’t think that his desired indoctrination will take if he can’t use public schools to push it at children. Unless children are surrounded by it 24/7, it won’t overcome what children are learning in public schools. More to the point, it won’t overcome the worldview they are absorbing.

Ken Ham’s god isn’t anywhere near strong enough to defeat a worldview that simply doesn’t lend itself to accepting the claims Ken Ham likes to make.

The ‘biblical worldview’ that’s almost extinct

You might notice that Ken Ham quoted George Barna in assessing Gen Z as ‘lost’ to evangelicals. George Barna started Barna Group many years ago (though he eventually left it to pursue a solo career). Barna Group is a for-profit survey house that sells analyses of its research and polls to worried evangelical parents and leaders. Barna Group workers’ jobs involve creating analyses that will open evangelical wallets.

And nothing worries evangelicals and opens their wallets quite like predicting imminent disaster.

Indeed, George Barna must be having quite a heyday. For years now, he has been crying in the wilderness about the extinction of the ‘biblical worldview.’

If you’re wondering what “biblical” means in this context, it’s simply a Christianese adjective that indicates that its noun is something the judging Christian likes.

Usually, you’ll only see this adjective in evangelical writing, where it modifies any number of nouns:

Biblical marriage. That’s opposite-sex, hetero-only, woman-subjugating marriage between one man and one woman who follow evangelicals’ weird, regressive gender-role expectations.
Biblical parenting. That’s the creepy, punishment-oriented, dysfunctional-authoritarian parenting style that evangelicals think is the only way to set children up for lifelong faith.
Biblical dating. Think “Duggar-style courtship” and you won’t be far off the mark.

Evangelicals love sneering at other flavors of Christianity as sub-par, even though there is no way whatsoever to say that any one flavor is more authentically Christian than any other. The word biblical is how they do their sneering: by implying that other takes aren’t based on the Bible like theirs is.

So a biblical worldview simply means the worldview of a hardline evangelical like Ken Ham or George Barna.

Why Ken Ham and George Barna think that their biblical worldview is going extinct

According to George Barna and his onetime business organization, that worldview is going “extinct!” In 2018, they found that only 4% of Gen Z had a biblical worldview. Then, in 2020, they found that only 2% of Millennials had one.

By 2023, Barna was alarmed to find that the percentage of Americans generally who had a biblical worldview had declined from 6% in March 2020 to 4%. Meanwhile, from 2020 to 2023, he found that the percentage of Americans calling themselves “born again” had likewise declined from 19% to 13%.

I’m not sure if Barna took into account the huge number of senior-citizen evangelicals who have refused to vaccinate or take safety precautions due to the COVID pandemic. Though we know about the evangelical leaders who FAFO, and some websites keep track of a few of the antivaxxers who have likewise died in service to their own willful ignorance, it’s hard to say just how many of those “born again,” biblical-worldview-holding evangelicals have died and brought down Barna’s numbers.

Either way, Barna certainly thinks that his worldview is going “extinct.” By extension, so does Ken Ham. In Ham’s case, he’s also very certain that public education is to blame. Of course, Creationists have never conducted any research regarding this assertion. But he’s still very certain of it, and certainty—even if it’s completely misplaced—carries a lot of weight with literalists.

(Related: “Hello, my name is Kent Hovind” — this dissertation will tell you immediately why Creationists aren’t real big on science.)

That worldview is what is most important to evangelicals

In the context of indoctrinating children, evangelicals like Ken Ham are well aware that their god is nearly helpless up against a mismatched worldview. If children cannot be taught or forced to adopt a worldview amenable to Ken Ham’s flavor of Christianity, then they’ll think for the rest of their lives that his claims are whackadoodle-squared.

We see exactly that same problem in missionary efforts. Some years ago, a then-missionary to Thailand wrote of how she learned this lesson:

I remember our first year on the field literally thinking, “No one is ever, ever going to come to faith in Christ, no matter how many years I spend here.”

I thought this because for the first time in my life, I was face-to-face with the realities that the story of Jesus was so completely other to the people I was living among. Buddhism and the East had painted such a vastly different framework than the one I was used to that I was at a loss as to how to even begin to communicate the gospel effectively.

And so, the Amy-Carmichael-Wanna-Be [a famous Irish missionary] that I was, I dug in and started learning the language. I began the long, slow process of building relationships with the nationals, and I ended up spending lots of time talking about the weather and the children in kitchens. And while over time, I became comfortable with helping cook the meal, I saw very little movement of my local friends towards faith.“Rice Christians and Fake Conversions,” Laura Parker, 1/28/13

Unfortunately for Ken Ham and his like-minded pals, they have a much worse problem than that missionary. Their worldview is very much on the outer fringes of Christianity. So they’re not just fighting reality itself, but every more-sensible flavor of their own religion. Even if a child has a generally-Christian worldview, that’s not enough to make Creationist claims sound plausible.

The demographic time bomb exploded years ago for Creationists

It’s worth mentioning, by the way, that one of the main witnesses for the plaintiffs in the landmark Creationism-based Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District lawsuit in 2005 was a Christian, Dr. Kenneth Miller. Miller, a biology professor, had, in fact, written many peer-reviewed biology articles and even a popular biology textbook.

For years prior to this lawsuit’s filing, Creationists had been champing at the bit for exactly such an opportunity. They’d been sneaking their indoctrination materials into public schools for years in hopes of provoking it. Finally, parents and science teachers in one small, out of the way town got sick of their antics and filed suit against their district’s school board—which was led by and packed with Creationists and their sycophants.

The judge in that case, John E. Jones III, was likewise a Christian—and a Dubya appointee. So Creationists were doubly sure that they’d successfully win the right to push their religious materials into public science classrooms.

They brought their A+ game to this fight, insofar as they could, I suppose.

And they got completely BTFO. They lost. They not only lost, but they lost in the most humiliating ways possible. Not only did Creationism get exposed as purely religious in nature, not only was the Dover school board leader caught red-handed lying to a federal judge, not only were their own witnesses—the ones who didn’t just withdraw from the trial, I mean—exposed as clown-shoes incompetents, but Dover-area voters also immediately replaced the Dover school board with people who understood and accepted real science.

(If you like definitive legal smackdowns or even just want to learn every single way that Creationism is not science but instead absolutely positively simply Christian indoctrination aimed at grooming children to hold a Creationism-friendly worldview, Jones’ opinion paper cannot be missed. It’s one of my favorite reads, a GOAT winner.)

And Gen Z had a front-row seat to watch it happen

Evangelicals’ decline started right around this same time. From 2006, their roller coaster only went downhill.

I really feel like that’s when the pendulum began to swing back to sanity regarding Christians trying to infiltrate public schoolrooms. People began taking those attempts a lot more seriously after that. Sure, Creationists still tried to get into public schools, and they still do try. But they’re tightly constrained compared to how things were before 2005.

I’m bringing up this trial almost 20 years later for a reason. The aftereffects of it cannot be overestimated.

Remember, Gen Z was getting born during the Dover period as well (they were born between 1997-2012). Parents with Gen Z kids were direct witnesses of this evangelical overreach. And the youngest kids in Dover classrooms in 2005 were Gen Z.

The real surprise is that even 4% of Gen Z kids have a biblical worldview, not that so few do. I doubt that percentage will rise.

Ken Ham has no clue in the world how to deal with that demographic time bomb, either

Nowadays, Ken Ham preaches to his choir in his little safe space. I don’t think he makes many new converts to his flavor of Christianity. Instead, he’s stuck in that safe space with a dwindling number of believers. I’m sure it’s very cozy, at least. But it’s going to get less comfortable as the years pass.

The problem Ken Ham is having is that his worldview doesn’t come naturally to anyone. It has to be coached extensively into people who don’t know any better. So generally, that coaching must begin very early. It must also be reinforced constantly and from all sides. Children must be absolutely shrink-wrapped to maintain it.

Even so, the moment such a child ventures out into the real world, their false worldview always risks toppling in the face of reality. There simply does not exist a way for the Ken Hams of the world to shrink-wrap a child so well that reality cannot ever penetrate those layers of indoctrination.

Not anymore, anyway. At one time, I’m sure it was a lot easier to build those bubbles.

As Ken Ham himself has admitted, evangelicals have already lost Gen Z. But let’s be clear here: they lost Gen Z because Gen X and older Millennials refused to allow their children to be indoctrinated with a Creationism-friendly worldview. He demonizes schools for this refusal, but really he’s missed a few steps here!

That said, I’m sure he wishes with all his heart that he could indoctrinate those children without their parents knowing, but it ain’t gonna happen.

Now younger Millennials are poised to start having their own children. Those children will be part of Gen Alpha (born between 2013-2025) and whatever we call the next age cohort. It seems very likely that they will also generally refuse to allow their children to learn fake science to make Ken Ham happy.

His roller coaster may be reaching the end of the ride. But the future for children has never been brighter as a result.

More big drama for the Southern Baptist Executive Committee

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

AUG 22, 2023

Another big drama for the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee — Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash

Overview:

Last Thursday, the Southern Baptist Convention’s top-ranked Executive Committee got a shocking bit of news about their Interim President, followed by his resignation.

The next day, they appointed a new Interim President with a strong link to its last real president, and likely some loyalty to him.

Reading Time: 5 MINUTES

The Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) just can’t get away from nonstop drama. This time, it involves fabricated credentials, a swift resignation, and an equally swift replacement appointment.

At least it’s not another sex scandal!

Situation report: The Executive Committee

The SBC contains a dizzying array of groups and sub-groups. Some are seminaries, others missionary organizations, and still others part of Lifeway, the denomination’s printing-and-research arm. Others still are mostly administrative, like one offering health and life insurance to pastors and their families.

The Executive Committee rules over all of them. It sets their annual budgets and handles the day-to-day decision-making for the SBC as a whole. It is the most powerful group within the SBC, answering only, really, to its president. In a very real sense, the Executive Committee is the visible face of the SBC.

Over the past 20 years, this committee got packed full of a stalwart, ultraconservative, ultratraditionalist faction of the SBC that I’ve come to call the Old Guard. But their control began to fray in 2019, when the denomination’s staggering “Abuse of Faith” crisis made national news. Its president at the time, Ronnie Floyd, was an Old Guard power player. But rather than cooperate with outside investigations, he simply quit the job.

The committee appointed Willie McLaurin to be its Interim President.

Since then, the Executive Committee has been trying to find an official president. They organized a search committee and held a vote to confirm the candidate they’d found. Somehow—and against expectations—the vote failed. So they had to dissolve the search committee, organize a whole new one, find another candidate, and hold another vote.

Another drama has hit the Executive Committee amidst this new search.

If you’re squeamish, don’t prod beach rubble

Very suddenly last Thursday, Willie McLaurin quit. It sounds like this is another classic Southern Baptist case of a big-name leader quitting before he could be fired. But this time, there’s a lot less doubt about that being the case.

His reasons remind me a lot of the 1994 movie Renaissance Man. In it, Danny DeVito teaches English literature to some new Army recruits who are about to wash out of basic training. While he’s there, he discovers that a gifted young man in his class nurses a secret family tragedy: he doesn’t know what happened to his Army-enlisted father, who apparently died or disappeared many years earlier. DeVito decides to do this young man a favor, so he looks into the situation without clearing it with him first. Unfortunately, this help creates some very unexpected problems.

In the case of the Executive Committee, McLaurin became one of the potential candidates for its official presidency. And that meant that the search committee had to do a bunch of background checking of his resume.

One idly and innocently wonders if this kind of deep fact-checking occurs with every candidate. Obviously, nobody had ever checked McLaurin’s background out very carefully during his rise through the ranks. But now suddenly there had to be a full background investigation like he was running for the United States presidency or something.

A wild resignation appears!

Regardless of the answer to that idle, innocent question, the search committee discovered that McLaurin had faked his educational credentials.

He’d lied.

He had told them that he’d earned degrees from North Carolina Central University, Duke University Divinity School, and Hood Theological Seminary. Alas, none of those schools corroborated his claims. I don’t know if he dropped out or simply never attended them at all. It seems to be a mixture of both. But he definitely didn’t earn degrees from any of them.

In fact, he’d even submitted fake diplomas to bolster his false claims.

Apparently, the other Executive Committee officers confronted McLaurin with their findings. He admitted that he’d lied, then resigned.

The Executive Committee quickly appointed a new Interim President

Moving with surprising speed, the next day the Executive Committee appointed Jonathan Howe as its new Interim President.

In September 2019, Jonathan Howe became the committee’s Vice President of Communications. He’s been there ever since. Though he’s quiet by SBC leadership standards, he’s popped up twice in my writing:

Just a few months before he landed his Executive Committee position, Howe appeared on a podcast with Thom Rainer. At the time, Rainer himself was just about to retire-before-he-got-fired. They were talking about the various ways that church congregations disappoint and frustrate their pastors. To put it very mildly, Howe revealed a lot of damning contradictions to evangelicals’ fanciful claims about their churches. But then, so did Rainer.

Then, in 2021, he shows up in one of the two emails that Russell Moore leaked as he was quitting-before-he-could-be-fired. Moore headed the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). Interestingly, Moore didn’t particularly praise Howe in that email. Moore just said that when he told Howe that he’d be talking about the sex abuse crisis at the ERLC’s Caring Well Conference in October 2019, Howe was fine with it.

It now makes sense that Moore might have told Howe that. As VP of Communications, Howe handled the various news sites related to SBC doings, like Baptist Press itself. Howe presumably would know if Moore’s plan would be a public-relations disaster.

Whither now, Executive Committee?

Jonathan Howe is apparently a Ronnie Floyd appointee. In fact, Floyd himself recommended Howe for the role, held a conference call with the other committee officers, and confirmed his appointment then and there. Given what a deeply polarized and tribalistic bunch the Old Guard are, it’s hard to imagine Floyd going to that kind of trouble for anyone in the Old Guard’s enemy faction, which I call the Pretend Progressives.

Moore was a Pretend Progressive. The last few SBC Presidents have been as well: J.D. Greear, Ed Litton, and now Bart Barber. They are slowly making steps toward reforming the denomination and resolving that sex abuse crisis, and they’re nowhere near as rigidly regressive or misogynistic as the Old Guard.

That said, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re really progressive. They aren’t. They keep making the mistake of thinking they can maintain rigid gender roles, their culture wars against human rights, and dysfunctional authoritarian social structures throughout the denomination, while still keeping out all the scandals and hypocrisy that keep popping up in their ranks.

The vote that the Executive Committee held this past May involved a candidate who should have appealed to both factions, Jared Wellman. Even the nastiest Old Guard leaders had nothing bad to say about him. In fact, he’d really seemed like a shoo-in. But at the last second, the vote to confirm him failed.

McLaurin himself seems to lean Pretend Progressive as well. He certainly seemed to approve of various courses of action that the Old Guard condemned, like publicly releasing a formerly-top-secret database of accused and confirmed sex abusers in SBC churches. That move seemed to set the Old Guard off like rockets!

So to me, it looks like the Old Guard is not prepared yet to give up the most powerful role in the denomination. Presidents? Oh, they come and go. Every year there’s a vote for the SBC presidency. It’s dizzying to watch them go through the revolving door!

But Executive Committee Presidents are a different duck entirely. They seem to wield the real power behind the throne. The resolution of the entire sex abuse crisis might hinge on whoever gets the role, and there are lots of other faction squabbles that the person in this role will inevitably shape. If I found out that the Old Guard had anything to do with McLaurin’s resignation, like slipping a rumor to the background checkers, then I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

If Jonathan Howe is careful, he might just end up in Ronnie Floyd’s old office one day soon.

Relax, everyone! Russell Moore knows exactly how to reverse evangelicals’ decline

Here’s the link to this article.

You won’t believe this one weird trick

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY JUL 29, 2023

Russell Moore knows exactly how to reverse evangelicals' decline — Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

Overview:

A recent post by Russell Moore in ‘The Atlantic’ reveals the standard-issue advice that evangelicals keep giving each other about how to reverse their decades-long decline.

It’s not that it’s terrible advice. It’s that almost nobody will do it. Any evangelicals still sticking around this dysfunctional flavor of Christianity are there for a reason. And this advice conflicts with that reason.

Reading Time: 13 MINUTES

Acouple of years ago, Russell Moore made a name for himself as the earnest leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). Eventually, his fellow SBC leaders got sick of him taking his job seriously and drove him out of not just the job, but the entire denomination.

He found a soft landing, though. And now he’s written an opinion piece for The Atlantic about how evangelicals can totally reverse their ongoing decline. Let’s review that advice—and see why it won’t work in the increasingly toxic and dysfunctional culture of evangelicalism.

Russell Moore: A Southern Baptist without a denominational country

The ERLC is an interesting office. The SBC’s Cooperative Program finances it with a budget set by the top-ranked Executive Committee. It or something like it has existed in the SBC for over a century, but a huge reorganization in 1997 gave it its current name and mission:

The ERLC is dedicated to engaging the culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ and speaking to issues in the public square for the protection of religious liberty and human flourishing.“About the ERLC,” ERLC.com

In practical terms, the ERLC encourages evangelicals to vote (Republican), wages the evangelical culture wars in the media, and convinces evangelicals to toe the party line on those culture wars. In essence, the ERLC is supposed to help evangelicals regain their lost dominance over America—and other Americans’ lives.

From 1988-2013, Richard Land led the ERLC. He turned out to be quite a handful. After saying some shockingly racist things about the Trayvon Martin case, the SBC allowed him to quit-before-he-was-fired. Now, Land had been a quintessential SBC good ol’ boy—plugged into their crony network at the hip. He’d understood what his position required and involved. Under him, the ERLC operated as a freewheeling, rollicking display of casual dominance.

But the SBC needed to make a major statement about Land’s gaffes. They chose to make it by hiring Russell Moore as his replacement.

Out of every other officer the SBC has ever had in the past 20 years, Moore might just be one of the only ones who really wanted to do the actual job he’d accepted. By that, I don’t mean he’s a wonderful—or even good—person. But he always demonstrated a certain charming sincerity about the ERLC.

It’s quite clear that the very last thing the SBC’s top leaders wanted was someone who genuinely wanted to help evangelicals win their war for lost dominance. But that is precisely what they got.

After years of outraging Southern Baptists with his suggestions, it was inevitable that they’d drive him out eventually.

Nowadays, he works as the Editor in Chief for Christianity Today. And he writes opinion posts like this one in The Atlantic.

Russell Moore declares that ‘there is only one way out’ for American evangelicals

On July 25, Russell Moore penned quite a dramatic post for The Atlantic. Its title and subtitle say it all:

The American Evangelical Church Is in Crisis. There’s Only One Way Out.
Evangelicals can have revival or nostalgia—but not both.The Atlantic

Indeed, The Atlantic has provided a home for posts just like this for years now. From almost the start of Russell Moore’s time at the ERLC, The Atlantic liked the cut of his jib. In 2015, a writer for the site praised his attempts to end Southern Baptist structural racism. In 2019, another praised his opposition to Donald Trump as a political candidate. Evangelicals might be a noxious bunch, but Moore at least seemed to want to steer them in a slightly more wholesome direction.

And now, he wants to try to do that again. His post concerns evangelicals’ ongoing decline. It is, as Moore puts it, a “crisis.” He perceives only one way to reverse that decline and end that crisis:

Evangelicals must step up their Jesusing.

In other words, they must stop pining for their glory days, whatever that phrase might mean to them. Instead, they must seek revival. And not just any kind of revival, but the real-deal revival.

Revivals are very important to evangelicals

Evangelicals love the idea of revival. Revival is a Christianese word. It means a period of great zeal and rowdiness that leads to tons of new conversions and generally increased piety for years to come. Often, lots of miracle claims multiply during the initial outbreak of revival.

In evangelical reckoning, their god personally sends revivals to his followers—after, of course, they demonstrate their worthiness for it. They love to claim that revivals couldn’t possibly happen on their own.

Many evangelicals pray at least sometimes for small-scale revivals in their churches—and larger-scale ones across their countries. Earlier this year, they hoped that that recent shindig in Kentucky would become such a large-scale revival, but it petered out before it could get that far. It also sparked vanishingly few new converts, which is a requirement for the label of revival.

(That’s why the Toronto Blessing is called a blessing and not a revival. As spectacularly important as it was for evangelicals, most normies at the time barely even knew it was happening.)

So when evangelicals talk about revivals, they’re talking about an unmistakable show of power from their god. And that show of power always leads directly to them gaining both lots of new converts and more cultural power.

What a real-deal revival means to Russell Moore

In his post, Russell Moore also wants a large-scale revival. But he frets that evangelicals might be yearning for the wrong kind of revival.

If you’re wondering what that even looks like, you’re in luck:

The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace. [. . .]

Churches must stop the frantic rhetoric and desperate lack of confidence that seek to hold on to the Bible Belt of the past. Instead, those worthy of the word evangelical should nurture the joyous and tranquil fullness of faith that prays for something new, rooted in something very old—namely a commitment to personal faith and to the authority of the Bible.

That starts not with manifestos and strategic road maps, but with small-scale decisions to reawaken the awe of the God evangelicals proclaim. We must refocus our attention on conversion rather than culture wars and actually read the Bible rather than mine it for passages to win arguments.The Atlantic

Still confused? I wouldn’t blame you if you were.

Yes yes, but what did that even mean?

Evangelicals have this maddening habit of writing tons of words, words, words that don’t mean much in concrete terms. When they’re done, we don’t know what they actually mean, or what their suggestions look like in the real world, or how we’d know if someone were enacting their suggestions correctly or incorrectly. I’ve even caught evangelical ministers lamenting this unfortunate tendency. So I will translate:

Russell Moore thinks many evangelicals want a huge revival, but they want the wrong kind of revival. They want a revival that will result in them returning to their former dominance over America. For some evangelicals, that means a return to 2015:

Many mainstream evangelicals assumed that we were all just waiting out a moment of disorder: If we can just get through the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic, the racial-reckoning protests and backlashes, the 2020 presidential election, and the seemingly constant evangelical-leadership sex-and-abuse scandals, we’ll end up safely back in 2015. That’s clearly not happening.The Atlantic

That date is specific and very important. You see, 2015 was the last year evangelicals could still delude themselves into thinking that they were not, in fact, years into an unending decline of members and cultural power. That was the year that Pew Research released their 2015 Religious Landscape Study. This study revealed what some observers had been saying for years: People were leaving Christian churches by the truckload, and they were not coming back.

Other evangelicals, Moore asserts, want a revival will land them back in the 1950s:

Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age. A generation ago, one evangelical leader said that the goal of the religious right should be 1950s America, just without the sexism and racism.The Atlantic

I couldn’t figure out which evangelical leader he means in that quote, but it doesn’t surprise me. Even when I was Pentecostal in the 1980s-1990s, everyone I knew idolized that decade as the last great period of evangelical dominance. Looking back, it was like they all wanted to LARP a Jesus-themed Mad Men TV show.

But those are the wrong kind of revivals

However, the 1950s were far from the gauzy idealized decade that evangelicals crave. Sure, evangelicals got in bed with Republicans around then. That strategic alliance gave them a huge amount of cultural power—which they immediately began using to the hilt. For years, it was unsafe to vocally oppose evangelicals’ control-grabs or to express a lack of belief in their god. In some areas of America still dominated by evangelicals, it still is.

However, Christian leaders in the 1950s sure didn’t feel that way about their time. They lamented what they saw as a rising tide of secularism and disobedience to Christian demands. Back then, those leaders wanted a revival that would get them back to the Victorian Age. They were certain that Victorian-era evangelicals knew exactly how to Jesus correctly, and that nobody had dared refuse them anything they wanted. And as with the 1950s, the Victorian Age was far from that ideal as well.

No, Moore tells us, evangelicals should not crave a revival that ends with a return to dominance:

The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous. In the supposedly idyllic Christian America of the post–World War II era, the evangelical preacher A. W. Tozer wrote: “It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.” Tozer knew that the confusion of revival with nostalgia could amount to exactly what contemporary psychologists tell us about trauma: What is not repaired is repeated.The Atlantic

Instead, Moore wants a revival that ends with evangelicals Jesusing like they’ve never Jesused before.

Russell Moore wants the right kind of revival here

Here’s what the right kind of revival looks like, according to Russell Moore:

The answer to the crisis of credibility facing evangelical America is not fighting a battle for the “soul of evangelicalism,” with one group winning and exiling the losers. [. . .]

The answer is instead what it has always been: Those who wish to hold on to the Old Time Religion must recognize that God is doing something new. The old alliances and coalitions are shaking apart. And the sense of disorientation, disillusionment, and political and religious “homelessness” that many Christians feel is not a problem to be overcome but a key part of the process. [. . .]

The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.The Atlantic

Oh, okay. So evangelicals need “an organic movement” that focuses on “personal transformation.” That will, in turn, result in showers of divine grace upon them and the entire nation.

And how, you might be wondering now, shall evangelicals do that?

Out with the old, in with the new (again), sort of

To accomplish this miraculous change of priorities, evangelicals must stop doing all the stuff that Russell Moore doesn’t like and start doing the stuff he prefers. He doesn’t like social media fights, so evangelicals must stop doing that. Nor does he like “manifestos and strategic road maps,” so those must stop as well. Instead, evangelicals must talk up how awe-inspiring their god is, which will inevitably lead to conversions and increased piety.

He even, shockingly, appears to suggest that evangelicals exit the culture wars to focus like lasers on recruitment instead. Here it is again:

We must refocus our attention on conversion rather than culture wars and actually read the Bible rather than mine it for passages to win arguments.The Atlantic

Oh, that was such a sly, devious little bit. Bravo, Russell Moore!

The first time I read his post, I completely missed it. A friend had linked it to me and mentioned the culture wars line specifically, and I seriously thought they’d linked the wrong URL. What culture wars? He didn’t talk about culture wars. When I reread it (since that person’s not prone to such mistakes), I finally caught it. It’s just buried in there.

What the culture wars encompasses and what its warriors want

Right now, evangelicals fight culture wars on three main fronts:

Anti-trans legislation
Anti-LGBT efforts, generally
Complete opposition to elective abortion

But those aren’t their only culture wars. Here are some others:

Blocking gun control efforts
Sneaking indoctrination in front of non-evangelical children without their parents’ knowledge or approval
Destroying the social safety net
Enshrining Christian—particularly extremist evangelical—privilege into law at all levels of government and throughout its three branches
Rejecting climate change efforts and denying the science behind those efforts
(Related: The 2008 documentary that mostly-correctly predicted events in a world one degree warmer.)

As well as these culture wars, evangelicals also have begun to perceive some looming schisms over racism, sex abuse, and women pastors.

None of this stuff is coincidental, either. For the most part, all of their wars and schisms boil down to sheer, blithering authoritarian panic over lost power. And they’re losing that power thanks to increasing regard for and awareness of human rights and civil liberties. Abortion care, in particular, draws upon an impressive number of recognized human rights. When it is restricted and criminalized, human rights in that society erode for everyone who isn’t in power, not just women. It cannot be restricted or criminalized without jeopardizing human rights generally.

Their other culture wars run along similar lines. They all attack human rights and civil liberties at some level. These attacks seek to weaken America’s dedication to protecting both. After all, a society that robustly protects rights and liberties certainly won’t allow evangelicals to graciously appoint themselves everyone’s Designated Adult and start unilaterally making big sweeping personal decisions for others.

And authoritarian evangelicals fall apart if they stop feeling like they own everything around themselves—or are at least in the process of seizing that ownership.

Did Russell Moore seriously suggest that evangelicals stop fighting their culture wars?

I shall not be breaking Betteridge’s Law of Headlines today: No, he did not. The guy who once led the ERLC with rock-solid conviction is not about to drop evangelicals’ ongoing war for dominion over America.

He just wants it done more nicely.

If evangelicals stop pursuing the culture wars, they will implode on themselves like a star collapsing into a black hole. The entire thrust of their end of Christianity is like America’s so-called Manifest Destiny: A sense of permission to take control of something that did not actually belong to them. As it was then, their permission slip happens to be totally signed by Jesus himself.

That’s why evangelicals keep coalescing into totalitarian, theocratic political-takeover movements. From Biblical Patriarchy to Christian Reconstructionism to Dominionism to the John Birch Society and all the way to the Seven Mountains Mandate currently festering in Republican hearts, evangelicals just can’t stop sprouting these groups. As one right-wing evangelical site admits:

The church is an environment of extremes. The trouble with extremes is that they always contain a seed of truth, making them look and sound plausible to the careless bystander. By virtue of this fact, the church is also often full of susceptible bystanders ready to lap-up the latest and greatest fad.Reformation 21

It’s always nice to hear evangelicals concede that as a group, they have absolutely no way to discern dangerous lies from divine demands.

As outraged authoritarians suffering a group-wide narcissistic injury, evangelicals can no more abandon the culture wars than they could stop breathing.

The only moral culture wars are Russell Moore’s culture wars

Russell Moore has always wanted authoritarian evangelicalism, just without the sexism and racism. In his post, he may gently criticize an unnamed previous evangelical leader for using that exact phrase, but it’s his own heart’s desire as well. It always has been.

He thinks he can have dysfunctional authoritarian evangelicalism, but somehow strip away all the bad stuff that always happens with systems like this. That never works. Dysfunctional authoritarian systems absolutely depend on everyone in power acting only in good faith. But groups created under these systems have absolutely no way to ensure that—much less to prevent bad-faith actors from achieving power, much less to remove such bad-faith actors when they become aware of ’em.

So Moore’s always been perfectly happy to wade into the culture wars himself. He still is. In just the past year or so, he’s written a slew of anti-abortion articles for Christianity Today alone. In fact, at no point have I seen him suggesting that evangelicals should back off from their attempts to restrict and criminalize this care.

Instead, he just wants evangelicals to adopt a more simpering paternalistic tone while they trample human rights in America. You know, explain things to death. That way, women in evangelical-controlled states will completely understand why they no longer have access to the same human rights that men enjoy without even thinking about it. That’s always worked before.

Though Russell Moore also wants a strengthening of the social safety net, this is pure wishful thinking. Evangelicals despise helping the poor and disadvantaged, and always have. Worse, that desire takes second place to maintaining abortion as a heavily-restricted, criminalized form of health care. It’d be nice if the social safety net thing happens, he implies, but that legal stuff is staying regardless. That legal stuff is mandatory. The rest is just him begging evangelicals to at least pretend that they care about something besides power, dominance, and control of others’ lives. And they won’t, because nobody is making them.

Dude’s as much a culture warrior as the evangelicals he’s begging to leave the culture wars behind. It sounds a lot like he just wants the faction warfare to die down. And that ain’t gonna happen for the exact same reasons that evangelicals will continue to refuse to strengthen the social safety net.

He just wants other evangelicals to adopt his priorities instead of caring about their own.

Why Russell Moore’s suggestions will not become the new face of evangelicalism

I’ve mentioned already that I had to reread the post to find his buried reference to ending the culture wars (that he doesn’t like). Well, I also had to double-check the date of the post because this exact suggestion crops up constantly in evangelical writing. I’ve double-double-checked it a couple of times already because I keep thinking I might have misread the date and it really came out in 2021 or something.

Here’s how perennial this advice is:

Joe Battaglia recommended Jesusing harder to fix America itself.
Jesusing harder will totally fix dying churches, too, did you know?
It’ll also fix racism.
Jesusing harder also substitutes for real self-improvement.
But it’ll totally fix membership declines.
And every other thing evangelicals are doing wrong.
It’ll impress churchless believers so much that they’ll return to church!
It’ll also keep evangelicals from “transactional” faith and behavior!
Even more progressive Christians think Jesusing harder will satisfy every human yearning and need.
Jesusing harder will especially make evangelicals less gullible and prone to conspiracy theorizing.

Evangelicals constantly exhort each other to Jesus harder as a way to fix any problem they perceive anywhere. This advice has been a constant since well before I began writing. When Ronald Sider published his famous book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience in 2005, he suggested that Jesusing harder would make evangelicals finally stop being such hypocrites. Since then, any number of evangelicals have made this exact same suggestion.

But they didn’t take this advice then, and they’re not about to start now for Russell Moore.

The sad truth about Jesusing harder

Anyone loudly involved in right-wing evangelicalism right now is there because they like how things work right now. They’re not there to Jesus harder. They’re there to climb the power ladder of a dysfunctional authoritarian political movement that claims to derive its mandate to rule from nothing less than the god of the entire universe.

This exact combination of factors makes evangelicalism extremely dangerous to the rest of us. Jesusing harder should theoretically keep evangelicals so busy they wouldn’t possibly have time to grab for temporal power. But evangelicals imagine that it would do the opposite by bestowing upon them all the power in the world. And since Russell Moore has a demonstrated affection for C.S. Lewis, let me offer a word of advice from the man himself about what would happen then:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.C.S. Lewis

If they were thinking straight about this thing, even evangelicals would not want a world where super-hard-Jesusing evangelicals rule over everyone.

But we’re all in luck, because it won’t ever happen. If some evangelical leader ever somehow did manage to force this fractious, restive tribe to Jesus harder, they’d leave immediately to remake this current version of evangelicalism elsewhere. This is the only version that suits their needs and seems likely to fulfill their dreams of rulership.

And since it requires only lip service to Jesusing harder, then that is all they shall give it.

Meet ‘creation care,’ the evangelical substitute for environmental activism

Here’s the link to this article.

Evangelicals can’t care about anything unless they can feel like they literally own it.

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

JUL 13, 2023

Overview:

As a substitute for accepting reality about climate change, evangelicals have decided that Jesus has given them ownership of the entire planet. Thus, they really ought to take care of it so he doesn’t get mad at them for breaking his gift. That sounds good—until you read the Christianese terms and conditions.

Christianese does a lot of heavy lifting for evangelicals. Everyday life becomes a godly melodrama. You aren’t the guy who carries the pastor’s stuff—you’re an armorbearer. You aren’t eating lunch, you’re breaking bread. Even a simple word-shuffle like Christ Jesus can give an insidery zhuzh to whatever you’re on about. The result can be a harmless spiritual RPG or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, bless your heart.

Now we see (some) evangelicals deploying the phrase creation care. It’s their substitute for environmental activism, a way of owning the concept and (most importantly) giving themselves permission to gut any parts of the actual meaning that they find inconvenient. Those who embrace it might not accept that humans have had anything to do with the climate’s huge changes in the modern day, but they’re still aware that not GAFF about the planet is a bad look—and they want to at least make an effort at look maintenance.

The other name for creation care, “environmental stewardship,” reveals the ideas at work here. Though this phrase isn’t technically an evangelical creation, the word stewardship conveys a great deal about evangelicals’ mindset and priorities—and what this creation care movement actually involves.

Worse, at a time when human impact on Earth’s climate grows more and more certain, this entire movement might just be a little too little, a little too late.

One degree warmer isn’t a big deal, said the homeschooling evangelical mom to her nine-year-old

A long time ago, I saw a short clip of an evangelical mother homeschooling her young son. The lad looked about nine years old and was decidedly not enthused about being filmed while engaging with substandard pseudoscience at his home’s kitchen table.

Somehow, he feigned interest in his mom’s placement of two cups of water in front of him. She’d carefully made sure that the water in the cups was exactly one degree (Fahrenheit, I assume) different.

Now, she asked him to test the temperature of the two glasses with his finger. He did so. She asked him if he could tell her which cup contained the warmer water. He could not.

“See?” she asked triumphantly. “One degree isn’t a big deal.” Then, she swooped in for the kill: Global warming is obviously fake, just some liberal ploy to, I don’t know, put oil companies out of business.

All those people saying that the Earth couldn’t get one degree warmer or bad things would happen? They were wrong. One degree is no biggie.

Tentatively, the lad agreed.

She was wrong

At the time, I didn’t quite understand myself what the whole one-degree-warmer thing meant. But I’d sure learn when the documentary Six Degrees That Could Change the World came out in 2008. Judging by the comments on one YouTube channel’s video of it, that documentary was the Zoomer version of the 1983 movie The Day After, which very effectively traumatized so many Gen X kids about nuclear war.

If so, good. Because yes, a planet that is one degree warmer is a huge freaking ginormous big deal, Homeschooling Evangelical Moms of the World. And that’s where we are now, according to several authorities: NASA, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In fact, Earth is somewhere between 1.1 degree (Celsius) warmer and 1.2 degrees warmer than it was in 1900.

Within 20 years, the IPCC thinks we’ll hit 1.5 degrees warmer. We got to see some of the ramifications of that warming just recently, in fact.

But don’t you worry none! After a long period of denial that climate change was even a real thing that is actually happening right now thanks to humans, evangelicals have swung into action to take up their divinely-given role as Earth’s stewards.

Christianese 101: Stewardship (in general)

For normies, environmental stewardship is not a new idea at all. That phrase has been around for almost a hundred years. In less religious spheres, environmental stewardship is simply direct participation in conservation efforts. A 2018 paper offers some specific activities encompassed by the phrase:

The term environmental stewardship has been used to refer to such diverse actions as creating protected areas, replanting trees, limiting harvests, reducing harmful activities or pollution, creating community gardens, restoring degraded areas, or purchasing more sustainable products. It is applied to describe strict environmental conservation actions, active restoration activities and/or the sustainable use and management of resources. Stewardship actions can also be taken at diverse scales, from local to global efforts, and in both rural and urban contexts.“Environmental Stewardship: A Conceptual Review and Analytical Framework,” 2018

But in religious spheres, the phrase “environmental stewardship” takes on a very special meaning. And it all begins with the word “stewardship.”

Evangelicals often pretend that they’re just taking care of things for Jesus until he returns. That’s why they call themselves his ambassadors, even though any real ambassadors would have been recalled a dozen times if they’d done even a fraction of what evangelicals constantly do.

As part of their self-declared role as ambassadors, evangelicals pretend that Jesus is very nicely allowing his most beloved and trusted followers to manage things for him in his absence, like parents allowing small children to help with light housework so they feel involved.

In other words, evangelicals act as Jesus’s stewards.

Christianese 201: Environmental stewardship and creation care

When I said “manage things” up there, I meant absolutely everything. Evangelicals claim to believe that Jesus owns literally everything: the planet, the universe, every government on Earth, even people themselves. That’s you and me. As his ambassadors, evangelicals are therefore his stewards in managing all of the above. They steward Jesus’ property in his name and for his benefit.

So environmental stewardship means exactly what you now think it means. Some evangelicals want to make an effort not to wreck the planet, but only because they own it and want to keep it nice—for Jesus, of course.

Creation care is simply what many evangelicals call their environmental stewardship. They’re taking care of Jesus’ creation—at least until he returns to destroy it all.

If you’d like a lot more info about this distinction between secular and religious uses of the term environmental stewardship, a 2012 paper by Jennifer Welchman might be your best bet. She describes the religious overtones of the term, offers a much more detailed overview of its history as a concept than you’ll find much of anywhere else, and details the risks inherent in using it in more secular contexts. She ends with a more nuanced definition of the term going forward. So if you have a JSTOR account, I highly recommend checking it out.

(How to get a JSTOR account to access tons of amazing journal articles for free. I have no formal relationship with this site beyond being a happy account holder.)

How evangelicals first engaged with creation care

Some evangelicals responded to early calls for creation care with enthusiasm. In January 2023, Neall Pogue wrote an interesting essay about those early days for The Conversation. He asserts that from the 1960s to the early 1990s, white evangelicals largely supported “an environmentally friendly position.”

When Francis Schaeffer père adopted environmentally-friendly views in the late 1960s, the stage was set for white evangelicals to follow suit. He was hugely influential with that crowd and would eventually lend a hand in engineering their anti-abortion culture war. (Before then, abortion wasn’t on evangelicals’ radar. They saw it as a backward Catholic thing.)

So when Schaeffer spoke on environmental stewardship and wrote books and essays urging evangelicals to adopt those ideas, evangelicals listened to him. Even Southern Baptist ministers adopted his suggestions.

By the 1980s, Pogue tells us, evangelical homeschooling resource companies like Abeka Book praised environmentalist ideas and leaders. Their materials also cautioned against the impact that capitalism could have on the environment.

In 1988, when Pat Robertson bowed out of the presidential race that year, he gave his version of the classic “City on a Hill” speech. Whereas Ronald Reagan’s idealized City had emphasized free trade, busy ports, and harmonious diversity, Pat Robertson’s resembled an extended, idealized evangelical family. And that family specifically enjoyed clean water, pure air, healthy soil, and a robust ecology.

The second phase of creation care should have given evangelicals whiplash—but it sure did not

By the 1990s, though, the political climate in evangelicalism had changed dramatically. Evangelicals now largely completely embraced both the culture wars and very conservative political and social positions. Their leaders had completely politicized them. They even trampled and drove away anyone who thought differently.

This time on the merry-go-round, evangelical leaders needed their flocks to hate environmental stewardship, not embrace it. Their reasons were twofold:

First, so the flocks would reject liberal politicians who were overwhelmingly pushing hard for environmental protection measures, along with liberal causes themselves.

Second, so the flocks would reject any ideas that might lead to changes that would negatively affect conservative donors to Republican politicians.

The anti-abortion culture war had already demonstrated that evangelical leaders could reliably deliver scads and reams of evangelical votes to conservative politicians and causes. Those leaders simply used that culture war’s rails to deliver the same kind of misinformation—this time, it simply concerned climate change instead of human rights and gynecology.

It worked, and it worked remarkably swiftly. Evangelicals were, by now, very comfortable with not only completely reversing course at their leaders’ urging, but also with forgetting they’d ever held any other position.

But creation care still, uh, found a way

I can tell you with both a quickness and a certainty that my old crowd of fundamentalists almost completely rejected environmentalism in the late 80s and early 90s. I didn’t even know that evangelicals had once thought any differently.

In fact, I had a Pentecostal friend in college who got so annoyed with Earth Day celebrations on campus that he told everyone he was going to buy a gigantic diesel pickup truck, pursue an almost-entirely beef diet, and eat a lot of beans for the rest of his life—for their intestinal effects, geddit? He didn’t do any of that in reality, but dang, that’s some real stewardship!

One creation care group online, the Evangelical Environmental Network, claims to have begun life in 1993 (close to the end of my involvement with the religion). That sounds about right for the movement as a whole. They affiliate with the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), who are culture warriors trying not to be quite so political about their culture wars.

In fact, they base their entire creation care movement on their conceptualization of evangelicals’ beloved anti-abortion culture war. They think it requires evangelicals to focus on all human life, not just on forcing pregnant women to give birth against their consent:

Creation Care as a Matter of Life

In the United States, air pollution alone kills an estimated 200,000 people each year., Approximately 6,000 unborn children die from soot (fine airborne pollution) in the U.S., while another 10,000 are born premature from soot exposure. Additionally, a Lancet Commission on Pollution and Human Health found that in 2015, pollution resulted in over 9 million deaths worldwide. This represents 3 times more deaths than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined and 10 times more deaths than all forms of violence and conflict. Pollution’s threat to life continues and is projected to at least double by 2050 unless we act.

As pro-life Christians, our mission demands that we defend life in every way. Our faith and our values will never be compromised.Creation Care Statement on Development (archive)

Francis Schaeffer clearly has a lot to answer for.

The culture wars wreck everything, even creation care

By the Aughts, though, climate change was starting to become a big topic. More and more, the scientific consensus looked not only compelling but overwhelming. And some evangelicals accepted their assertions.

But by now, evangelicals had begun their big decline in membership and cultural power. They were far more sensitive to their growing vulnerability to their many enemies.

If you ever saw that classic Key & Peele sketch about President Obama goading Republicans into supporting all kinds of liberal causes by pretending to reject them, then know that the same thinking governed evangelicals at the time.

Whatever leading scientists asserted, evangelicals seemed to delight in rejecting. That definitely included climate change. Rejecting any care for the environment had become as certain a belief marker as opposition to legal, accessible abortion was.

Creation care emerges from the ashes

In 2006, almost 100 evangelical leaders signed a major statement about global warming. These included Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, which just got booted from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for being friendly to the idea of women pastors. The letter, addressed to the NAE, asked its leaders to support legislation that would help ease global warming. To support their requests, the signers met with various congress members and ran advertisements supporting climate change science and environmentalism.

However, an opposition group soon formed to push back against this letter’s requests. The opposition included Richard Land, the leader of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. Notably, the organizer of this opposition effort, E. Calvin Beisner, said he felt driven to do it because he denied climate change science:

He said Tuesday that “the science is not settled” on whether global warming was actually a problem or even that human beings were causing it. And he said that the solutions advocated by global warming opponents would only cause the cost of energy to rise, with the burden falling most heavily on the poor.“Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative,” New York Times, 2006 (archive)

(Yes, because extremely conservative, science-denying white evangelicals have always been so very very very concerned with the plight of poor people.)

In 2008, creation care gained a whole new set of supporters.

Nowadays, Jonathan Merritt is a big-name religion writer and the son of an SBC pastor who is, in turn, one of the denomination’s former presidents. But back in the Aughts, when he was just a seminary student, Merritt spearheaded the Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI). In 2008, the new group released a powerful statement:

We have recently engaged in study, reflection and prayer related to the challenges presented by environmental and climate change issues. These things have not always been treated with pressing concern as major issues. Indeed, some of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that these are real problems that deserve our attention. But now we have seen and heard enough to be persuaded that these issues are among the current era’s challenges that require a unified moral voice.

We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues have often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice.A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, 2008 (archive)

Merritt’s declaration garnered 45 high-profile SBC signatures, including his dad’s, that of the SBC’s current president, Frank Page, and that of the president of Merritt’s seminary, Danny Akin.

Despite its name, though, the SBECI was not an official endeavor of the SBC itself. And it revealed that Southern Baptists weren’t at all unified behind the idea of creation care as a priority—or even as a real necessity.

When money gets involved, creation care stops mattering

Then, in 2010, Daily Mail famously reported on John Shimkus, then a Republican Congressman from Illinois. That year, Shimkus campaigned to chair the House Energy Committee despite being a climate change denier. In fact, he thought Jesus had implicitly promised humans that they’d never destroy the planet because Jesus had already claimed that privilege for himself. Naturally, Shimkus not only won the position but also became the Republican Leader of the committee’s Environment and Climate Change Subcommittee.

But take heart. He lost the position in 2016 to Greg Walden…

… Who is an Oregon Republican who did quite a lot to ensure that climate change will only continue to worsen, and who seems to deny that climate change is an urgent problem at all. (He appears to have profited handsomely from these stances.)

And if you’re wondering, the current Chair of the Energy Committee since January 2023 is Cathy McMorris Rodgers…

… Who is a Creationist and therefore a denier of all established biological science.

In a way, though, these ferocious examples of pushback against climate change only highlighted how inevitable the movement was among the most important demographic of all:

The newest crop of voting-age Americans, especially those who still affiliated with evangelicalism.

Creation care gains a foothold in Gen Z

Despite older evangelicals’ now-decades-old rejection of creation care, gradually younger evangelicals adopted its ideas. A year or so ago, a writer for Wayland Baptist University explained the school’s fairly-new recycling program with this strong statement:

[M]any Christians today believe the environment (God’s creation) is an exploitable commodity, given to us to use as we see fit. Christian environmental stewardship, also known as “Creation Care” takes a different view, reminding us that we cannot honestly declare that we love God, nor love Jesus, while at the same time destroying His creation, which He declared to be good and exists to glorify Him.Wayland Baptist University Green Initiative, “Biblical Foundations for Christian Environmental Stewardship” (archive)

A photo of the program’s volunteers taken last year reveals some very youthful, smiling faces. I’m not surprised to see them, either. In 2021, Pew Research discovered that Gen Z tends to feel the most strongly—and to take action most often—about climate change than earlier generations have. Millennials got that ball rolling years earlier. It could well be that when their older Christian leaders refused to join them in their concerns, that became a sticking point for Millennial Christians.

In turn, those older Christian leaders can only (incorrectly) sneer that young environmental activists have “picked up a new religion.”

No no, Padre, tell us more about how sour those grapes must be.

I bet they’re totally sour.

Why Christian leaders have to talk like that

Generally, the big-name evangelical Christian leaders have not changed at all from their mid-1990s course. They’re still lip-locked with Republican priorities, still tasked with delivering votes to Republican politicians and causes, still flogging misinformation through the culture war’s established rails.

Very clearly, Republicans still need evangelicals to reject any progress regarding the environment. And so that is exactly what evangelical leaders are telling the flocks to do.

But a few have broken ranks. I spotted some of them on a 2020 editorial. In it, these pastors discussed grants for solar panels for churches through their new group Creation Care Partners. In a separate interview with Christianity Today, one of the editorial writers, Bob Whitaker, had this to say about why he’s involved with the group:

“This whole thing for me has been a bit of a conversion,” said Whitaker, who has pastored at Evangelical Community Church for 22 years. “I didn’t grow up thinking this way. I didn’t begin serving this church with this mentality…. Among evangelicals—churches, pastors, even theologians—we’ve focused on the salvation of the soul to the exclusion of other parts I now consider to be part of the Good News.”

His change was gradual—an expansion of his understanding of how the gospel applies to everyday life and a growing sense that God’s people should treat the earth not as consumers but as caretakers.“Creation Care Movement Takes Action with Solar Panels and Petitions,” Christianity Today, 2020 (archive)

Looking at his church’s website, it becomes abundantly clear that he’s got a lot of younger Millennial and Zoomer congregants going there. Mystery solved!

And now, just look at that horse run!

Perhaps because of the pandemic, creation care seems like it’s everywhere in 2023. Here’s a very small sampling of creation care events and happenings that are either going to happen or that have occurred already this year:

The Creation Care Alliance ran a big symposium this past February. It included a ton of workshops and presentations.
During Lent 2023 (from late February to early April, basically), an interfaith group offered an entire Lenten Creation Care calendar full of activities that Christians could do to help with climate change.
Hope for Creation Conference (April 2023). Held by the Episcopal Diocese of Spokane, Washington, this one-day event was packed with speakers on a variety of conservation topics.
In May 2023, the Creation Care Committee of the North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church issued a “Creation Care Resolution.” It offered some far-reaching recommendations that the committee hopes the denomination will accept.
2023 EDRI Conference for Creation Care (September 2023). If you’re wondering, EDRI stands for Episcopal Diocese of Rhode Island. This is the second year they’ve had this conference. This year, they’ll focus on “environmental justice.”
For that matter, The Episcopal Church mothership runs an entire page devoted to various activities related to creation care.
BioLogos Creation Care Summit (October 2023). BioLogos famously consists of evangelicals who reject Young Earth Creationism.
The Catholic Climate Covenant (“Care for Creation; Care for the Poor”) offers a bunch of resources on their page regarding creation care. Among these is an essay from Pope Francis concerning ecology.

Creation Care: It’s What’s For Dinner™.

The problem with creation care

So here we are, with younger evangelicals loving creation care and many older ones still rejecting the idea that climate change is even a thing that humans have caused and need to fix now.

Even if evangelicals as a whole finally get on board with what creation care advocates want, there’s still one huge, glaring dealbreaker problem with the idea:

Creation care will never be anything but completely optional for evangelicals.

The situation reminds me of being in grade school in the American public school system. Whenever the school got new textbooks, teachers begged students not to trash them.

Some students listened (like, ahem, me—a sweet, dreamy, quiet little girl who already treasured books) and took perfect care of these perfect new textbooks. Others didn’t quite achieve that standard. And a few trashed the books on principle, because what exactly was the school gonna do to them if they did? Fine their parents? It’s not like they’d ever suffer any penalties themselves.

That’s exactly what’s going on here with creation care.

If evangelicals choose to reject creation care, it’s not like Jesus will do anything to them. They’ll still go to Heaven, after all. Creation care is purely optional, just like every other behavioral demand evangelicals make of other evangelicals. It’s not like anyone’s going to do anything to them if they ignore the demand.

If evangelicals are not forced to do the right thing, they have shown us time and again that they simply will not do it. In fact, they’ll do its opposite if they can. Wanting their grandchildren to have a clean, livable planet doesn’t matter, either, to the large number of evangelicals who believe that Jesus will kick-start the Endtimes before too long.

They might as well drive huge diesel pickup trucks and eat steak every day—along with a lot of beans.

Will evangelicals be fooled by the ‘He Gets Us’ campaign?

Here’s the link to this article.

Even in recruitment, the most important part of evangelicalism, hucksters don’t care if what they sell works—only that it works to sell.

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

JUN 27, 2023

I hope evangelicals aren't getting too fooled by 'He Gets Us' campaign — Photo by Danting Zhu on Unsplash

Overview:

A hilariously bad article at Christianity Today lauds the supposed runaway success of ‘He Gets Us’ marketing campaign. We examine the article on its own merits, finding it completely lacking.

Diving deeper, we discover a potentially very dark and ominous evangelical hope that may explain why they’re willing to sink $1B into this pathetic turkey of a campaign over three years.

He Gets Us is a billion-dollar evangelical ad campaign that has been running nonstop on social media and television for about a year and a half. It undoubtedly pays the salaries of a great many artists, managers, and consultants—and, of course, the so-called ministers who scheme from the shadows behind it in their so-called “ministries.”

A recent story at Christianity Today extolled all the runaway successes of He Gets Us. But as I read, I noticed a curious absence of information. And then, my gaze swept up to the very top of the page—where I spotted something that suddenly made complete sense of what I was reading. Ah yes, I thought. Our old evangelical pal Self-Interest has come a-callin’. Again. H’ain’t he wore out his welcome yet?

He Gets Us creates success of a very different kind for evangelicals. And that success bodes very poorly for the rest of us. Let’s examine this story on its own merits, and then let’s dive beneath the surface to see what’s likely really going on.

(Author’s note: I use the term “heathens” to indicate non-Christians or lapsed Christians. The term also has a specific meaning of Germanic pagan reconstructionism, but that’s not what is meant here.)

Quick recap of the dire importance of recruitment in evangelicalism

For about five years, evangelicals have been pushing very hard on the flocks to do more recruitment. They call this personal evangelism, which is Christianese for person-to-person recruiting largely done by amateurs.

Personal evangelism is a bit like if a major fast food chain stopped running advertising, marketing, or publicity of any kind and instead relied solely on word of mouth from its current customers to get new ones. Except now they only sell bags of rocks painted to look like food. And everyone in the restaurant, from the manager down to the servers and the other customers, is rude. It wouldn’t take long for the restaurants’ personal evangelists to start getting the cold shoulder.

In response to these increased calls for personal evangelism, the flocks have nodded in agreement, smiled, and then almost completely ignored their Dear Leaders’ commands.

A long time ago, noted evangelical leader John Stott moved the evangelism goalpost to make things as easy as possible for the pew-warmers. Instead of scoring a recruit, now all he asked was for the flocks to at least make a recruiting attempt. He hoped that’d make the idea of personal evangelism less daunting to evangelicals.

But it didn’t help at all.

Evangelical pew-warmers do not want to recruit. They don’t like recruiting. It’s embarrassing, destroys their relationships and credibility, obviously violates others’ personal boundaries, and largely only results in rejection and worse. Moreover, there isn’t a thing their leaders can really do to them if they don’t do it. So they don’t do it.

If evangelical leaders are correct, and personal evangelism is all that will save Christianity from its decline, they are in big trouble.

Quick recap of He Gets Us

He Gets Us is supposed to redeem evangelicals’ beyond-tainted brand. In marketing, a tainted brand is one that is mired in controversy and problems. Think like Bud Light in their latest fracas over Dylan Mulvaney. Months after the controversy began, the brand is still facing huge problems as their core consumer demographic continues to reject their product. Evangelicals are in that kind of situation with their own brand, except their decline has lasted longer, has more roots than just one social media post or stray comment by an executive insulting their core fanbase, and involves a whole lot more scandals and political control-grabs.

In the case of He Gets Us, the campaign consists of many millions of dollars’ worth of advertisements in prime media spots like the Super Bowl. These advertisements seek to present Jesus as a hip Zoomer/Millennial kinda guy who totally “gets” people today. Just like Zoomers/Millennials feel disaffected and lonely, he was too! Just like Zoomers/Millennials feel like the world is getting more hostile, he’s right there to tell them how to make it better! They wanna change the world? So does he! See, he gets them!

The campaign has three ostensible goals:

As the campaign creator has said, “obviously” to persuade people to join Christianity (or become more active in it, if they’re inactive Christians)
To raise interest in Jesus himself, apart from icky politics, which should make heathens more amenable to Christians’ recruitment attempts
To get Christians to do good deeds for others to hopefully improve Christianity’s tattered reputation

The ‘Project Sparkle’ of Christianity

In a way, the campaign reminds me of one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons, “Project Sparkle.” In this 1997 cartoon, the Pointy-Haired Boss (PHB) makes an announcement:

He Gets Us displays the same kind of mismatched priorities. Nothing about He Gets Us actually tackles the reasons for Americans’ growing distrust and dislike of evangelicals: their ever-increasing politicization, their constant skewing ever-more-rightward, their belligerent bigotry, sexism, and racism, their hatred of the poor that Jesus told them to help, their utter hypocrisy regarding the selfsame rules they want to force the rest of us to follow, their wingnutty denial of science and reality, and their leaders’ constant abuse scandals.

Worse, most Americans probably have a decently-positive opinion of Jesus as a sort of Ultimate Good Guy of the Universe, though perhaps they shouldn’t, in my humble opinion. It’s hard even to fathom why anyone thought evangelicals needed an ad campaign about something most Americans probably already accept.

Also of note, He Gets Us operates a website that sends free stuff to Christians who claim to have done various good deeds for others. This stuff includes He Gets Us-branded hats, shirts, water bottles, and other such inexpensive goods. They don’t check up on whether or not the recipient has actually done whatever good deed is claimed.

One of the “payment” screens for free stuff from *He Gets Us*

On the site, interested parties can also connect with local churches and ministries, as well as chat with whoever the campaign has hired to hang out on the site for that purpose.

A glowing assessment of He Gets Us

At the time I spotted it, this Christianity Today story ran on its site’s front page. Its title makes it sound like quite an important story, too: “5 Critical Insights for Church Leaders: How the He Gets Us campaign is influencing culture and changing churches.”

Neato, I thought. Has someone finally released some actual meaningful research about this campaign’s effectiveness?

Because it’s been running for a year and change now. An evangelical group, The Servant Foundation, began it in March 2022. It even has its own Wikipedia page, which notes that the people behind the campaign intend to waste a mind-blowing one billion dollars US on it over three years. I’ve even written a few pieces about it.

From the get-go, the whole campaign sounded like a bunch of sinecures for a bunch of evangelicals—a way to get free money to waste on pet projects that would make evangelical big-money donors feel like they were truly advancing Jesus’ kingdom on Earth with their donations. Nobody even seemed to care that the campaign had no real measurable goals or even metrics for performance. So I was actually eager to dig into the story.

Then, I discovered that it was complete fluff. It talks a lot about the Super Bowl ad they ran, name-drops creepy, ineffectual Ed Stetzer as one of the campaign’s advisors, and then plunges into claims that the campaign has totally changed evangelical churches for the better.

Hilarious claims that do not connect with evidence in the least in He Gets Us story

To demonstrate the campaign’s effectiveness, the story tells us this:

He Gets Us certainly achieved its goal of sparking conversations about Jesus. By centering Jesus’ humanity, the ads prompted viewers to explore questions about his divinity. The result? Google searches for “Jesus” surpassed Christmastime searches and were on par with Easter, experiencing an increase of 1,200% or more. Prominent media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and USA Today took notice of He Gets Us, amplifying the campaign’s message. The Super Bowl itself became the most-watched TV event in history, exposing approximately 115.1 million viewers to the ads that highlighted the importance of child-like faith and Jesus’ love for others, including our enemies.“Movement Making: 5 Key Takeaways from He Gets Us,” Christianity Today, archived June 7

Are they serious? They’re using Google searches for “Jesus” as the metric by which they are measuring their ad campaign’s success? And they’re using that as their metric in a year when a prominent Christian movie with the word “Jesus” in its title, Jesus Revolution, came out, along with various shows about Jesus like The Chosen and The Chosen One?

In fact, I did what the hucksters behind He Gets Us hoped nobody would do: I went to Google Trends to find out just what was going on with search terms. That’s when I found out that Ed Stetzer isn’t just creepy and completely ineffectual. He’s also a fibber. Here is the Google Trends report for searches for “Jesus” between Christmas 2022 and mid-April 2023 (Easter was on April 9th; the Super Bowl was on February 12th):

I see no real spike, particularly not one rivaling Christmas or Easter. Unsurprisingly, searches spiked hard on the former and way lots hard on the latter, but not much was going on for Super Bowl Sunday.

For kicks and giggles, I also ran a search for “Jesus” vs “He Gets Us” for the same period. I figured that if the ad campaign got a lot of attention it’d show up on searches as well:

It’s not surprising that a tiny bit of interest spiked around the time of the Super Bowl, but otherwise it hasn’t attracted much interest at all. That is likely how the donors to the campaign prefer it; they’ve remained largely anonymous.

Unfortunately for Ed Stetzer and his pals at He Gets Us, nobody can tell if the Super Bowl ads “prompted viewers to explore questions about [Jesus’] divinity,” any more than we can tell from searches of the term “Jesus” that people are exploring any specific traits of his.

It’s obvious that the campaign’s research team hasn’t explored such connections at all, or if they have that they found no connection. If they had and one existed, then they’d have told us all about it.

When evangelicals brag about evangelistic success, listen to what they do not say.

What He Gets Us marketers do not say (speaks volumes)

As just one example, consider this success claim in the story:

139 million Americans are now familiar with the campaign, and in that group, there has been a significant shift. After watching the ads, viewers are more likely to: see Jesus as a worthy example, agree that Jesus loves everyone, believe Jesus understands them, and express interest in reading about Jesus in the Bible.“Movement Making: 5 Key Takeaways from He Gets Us,” Christianity Today, archived June 7

Wow, that sounds impressive, right? But is it?

Super Bowl 2023 viewership numbers range from 115 million (Fox Sports) and 200 million (NFL.com). Anyone watching Super Bowl ads during the game would have seen the ad, of course, and a lot of people like watching the ads on their own anyway.

We don’t know how He Gets Us marketers know about this shift. We don’t know if the people involved were already Christian, or if they were heathens who were just wonderstruck by Jesus’ incredible Jesus Aura. The paragraph does not say that these respondents changed their minds about Jesus or that they’ve decided to start reading about him after never having read about him before. It only says they agree with those points. Existing Christians seem extremely likely to say all of that after viewing such ads.

In 2019, Pew Research estimated that there were roughly 167 million Christian adults in America. There also appears to be quite an overlap between football fans and evangelical Christians. Thus, a bunch of heathens were likely at no risk of seeing the ads in the first place.

The story does not specifically say that heathens saw or agreed with the ads. So we can assume they did not. Rather, the ads made existing Christians, particularly evangelical Christians, happy. But they already agree with the claims the campaign makes.

The 5 supposedly “critical” and “key takeaways” of the He Gets Us post

Again, listen for what is not being said in these takeaways.

1. People are open and hungry to learn about Jesus. The campaign has opened doors for important conversations, and church leaders need to be prepared to engage with curiosity and sensitivity.

Which people? And how exactly has the campaign opened those doors? How are those open doors manifesting?

2. The campaign is opening doors to a conversation, that Jesus followers need to be ready for. Church leaders and Jesus followers can engage with curiosity, sensitivity, and mindfulness of how they are representing Jesus.

It’d be nice if the post noted that a lot of those conversations will center around the campaign’s utterly ridiculous budget—and its backers’ active participation in the evangelical culture wars. A few months ago, Chrissy Stroop speculated that Zoomers would be asking some very pointed questions along those lines. I agree. Every sign points to Zoomers viewing evangelical bigotry and -isms with ever-increasing distrust and revulsion. This campaign looks like evangelicals are trying to sell young adults Good-Guy-Jesus to get them in the church doors, then bait-and-switching them with the reality of evangelical bigotry, authoritarianism, and cruelty-being-the-point.

Also: Scope the “Jesus followers” thing. That’s the ultra-hardcore TRUE CHRISTIAN™ way to call oneself a Christian.

3. The best conversations start simple – and include shared experiences. Effective conversations about Jesus don’t require theological expertise. Asking great questions allows for meaningful engagement.

That bit has the whiff of Ed Stetzer’s involvement. For years, he’s pushed for personal evangelism to start with bad-faith conversational openers that lead into unwanted sales pitches. Gen X and Millennials took a while to catch on to this predatory sales technique. However, Zoomers seem to understand it innately. It didn’t really work in previous generations, and it really doesn’t work now.

Also, evangelicals are largely incapable of having real conversations with anybody. They’re too authoritarian to allow for a genuine engagement of two-way information.

4. Think of the ads as part of your ministry strategy. The ads can be powerful tools for sermons, small groups, outreach training in today’s culture, and serve as a catalyst for prayer.

Translation: Please, for the love of tiny orange kittens, do something—ANYTHING—with our ad campaign!

More realistically, I suppose the ads “can be” all that. In reality, they are just rah-rah for existing Christians. They also have a much darker purpose that we’ll explore in a minute here.

5. Embrace your role in the movement. As leaders, pastors play a critical role in bringing the messages of He Gets Us to life by embodying Jesus’ love and reflecting it in their relationships.

Firstly, it’s not a “movement.” As we’ve already seen, it didn’t even budge the needle regarding Google searches for “Jesus.” This item sounds a lot like them pleading with pastors to please start pushing their ad campaign in church sermons and outreach efforts. And that makes me wonder just what pastors’ involvement rate is here. I bet it is abysmal. But of the ones who do participate, they’re feeding into that dark purpose I mentioned above.

He Gets Us has not actually helped evangelicals at all

Coming back to that “movement” claim, I’d like to know where this “movement” even is.

I watch evangelical news like a hawk. I’ve seen absolutely nothing about this “movement” anywhere. However much free swag the campaign is giving individuals, it hasn’t done a thing to help with recruitment. It doesn’t even appear to be a factor in improving the retention of existing evangelicals.

In addition, I’ve heard absolutely no conversion stories involving He Gets Us. Not one. Even Chick tracts, those pathetically oversimplified, offensive little cartoon booklets, have a few conversion stories attached to them. So do even those awful roadside billboards that hardline evangelicals and Catholics love to inflict on drivers. But after a year-and-three-months since this campaign began, I’ve yet to hear a single conversion story claiming to be the result of these ad spots.

For that matter, I haven’t even heard any evangelicals claim that the ads have had a marked effect on their own success in recruiting heathens. If these ads are sparking what they like to call gospel conversations, which is Christianese for any exchange of words that might one day eventually perhaps maybe lead to a recruiting attempt in some far-flung future multiverse version of our reality, then nobody’s reporting them to He Gets Us.

I’ve not even heard a word about all these supposed good deeds inspired by the ads, either. If some churches use the campaign as a ministry tactic, they’re being awfully quiet about it.

And now, the self-interest in the story

After I read those five key super-critical takeaways from He Gets Us, I shook my head in utter derision. And my gaze flitted up from there to the top of the page at Christianity Today. That’s when I spotted the detail that explained everything about this story:

PAID CONTENT FOR HE GETS US

And at the bottom of the story, a disavowal from Christianity Today:

The editorial staff of Christianity Today had no role in the creation of this content.

Right above that disavowal, He Gets Us links readers to three more paid advertising spots with other fake stories about their marketing campaign.

Of course. That’s why the story has no relation whatsoever to reality. It’s just wishful thinking from marketers who’ve sunk a whole lot of money into this utterly, spectacularly failed campaign.

This story, along with those other paid ad spots, is what the marketers behind He Gets Us really hope that evangelicals will think of their campaign. They hope with all their hearts that evangelicals think that He Gets Us is accomplishing the impossible: Making normies feel more warmly toward evangelicals, and making normies more open to evangelicals’ recruiting attempts.

These ad spots live up to their creators’ hype as poorly as apologetics books and evangelism how-to guides do.

Hucksters push He Gets Us to make sales to evangelical donors, not to viewers of the ads

But it doesn’t matter to the creators of He Gets Us if their ads do anything that they claim it does. Similarly, results don’t matter to the creators of apologetics hand-waving routines or failtastic evangelism guides.

All of these hucksters have already made their money from the one and only market they must reach.

For apologetics books and evangelism guides, that market is evangelical purchasers. Once an evangelical has purchased one of these products, its creator can leave with that person’s money. Heathen normies don’t pay those hucksters’ bills. Existing evangelicals do.

The campaign’s hucksters are saying the campaign will cost a billion dollars over three years. But their target market isn’t heathens. No, they aim instead for deep-pocketed evangelical donors.

All they need to do is make those donors think they’re getting their money’s worth, somehow.

Reforming evangelicals’ terrible reputation will require more than some small good deeds

By now, it almost seems pointless to say that He Gets Us is not going to reverse membership declines. That’s been obvious since its first day of existence. Nor will it boost Christianity’s credibility as an ideology, or even warm people to the notion of Christians as a group worth joining. Its claims of success seem to derive entirely from existing Christians.

The campaign particularly won’t improve evangelicals’ tainted brand in any way. The soft-focus Ultimate-Good-Guy Peacemaker Wise-Outcast Poor-Folks-Loving Jesus that these ads peddle is one that evangelicals themselves already reject out of hand.

Nor will a few good deeds redeem evangelicals’ reputation as a group. The campaign’s creators clearly want heathens to see those good deeds as part of evangelicals’ Jesus Aura. Evangelicals push this imaginary association constantly. They desperately want heathens to see Jesus’ love shining out of their behavior and outlook. They’ve been trying to figure out a way to make it happen since I myself was Pentecostal in the late 1980s and mid-1990s.

And they’ve always completely failed because evangelical hype about themselves collides so consistently and catastrophically with evangelicals’ actual behavior.

A billion dollars, though, is a ton of money for a project that seems doomed to absolute failure. So maybe something else is going on here.

Why He Gets Us matters to the rest of us

Up until now, we’ve largely considered He Gets Us on its own terms, as if we took its central premises seriously.

But He Gets Us is like a malevolent iceberg of dark motivations. When we dive beneath its surface to view its underside, we can understand why it matters enormously to the rest of us.

First and most importantly, money is a nonrenewable asset. The billion dollars evangelicals will eventually pump into He Gets Us isn’t going directly into their ongoing, nonstop culture wars and attempts to seize temporal power in America. Politicians and political campaigns cost money. Funding groups to sneak indoctrination into public schools costs money. This is wasted, useless money going straight into some scheming, grifting evangelicals’ pockets.

I don’t think evangelicals are absolutely blithering stupid. They wouldn’t be spending that kind of cash without some kind of goal. Their endgame is always going to be grabbing back their lost temporal power and cultural dominance. Eventually, I believe that those evangelicals will plunge whatever they get from He Gets Us into politics. The evangelicals running He Gets Us already use part of their donations to fund their other political and culture-war endeavors.

As well, the money appears to be going into a few key so-called ministries designed to lure in curious internet explorers. Once they sign up for the campaign’s various websites and engage with them, the sites capture their information, develop marketing profiles for them, and funnel their findings to several marketing ministries. Once those ministries have enough of that information, then the people behind He Gets Us will be better primed to fling marketing nonstop at those people.

The explanation that snaps everything into place

And suddenly, we understand exactly why the campaign gives away all that free swag. That’s how they get users’ addresses, email and social media profile names, and other personally-identifiable information. Remember: If you’re on a site that is free to use, particularly one offering free services to you, then you are not the customer of that site. You—and your precious personal information—are the product the site is selling to their real customers.

He Gets Us isn’t just some touchy-feely, lovey-dovey uwu marketing campaign aimed at promoting Sweet Li’l Jesus the Divine Cuddlebug. It looks a lot more like evangelicals’ latest attempt to regain what they have lost. Don’t be fooled by its hype. Don’t buy in, and definitely don’t engage with the campaign’s websites.

That goes double if you’re Christian or at all alarmed by evangelical shenanigans.

The Power of Prayer, Part Two.

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photo by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

JUN 02, 2013

pray all you want, the results are the same — Sure, why not? (Dennis Jarvis, CC-SA.)

I was reeling from so many sources by now. I’d just graduated from college and had a nice shiny degree that was more or less useless by itself. I was married to a handsome and impossibly fervent minister husband who had some measure of respect in our denomination. I had a decent little job doing something I enjoyed tolerably enough. I was a busy bee all right. But beneath that surface happiness, tension roiled like a stormcloud and nothing was what it seemed. I needed answers about prayer, and I needed them now.

We all have a number of props and supports for our religious ideas. Mine were as varied as anybody else’s. But they were getting knocked out from under me at a frightening pace.

Probably the very last one I had was that the Bible’s god was faithful to his people and an omnimax being who loved us (“omnimax” means omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent–omni-everything, if you will). And the best way for me to evaluate that claim was to examine my god’s response to prayer.

God loves prayer. All through the Bible, his people are told to pray and God listens to those prayers. We are also told that God uses prayers as a barometer of our needs and desires, and responds to those prayers in ways that will benefit his followers. Among many other exhortations, we have Jesus in Luke 18:1 telling us that we should always be praying. Out of every single thing that a Christian is almost always totally sure of, it’s that his or her god hears those prayers and cares about each and every one. If I found out that prayer wasn’t what it seemed, not much was going to be left.

The Bible Verses

First we’ll lay out the verses:

Mark is usually thought to be the first Gospel written (see Markan Priority), though this isn’t a totally universal idea. I think it’s first, so I’m starting there. In Mark, we see these passages:

Mark 11:23-4: Whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” There’s a bit of weaseling and fine print here (the stipulation is that the praying person have absolute faith that he or she will receive whatever is requested) that is absent in later-written Matthew, but overall the intention seems clear: if you just believe enough, you’ll get whatever you want.

Mark 16:17 follows up the general trend this way: “These signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” So about those snake handlers who keep dying of snake bites… In my church, we regarded ourselves as a bit more sophisticated than that. My first Pentecostal pastor (remember, the good egg who discouraged Biff from running off to Waco) refused to handle snakes, and refused to let anybody in the congregation do it either. And I never once saw or heard of any group out there deliberately drinking poisons just to show the miraculous power of God, which if you think about it is *way* more impressive than handling snakes which might or might not bite. Why was that, I wondered that night as I pored over my study Bible? Why wasn’t snake handling and poison-drinking more popular? Why didn’t anybody do it in perfect safety, knowing the Bible flat-out said they could do this as a specific sign and testament given by Jesus Christ himself? (Now I know this passage is in all likelihood a later addition to Mark and as likely to have been said by Jesus himself as a Transformers quote, but at the time, I took it all as one big piece.)

Matthew 7 has Jesus telling us all about how we will be given whatever we ask for: “Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” Well, that sounds really strong, doesn’t it? No less than the savior of humankind is saying that whatever we want, we’ll get, and he isn’t using any fine print here at all. (HelLO prosperity gospel! We’ll be discussing this concept in detail at some point.)

In Matthew 17, Jesus expands on this mysticism thusly: “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” Well, that sounds pretty positive too, doesn’t it? He doubles down on it in Matthew 21 when he’s just gotten done cursing that fig tree (you know, the one that wasn’t doing anything wrong at all except being out of season when Jesus had a major munchie fit for figs): “If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” Now, note that the fig tree cursing is a specific power he’s telling believers they’ll have. So all those Christians saying a prayer didn’t get answered because it was “selfish” have some explaining to do.

In Matthew 18:18-20, we even get a look at how powerful groups of Christians are (is there a word for a group of Christians, like a flock of geese or a lamentation of swans? “Congregation” is too specifically churchy): “Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” So whatever the magic power is of one Christian praying, it’s even more powerful when more than one gets together and prays. In almost every one of the church services I attended throughout the Protestant system, this verse got invoked, by the way–especially when the church prayed for one particular thing (like that pastor’s healing of brain cancer).

John’s probably the last of the gospels, and it has the strongest of all the assurances. In John 14, we see this: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” Straightforward enough.

But now let’s look at the weaseling out of these strong assurances in the rest of the Bible:

1 John 3:22: “Whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” So a Christian who sins won’t get what’s requested. Well, that’s about all of us, because nobody’s righteous but Jesus (Romans 3:10, but see this writeup which mysteriously we didn’t know about as Christians).

Philippians 4:19: “But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Jesus Christ.” Well, that implies that if we don’t need it, we won’t get it.

James 1:5-7: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.” Another one that implies that faith is required. All right.

James 4:3: “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” If you don’t get what you asked for, you probably were asking in the wrong spirit–you just wanted it out of some selfish or sinful impulse (you know, like wanting figs out of season). So it’s your fault. That does kind of knock the prosperity gospel Christians right in the nads and it’s definitely not in keeping with Jesus’ earlier assurances that he’d do whatever we asked, especially if we asked in groups, but it’s a pretty standard deflection I heard to explain away the problem.

James 5:13-18:” Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. . . The effectual prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” This one predicts healings aplenty and reaffirms that righteousness is required. Seems like a poisoned well excuse, doesn’t it? If someone doesn’t get what was requested, there’s probably some taint involved.

The only requirements I can see in the Gospels is that whoever’s praying for something needs to be very very fervent in believing that whatever is being requested will happen. The later books of the New Testament add a few stipulations, but overall, the insistence is there that yes, God answers prayers.

The Reality of the Bible Verses.

But that’s not how it works.

That’s not how it works at all.

And this “yes/no/later” thing that Christians repeat like a mantra isn’t mentioned in any of these verses. Ever. I didn’t even see how such a concept could be inferred from these verses. Either God answered the prayer every single time by giving the praying person what was requested, or in the later weasel words, God flat refuses due to some inadequacy on the part of the petitioner–not out of the person’s best interest, but out of inadequacy. What I’d been told about prayer just wasn’t true if the Bible was any kind of guide in the matter.

As I studied, I wondered again to myself: just when had I stopped asking for anything really supernatural? Every time I got in my car, I prayed that I’d get to my destination “safely and unharmed,” as I had learned from the older members of my church. When I went to the mall with Christian friends, they prayed that we’d get a good parking spot (and one year, on Christmas Eve, we did! Right up front! It was a miracle!). I prayed that work would go smoothly, that God would bless me in general, that God would bring my errant family to salvation (not a single one was saved yet).

But when I prayed for specific things, did I really get them? No, not normally, not any more than I might get them with random chance or my own hard work. Were parking spots really a miracle? Why would God let me get to work without a car accident when tons of other people, many who presumably prayed the same sort of way, did not get to their destinations safely? When Biff had invaded Pastor Daniel’s deathbed vigil, I tell you he’d have been quite positive he could bring about Daniel’s healing–but he got thrown out by the very people who should have most known that prayer worked. And I can tell you that thousands upon thousands of Christians banded together to beg God for Daniel’s healing, only to be denied. Are we to assume that they were all inadequate in some way?

Forget all the rationalizations. Forget all the fine print (because whoa Nelly there is a lot of fine print). Forget all the justifications for why. Just look at the situation.

The god this Bible described says over and over again that he is a wonder-working god. This god says he listens to prayer. He answers prayer. No “yes/no/later” bullshit. Yes. If you believe, yes. The later books of the Bible, written long after Jesus didn’t return as he’d said he would, were clearly scrambling for explanations for why prayers weren’t getting answered (and settled on the approach Christians would use for centuries to come: “It’s all your fault”).

I never once while a Christian ever heard of any supernatural answer to prayer that was accompanied by credible, objective evidence for the claim. I never saw evidence of supernatural healing. I never saw any mountains moved. I never experienced a single “answered prayer” that couldn’t be explained easily by some other means. And 2000 years after these promises were made, we’ve still got slavery, murder, disease, and a host of other things that prayer was specifically said to be able to stop. Not a single mountain has been moved. Nobody’s ever documented any big-time healing. No amputees have been regenerated. No missing eyeballs brought back. No dead people raised. No poison drunk safely. Reality simply did not conform to what the Bible promised.

When had I stopped bothering to ask for anything that big? I already suspected in my heart of hearts, I realized as I studied, that prayer was a waste of time. Once I’d been positive about it, yes. I knew that. But somewhere along the way I learned the hard lessons that all Christians learn, and I’d internalized those doublespeak arguments meant to stop my thinking about it and make me content to labor in delusion. Now that I wasn’t bound by those old thought-stoppers, I could think about the matter honestly for the first time.

And I rejected it all in one fell swoop. It made no sense, and I was not obligated to keep twisting and contorting my mind to accept all these contradictions and complete fallacies. Nothing held me anymore–there was no fear left in me, and whatever love I’d felt had dissolved over time and with repeated disappointments (something that was happening simultaneously with my “godly” marriage).

With the sadness of a mourner at a funeral, I closed my Bible. Biff would be home soon from his lying–er, witnessing session at the Crisis Pregnancy Center. Tomorrow was Sunday. I didn’t know what I was going to do at this point. I couldn’t just not go–I was a minister’s wife. But I couldn’t hold the truth in any longer. My eyes had been opened. I’d made my saving roll to disbelieve at last, at last, at last. I couldn’t force myself to believe again any more than you, reader, could force yourself to believe once more in Santa. I’d seen too much, learned too much, suffered too much. This religion was not true (the question of “well, is it valid then at least?” hadn’t occurred to me), and I would no longer ally myself with lies.

A Long and Scary Night.

I was in bed by the time Biff got home. I don’t remember talking to him or anything else that happened. I don’t think I slept a wink all night. I didn’t weep, though; I was out of tears. I had spent them all earlier that night. I was over Christianity, and just as you know when a romantic relationship is well and truly over, I knew this “relationship” I’d built in my own head was over too.

All night long, I tossed and turned. Later I would read about the philosopher Epicurus who presented a dilemma called “The Problem of Evil” that illustrated perfectly what was going on in my head in a far more primitive and less eloquent form. If God really was omnipotent, then he certainly could easily do anything one of his followers asked. If he really were omnibenevolent, then I couldn’t see any rational reason why he wouldn’t do simple things like heal disease or end war or violence that might hurt his children (and “well you know God, he’s just so confusing sometimes” thought terminators didn’t cut it anymore, remember?). If he really were omniscient, then it didn’t make sense why he even needed his beloved spouse to even need to ask him for anything–he should know already. The truth was clear: there was no way that the god I’d worshiped all this time was omnimax. I couldn’t trust the Bible’s history or science, and I couldn’t trust Christianity’s assertions about his power, love, or grace. I wasn’t that sad by the time morning came, really; I felt a curious sense of detachment from myself that liberated me and freed me. I felt like I hadn’t eaten in many days and had hit that stage in starvation when the human body just doesn’t feel hungry anymore.

I felt gaunt and wrung-out. But I also felt a strange exhilaration. I didn’t have to bash my brains out trying to reconcile those things which are not by their nature reconcilable. I no longer had to struggle to understand that which makes no sense whatsoever. Slowly I began to feel strength coursing back into my body as my liberation became more and more clear. I was free. And I would never be enslaved again.

As the grey morning light began its creep across my bedroom floor toward the bed, I realized I could just not go to church. I could just skip out. I could just quit going. And nobody could make me go if I didn’t want to go. That is where you first joined me in this blog, dear reader; this very bedroom and this very dawn is where you first met me. I had just closed an old book full of mold and fungus and rot, and I’d just made a new beginning that was fresh and clean and full of hope. And this new beginning is where we shall start our journey together. Thank you for making it with me.

XXX

This was a huge post for me, and like all big projects, it didn’t happen without help. I’d like to give a grateful tip of the hat to Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?, which very devastatingly and sensitively covers the argument against prayer’s effectiveness in greater (and probably way more eloquent and relevant) detail. I used the site as a gathering-point for many of the Bible verses as I don’t pretend to remember them all now. I’d also like to thank Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which has such a great search function and such helpful collections of the Bible’s various flaws and absurdities. I wish these sites had existed when I was a Christian; their existence would have made my transition a lot easier and faster. I encourage those who question and doubt to check those sites out.