The Evangelical Reckoning That Will Never Happen

 JANUARY 8, 2021 BY CAPTAIN CASSIDY Hi and welcome back! After Donald Trump supporters attacked the nation’s Capitol Building on Wednesday, I noticed some evangelical leaders saying there’d be some big ‘reckoning’ due for American evangelicals. It made me laugh. Evangelicals don’t do reckonings. There’ll be no reckoning for them, not even now, not even after all the stunts […]

Christian Games, Incomplete Participation, and Suspension of Disbelief

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020 BY CAPTAIN CASSIDY Hi and welcome back! Yesterday, we talked about authoritarian Christians in terms of roleplaying games. And now, I want to show you where the metaphor leads: suspension of disbelief. Authoritarians require complete participation in their Happy Pretendy Fun Time Games. Otherwise, they lose suspension of disbelief and everything goes higgledy-piggledy. Today, let me show you why […]

A Biblical Worldview: Toxic Christians’ Self-Serving Definition

SEPTEMBER 12, 2020 BY CAPTAIN CASSIDY Hi and welcome back! Earlier, we talked about Joe Battaglia’s book Make America Good Again. As we discovered, it’s chock-full of culture-war talking points disguised in a thick slathering of Christianese. So we spent a few days talking about Christianese. For today’s entry, I’d already planned to discuss this phrase. But then, a Christian leader came […]

Christianese 101: ‘Conviction’

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020 BY CAPTAIN CASSIDY Hi and welcome back! For a long time now, I’ve studied Christianese. That’s the jargon that Christians use among themselves — particularly the really fervent and toxic ones, like fundagelicals and Catholic hardliners. Thanks to Christianese, they can be utterly unintelligible to outsiders — or, conversely, can hold an entire conversation […]

‘Christian Love’ Flows As Jen Hatmaker Divorces

 SEPTEMBER 8, 2020 BY CAPTAIN CASSIDY Hi and welcome back! I know nobody’s surprised when we talk about evangelical hypocrisy. They’re soaking in it! However, today’s story might represent one of the more egregious recent examples of that trope. Jen Hatmaker, a popular Christian speaker/author, recently announced her impending divorce. As expected, most people responded with compassion. But […]

Evangelicals vs. the Commandments

 SEPTEMBER 6, 2020 BY JAMES F. MCGRATH Evangelicalism’s representatives tend to be characterized by two major characteristics: loud denunciation of the sins of others combined with the revelation sooner or later that those individuals were themselves living lives that are sinful by their own standards. Sometimes they are the very same sins they denounced, but not always. […]