For LaHaye and Jenkins, and for Rayford and Buck, the main -- and only -- duty of Christians is to ensure the salvation of their own immortal souls, everyone else be damned. But it doesn't matter what you pray -- or in whose name you pray it, or how fervently -- if the whole motivation for your prayer is "All right then, screw Jim, I'll go to Heaven!" Read more
That ploy never really fools anybody, but it provides a thin buffer of semi-plausible deniability. We all know it wasn't the dog, but when you loudly say, "Good Lord, pooch, what did you just do?" and direct everyone's attention to the innocent creature, the dog will respond in some doggy fashion, doing something with its eyes, ears and tail that might be interpreted as indicating guilt, or relief, or shameless pleasure. Read more
The land beneath 69 manufactured homes in Santa Barbara is being sold to a developer who wants to build condos. Those homeowners could lose everything. But it doesn't have to work that way. Plus: The audacious dishonesty of anti-abortion amicus briefs; more on the Driscoll-Trump parallels; and white evangelicals embracing the herb. Read more
C.S. Lewis said that a determination to cling to the idea that our enemies are as bad as possible is "the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils." That process always leads, inexorably, to pretending, then wishing, then enslaving ourselves to, the lie that our enemies are the worst-possible thing we can imagine: Satanic baby-killers. Read more
Enthusiasm for a national ID card shows that fear of the Mark of the Beast is no longer the factor that it used to be in American politics. That's a shame, because I was hoping to channel that fear to rally public opposition to credit-scoring. Using the creative exegesis favored by "Bible prophecy" scholars, credit scoring seems to be exactly what Revelation 13 was talking about. Read more
Evangelical churches are good at many things, but funerals are not our forté. The improvisational approach of most evangelical services doesn't serve us well when it comes to funerals. So we fall back on what we know best -- proclaiming the gospel of individual salvation. That's why Rayford's eulogy here segues into an evangelistic altar call. Read more
For a big chunk of those voters, Orwell's language of "Big Brother" isn't the preferred literary metaphor for the totalitarian nightmare they fear. They're not worried about Big Brother, but about the Antichrist. This is why it's so startling and jarring to see demand for a national ID card as one of the top issues on the agenda of these Trump-loving voters. Because everybody knows that a national ID card is the Mark of the Beast. Read more
Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, "Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much." Then Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house." Read more
"I was good at it," Bruce Barnes says of his role as visitation pastor. This is not true. This cannot be true. All of Bruce Barnes' extended testimony to Rayford and Chloe is premised on the idea that his getting left behind produced an epiphany of self-knowledge, but this newfound self-knowledge does not extend to the recognition that he had been a half-assed poser of a visitation pastor. Read more
Amanda Taub has an excellent piece at Vox exploring "The rise of American authoritarianism." I recommend it. But I think the political science research Taub ably introduces here is a description posing as an explanation. It describes what we're up against, but it cannot tell us what to do about it. Read more
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