Next week, the Southern Baptist Convention will hold its annual meeting in Indianapolis and vote on the second reading of what has come to be known as the Law Amendment. A proposed amendment to the SBC’s Constitution, named after the…
Rosaria Butterfield is not a model for becoming un-gay
Growing up as an independent fundamentalist Baptist, I was taught that loosening any standards meant you were getting on the slippery slope toward becoming gay. If I grew my hair out over my ears, I might eventually reject God and…
Making sense of denominational decline and church shifting
Evangelical Protestantism continues to be a growing force in American Christianity, as Mainline Protestant denominations continue to decline, but where are these converts coming from? There is very little data showing where Christians go when they convert away from a…
The NRA is a (mostly) changed organization, but the American public must not look away
In 2018, I did something most people wouldn’t dare do. While making a play about guns in America, I took a group of high school students to the NRA annual meeting in our hometown of Dallas. What we saw and…
Like all schools, Christian universities wrestle with rising costs of education
College tuition continues to increase year after year, with student loan debt mounting and affecting the ability of the middle class to invest in the future. That is a bread-and-butter issue for many private Christian universities. As the Associated Press…
The Harrison Butker story is so much weirder than you know
“The headline could just be, ‘Man who kicks ball for a living and has no other job criticizes women who want to be nurses, surgeons and U.N. Secretary General,’” said Brad Onishi on the Straight White American Jesus podcast episode that featured…
What do George Floyd and Kyle Rittenhouse have to do with armed civilian combat? Evidently, quite a lot
After two days at the 2024 National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Dallas this weekend, I was ready to call the gun advocacy organization a changed institution. At first, the imagery, rhetoric and workshop topics seemed less misogynistic than those…
Cal Thomas is the latest to promote false claim of evangelical church growth
Church attendance is falling in the U.S., but some evangelicals continue to comfort themselves with the false idea that their churches alone are still growing. Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas gave the debunked claim fresh legs in his recent nationally syndicated…
A controversial horror film embodies the real-life horrors of church abuse
There’s a thin line between reading a memoir written by somebody who grew up in conservative Christianity and watching a horror movie. As Christa Brown, a frequent contributor to Baptist News Global, releases her new memoir Baptistland: A Memoir of Abuse,…