Author: Adam Lee Benner
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#2: A Christian Nationalist Deserter
At the vertex of my turn away from Christian nationalism stood a shit-stirring seaside woodworker named Jesus.
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#1: We Were Christian Nationalists Once, and Young
I was so angry at those villains, those godless and underhanded liberal evildoers that the thought of waging war against them was bait to a bloodthirsty soul… Until I went AWOL.
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Bad Ideas: A Curse is Upon You!
by Adam and Renée Benner For each of his years at Hogwarts, Harry Potter had a different Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. There was the conniving Quirrell, the haughty Gilderoy Lockhart, the sinister Barty Crouch (disguised as Mad-Eye Moody), the poisonous Delores Umbridge, even Professor Snape. But the one I always felt sorry for…
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Good Ideas: Holy Lit, Not Holy Writ
There might be a better way to read the Bible than as a set of useful memory and life verses.
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Bad Ideas: Biblical Inerrancy
Some seem to believe that if the scriptures were composed under the guidance of a perfect being, they must themselves be perfect. Yet is that really the case?
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Bad Ideas: The Mark of the Beast
Patty vs. The Minions of the Antichrist t’s a Wednesday evening, around the time of the Gulf War. I’m in a narrow rectangular room with around fifteen other boys, members of our church’s Boy’s Brigade group (a Christian version of the Boy Scouts). A television and VCR are positioned at one end of the room…
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The ‘Deconstruction’ Thing vs. ‘Assurance’
There was a kind of calculus in operation in the evangelical churches in which I grew up. The equations had been balanced, the variables accounted for, the formulas distilled. Questions and problems of theology had been answered and resolved, then slotted neatly into clockwork systems, with every ‘t’ crossed and every ‘i’ dotted.
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The ‘Deconstruction’ Thing: Maybe it’s God’s Work
Are there in evangelicalism enough question marks, enough bad habits, enough dubious practices, enough blind spots, enough patches and shortcuts and hacks and rotting beams and decaying joists, that deconstruction is necessary? And if that’s the case, then could deconstruction be God’s work?
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Female Submission: Let’s Stop Doing as the Romans Do
When it comes to the position of women in complementarian and fundamentalist circles, we think and act a lot less like Christians and a lot more like Romans.
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Enslaved to Civic Freedom
‘Freedom’ is a common and hackneyed word on the lips of so-called ‘Christian nationalists‘.1 It echoes from pulpits. It simmers on social media. It entitles a rock-star worship leader like Sean Feucht to wander the United States like a patriot missionary, preaching the good news of civic freedom to his groupies, and singing a few…