A Christian superstar looked super gay—and the religion kept it quiet — In 1945, a pastor in Germany was executed by the Nazis for trying kill Hitler. Over the next decades, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a Christian superstar. The religion liked his story, and read his books, like Letters and Papers From Prison or The Cost of Discipleship. He was often called a Protestant saint, especially loved by Evangelicals, even though he never married.

Let’s look at Aiden Hale’s religious details — After the horror shooting at Covenant School in Nashville, many Christians are trying to call the event an anti-Christian “hate crime.” I’m watching Senator Josh Hawley make that case. But is “hate” the story here? As best I can tell, Aidan, formerly Audrey Hale, went to kill Christian people, and was himself a Christian. When members of a religion harm each other, the phrase that’s ordinarily used is ‘sectarian violence’.

Let’s look at James Dobson of Focus on the Family — What’s the difference between Christianity and eugenics? That seems easy. Eugenics is the effort to control human reproduction. And religion is — something else? In Christian discourse, it can often seem that “God” means a lot of rules around sex and reproductivity. How opposed are they to eugenics? Because the advocates can seem to intermix. Consider James Dobson.

Let’s see what Christianity rejects — The Christian Bible has four gospels telling the story of Jesus, but early on there were more. Also, there are “strange” copies of the gospels that are mostly ignored. I’m pretty interested in Jesus, so I went looking up these “strange” texts. Many times they had deep support in early Christianity, and were seen as real. Here’s the Jesus story—the director’s cut?

The story of Morton Smith and the “gay Jesus” manuscript — In 1960, a scholar at Columbia University named Morton Smith reported that he’d found an unknown letter apparently by a ‘church father’ of Christianity, Clement of Alexandria. The letter said that two passages in the gospel of Mark had been removed, and quoted them. Jesus was in some odd proximity to a young man. Bible scholars knew what to do about that. The profession launched a decades-long war against Morton Smith himself. Clearly, the scholars asserted, he…

How Christians struggle with ‘Secret Mark’ — One of the strangest manuscript discoveries in Christian history — the ‘secret’ version of the gospel of Mark—is back under the microscope. So let me tell that story? In 1960, a professor of ancient history at Columbia University named Morton Smith announced that he’d been in the Mar Saba monastery, outside Jerusalem, and found a letter in an old book. An extraordinary author was writing about an amazing subject.

Maybe God loves it — When you’re raised in church you’re told that pornography is as “sinful” as it gets. God hates porn! That’s what they say. But if you go trying to find out where Christianity got this information about the deity, you might be puzzled. Is it in the Bible? That’s the book that begins with naked people in a garden. Does God hate porn? Or was that just Christians? The religious likes its ban on porn, and yet look for sources, it becomes…

Tim Mackie of ‘The Bible Project’ shocks his religion — His voice is nervous. “I never get nervous before sermons,” he says, “but I totally am right now…” And then he proceeds to talk about Jesus and sexuality. Tim Mackie is the most popular Bible scholar in Evangelicalism for his work on ‘The Bible Project’. In a sermon he gave in 2015, just recently noticed, he does a shock smackdown of his religion’s anti-gay obsession.

Back in 2019 I set up my little channel here on Medium, determined to be a “religion blogger” — a phrase I was pretty sure I had just made up. I thought more light was needed on religious issues and Evangelicals in particular. And when it comes to the dark, vulgar, nasty and gut-wrenchingly horrifying, I’m your huckleberry. Now in 2023, I reached 100k followers while doing a post on Evangelical bigwig Rod Dreher’s sexual history. Could he have seen…