Jesus will be appearing in the sky any day now, as Evangelicals—his truest believers—will fly up there to meet him.

When growing up Evangelical, I heard this approximately every day. I find out now that there’s something odd about ‘the Rapture’. Nobody seems to know where the idea came from.

Evangelical books about the Rapture say nothing of its origins.

I check a shelf of books, from J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come, the 1965 classic of prophesy talk, to…

Since 1909, it’s been seen by Evangelicals as nearly divine. Those famous footnotes explained everything to you.

Selling millions of copies, the Scofield Reference Bible is a key Evangelical text—and a staple of my childhood. I only realize now it was a blast of race hate by Cyrus Scofield, a former Confederate soldier.

We knew nothing about him.

I didn’t know that Scofield—born on August 19, 1843 and raised in Tennessee—was a…

Tall, muscular, bearded, talking up his ‘masculinity’ and Republican politics, slinging insults against feminists, etc., Jack Murphy has been a right-wing star.

But his community was thrown into upheaval over the last two weeks. A blog post of 2015 surfaced in which he’d written of his love of ‘cuckolding’, i.e. watching his girlfriend have sex with other men.

Jack Murphy was an “alpha” or “giga chad,” as the lingo goes.

He was as ‘manly’ as a male could be. That was his reputation, at…

What a year 2021 was for Evangelical sex scandals! My God, they fell like manna from Heaven. Can I even pick a top ten?

It’ll be hell—but here’s my favorites.

10. The sins of Brian Houston’s father

Hillsong is a global megachurch that merges Evangelical and Pentecostal sensibilities, and stages Pop Culture-infused worship services. It has a deep, dark secret — that came to a head in 2021.

Hillsong was formed in 1999 when a church that Brian Houston pastored in…

Joan Didion, the beloved writer, died a few days ago. She was a Christian? “I was raised an Episcopalian,” she said.

It’s a Christian story, I realize, as I dig into the details. Though with Joan Didion, there’s the story she told—and the ones she didn’t.

She was born in 1934 in Sacramento.

Her family, as she’d write, were “conservative California Republicans.” They were affluent. …

When I was growing up Evangelical, I thought it was ruled by pastors who were “men of God.” Shouldn’t powerful men be running things?

But turns out, that’s a false front for a religion being scripted by unseen ghostwriters — many of them female, or gay.

There’s notorious cases—like Hal Lindsey.

In 1971, his mega-selling book The Late Great Planet Earth introduced to the Evangelical world an idea that all the true Christians would soon be whisked up to…