And if there’s one thing I learned through all my immersion in this biblical-worldview subculture, it is this: the world doesn’t give a rip about our biblical-worldview subculture—unless, of course, it affects them personally, or becomes useful to satisfy their appetite for ridicule and mockery. This is especially true of the secular-pluralist world, which prefers to view all religion as symptomatic of some form of social psychosis. The inhabitants of that world do not take the things we believe seriously for half a minute.

When I became an evangelical Christian 40 years ago this past December, I had no idea what I was getting into.

I was only sixteen. So what were “evangelicals” to me? People who liked to run hospitals and rent out their churches for free? How should I know?

It took a few months for me to realize that not only had I become one of them, but that—hey!—now it was 1976!

This was the year that George Gallup (in Time magazine), and a Newsweek cover story dubbed, “The Year of the Evangelical!”1 This was the year that Jimmy Carter won the U.S. Presidential election with a Bible under his arm on his way to teaching Sunday School classes! The year that the New York Times Best-Seller list advertised that former Watergate hatchet-man Chuck Colson was Born Again!

It turned out that this evangelicalism thing I joined was kind of a big deal.

Getting to know this new world would take me through five evangelical institutions of higher education (two of which employed me, one conservative the other loosey-goosey), a brief stint in church ministry, and countless hours of pouring over the Bible and theological texts in worship services, adult Sunday School classes, small groups, and in my own private studies.

And if there’s one thing I learned through all my immersion in this biblical-worldview subculture, it is this: the world doesn’t give a rip about our biblical-worldview subculture—unless, of course, it affects them personally, or becomes useful to satisfy their appetite for ridicule and mockery.

This is especially true of the secular-pluralist world, which prefers to view all religion as symptomatic of some form of social psychosis. The inhabitants of that world do not take the things we believe seriously for half a minute.

And why should they? We believe things that they find ridiculous. So ridiculous, in fact, that they are compelled to explain them in psycho-socio-political terms rather than as what they are: religious beliefs.

“Beliefs?!” In the great echo chamber of secular pluralism evangelicals do not have “beliefs.” Instead, evangelicals have “obsessions,”2 “paranoid delusions,”3 “persecution complexes,”4 and “bigotries.”5Whatever “beliefs” they claim to have can be safely dismissed as cruel dogmas designed to “abuse,” “terrorize,” and inflict “trauma,” in order to “shame” people into conformity.6

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1. “Religion: Counting Souls,” Time, October 4, 1976; Kenneth L. Woodward, et. al., “Born-again: The Year of the Evangelical,” in: Newsweek, October 25, 1976.
2. Kristen Syme, “An Exploration into the Evangelical Obsession with the Unborn,”Religion Now, June 22, 2015. See also Rachel Held Evans’ reference to “just how out-of-control the evangelical obsession with homosexuality has become” in her article, “On the World Vision Reaction: Some Bad News, Some Good News, and Some Ideas,” May 25, 2014. Oh yeah, right: homosexuals have been pushing their social agenda for 40 years, but it’s the evangelicals who are “obsessed!” Thanks for clarifying that, Rachel!
3. Karoli, “Study: White Evangelical Christians Are Paranoid, Delusional,” Crooks & Liars, January 29, 2013.
4. . Alan Noble, “The Evangelical Persecution Complex,” The Atlantic, August 4, 2014. And Randall J. Stephens, “‘Religious Liberty’ And The Origins Of The Evangelical Persecution Complex,” Religion Dispatches, January 12, 2016.David Vanderveen, “Wheaton College’s Orthodoxy Police and the Spiritual Price of Bigotry” in The Blog, Huffington Post, January 11, 2016. Vanderveen proudly reminds his readers that he himself was forced out of Wheaton as a student in the early ’90s for publishing a sexually suggestive poem in a student publication. Oh, those nasty bigots!
5. Bill Moeller, “I Was Traumatized by Christian Dogma: I Won’t Do the Same to My Child,”AlterNet,July 31, 2014.
6. In his Annales(The Annals) 15.44, the Roman historian Tacitus (AD 56-117), called the ancient Christians “odio humani generis,” which is usually translated something like, “haters of mankind.”