Alisa Childers Strikes Back On The Babylon Bee Against Lying Liars
Alisa Childers, who first gained fame with the Christian pop band, ZOEgirl, is back on The Babylon Bee Podcast to discuss how we can still have hope for Gen Z, how our culture today is disconnected from reality, and how original sin is a fact as practical as potatoes. They also discuss how parents need to watch movies with children and carve out teachable moments to talk about the non biblical worldviews that these movies are trying to push on kids. Check out Alisa's new book Live Your Truth and Other Lies Alisa previously talked to The Babylon Bee Podcast on Alisa Childers: The Dangers of Progressive Christianity.
Like, I'm thinking back to when my dad became a Christian in the late 60s, early 70s.
Everybody knew they were sinners.
You didn't have to convince people.
And so, when you present the gospel, it was seen as a cure.
Whether they accepted it or rejected it, it was like, well, here's an answer to the problem that you're having, right?
But today, the hardest sort of opposition to evangelism today is trying to convince people that they're actually sinful.
This is the Babylon Bee interview show.
I'm Jarrett LeMaster.
This is my friend Sam Greer.
We're going to be interviewing a really special host today.
I'm personally a massive fan of hers, and she's been really instrumental in our families.
We've dealt with a lot of progressive Christian stuff in and around our family and our church too.
And so you've been very helpful.
So this is with us today as Alyssa Childers.
It's a thrill to be here.
I've been a Babylon Bee fan from like way back in the beginning days when you had, I mean, I think my still to this day, my favorite all-time Babylon Bee article is the guy who goes forward for the altar call just to put the altar curl out of its ministry or out of its misery.
Remember that one?
It was like many years ago, just ages ago.
I cracked up at that so much.
Yes, that one's a good one.
I like the ones that are directed at the church.
They don't get as much traction as the ones that are political, but they definitely were part of the band Zoe Girl.
Oh, by the way, you're promoting your book today, which is Live Your Truth.
Live Your Truth.
And other lies.
And other lies.
Yeah, I got to get that second part in there.
I know.
That's true.
Yeah, we got to make sure we're, yeah, this is what we're criticizing.
So, hey, you were part of the band Zoe Girl, and I'm looking at the photo right now, and you guys look like triplets.
Which one is you?
So I'm the only non-blonde.
Oh, there we go.
That makes it easy.
It wasn't four non-blondes.
It was just two.
Just one non-blonde.
Just one non-blonde.
Yeah, one non-blonde.
We have a question along the Zoe girl lines.
I mean, the contemporary Christian music scene and, you know, around the turn of the century was a unique time.
Would you ever consider bringing it back?
Would you do a reunion tour if the other Zoe girls were up for it?
Or if you could get Super Chick and Barlow Girl to all come out together, would you do a comeback tour?
You know, I would not rule out anything.
In fact, the girls and I have talked about even coming together at some point.
Of course, we've been talking about this for like 10 years now, but doing a like a lullaby album because all of us started singing lullabies to our kids.
And we're all still good friends with Tricia from Super Chick.
So, I mean, it's plausible.
Plausible.
Small world.
So not a no big feuds or anything like that.
You guys don't hate each other after all these years.
It's not like the police.
No.
And everybody's still a Christian, which is amazing.
Yeah, all three, all three of us are still Christians, which these days is kind of a big deal.
That is a big deal.
And I'm always so frustrated to see some of my great heroes from the 90s that I was, I used to, you know, I was a Christian kid in the 90s.
And I, you know, a lot of those folks have walked away or they've become progressive, which is essentially the same thing.
And so, yeah, really, really sad.
So I'm reading your book right now.
What are the happy little lies?
They sound so positive, life-affirming that our culture is telling us.
What are the worst lies?
Who's the biggest liar?
Like, you know, like, other than Satan.
Yeah.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
So who is, what, what do we need to watch out for?
What are these lies?
Tell us a little bit about your book.
Yeah, yeah.
So, this book came on the heels of my first one, which my first one was about my experience of walking through a faith crisis facilitated really in a church that would end up becoming a progressive Christian church.
And along the way, I was kind of doing this deeper dive for that one.
And then, along the way, I noticed just these social media platforms that began to pop up everywhere and gaining like up to a million followers.
And these were people who were calling themselves Christians.
They were promoting their materials as being, you know, Christian books and Christian Bible studies and things like this.
And yet, the messages that they were promoting were all about kind of would eventually lead you to worship yourself.
So, everything from, you know, you're perfect just as you are, you are enough.
God just wants you to be happy.
You should put yourself first.
These are the kinds of messages that were really gaining a lot of steam that were sort of rooted in progressive Christianity, but they were also really big in culture.
And so, that's when we began to see a big crossover of maybe somebody who used to be a Christian mommy blogger and then ends up writing books and going on Oprah.
And then is some of the main people promoting these kinds of messages still under the guise of Christianity.
And so, I wanted to just kind of take a look at some of these slogans.
And I think, you know, they really are like slogans because we have social media and people like to throw things on a graphic meme and share them out.
And it's just like these kinds of things that sound good.
Like, it sounds good to tell somebody you're perfect just as you are or you're enough for yourself.
Like, all of that sounds good.
It sounds positive.
But in the book, what we do is we kind of just dig right underneath the surface and look at just the logical failure of some of these ideas.
And then we go even deeper and look at the spiritual rot.
So we go to the Bible, we look at what the Bible has to say, which really gives us so much, not just more of a truthful way to live, but such a more just life-giving and peaceful and just better way to live, even in the here and now.
We're glad you brought up the Bible.
I know in the Bible it says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
Who can know it?
It also says while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Calling us sinners, it doesn't seem very encouraging.
Do you think you can recommend some other books that'll affirm our felt needs and remind us of how complete we are and how beautiful we are?
Preferably Norman Vincent Peel.
Yes.
Yeah.
Anyway.
I'll tell you, it's crazy right now.
Like I'm thinking back to when my dad became a Christian in the late 60s, early 70s.
Everybody knew they were sinners.
You didn't have to convince people that they were sinners.
They knew that.
And so when you present the gospel, it was seen as a cure.
Whether they accepted it or rejected it, it was like, well, here's an answer to the problem that you're having, right?
But today, I tell people the hardest sort of opposition to evangelism today is trying to convince people that they're actually sinful.
And you're right.
I love that you bring up what the Bible, the Bible has a lot of really difficult things to say about our natural state and about our hearts.
I mean, we are called children of wrath by nature.
So like, you know, Jesus saying you have to not find yourself or affirm yourself or live your authentic self.
He says you have to really have to deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me.
So the Bible has this really radically different message to give us, but it's so hard these days to convince people that they're sinners when absolutely every message that's being pumped at them through all sorts of social media platforms and online streaming platforms is just affirming like whatever you find inside your heart is going to be good.
And so you need to identify that, proclaim it to the world and live your truth, right?
Live your most authentic self.
And so we have kind of an uphill battle as Christians because we have to actually convince people that they're not good.
Amen.
And I was just going to chime in, something you said earlier caught my ear.
You talked about how living according to the Bible creates peace.
It's more peaceful.
We don't see peace around us, and it's because I think of what James talks about: the wisdom from below, which is earthly, unspiritual, demonic, versus the wisdom from above, which is peaceable and pure and open to reason.
Go ahead, Jarrett.
Oh, yeah.
No, I think you're absolutely right.
The people that buy into these philosophies, you see how their lives sort of like fall apart.
I mean, I think there's a quote, there's a story that you tell in Live Your Truth.
It's one of my favorite parts where you say, Yeah, I'm going through this.
I've never actually flown a plane before, but we're all going to fly together to Arizona.
I've read some books.
I'm sure I can make it happen.
You know, and like, you know, you don't join with people that are like, I'm just authentically broken.
You can be authentically broken too.
Yeah.
You want to look to find, you know, to find people.
It's like a girl washes her face, stops apologizing, and is still going to live in eternity without God.
What is that?
That was one of my RP headlines.
This is one of my favorite ones.
Yeah, you guys have some good ones.
That's awesome.
No, that's great.
So the culture says love is love.
Women's rights are humans' rights.
Science is real.
What do you have against love, science, and human rights?
Everything.
They're terrible things.
Why do you hate them?
So this is the thing, though, right?
So in the book, I talk a little bit about how postmodernism has really infected our culture.
Like most people just living in the world today, at least in the West, have a postmodern outlook on life, and they may not even realize that.
And, you know, postmodernism, of course, marked by its hyperskepticism.
It's marked by its rejection of absolute truth, or at least a rejection of the idea that if absolute truth exists, that it could be known.
So this is why, as you guys so, you know, artfully demonstrate time and time again through your satire and your posts, is that whenever somebody comes along claiming to know what is actually objectively true when it would come to things like religion or morality, those are seen as power grabs.
So the culture around us, because they've adopted the idea that objective truth can't be known about these things, when Christians come along claiming to know what those truths are, then they don't interact with the actual claims being made.
They're interacting with why they think you would say such a thing.
Like what kind of institution of power are you protecting?
Or, you know, who are you trying to control with this?
I see this all the time, even in the deconstruction online space, where people will say things like, you know, teaching people that they're inherently sinful or that hell exists or that God will judge them.
These are toxic doctrines that you're just instituting to control people by fear.
And so with words, right?
So it's this redefinition of words, like all of those signs that we saw pop up on lawns all over the place in 2020.
Love is love.
What does that even mean?
Love is love.
You can't, that's like, you can't define a word by using the word to define it, right?
It's kind of like people with the word woman today.
What's a woman?
Well, it's a woman.
They can't define a woman anymore.
And so these words have taken on these sort of postmodern meanings and where you can sort of interpret them any way you want to.
So culturally speaking, love is love is a slogan that doesn't mean love in the biblical sense where Paul says love cannot rejoice in wrongdoing, but love rejoices in the truth.
That's not what they're talking about.
They're talking about a very specific push for the full affirmation of the entire LGBTQ plus array.
And that's what that means.
It doesn't actually have anything to do with real love.
And of course, science is real.
I mean, talk about gaslighting a whole bunch of people that also believe science is real, but that's not what that slogan really means.
You know, that has a very specific political agenda behind it.
And so that's, I think a lot of these slogans, people just sort of adopt them uncritically without realizing that we have just been infected with this moral relativism, which never, interestingly, ends up actually being relative.
It's like there ends up being this narrative, this dominant narrative that you must obey or else you're intolerant or you're bigoted or whatever.
You're a hateful bigot.
You're right.
Sam, you are a hateful bigot.
Because I believe in real love and real science.
Okay.
That's right.
This is incredible.
I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm like, I'm flying by the seat of my pants with just you're, you're speaking truth from the Bible.
We wanted to ask you about coaching children through the same thing or even just young people.
An example comes to mind.
So impressionable children can be formed by messages of self-idolatry that are really messages of self, you know, they look like messages of self-acceptance, but it's about idolizing the self.
And it's what children's movies sell.
The example is in Kung Fu Panda, the movie, the MacGuffin of the whole movie, the Dragon Scroll, finally gets opened.
And the punchline is it's a golden mirror.
The power that, you know, Poe gets is looking within.
And it's, I mean, the story clicks.
It resonates on a narrative level because they paint his insecurities so clearly and then they give an elixir that seems to satisfy them, but we know it's biblically hollow.
So that's one quick example.
There are others.
How can grown-up Christians, mature Christians, go about shepherding young people, especially when it comes to innocent looking children's programming?
Should we just skip out on DreamWorks, Pixar, Disney, and the rest?
Should we, you know, build our own stuff?
Or when it comes to shepherding our kids through what we'll inevitably be showing them, how should we do it?
Well, I may have a different opinion on this than some.
And, you know, of course, I think every parent is going to need to pray and read their Bibles and do what they think is best in some of these areas.
But, you know, I grew up in a time when if the movie was quote unquote clean, you could watch it, right?
And clean meant it had no cussing and no graphic sex.
If it didn't have any of those two things, then you could watch it.
Well, that taught an entire generation of people to sort of take in all these messages uncritically as long as there wasn't these, you know, A, B, or C in the movie.
And we didn't really learn how to discern.
We didn't learn how to parse through the messages that were coming at us.
So what we do with our kids is now we have sort of skipped out on Disney as of lately.
We canceled Disney Plus.
We had it for a while.
We're not like, I'm not going to, you know, tell my kids they can't go see a Marvel movie or something.
But what we've done is we've tried to teach them.
And of course, all of this would be age-appropriate exposure, of course.
That should go without saying, but to really, rather than completely remove them from those situations, teach them how to discern the messages.
So for example, I remember watching the movie Pocahontas with my daughter when she was real little.
And when it got to that part where Pocahontas is singing about every tree and rock and creature having a spirit, right?
Having a name.
I paused the movie and I said, do you know what they're talking about?
And she was like, no, what is that?
And I said, well, that's actually a view of the world.
We had talked a little bit about worldview.
I said, that's called pantheism.
And here's what pantheism is.
And I explained what pantheism is.
And I said, that's why she's coming, you know, at looking at things in nature as having spirits, right?
As having personal identities and names.
And then I explained to her the correct view, the biblical view here.
This is what the Bible teaches.
This is what reflects reality.
This isn't just what we believe.
This is actually what's real.
And teaching her the correct view.
And then, but also modeling for her, like we don't have to be afraid to watch this, but we're going to be aware.
Well, fast forward several years, I was really on the fence about taking her to see Frozen 2 because, you know, it was like all these parents are online, Christian parents duking it out online.
Should we take them?
Should we not?
So we decided, I decided to take my daughter to see it.
And we were going to just talk through all of the ideas.
And I'll never forget, Elsa starts singing about the elements, the earth and the wind and the water.
And my daughter nudged me and she goes, Mom, that's pantheism.
I know, right?
And I was like, that is right.
That's really based on a pantheistic worldview.
And so she was already taught to critically evaluate the movie.
And even there's this other scene where Olaf makes all these truth claims like, you know, turtles breathe out their butts and the other things he said.
And I said, we're going to go home and fact check some of that stuff.
And we did.
And it turns out some turtles do breathe through their butts.
So I learned something from Frozen 2 as well.
So I think it's like the age-appropriate exposure, but also really asking really good questions about the movies they're watching.
Like what do they want you to walk away thinking is good and virtuous about the world?
What kinds of things are celebrated?
What kind of behaviors are viewed as less enlightened?
I mean, is the family denigrated?
Is rebellion and thinking for yourself seen as virtuous?
And how does that work out in the movie?
But how would that work out for someone in real life?
And just going to scripture and just teaching them to think critically about these types of ideas because I don't know if we can fully, you know, isolate.
I do think that, you know, we should, if we can, start producing really great content for kids, but at the same time, teaching them to discern as we go.
I love that.
Well, they are, some people are.
So just a shameless plug for the Wing Feather saga that is just about to come out.
That's awesome.
We just went to the premiere about a week ago, and it's an amazing, amazing, amazing film for kids.
Really, really good story, really good philosophy, all that stuff.
I'm with you.
So I have four boys.
And whenever we watch a film, and I'm actually way more concerned about the philosophical underpinnings of each movie that I'm watching than the content.
Like if something has like cussing and stuff like that, I'll just be like, like Guardians of the Galaxy or something.
I'll watch that with my kids, all four of them, even like even my six-year-old, you know, which is like, bro, it's iffy.
It's iffy.
But I watch it with my six-year-old.
And afterwards, we'll be like, all right, who's the bad guy?
Who's the good guy?
What's the philosophy?
What does the director want you to think when you walk away from this?
What does family mean in this?
What do they believe about God?
What is, yeah, what is, you know, Star Lord's belief about God?
I feel like they should let you or Alyssa Childers, either way, they should let someone just interrupt movies in the movie theater.
Like, hold on, hold on.
Worldview rundown.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
It's a worldview rundown.
I think that's a good way to put it.
I think it can be devotional even.
It can.
We're staying off script.
It can be.
We're getting off script, but we're both passionate about this and you are too.
I think it can be devotional to learn story structure, screenplay structure, like hero's journey, hero with a thousand faces type of stuff, because then you have a sharper eye to like, oh, we're going into the inmost cave.
The hero has found their elixir.
That's usually where the worldview is hiding.
And that's where you can teach kids to focus on or even, you know, you can teach yourself to focus on what is being sold to me is going to be in that climactic moment.
Absolutely.
And I love that you do that.
I think it's important.
So, and to train our kids to be consumers that are not just taking things without uncritically.
I think that's really important, especially when we're dealing with this world, this philosophical war going on.
So anyway, so you write a little bit about Gen Z and Live Your Truth and Other Lies.
And what is the worst generation?
And why is it Gen Z?
Oh, no.
I'm just kidding.
But seriously.
I'm so hopeful for Gen Z.
We all have kids in Gen Z.
We do, but they're self-obsessed.
No, I know.
There's some specific challenges that come along with Gen Z for sure.
It's like, it's so interesting because I look at my kids and in many ways, there are sort of these traits emerging in Gen Z. They're really, really cool.
Like they're very entrepreneurial.
You know, they can monetize anything.
That's just the way they think.
You know, they're like thinking that way.
And then, but they're also kind of skeptical.
Like they don't want people to, you know, they want to know what's real.
They want to know what's true, but it's very hard to discover that with this world that we're giving them.
So it's, yeah, it's really tough.
And we're seeing anxiety skyrocket among Gen Z and we're seeing just, you know, an increase in mental health issues.
And I think, you know, when you, when a, when an entire culture detaches itself from truth, reality, essentially, disconnects itself from reality, I think that we can expect to see quite a bit of that going on as well.
It's good that you've got like the burden for Gen Z because obviously we have to have it by necessity.
Yeah, I was kidding.
Yeah, I don't, I like all those kids.
No son of mine's going to be some Gen Z ticky talk.
Weirdos.
Anyway, yeah.
I do have to correct my kids, though, because, you know, if I do something that they think is a little old-fashioned, they'll call me boomer.
And I have to swiftly remind them that I am not a boomer.
I'm actually in the greatest generation, which is just a small window in history called Gen X.
And we are the best.
So, Gen X, you're a solid Xer.
Yes.
Okay, so I'm a tweener.
So I don't know.
They call them exennials.
So like, you know, digital adulthood, analog childhood.
And I think we're the best.
And there's only about a two-year span there.
So I just can argue.
We can argue.
I think millennials are the best.
Yeah, you're all right.
I don't have a dog in my life.
That's the worst.
Anyway, so, all right.
So, yeah, you have a, would you like to ask her another question?
Yes.
This question has poetry in it.
Everyone, buckle up.
Are you ready?
At the end of John Keats's Ode to a Grecian Urn, the speaker says, beauty is truth, truth, beauty.
That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
It's an elegant line that plays well to the ears and plays well to the heart, at least on a, on a surface level, sounds deep.
Our question is this.
What is the true relationship?
You talk a lot about truth in your book.
What is the true relationship between aesthetics and beauty?
Can Satan use beauty to make lies more palatable?
Should Christians use beauty to adorn the truth?
Is it even necessary?
Does the truth stand on its own?
Can you tease that out for us?
Oh, boy, I'd have to do some deep thinking on this because I've actually been, somebody asked me the other day about like objective beauty.
And I know a lot of people in Apologetics have thought about this deeply.
I have not actually thought about objective beauty in a very deep way, but I think beauty and aesthetics are very important.
Now, I think, you know, key number one, going back to how we talk to our kids, we have to train our kids to understand that beauty doesn't equal truth or what you would perceive to be something that's attractive or appealing to you or enticing to you for whatever reason, that doesn't make that true.
You know, somebody can be beautiful and get up and speak very eloquently and be telling straight up lies the whole time.
Whereas somebody else could be saying it in a very, you know, unattractive way, but still be speaking the truth.
So I think just kind of giving some information and training on what objective truth actually is and what it's independent of.
It's independent of belief.
It's independent of perception.
It's independent of the attitude of the person who's promoting it.
So I think that would be a good place to start.
But there is something to be said for Being persuasive by making things attractive.
I mean, the Bible even says the devil comes as an angel of light.
I mean, he doesn't show up with a pitchfork and red skin.
He shows up as something you're going to find really attractive and really beautiful.
I often joke with my friends: like, if I only based my religious beliefs on what I thought was beautiful, I'd probably be like up in the hills meditating with the Buddhist monks up there.
If it was just like on what I, what kind of life seemed appealing to me, I'd probably live in a commune up on a mountain somewhere.
But that's not how I choose my religious beliefs.
I want to line up what I believe with reality.
I want to be connected with reality.
And I suspect if I did some deeper thinking on objective beauty, that would be the definition of objective beauty: lining up what is real with what you believe.
And, you know, if you even look at the history of art, I think Nancy Piercy did a great job explaining this in her book, Saving Leonardo, where she goes through the history of art and how at different points in time it got skewed.
It was like it was about magnifying what's beautiful.
And then, you know, then you had postmodern art and things coming in.
And even just through art, she was showing how we got to where we are today with when you disconnect yourself from objective truth.
And people think they can do that just in certain areas.
People think, well, I'm going to live as if objective truth exists when it comes to math or whatever.
But religion, morality, these things are just kind of more like your favorite flavor of ice cream.
And it's not nice to tell other people they're wrong about those things because it's really just finding something that works for you.
But as I point out in the book, Christianity doesn't work that way.
It's not something that can just work for one person and not for someone else because the claims it makes about itself are objective claims.
And if Christianity is true, if it lines up with reality, then it's true for everyone.
And that has eternal consequences for everyone.
And I think that's something that our culture really misses out on because they're viewing religion as something is just like a pragmatic thing, something that just improves your life or makes you feel better.
Well, there's lots of false things that can make you feel better for a little while, like, you know, like drugs or something.
There are things that have a temporary, you know, effect on you that might make you feel really happy, but in the end, they're out to destroy you.
And so I think this is why we do have to root it in truth.
And yeah, I think that Christians should definitely use beauty to try to persuade.
I think because we have the most beautiful worldview and we need to model the beauty of the gospel.
And, you know, and yes, because it's that beautiful and it's that powerful and it's that valuable, there are going to be fences around it.
There are going to be a lot of no's to keep, you know, to protect the beauty of the Christian worldview.
But it is the most objectively beautiful thing because it's the best explanation of reality.
I like what you said.
I like what you said there because I feel like, you know, Lewis, Lewis talks about this at the beginning of The Abolition of Man, kind of like the objective definition of majesty, the objective definition of beauty when it comes to the waterfall at the very beginning.
I think it's really important to know that.
I also like what you said about the devil being an angel of light and beautiful because I play the devil a lot.
So beautiful.
I often am the devil.
So I love that you're talking, I love you talking about objective beauty.
Okay.
He forgets to paint Jared.
Just enjoy it.
Yeah, in red paint.
And I was just going to chime in and say, beautifully put.
Wow.
That was really good.
Thank you for contributing.
Yeah.
So the so here's an easy one.
I actually would love it if because I love every time we talk.
I talk about progressive Christianity a lot on the podcast just because I think it's the most important thing to talk about in terms of where the church is and where we need to be in terms of discernment.
So can you list the main differences just really quick?
Can you do like a quick rundown of the main differences between progressive Christianity and historic Christianity and what the biblical responses are?
If it's just, yeah, if you can just give us a rundown of that, it would be helpful.
Yeah, I'll give you a couple of different ways to look at it because progressive Christianity is really hard to define because you really can't pin it down.
There's all sorts of different beliefs that fall under that umbrella.
It's very fluid.
It's constantly changing.
Just, you know, what is it, two years, I think, after my book came out, I already want to update it with a couple of new chapters just to reflect how the movement has sort of merged with the whole critical theory conversation and also the whole Richard Rohr component of the universal Christ, which has become the dominant Christology.
But just to keep it really simple, I would say this.
Primarily, just at a fundamental way that religion is viewed, for the historically Christian person, they're going to view the earliest sources, the people who walked with Jesus, the eyewitnesses of his life, the people who he commissioned as his apostles, right, to have the highest authority to tell us what Christianity is and what it's all about.
And so this is one of the reasons that we view the apostles' teaching, what's written down in the New Testament as authoritative on par with the Old Testament, right?
Our New Testament is equally authoritative as our Old Testament.
Whereas in progressive Christianity, this is sort of flipped on its head.
So it's sort of based on the idea that Christianity itself is progressing.
So the earliest Christians, the people who knew Jesus even, the apostles, those who wrote the New Testament, these were just people that represent Christianity in its infancy, much like a baby just learning to crawl before it walks.
So we can look at Paul, we can look at Peter, and we can see what they believed about Jesus at the times and the places they lived.
What kinds of things were they trying to figure out?
But ultimately, in the mind of the progressive, as we've evolved spiritually and physically, mentally, all this time, we have access to a higher knowledge of God.
So we can look back at Paul and we can say, well, I agree with Paul on a couple of things here.
In fact, I just saw a post from a progressive Christian pastor just a couple months ago where he said Paul was a great kindergartner, but he makes a terrible professor.
So in other words, we need to see Paul as this kind of unevolved spiritual guy.
And now we can look back and make corrections.
So I'd say that's primarily the view.
But as that would flesh out theologically, it would be a denial of the idea that if you are a sinner, that that sin separates you from God.
I would say that is the most fundamental theological belief in progressive Christianity.
It's if you tell people they're sinners, if you tell people that they need to be reconciled to God or there's some sort of separation between humans and God, you're traumatizing them.
That's oppressive.
That's an abusive doctrine.
So in the mind of the progressive, you just need to realize that you've never been disconnected from God.
If you feel separated from God, it's just in your mind.
It's your own shame talking.
You need to do some inner work and realize how loved you are.
And that's really the gospel of progressive Christianity.
Scary.
This is so good.
I know.
We can take things in a lighter direction here at the end before we transition into our subscriber portion because that was tremendous.
We're going to lob some headlines at you that we wrote in your, again, in your first book, Another Gospel.
Your faith was rattled and almost shattered by progressive Christianity.
After a couple years, you were able to write the ship.
Progressive Christianity, big threat.
We at the Babylon Bee heckle it a lot.
Jarrett, you can lead off with the first headline about progressive Christianity.
Yeah, let's do it.
So the first headline is this, and you can tell us what you think.
Progressive Christian hopes God has his preferred pronouns by his name in the Lamb's Book of Life.
Stinging.
But man, that's true.
I mean, it's true.
And that's the thing.
So, I'll just a quick commentary on that.
I remember back when the progressive Christianity was sort of just getting off the ground, the conversation wasn't even about pronouns.
It wasn't even about the trans ideology or radical gender theory.
It was simply about LGBT affirmation, like basically gay marriage affirmation.
That was the big cause.
Everybody was saying, No, it's never going to go further than this.
We just want full inclusion, just like heterosexual couples, but we want to be held to the same standards, the same degree of faithfulness.
People, and just in a few years, it's gone to complete radical gender theory and trans ideologies, as anybody could have easily predicted.
That you know, it's just like when you get on the culture train, you're going to go where culture goes.
And you can't just, even if it was just that one topic, that would have been wrong.
But it never is going to stay just with the one thing.
That's awesome.
I love how you said that.
Yeah, that's really good.
Yeah, the slippery slope.
They were always saying the slippery slope doesn't exist, it's not going to happen when O'Burger fell happened.
They're like, Oh, yeah.
Anyway, we've got happened.
We've got another headline for you.
I'm skipping around some of these.
Okay, progressive Christians sad they have no way to love their neighbors now that mask mandates are gone.
Yeah, I remember seeing that one.
Yeah, and that was, I loved that because that was sort of a stinging commentary at some of the even evangelical that people you wouldn't have at the time maybe thought were leaning progressive that were saying, Hey, you know, there's no conversation to be had about efficacy or looking at studies or any of this, but we're just saying that you have to get on board with this cultural narrative or you're a bad neighbor.
And that was just like gaslighting so many Christians.
Okay, progressive Christian offers new, more open, less judgmental Christianity.
No way, it's just Satan again, right?
Like the Old Testament prophets who would say, you know, all is well.
It's, you know, peace, peace where there is no peace, right?
That's kind of what the devil does there.
Progressive Christian believes everything about God except that Bible stuff.
Yes.
I mean, seriously, you could have just written my first book for me with that one.
That's good.
We probably took it from you.
Let's see.
Let's see.
Is this the last one?
Progressive Christian can't wait to get to heaven so he can lecture God on privilege.
I like that.
That's a good one.
I like that we're getting the read the subscriber headlines.
We have a portion at the end of our podcast where subscribers will pitch their headlines and sometimes they get cackles, but sometimes they get the well, it's just you know why?
Because so many of your headlines are based in so much truth.
It's like they capture something that you can't always feel like you can articulate, but then you see the headline and done it in that way, and you're just like, that's it.
That's exactly it, right there.
Gosh, I love it.
Well, listen, Alyssa Childers, thank you.
We really appreciate you coming in.
We're about to head into a subscriber portion, so you'll be staying with us there.
But for the rest of you, thank you guys so much for tuning in.
What a blessing to have you on.
This has been incredible.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
I got in trouble with Carmen once because, and I had to be on the stage for the whole show because we were Zoe Girl doing the opening, but we were also his backup singers for his show.
And I had to go to the bathroom really, really bad.
And so I just kind of slinked off the back of the stage and crawled down the back.
Nobody could see.
And then I ran off to the bathroom and then came back.
And then there was like a meeting.
And Carmen let everybody know you don't, nobody leaves the stage during the show.