James Talarico, The Population Bomb, Evangelical Takedowns
Plus, mall culture 2.0 and other signs and wonders from this week.
EDITOR’S NOTE: “Signs and Wonders” is a column that shares thoughts on news items that either do not rise to the level of a news story for MinistryWatch or are slightly (even significantly) outside of our normal charity and philanthropy “beat.” My goal is to be punchy, opinionated, and not to worry much about being slightly off brand. If that is not for you, no hard feelings. But if it is…read on.
Talarico Takedowns. James Talarico, a Democrat running for the U.S. Senate in Texas, is using religious language to appeal to moderate voters. Conservative and Christian commentators have rightly called out Talarico for trying to make the Bible say what it clearly does not. I especially commend to you this article by my friends and former colleagues John Stonestreet and Tim Padgett. The bad news, though, is that it is likely that Talarico will fool a lot of people whose faith has been poorly formed, or non-Christians who nonetheless want to appear faith friendly. It does not help that the GOP has chosen prosperity gospel spokespeople such as Paula White to carry their banner. I think critiques of Talarico’s heresies would have more credibility if those critics had also been on record calling out prosperity gospel heresies. (Just for the record, Stonestreet has. You can read his critique of White and the prosperity gospel here.)
Small Publishers Squeezed. Axios published an article saying “Smaller web publishers, with 1,000–10,000 daily page views, are experiencing the most precipitous traffic declines in the AI era, according to new Chartbeat data.” Artificial intelligence has meant that more people are getting answers to questions directly from AI and not by clicking on the results of Google searches. That has hurt the traffic of small publishers. Axios continues: “Over the past two years, referral traffic from traditional search engines has declined by 60% for small publishers, compared with 47% for medium-sized publishers and 22% for large publishers, per Chartbeat. Medium-sized publishers are outlets with 10,000–100,000 daily page views, on average. Large publishers are those with more than 100,000 daily page views on average.” For the record, MinistryWatch fits into the “medium” category, and we have seen our page views go up steadily over the past two years. Last year, we had about 4 million page views on our site. This year, we are on track for about 4.5 million.
Trashing Evangelicalism. I have my own issues with evangelicalism. I even wrote a book about it (“A Lover’s Quarrel with The Evangelical Church”)! One of the reasons I wrote that book was my concern that most critiques of evangelicalism were from those who had no real interest in the church’s health and restoration. They were merely ham-fisted attempts to take down the church. Jared Stacy’s new book “Reality in Ruins,” unfortunately, fits into that category. That’s why I was delighted to read Bonnie Kristian’s lengthy and thoughtful review of the book at Christianity Today.
While We’re At It. Check out Bonnie Kristian’s Substack. It is one of the few “blogs” (Is Substack a blog? Are blogs still a thing?) that I read from beginning to end.
Demographic Winter? You may have heard that Paul Ehrlich died last week. He was 93. Ehrlich made news in the 1960s with a book called “The Population Bomb,” which predicted widespread starvation and war because of overpopulation. Liberals used the book to promote abortion, contraception, and homosexuality as an “evolutionary adaptation” to procreative unions. Ehrlich turned out to be spectacularly wrong about this and many other matters. The real reason for population growth in the 20th century was the worldwide increase in living standards and lifespan. As population expert Steven Mosher once told me, “The reason the population grew was not because we were breeding like rabbits, but because we were no longer dying like flies.” But we have likely reached the end of longevity increases, so if birthrates stay the same, look for population declines in most countries in the world in the decades ahead. That is already happening in much of Europe.
Pop Culture Check In. My friends at Axis, a Christian ministry that helps parents keep an eye on youth culture and how it’s affecting kids, noted this week that “according to the Wall Street Journal (paywall), Gen Z is driving a resurgence in mall shopping, with many malls redesigning public spaces to be more ‘photogenic’ and social-media friendly, as well as popular online stores like Edikted opening brick-and-mortar locations.” It will be interesting to see if this “resurgence” is a flash in the pan or the 2.0 version of the social media era, an era that provides an antidote to social media isolation with a dose of ‘80s and ‘90s mall culture.
Readers in Los Angeles. I have some travel coming up in the next couple of months, and I would love to see you. I will be in Los Angeles in April and Nashville in May. I will be doing reader lunches in both cities. Let me know if you would like to join us. My email is [email protected].
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