Porn on X, Fixing the Baptists, and Star Wars: Reader Questions

Dear Evangelical Thought Leader: Help! I don’t want to leave Twitter/X, but with the influx of porn accounts, I feel like I have no choice! Should Christians stay (and be tempted), or give up an online community of believers? —RD

Dear RD: This is exactly why we, as Christians, should produce our own adult content and upload it to social media. Just this week, I sent a script to Pureflix for a faith-based erotic thriller, COVENANT THIGHS. In it, a married Christian couple go undercover to infiltrate the porn industry to learn how to build the perfect anti-porn web blocker. But in a world of skin and intrigue¹, is anyone who they seem?

I haven’t heard back from Pureflix yet, but they’re probably just checking to see if Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney are available to play the leads, as I suggested.

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Dear ETL: Can you fix the SBC real quick? —B

Dear B: Of course I can. First things first: we need to get back to basics. What do Southern Baptists do better than anyone else?

Barbecue. Cooking it, eating it, talking about eating it, thinking about when they ate it, planning to cook and eat more of it—this is what Baptists are good at.

Then, we do this:

• at every yearly convention, we start outside, at the grills and smokers. No one gets in the door until they eat a plate of BBQ. That’s why they have problems at those meetings: all those pit kings and kitchen queens from little towns in Arkansas and South Carolina get hungry and irritable, and you want them to sit still and listen to motions and debates and amendments?

• each church must have its own BBQ sauce. You can tweak the ingredients once per year, but you must have good attendance to have a say in this process. This will get men back in the church. Each church bottles its unique sauce and sells them to raise money for missions. This will be the new organizing principle of the SBC. What kind of church are you? Red? White? Gold? What kind of red, exactly? Sweet? Spicy?

• if a church acts up, we’re going to send someone to put locks on that church’s grills. You didn’t handle an abuse case properly? No BBQ for you this year. Have fun getting the church picnic catered from some second-rate Anglican slop house that uses ketchup as a sauce, I’m sure no one will complain about it.

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Dear ETL: Is Star Wars propagating witchcraft because Ewoks are from Endor, like the witch Saul consulted? —CL

Dear CL: Excellent question. Good luck getting John Piper to take on the hard-hitting issues like this.

The short answer: yes. Kind of. It’s complicated.

Let’s show our work here.

If we go to the Greek, we learn that Saul (now known as Paul, because he was blinded on the road to Dalmatia) went to see a mysterious woman on the Endor forest moon who had mystical powers. Does this sound like anyone we know?

At this point, Princess Leia was not a trained Jedi, but was definitely force sensitive. So Paul went to see her and was like “can you fix my eyes?” and Leia called up Samson’s force ghost and Samson was like “this is ableism; you can still do things, even if you can’t see. I was blinded, but then I killed a bunch of people by pushing a building down.”

And then Leia looked at the camera with lady horniness and was like “he can push MY building down,” because Samson was super buff, except Han Solo was watching from the shadows and he got real mad and left to go be a space pirate and that’s why Ben Solo grew up to be emo, because James Dobson was right; little boys need fathers. Anyway, Paul went off and wrote some books of the Bible.

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Dear ETL: Whenever you put out a think piece, one of us reads it aloud to our friend group. Is this Biblical? —James, Matthew, Ashley, and Tate

Dear group: Of course it is. Although I doubt any of you will ever be as holy as your friend Luke. Nevertheless, here are a few tips for reading these articles out loud in a group setting:

• at any mention of sex, immediately snort and bray like cattle in heat

• when you encounter the phrase “go to the Greek,” read it in an exaggerated, nasally nerd voice

• when a sentence begins with “Folks,” you must pause for three seconds after the word “folks,” like a youth pastor trying to drive the point home

• whenever bosoms are mentioned, make honking noises. No hand motions, though; that is too far

*Weekly-ish articles are free; periodic special articles are behind the paywall. If you are a paid subscriber, even for a short while, thank you for making this whole thing work. To everyone, thank you for reading and sharing. Please understand that all offensive content is the fault of Glen Powell.

1. skintrigue