BY FRED CLARK

I don’t think most normal white evangelicals understand how full-gonzo nutbags Charisma magazine is. It really is off the charts.

Name any three new religious movements at random and then name three more beyond-the-fringe cults that even the most cautious religion scholars would agree to describe using that word and you’ll find Charisma embracing and promoting ideas that outstrip anything imagined by all six of those groups. Every week there’s stuff posted at Charismanews that would make the surviving members of Heaven’s Gate or Chloe from Smallville balk, saying, “Whoa — those people seem like whackjobs.”

If you called up Coast to Coast AM and started reading stuff from Charismanews, George Noory would hang up on you so that he could get back to legitimate callers talking about more sensible topics, like Bigfoot or how aliens built Stonehenge.

Part of the reason that mainstream white evangelicalism has trouble confronting the reality of what Charisma has become is that an accurate, honest, dispassionate evaluation of it would seem, well, rude. To name or even attempt to describe something so unseemly strikes most normal, decent people as itself unseemly. They doubt others’ accurate descriptions of what Charisma publishes because those descriptions, if at all accurate, are bound to seem hostile or pejorative.

This instinctive distrust kicks in even when it’s their own two eyes doing the describing. Even when they look at it, they can’t quite bring themselves to believe that it’s as batshit loony as their own eyes tell them it actually is.

And so every criticism of Charisma will be dismissed as “over the top” because Charisma is, itself, so over the top.

Take a look this piece from Charisma, “Has Hollywood’s Satanic Activity Been Exposed?”

The post-awards-show column decoding and condemning the alleged “Satanic” symbols or rituals invoked by celebrities is a standard feature at Charisma, but this year’s Academy Awards show posed a problem. The show featured what seemed like an easy and obvious target for the latest recitation of that column: Becky G’s performance of the Oscar-nominated song, “The Fire Inside.”...

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2024/03/13/but-not-a-real-green-dress-thats-cruel/