Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Getting Your Critics' Support

Most people realize that I don’t agree with Rachel Held Evans. My take on her doctrine is that she believes a living god exists, but she also believes we came from monkeys. But I have no intention of discussing her doctrine. There’s plenty of evidence to prove her wrong that others have written about. What I do want to talk about is a marketing tactic she uses that might do us all well to examine. Writing for The Washington Post Rachel wrote the article When Atheists and Baptists Agree. In the article, she calls her critics by name and provides links, but she doesn’t pick on just any critic, she chooses Ken Ham of the Creation Museum, Hemant Mehta of the Friendly Atheist Blog and Dr. Albert Mohler, a prolithic blogger and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It is through his blog that I learned of the article she wrote.


What we can learn from this is that if you want publicity from blogs you should pick a fight with bloggers who have a history of writing about people who disagree with them. Also, the bigger following they have the better. If you look at how her article is designed, it appears that she was aiming to produced something that could not go unanswered. She accuses Dr. Mohler and other Baptists of “setting young Christians up for failure” and “orchestrating the very exodus that they fear.” She also says, “the Baptists have essentially conceded that the atheists are right after all.” The fact is that on the thing we’ve “conceded that the atheists are right” about we never disagreed. The atheist say that evolution and Christianity are incompatible and so do we. We have to is we are to hold to our belief that every word of the original Bible texts were inspired by God.


The thing that Rachel Held Evans accomplishes through her antagonistic article is that she gets publicity from her critics. She gets much publicity from Dr. Mohler and yes, she gets some from me. As a result, I’m sure she’ll sell more copies of her book to people who want to know what she has to say.