Christians Sharing Fake News-- three voices: gullible? malicious? persecution complex?

1)Ed Stetzer:

An Embarrassing Week for Christians Sharing Fake News

Don't believe everything you read on the Internet. You embarrass us all when you do. |

 

Ed Stetzer

So, here is the deal.

We are too gullible.

I've done a bit of a series on the "Faux Christian Controversy of the Week" and it just keeps happening.

This week, two “news” stories made the rounds.

Pastor Arrested for Refusing a Same-Sex Marriage

So, what should you do it you see a story like this?

Well, first, if pastors are going to jail for a ruling from last month, you should be suspicious. OK, not really, you should be totally incredulous.

But, let’s say it is a couple of years from now.

If that were the case, it would be EVERYWHERE. It would be on the nightly news.

Did you check ChristianityToday.com? How about WORLD, the Christian Century, orCharisma? They'd all have it on their front page.

But, you say, “It was at NBC.” Well, if something sounds crazy, check the URL. This particular story was on NBC.com.co.

Did you notice the extra .co on the end? That means it's not really NBC.com. Also, click around to the other stories, which literally have text that reads "adfasf weoogsdre gawerags."

You just make us all look gullible when you don’t do simple steps like that.

By the way, if you are a pastor you should already know that no one can make you officiate anything. In fact, you can refuse to officiate an interracial marriage. You'd be an idiot and a racist, but you wouldn't be arrested.

Bible Lawsuit

Then, as if we don’t look silly enough, there is the Zondervan lawsuit. Just Google to see how many websites ran recent stories about a guy suing Bible publishers because the verses on homosexuality are link, continued
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2)by Fred Clark:

"It’s not gullibility; it’s malice. (C.S. Lewis is right and Ed Stetzer is wrong.)"

It has been “An Embarrassing Week for Christians Sharing Fake News,” Ed Stetzer writes for Christianity Today.* By “Christians,” Stetzer means the CT audience, which is to say white evangelicals. White evangelicals, he says, seem particularly susceptible to believing and spreading fake news stories because they are “gullible”:

So, here is the deal.

We are too gullible. …

You just make us all look gullible when you don’t do simple steps like that. …

Posting links to fake [news stories] just makes all of us look (rightly) gullible. …

Be less gullible next time.

That’s the gist of Stetzer’s entire post, which makes a commendable case against credulous gullibility and offers some practical advice for how to be more skeptical when evaluating outrageous-seeming news stories online.

All well and good. But all, also, utterly beside the point. Gullibility is not,,
cont: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2015/07/15/its-not-gullibility-its-malice-c-s-lewis-is-right-and-ed-stetzer-is-wrong/

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3)Rachel Held Evans:

For the sake of the gospel, drop the persecution complex 

d you hear about the pastor who was arrested for not marrying a same-sex couple? What about the publisher that got sued for refusing to censor anti-gay verses from the Bible? 

Both of these stories have been exposed as fakes of course, but that didn’t keep hundreds of thousands of conservative Christians from sharing them online this week. When I pointed out to a friend that the story he had just shared on social media wasn’t true, he replied, “well it might as well be. Christians in this country are under attack.” 

It has become a familiar refrain. We hear .. link