This is still a phenomenon worth examining. How is this cowardly? The author can’t do anything about the IRS. What else is there to say about megachurches that hasn’t been said?
Cowardice seems likely when somebody ignores the high impact manifestation that enjoys popular support, choosing instead to lampoon the low impact fringe manifestation.
Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach. There are deep subtleties to it on a sociological perspective that are far more interesting than its extreme fish-in-a-barrel status theologically. Maybe that doesn't interest the author?
> Also going against contemporary American megachurch Christianity would require a very different kind of focus and approach
I'm not sure I agree with that though. The same method, pointing out conflict between modern espoused belief and historical reality, seems like it would be equally effective against both.
People don't follow religions because they're true. They follow them because they offer narratives and social interactions they personally find compelling.
Understanding the social interactions - they're not always obvious - might do more to make religions less appealing than yet another unsuccessful attempt to debunk the core narrative.
https://athenaeumreview.org/contributor/diane-purkiss/
Diane Purkiss is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and fellow and tutor at Keble College. She holds a doctoral degree from Merton College Oxford, and an honours degree in English and History from the University of Queensland. She has published widely on the English Civil War, and on witchcraft and the supernatural in the early modern period.
She's writing about popular misconceptions relevant to her own specialty. She has no special background to bring to bear on contemporary American megachurch Christianity.
Her critique was published in the Athenaeum Review, "a new journal of arts and ideas for the general educated reader."
Basically what you've got here is a cultural phenomenon dressed up as a religious one, borrowing some religious functions, taking over the public role of religion. But its foundations have a lot more to do with ingroup identity, shibboleths and the peculiar American take on the protestant work ethic. Trying to understand it theologically just hits a blank wall. You have to understand it as sociology.
([1] Other religions not of the same lineage shrug off this class of attacks. Disprove Shinto? Disprove what? It makes no historical claims.)
I think you can ultimately thank Thomas Aquinas for this movement. He was quite fond of a rational basis for God and repackaged the works of Aristotle for this end. But of course once you start down the road of adding rationalism to your religion then the whole mysticism of it can start to stand out to some. So some people started thinking it must be all literal and totally rational...
Eastern Orthodox Christianity still has no truck with that rationalism nonsense.
Yes, there are recognizably Christian subgroups that disavow all historical claims (and reinterpret Paul accordingly), but mainstream Christianity has always affirmed the bodily resurrection of Jesus and that (per Paul) this is essential to Christianity ... long before Aquinas.
N. T. Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God" is a very good read on this.