"When you think about it, isn't like, believing in black holes take as much faith as believing in God? Please listen. Please listen to me. I don't want to be alone in Heaven. Oh God."
Conservatives furiously typing out their essays about how leftists told people to hate religion and that's literally the only reason people stopped going to church
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-christian-right-is-helping-drive-liberals-away-from-religion/
They stopped going to church because YOU WERE IN THE PEWS
If you're against gay marriage and for conversion therapy and against abortion and refuse to act Christlike and actively worsen people's lives, why the fuck would anyone want to join your club
How the fuck are conservatives so good at capitalist propaganda but dogshit stupid at religious propaganda
Yeah even from a young age I was fine going to church and even interested in theology for a bit, but the right wing politics never vibed at any point. I was already kinda on my way out in 2015 or so, but I was doing a lot to consciously tune Trump out with the media talking about him all the time. I knew at that point I wouldn't be going back for a long time, if ever.
You're absolutely right that christians are the problem. Went to mass at my home parish this summer, the priest went on a rant about how modern society is too decadent, such decadences as gay marriage and abortion. No mention of the actual decadence of the wealthy, or massive military spending, or the wasteful suburban and corporate culture. It was people doing things that they needed to to survive. Back to TV mass after that.
Why people are leaving the churches is a very interesting and complicated issue, and as a former Evangelical Christian it's one I'm keenly interested in.
I think the religious right is driving people away, but I think there's more context that needs to be added. The Evangelical church is definitely more political than it was in the 80s and 90s, and even arguably up through the 00s. I mean, even back when I was growing up, white Evangelicals voted almost exclusively Republican. And individual issues like abortion and gay rights were certainly talked about. But the overall political ideology was much more subdued. Personally I think it changed with Obergefell and overall societal attitude changes regarding homosexuality. In a few short years, it became clear to Evangelicals that they had just gotten completely overrun in the culture war. The hyper-politicization of religion that you see now is a reaction to taking the L in the culture war, IMO.
But I don't think this politicization is in itself the main reason people are leaving. Anecdotally, I think the internet and the massive increase in access to information that people have at their fingertips is the biggest reason. If you're not someone who's regularly a part of a more conservative Protestant community, you probably aren't familiar with how bad it is. In general, people there are still taught things like how the universe is less than 10,000 years old and that the bible is completely accurate in historical matters and is free of contradictions. And of course, there's the all-pervasive belief in an eternity of conscious, unimaginable torment for all non-believers.
So if you're growing up in the church, you're getting pumped full of all these frankly ludicrous ideas. You get on the internet and you eventually see how ludicrous it all is. Maybe that's enough to get you to deconvert. But for a lot of people, it's not quite enough. That's because every authority figure you grew up with is telling you something that you suspect is wrong, but since they're all you know you still sort of stick with it.
Then you notice how these religious authorities treat politics. You see not only how little they actually care for the poor and oppressed, but you see them wholly embrace people like Trump. You see the extreme hypocrisy. You see them cry about how persecuted they are despite being the most privileged people on the planet right now. If you notice all that, it's usually enough to shake loose any notion that the grown ups know what they're talking about. And once you lose that respect for the authorities in your life, that shaky foundation their authority was built on collapses too.
All this to say, anecdotally it seems to me all the political shit that comes out the religious right is usually the final step in what drives people away, not the only step.
YMMV, of course.
Haven't been to church in twenty years so not sure how bad things have gotten but even back in the '90s i remember lots of talk about how Clinton was a servant of the devil. Lots of pro Bush stuff after that. No politics from the pulpit like I hear happens now, and certainly no political signs on church property, but conversations in the halls were very right wing.
I think that's a good analysis.
I would add that there's also often contradictions in one's personal life due to taking that L in the culture war, namely you actually get to know gay people, people of other ethnicities, etc, and now have to rationalize that with the far-right Christian stories you've been told about how all gay people are [redacted]. The hypocrisy is far more difficult to ignore when your best friend, who you know and love, comes out to you and the church vilification just isn't true.
Young people are also more mobile due to attending university, and therefore more likely to interact with any number is vilified groups of normal people and be forced into resolving the contradiction between those people being normal and your church telling you they're horrible. Obviously the contradiction isn't always resolved in favor of reality and acceptance, but a personal jolt like that is often the best shot at jostling someone out of their ideology.
Black holes won't give me shit for jerking off or not appreciating them enough
It's also really clear that at some point the respective white churches needed to fully embrace black protestants and latino catholics. If a significant amount of your politics is arbitrarily persecuting even the christians from your own denominaion, it's just too obviously bullshit.
Lol that will never happen, the folks who are staying around in the white evangelical churches are there for the whiteness of it. That's the big draw. The religion is secondary to the desire to be in a community of people who not only think like themselves, but look like them too.
Aboht 15-20 years ago, a white church in my town started to see increasing number of black congregants. And wouldnt you know it, as the number of black attendees increased, the number of white attendees quickly decreased. Surely just a coincidence...
I've seen the catholic church do pretty well with Latino Catholics, because they're the only families still producing priests. Still a lot of "oh, you're one of the good ones."
