Never Trumper!

By Mike Luckovich 

The Exodus From Christianity is Caused by Christians

By John Pavlovitz

Growing up in the Church, I was taught that the worst thing one could be was a non-believer; that nothing was as tragic as a doomed soul that condemned itself by rejecting God.

The religion of my childhood drew a sharp, clear line between the saved and the damned. All that mattered was making sure someone found themselves on the better side of this line—and the Atheists and Humanists didn't have a shot.

In light of this supposed truth, the heart of the faith (I was told), was to live in a way that reflected the character and love of Jesus so vividly, so beautifully, that others were compelled to follow after him; that a Christian's living testimony might be the catalyst for someone's conversion. The Bible called it "making disciples," and it was the heart of our tradition. As the venerable hymn declared, people were supposed to know we are Christians by our love.

What a difference a couple of decades make.

Just ask around, now.

People outside the Church will tell you: love is no longer our calling card. It is now condemnation, bigotry, judgment, and hypocrisy. In fact, the Christianity prevalent in so much of America right now isn't just failing to draw others to Christ; it is actively repelling them from him. By operating in a way that is in full opposition to the life and ministry of Jesus, that counterfeit religion is understandably producing people fully opposed to the faith that bears his name.

In record numbers, the Conservative American Church is consistently and surely making Atheists—or at the very least, it is making former Christians; people who no longer consider organized religion an option because the Jesus they recognize is absent. With its sky-is-falling hand-wringing, its political bed-making, and its constant venom toward diversity, it is giving people no alternative but to conclude that, based on the evidence of people professing to be Godly, that God is of little use. This God may in fact, be terribly toxic.

And that's the greatest irony of it all: that the very Evangelicals who've spent the last 50 years in this country demonizing those who reject Jesus are now the single most compelling reason for them to do so. They are giving people who suspect that all Christians are self-righteous, hateful hypocrites, all the evidence they need. The Church is confirming the outside world's most dire suspicions about itself.

People rejecting Evangelical Christian nationalism aren't stupid. They realize that bigotry, even when it is wrapped in religion or justified by the Bible or spoken from a pulpit, is still bigotry. They can smell the putrid stench of phony religion from a mile away—and this version of the Church, frankly, reeks of it. People are steering clear in droves, choosing to find meaning and community and something that resembles love outside its gatherings.

With every persecution of the LGBTQ community, with every unprovoked attack on immigrants, with every planet-wrecking decision, with every regressive civil rights move of these professed believers, the flight from Christianity continues. Meanwhile, the celebrity preachers and professional Christians publicly feign disbelief about the multitudes walking away from God, oblivious to the fact that they are the impetus for the exodus.

And one day soon, these same religious folks will look around, lamenting the empty buildings and the irrelevance of the Church and a world that has no use for it, and they'll wonder how this happened. They'll blame a corrupt culture, or the woke liberal media, or a wholesale rejection of Biblical values, or the devil himself—but it will be none of those things.

No, the reason the Church soon will be teetering on the verge of extinction and irrelevance will be because those entrusted to perpetuate the love of Jesus in the world lost the plot so horribly, and gave the world no other option but to look elsewhere for goodness and purpose and truth.

Soon, these Evangelicals will ask why so much of America has rejected Jesus, and we will remind them of these days and assure these people haven’t rejected Jesus at all.

They just found no evidence of Jesus in them.

Evangelicals and death rates

 From James Gundlach

Here is a scatter plot of the percent Evangelical in 2004 and the state's population aged 45-64 death rate from 2001 thru 2010. The scatter plot and regression statistics summarized in the title show that Evangelicalism substantially increases death rates in the United States.

The US is a nice test bed for analysis and policy, because it has 50 States, which have significant powers, so can follow different policies, plus 50 is a big enough number for the results of any analysis to be statistically significant.

In this case, I'm not sure whether there is correlation with a third variable. Possibly, poverty is strongly correlated with the level of fundamentalist Christianity. Poorer States will most likely have higher mortality rates, and (inexplicably to someone from outside the US) also be adherents of extreme religion. In other countries, the poor support socialist parties and policies (free health; fair wages; social housing; trade unions). In the US, religion and the hope of Heaven take their place. The poorest States in America are almost without exception "Red" States and the only ones which aren't poor are oil States. Even the use of Red as the colour for the Republican Party is odd. In the rest of the world, Red = socialist/progressive, and Blue = right-wing/conservative/regressive.

Whatever the reason behind the relationship, its existence is remarkable.

Sluttishness

 By Jeff Danziger

MAGA Supreme Court rules Trump can't be removed from the ballot

 The US Supreme Court, by this decision, loses all credibility.  The US is turning into a failed state.

Trump was wrongly removed from Colorado ballot, US supreme court rules

Cartoon by Dave Granlund

Satan and Trump

 Doonesbury (Garry Trudeau)

US church membership plunges

From Salon

The trend of Americans exiting the pews, never to return, has been steady for some years now and shows no signs of slowing down. According to a new Gallup poll released this week, only 47% of Americans polled in 2020 belong to a house of worship, which is the first time that number has fallen below half of the country since they started polling Americans on this question.

But what's really interesting is that the collapse in church membership has happened mostly over the past two decades. Since Gallup started recording these numbers decades ago, church membership rates were relatively steady, with only the smallest decline over the decades. In 1937, 73% of Americans belonged to a church. In 1975, it was 71%. In 1999, it was 70%. But since then, the church membership rate has fallen by a whopping 23 percentage points.

It is not, however, because of some great atheist revival across the land, with Americans suddenly burying themselves in the philosophical discourse about the unlikeliness of the existence of a higher power. The percentage of Americans who identify as atheist (4%) or agnostic (5%) has risen slightly, but not even close to enough to account for the number of people who claim no religious affiliation. A 2017 Gallup poll finds that 87% of Americans say they believe in God. So clearly, what we're seeing is a dramatic increase in the kinds of folks who would say something akin to, "I'm spiritual, but not big on organized religion."

Blame the religious right. Until recently, the U.S. was largely unaffected by the increasing secularization of many European countries, but that started to change dramatically at the turn of the 21st century. And it's no mystery why. The drop in religious affiliation starts right around the time George W. Bush was elected president, publicly and dramatically associating himself with the white evangelical movement. The early Aughts saw the rise of megachurches with flashily dressed ministers who appeared more interested in money and sermonizing about people's sex lives than modeling values of charity and humility.

Not only were these religious figures and the institutions they led hyper-political, the outward mission seemed to be almost exclusively in service of oppressing others. The religious right isn't nearly as interested in feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless as much as using religion as an all-purpose excuse to abuse women and LGBTQ people. In an age of growing wealth inequalities, with more and more Americans living hand-to-mouth, many visible religious authorities were using their power to support politicians and laws to take health care access from women and fight against marriage between same-sex couples. And then Donald Trump happened.

Trump was a thrice-married chronic adulterer who routinely exposed how ignorant he was of religion, and who reportedly — and let's face it, obviously — made fun of religious leaders behind their backs. But religious right leaders didn't care. They continually pumped Trump up like he was the second coming, showily praying over him and extorting their followers to have faith in a man who literally could not have better conformed to the prophecies of the Antichrist. It was comically over the top, how extensively Christian right leaders exposed themselves as motivated by power, not faith.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Gallup's numbers show numbers of religiously affiliated Americans taking a nosedive during the Trump years, dropping from 55% of Americans belonging to a church to 47%.

To be clear, the drop-off in religious affiliation is, researchers have shown, likely less about people actively quitting churches, and more about churches being unable to recruit younger followers to replace the ones who die. As Pew Research Center tweeted in 2019, "Today, there is a wide gap between older Americans (Baby Boomers and members of the Silent Generation) and Millennials in their levels of religious affiliation."

All of which makes sense. It's rare that people abandon an ideology or faith that they'e had for a long time. Once an adult actively chooses to belong to a church, it's hard to admit that you were wrong and now want to abandon the whole project. But young adults, even those who went to church with their parents, do have to make an active choice to join a church as adults. And many are going to look at hypocritical, power-hungry ministers praying over an obvious grifter like Trump and be too turned off to even consider getting involved.

In 2017, Robert P. Jones, the head of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of "White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity," spoke with Salon about how the decline in religion is concentrated largely among young people. There's "a culture clash between particularly conservative white churches and denominations and younger Americans," he explained, noting that young people were particularly critical of anti-science and homophobic rhetoric from religious leaders.

"[C]onservative white Christians have lost this argument with a broader liberal culture," he explained, including "their own kids and grandchildren."

It's a story with a moral so blunt that it could very well be a biblical fable: Christian leaders, driven by their hunger for power and cultural dominance, become so grasping and hypocritical that it backfires and they lose their cultural relevance. Not that there's any cause to pity them, since they did this to themselves. The growing skepticism of organized religion in the U.S. is a trend to celebrate. While more needs to be done to replace the sense of community that churches can often give people, it's undeniable that this decline is tied up with objectively good trends: increasing liberalism, hostility to bigotry, and support for science in the U.S. Americans are becoming better people, however slowly, and the decline in organized religious affiliation appears to be a big part of that.

Source: Pew Research Center

 

Praise the lard

 I can't read the signature of this cartoonist.  If you know who it is, let me know in the comments.

Roe is settled law

By Pat Bagley 

Blessed are the merciful

 

A straight line from segregation to anti-abortion

 An extremely interesting piece by Randall Balmer in The Guardian about how it wasn't Roe vs Wade which mobilised apolitical Christians into becoming political, but segregation. 

The supreme court’s refusal to block Texas’s restrictive new abortion law suggests that the end to country-wide legal abortion might be at hand. For white evangelicals, the rank and file of the anti-abortion movement who have worked tirelessly to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade decision, this represents the culmination of efforts that date back to – well, about 1980.

Although leaders of the religious right would have us believe that the Roe decision was the catalyst for their political mobilization in the 1970s, that claim does not withstand historical scrutiny. What prompted evangelical interest in politics, in fact, was a defense of racial segregation.

Evangelicals considered abortion a “Catholic issue” through most of the 1970s, and there is little in the history of evangelicalism to suggest that abortion would become a point of interest. Even James Dobson, who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged after the Roe decision that the Bible was silent on the matter and that it was plausible for an evangelical to hold that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being”.

I first began researching the origins of the religious right after a meeting at a Washington hotel conference room in November 1990. The gathering marked the ten-year anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency and, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me, I was invited to this closed-door celebration. There I encountered a veritable who’s-who of the religious right, including (among others), Ralph Reed of Christian Coalition; Donald Wildmon from the American Family Association; Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention; Ed Dobson, one of Jerry Falwell’s acolytes at Moral Majority; Richard Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail mogul; and Paul Weyrich, cofounder of the Heritage Foundation and architect of the religious right.

In the course of the first session, Weyrich tried to make a point to his religious right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Remember, he said animatedly, that the religious right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got the movement going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies, including a ban on interracial dating that the university maintained until 2000.

During a break following that session, I approached Weyrich to ensure that I had heard him correctly. He was emphatic that abortion had nothing whatsoever to do with the genesis of the religious right. He added that he’d been trying since the Goldwater campaign in 1964 to interest evangelicals in politics. Nothing caught their attention, he insisted – school prayer, pornography, equal rights for women, abortion – until the IRS began to challenge the tax exemption of Bob Jones University and other whites-only segregation academies.

Indeed, in 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution calling to legalize abortion. When the Roe decision was handed down, some evangelicals applauded the ruling as marking an appropriate distinction between personal morality and public policy. Although he later – 14 years later – claimed that opposition to abortion was the catalyst for his political activism, Jerry Falwell did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 1978, more than five years after Roe.

Falwell, who had founded his own segregation academy in 1967, was eager to join forces with Weyrich and others to mount a defense against the IRS and its attempts to enforce the Brown v Board of Education decision of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “In some states,” Falwell famously groused, “it’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”

So how did evangelicals become interested in abortion? As nearly as I can tell from my conversation with Weyrich, during a conference call with Falwell and other evangelicals strategizing about how to retain their tax exemptions, someone suggested that they might have the makings of a political movement and wondered what other issues would work for them. Several suggestions followed, and then a voice on the line said, “How about abortion?”

Still, it took some time for opposition to abortion to take hold among evangelicals. According to Frank Schaeffer – who produced a series of anti-abortion films called Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, featuring his father, Francis Schaeffer, and C Everett Koop, who later became Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general – the evangelical response was at best tepid when the films appeared early in 1979.

And when Reagan addressed 20,000 cheering evangelicals in August 1980, he mentioned his support for creationism and criticized the IRS for its supposed vendetta against evangelical schools. He said nothing whatsoever about abortion. Only in the early 1980s did opposition to abortion finally become an evangelical battle cry.

The beauty of the religious right’s embrace of abortion as a political issue is that it allowed leaders to camouflage the real origins of their movement: the defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions.

Cartoon by Steve Sack

Masks and guns

 

Climate change & Noah

 

Thanks to the posties

The quiet Australians

By Ozzie cartoonist Cathy Wilcox

America is becoming less Christian

From Pat Bagley

The New Pharisees

A cartoon by David Horsey

Evangelicals: Clinton vs Trump

Porn star hypocrisy

Christian principles