Here’s the link to this article.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

MAY 25, 2013

A month or two after the David Koresh compound went up in smoke, my church got some horrible, horrible news. Our co-pastor had late-stage brain cancer.

Daniel was an awesome man (our sign-language ministry even had a sign for him–the “D” symbol run over the top of the head like a lion’s mane). His wife was the lead pastor’s daughter, a slender and beautiful young woman, and they had two generally fervent sons in their teens who didn’t show any signs of becoming stereotypically rebellious “preacher’s kids.” When our lead pastor began to feel like he was getting a bit old to be doing all-night prayer meetings, he asked Daniel to come in to help lessen the burden. He’d only been our co-pastor for a short while, maybe six months or a year, before out of nowhere we learned he had cancer. And it was that super-fast-moving sort too. Immediately he went into treatment, with surgery and all that, and just as immediately the “prayer wagon” got rolling.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people were praying for his recovery. As I’ve mentioned, our pastor was one of the Big Name Fans in our denomination; we had ties to mission churches all over the world as well. I was one of the people who spent quite some time on her knees praying for Daniel’s recovery. Even Biff, who very rarely prayed anywhere but in church, prayed for him. We were absolutely convinced that God would heal him. Why wouldn’t he? Daniel was doing marvelous things for God; he had a family to support; he was an amazing person in every single way.

C’mon. You don’t need to ask what happened next. Daniel died a miserable death from cancer. Of course he did. What were you expecting? If there’s any disease worse than cancer, if there’s any disease that proves there can’t possibly be a loving god in this universe with ultimate power, I don’t know what else it might be if it isn’t this one (well, okay, maybe filoviruses, but still, cancer is horrible). Daniel left behind a grieving widow and two confused sons, and a world full of fundamentalists scrambling to explain why God hadn’t answered our prayers. This scrambling for the contortions required to make it totally okay that God had let Daniel die so horribly was even worse for me  than the fear of his death, the crushing disappointment when he died, and the mourning for his remaining family and friends. I’d never lost anybody before, so Daniel’s death hit me hard. And I couldn’t accept the doublespeak. As Calvin said in Calvin and Hobbes, “Either it’s mean or it’s arbitrary, and either way, it gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

At this point I noticed something strange. I’d pretty much stopped asking God for anything. Anything at all. Until I was asked specifically to pray for Daniel, it’d been a long time since I’d actually petitioned or beseeched God for anything. I praised him, yes. I told him about my day and explored my thoughts with him. I thanked him for things I thought he’d done (a minister told me once that I had the most thankful and grateful spirit he’d ever encountered). I felt what I thought was his presence in me. But I did not usually ask him for anything. Why should I, I thought? Either what I wanted was God’s will anyway, in which case it was going to happen regardless of what I said about the matter, or else it wasn’t, in which case I sure wasn’t going to strong-arm God into doing something that wasn’t his will. I perceived that God didn’t care about popularity contests or even very sincere petitioning; he was going to do whatever he thought best anyway. And it seemed hugely immoral of a “parent” to demand his “children” ask him for the basics of their lives–what father demands his children beg him for dinner every day before they’re allowed food to eat? Or for healthcare? Or for their very lives or those of their own children? Or to spare them from car accidents or abuse? Any deity who values and encourages those sorts of supplications now seems downright malevolent to me. At the time it just seemed pointless at best and a setup for disappointment at worst. If God’s will was so totally unknowable and mysterious, there seemed to be no way whatsoever to know if a request was actually in his plan or not.

I’d begun to perceive that Christians tend to treat God like a combo ATM machine and errand boy, ordering him around and demanding stuff of him. Even worse, I’d begun to see how hugely impotent preachers looked when they triumphantly shouted “I claim a healing in the name of Jesus Christ!” when they didn’t know even the tiniest bit about whether or not that healing was going to happen at all. It sounded mighty fine, yes, but the results were decidedly not supernatural in the least. When the healing didn’t happen, or it only sort of half-happened if you squinted and tilted your head and looked at it just the right way, they either ignored that they’d ever made the claim, I mean completely ignored it like it never happened as the soul-sick bunnies at Strawberry’s warren did in Watership Down, or else blew it up into some huge evidence of their god’s “wonder-working” power. The whole predatory charade was starting to sicken me and make me question just how much else in this religion was a charade.

Right after Daniel’s death, Biff told me we were going to start attending another pastor’s church. Brother Gene had just gotten married for the first time rather late in life to a sweet older lady who’d also “saved herself” until rather late in life, and they’d decided to start a little storefront church. They needed parishioners, and Gene had asked my husband to please consider joining up. Their church was in our general stomping grounds and we were on friendly terms with both of them, so it seemed like a no-brainer. I was not consulted about this move, but I didn’t especially care where I went to church by this time. Plus, I really liked Gene and his wife, who were nice folks who were obviously in love. I was content to let Biff dictate this move.

It was a pretty little church. Obviously the pastor’s wife had decorated it; she’d used the most tasteful and popular hues of the day: dusty rose carpet, cream walls, and pink chairs, with periwinkle accents all over and artificial flowers everywhere. It looked a bit like a wedding reception hall. I don’t think the congregation got bigger than about 20 people all told in the year or two we attended, but I liked the place and the people involved with it.

About six months later, when Biff and I attended our original church for a revival, though, I got a big shock.

He was off doing his usual bombastic routine at the altar and I was in the pew clapping to the music and enjoying the wash of emotions and goodwill from all the people up at the front, when a woman came up to me. I vaguely knew her by sight; she was an older woman in the inner circle of the Cool Kids’ Club. She wasn’t someone I normally talked to because of our age difference and the simple fact that I didn’t think she approved of me much. She began to make friendly conversation with me about Gene’s church before dropping a bombshell.

“I guess I’m not surprised you two went there, after what Biff did at Daniel’s deathbed vigil.”

I stopped cold and stared at her. “What do you mean?” I asked, a lump forming in my stomach.

She looked surprised. “He didn’t tell you? He invaded Daniel’s hospital room with a bottle of oil and wanted to pray over him for healing the night he died.” She went on to share that Biff’s demands had really disturbed and rattled the lead pastor and his wife (Daniel’s in-laws, remember) and Daniel’s distraught family. They’d more or less thrown him out on his ear. That night Daniel had died. The very next Sunday we were at Gene’s church.

Somehow Biff hadn’t told me about this incident.

The world froze. We talk about it as a metaphor, but it really felt like the world froze right then as I absorbed her words.

I looked up toward the altar where Biff was praying with people and babbling in “tongues.” He was already glistening with sweat from his exertions as he rocked someone back and forth who was about to get “infilled” as dozens of Christians surrounded them both and prayed over Biff’s victim. This command performance was his favorite part of going to church, but he never got to do that at Gene’s church; everybody there was already Christian, and Gene wasn’t that kind of emotional pastor. Plus, the sort of emotional catharsis that feels wonderful in big crowds feels a bit bizarre in small ones. Biff also fancied himself a “youth minister,” but Gene’s church only had two kids in it. In a flash of insight I realized what a mismatch Biff was for Gene’s church, yet my husband never complained or suggested returning to our original church home. Now I understood why that might be.

Biff hadn’t told me about going to Daniel’s hospital room at all. He’d never even mentioned it. He hadn’t said a word. He’d gone to the church that night, he’d said, while I stayed home studying. He’d presented our move to Gene’s church as just a logical step to support our friends in their effort to plant a new church.

I wasn’t that angry about his deception–remember, I liked Gene and his wife and that little church, and I had known for quite some time that Biff was a deceiver and liar; it wasn’t shocking at all that he might omit important details if those details made him look really bad. But I was more disturbed than I could say about one thing that loomed in my mind above all else.

Of all people, the pastor and his wife, Daniel’s in-laws, Daniel’s wife, Daniel’s kids, they should have known that prayer worked. Of all people, they above all should have welcomed a man of deep faith and conviction coming in to anoint a sick man to heal him. Whatever else you could say about Biff, and believe me you could say a lot about him that wasn’t really complimentary, he was so far past “rock-solid” in this religion thing that he probably wouldn’t even register on the scales of sincerity. But the people in that room had thrown him out.

Now I see that of course they reacted that way. Biff’s behavior was hugely disrespectful at a time when they were trying to say goodbye in as dignified a manner as they could to a much-beloved friend and family member. I knew exactly how Biff would have stomped in there and how dramatically he’d have declared his intentions. It would have been a Hollywood-worthy scene. My “now” eye sees the scene and cringes, and I totally understand why they did what they did. But at the time, their reaction destroyed something I’d been clinging to very hard.

When push came to shove, the people who preached the most about the power of prayer didn’t really believe prayer worked. They knew Biff’s actions wouldn’t heal Daniel and they knew that Daniel was doomed despite all their prayers and “claims of healing” of God. Just as every other sane person in the world did, they lived their actual everyday lives with all the human assurances necessary to get through the day: insurance, medicine, jobs, etc. We all talked a really big game about prayer and what it could do, but none of us really believed it. Not even me; I hadn’t even bothered asking for some time. When people actually tried to live the words out by refusing medical care for themselves or something, we rightly called those people nutbars and made sure their kids at least weren’t suffering for their parents’ zealotry.

I saw these things in a split-second while the church lady prattled on in fake sympathy about how embarrassed everybody had been for Biff, and how happy they all were to see Biff back here to make up with Daniel’s family, and of course nobody held it against him that he’d tried his best to help. I don’t even remember what-all she said specifically. I was dazed–shell-shocked. I wonder today if she knows how much she had to do with my later deconversion; even today I have no idea whatsoever just what her goal was in telling me what she did. (If you have a reasonable guess, you’re welcome to comment it. You know as much about the situation now as I ever did.)

On the way home, I decided that it was high time I did a Bible study asking for discernment regarding prayer, and soon you will hear what led me to decide not to go back to church on that fateful morning not long after this day.

Oh, and I asked Biff about what’d happened at Daniel’s deathbed vigil, but I could tell this was a really tender, sore topic for my husband. I very quickly dropped it, and we never mentioned it again, not even in fights, not even at the peak of my apostasy. I understood completely and even today don’t hold against him that he didn’t want to discuss the matter.

Some stuff you just don’t talk about.

Here’s the link to this article.

For decades, Christians have lamented their inability to pray regularly. And for decades, they’ve tried dishonest reframing to make prayer sound infinitely more exciting and effective than it really is.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

JAN 20, 2023

If there’s one universal complaint I’ve heard from Christians, one monolithic sore spot that seems to affect almost all of them, it is their inability to establish prayer habits. Even the most fervent and gung-ho of them willingly admit that their prayer lives are lacking.

But instead of stressing the real-world good of cultivating such a habit, Christians tend to try to drill down harder on the imaginary aspects of what they’re doing.

Prayer 101

Religious people call the process of talking to their god(s) prayer. Christians almost universally believe that prayer works all kinds of miracles. Their Bible commands them to pray without ceasing. In the gospels, Jesus is often seen praying and admonishing his followers to pray.

In the modern day, Christians believe that their god actually listens to their prayers. Many even believe that he responds to them in some way: giving them comfort, answering their questions, telling them what to do next, and more. They’ve even defined different kinds of prayer:

• Praise and adoration
• Petition (asking for stuff)
• Intercession (asking for stuff still, but for someone else)
• Confession (apologizing for stuff so they don’t go to Hell)
• Thanksgiving (for the stuff they think their god did for them)

In times of great stress, Christians learn that they should pray for help and comfort. (I recently saw The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). One hostage character prayed almost the entire way through the movie. This wasn’t particularly played for laughs.)

But Christians also learn that they should pray all the rest of the time too, and to cultivate what they call a prayer life. Their leaders teach them that prayer is a sublime and fulfilling experience—a sort of red Bat-Phone call straight to Heaven.

And the problem: Christians tend to neglect prayer

Despite centuries of consistent education on this topic, Christians don’t pray much at all. A 2021 Pew Research survey found that the number of Christians claiming to pray daily fell from 58% in 2007 to 45% in 2021. Meanwhile, the number of people saying they seldom or never pray rose from 18% in 2007 to 32% in 2021. Those are some serious shifts!

I use the word “claiming” up there on purpose. I’m pretty sure that Christians not only vastly inflate how much prayer they do, but that they also count any kind of prayer as prayer. That means quick blessings over their meals, ritualistic requests for divine protection before they start driving anywhere, or the brief little prayers they say over social media entreaties. These are simple magical invocations, no different from Wiccans saying “so mote it be.” And they’re certainly not what Christian leaders mean when they talk about cultivating a prayer life.

I can absolutely assure you that 45% of Americans are not actually getting on their knees in their war room to pray for hours on end for Republicans to win the next election and Aunt Nancy’s Stage IV cancer to go into spontaneous remission—much less to tell Jesus for hours at a time how wonderful he is.

Even in the most fervent evangelical circles, it’s always perfectly safe to lament one’s neglect of prayer. Usually, this confession prompts everyone listening to nod along in chagrined silence.

The stakes for neglecting prayer

One evangelical site, The Gospel Coalition (TGC), understands exactly what the stakes are here:

It’s shameful but true. Christians have long struggled to exercise their most astounding privilege: permission to approach the throne of grace and talk to God, communicating with the One who makes and rules the world, who creates and redeems, who loves with an everlasting love that has overcome the power of sin, death, and the Devil. Though such a privilege takes our breath away when rightly understood, it is all-too-often neglected, taken for granted, and performed as if what we profess about God isn’t true.The Gospel Coalition

That last bit is the most telling: “performed as if what we profess about God isn’t true.”

Whatever Christians say they believe about prayer, their actual behavior reveals the truth. They’re well aware that prayer doesn’t actually spark miracles, get them tangible help in their lives, or offer them any gods standing by to take their calls—much less waiting on pins and needles to respond to them.

But their writer shoots himself in the foot by making a testable truth claim about the results of regular long-form prayer:

Imagine what would happen if we inched our way closer to prayer without ceasing. Imagine if we cultivated the faith, godly discipline, and habit of communicating with God as if he really were with us all the time, ruling our lives and our world in the way Scripture says.The Gospel Coalition

If only. But he’s right about one thing:

We must imagine this result, because there really aren’t any real-world examples he can point out to us.

Why Christians spend so little time on prayer, according to Christians

There’s no shortage of guesses in the Christ-o-sphere about why Christians have such a problem with prayer. One pastor begins his list of guesses with the usual confession:

Over the years I have been amazed at the paltry desire I’ve felt to pray. I am especially aware of this aversion just prior to the times that I’ve specifically set aside to pray, whether in private or with others.Daniel Henderson

His guesses about why this is the case include demons and Bad Christians™, of course:

1. “The independence of the flesh.” (In Christianese, the flesh means the material world, our bodies, and our very human desires and motivations.)
2. “The relentless attack of the enemy.” (In Christianese, the enemy always means demons. They are—as Umberto Eco once defined fascism so well—both enormously powerful and ridiculously weak.)
3. “The busyness of our modern lives.” (He name-drops Charles Spurgeon, who gaslit evangelicals for decades to come by defining prayer as “a saving of time.”)
4. “The unpleasant memory of previous experiences.” (He goes on to explain that anyone who turns Christians off to prayer meetings is just a Bad Christian™ who has forgotten what Original First-Century Christianity is all about.)

Overall, his guesses can be found repeated all throughout the Christ-o-sphere. TGC adds an interesting new guess in their own post: “Surely,” he asserts, “this has a great deal to do with our lack of understanding about the nature of prayer.” (Even his own cited sources don’t come close to supporting that guess!)

The solution: Reframing prayer as exciting!

As you might have noticed already, Christians have a couple of different strategies for dealing with this lack of prayer in their ranks. TGC’s writer thought that the solution was simply (re-)telling Christians what he thinks the Bible says about prayer.

(Here, I’ll note only this: My last real act as a Christian, besides one last agonized prayer, was studying what the Bible says about prayer. That’s when I finally understood that it looks nothing like how Christians describe it, and nothing like reality either. Just like that, one of the most important taps feeding my faith pool turned off.)

But most Christians go another route. They try to make prayer sound incredibly exciting, rewarding, and magically effective. In other words, they reframe prayer. We’ve already seen one such attempt in the quotes I’ve offered above.

There’s nothing wrong with reframing, as long as the results are still true and accurate. It can be a healthy way to get past a problem. Sometimes people just need another way to look at a situation. When it’s done to manipulate, though, and it describes something that isn’t true or accurate, then there’s a lot wrong with it. Then, it becomes gaslighting.

In this case, Christians already know that prayer is boring, unrewarding, and the opposite of effective. They’ve done enough prayer to know! They’ve watched themselves do it!

Reframing in action

In 2019, a Calvinist evangelical, Derek Rishmawy, tried hard to reframe prayer:

There are many reasons I don’t pray: distraction, busyness, or the sense that I should be doing something. These are all terrible, of course, but I think the saddest reason is simply boredom. If you’ve grown up in church or simply acclimatized to the secular air we breathe, prayer can appear as small potatoes. It’s something good you know you’re supposed to do because God, like your Great Aunt Suzy, would like you to call more often. But there is little urgency or anticipation.

How much would change, I wonder, if we looked to the story of Moses and the burning bush as our paradigm for prayer?Derek Rishmawy, Christianity Today

He ends with a crescendo of reframed enthusiasm:

Certainly, there is no place for lethargy or boredom. To pray is to enter the Temple, the high and exalted place, where the Holy One dwells in majestic light (Isa. 57:15). It is to call on the name of Yahweh, the fear of Israel (Isa. 8:13).

Considering the One we are praying to, there should be an exhilarating rush of adrenaline and a quickening of the pulse when we take God’s name on our lips. [. . .] Prayer is nothing less than an intimate encounter with the voice from the Flame.Derek Rishmawy, Christianity Today

Impressive, eh? But I wonder how well this reframing attempt worked for him. Does he still find it difficult to find time to pray, even after positioning prayer in this impossibly grandiose way? I bet he does, because back in my Pentecostal days decades ago, my crowd did the exact same thing. And yet we still had trouble finding time to pray.

When the reframing attempt draws a picture that the target knows isn’t true, then it becomes dishonest. The Bible can talk about burning bushes all it wants. Any Christian who’s done more than a few prayer sessions knows perfectly well that it doesn’t feel even a little like “an intimate encounter with the voice from the Flame.” That Bible story describes an encounter that looks like the polar opposite of prayer.

Christians’ dishonest reframing attempts might even backfire by making their targets curious, as I once was, about what the Bible really says about prayer.

When rubber meets the road, Christians vote with their time

We make time for that which is important to us. If we say we know something is terribly important, but we don’t make time for it, that should tip us off about our real priorities.

Sure, we do this all the time with stuff we know is actually good for us. Right now, gym members are likely still dealing with the “resolutioners” who flood their facilities every January. In a few more weeks, most of those folks will be gone.

Exercise is important. It’s one of the best ways humans have to stay happy, healthy, and long-lived. In the moment of exercising, our bodies release all kinds of feel-good chemicals. We’re meant to be active. Our bodies suffer greatly when we’re not. And yet somehow our busy lives get in the way of doing the thing.

The difference between exercise and prayer should be obvious, however. One is a proven-effective activity with observable results. The other has never been shown to do anything that Christians frequently claim it does.

One activity similar to prayer, meditation, appears to have real benefits for those practicing it. Practiced in a similar way, prayer might accomplish similar benefits. But I doubt Christians would ever officially adopt that style of prayer, even if they evolve singly, Christian by Christian, informal redefinitions that inch closer to the truth of the matter (as I also did).

By now, Christians have developed a cultural view of prayer that is both impossibly lofty and completely removed from even their own reality. Nothing else will please most of them. So dishonest reframing it is and shall be forevermore!

Christians will keep dishonestly reframing prayer to try to motivate themselves to do it more often, and they will still keep having trouble finding time to pray. Truly, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Here’s the link to this article.

I suppose it keeps them out of trouble, but it won’t do much to save their ailing denomination.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

NOV 06, 2022

Overview:

Over the past couple of years, the SBC’s newest schism has centered around the question of women pastors.

After decades of decline, the hardline ultraconservative faction has swung into action to cast out one megachurch for appointing three women pastors.

Though hundreds of SBC churches have women pastors, suddenly it’s a big deal. They’re ignoring all of the denomination’s problems to focus on this one extremely secondary issue—the hill they will die upon.

Reading Time: 10 MINUTES

The argument over women pastors is heating up for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). They’ve been in decline for many decades now, by their own reckoning, with a protracted and uninterrupted drop in membership for the last 15 years or so. And yet their current strategy involves attacking anyone who’s even sympathetic to the notion of women pastors. To outsiders, this newest strategy might not make a whole lot of sense. But to Southern Baptist leaders, it’s the hands-down most important question of their day.

The absolute state of the SBC

When I said the SBC has been in decline for decades, I referred to what they call their baptism ratio. This is the number of baptisms they score compared to their overall membership: 1 person baptized per however many existing members. It’s a measure of their recruitment effectiveness more than anything else, a marker of how well their resources function to draw in new SBC-lings.

Many years ago, SBC leaders decided that recruitment is their ride-or-die mission. That makes their baptism ratio their ride-or-die statistic.

They’ve kept track of this ratio for a long time through their Annual Reports. From the late 1800s to the 1970s, sometimes it’d dip as low as 1:20, or it might rise as high as 1:31. But after 1975, it never dipped below 1:30 again. In 1986, it reached the 40s for the first time. By 2002, it stayed in the 40s for good.

After hovering in the 40s for a while, the 2013 report reveals it hitting 1:50 for the first time. By 2019, they’d dipped to 1:60, and would never see the 50s again. And the pandemic walloped them clear to 1:114. They’ve only slightly recovered from that drop by rising back up to 1:88. They might recover a bit more this year, but I doubt they’ll ever see the 60s again.

Membership has also struggled mightily. After reporting 16M members in the 2002 report and swelling to 16.3M by 2007, that figure, too, began to drop: 15M by 2012, 14M by 2019, and finally 13M in 2022, its most recent report. The last time they had 13M members was in 1983.

Focusing on anything but their decline

As you can tell from the numbers, the SBC’s decline has been accelerating in recent years. Various scandals and crises, like the 2019 “Abuse of Faith” crisis detailing the pervasiveness of sex abuse and cover-ups in pastoral ranks, have shattered the flocks’ confidence in their leaders. The SBC has also proven singularly incapable of responding well to Americans’ growing secularization.

Instead of finding recruitment or retention methods that work, they continue to rely on their old manipulative methods that only alienate them from the youngest generations.

One might think that a denomination that is in a decline this marked might be concentrating on retention, at least. But no.

They’re arguing about women pastors.

As in, pastors who are women. Specifically as in, SBC pastors who are women. And the SBC church leaders that have hired them, or might one day potentially hire them, or are even halfway sympathetic to the idea of some other SBC church potentially hiring them one day.

The SBC’s long and difficult relationship with women pastors

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the SBC underwent a schism that its victors now call the Conservative Resurgence. By planting ultraconservative allies in key positions throughout the denomination, and capturing its presidency for a set period of time, a small cabal of plotters drove out every church and church leader who was even vaguely non-conservative. Then, they set about progress-proofing the SBC for what they hoped would be all time.

And the entire official reason why they did all that, why they drove away literally thousands of member churches, literally why they went to all this trouble and planning and scheming, was to prevent women from becoming SBC pastors.

In the heyday of women’s rights advances, a number of women were making tracks toward pastor jobs in SBC churches. This development deeply alarmed the schemers.

Here is how Al Mohler, one of the earliest cronies and lickspittles of the takeover, put it:

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., recalled in a seminary chapel sermon the reaction when the Southern Baptist Convention in 1984 for the first time adopted a resolution declaring the office of pastor is restricted to men qualified by Scripture.

“That incited one of the most incredible denominational controversies — in the midst of that great controversy of the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s — that one could imagine.”Baptist News Global, 2010

He’d been a student aching for power back then, and initially he was very sympathetic to the idea of women pastors. But his Dear Leaders soon humiliated him into line.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that women pastors became the singular doctrinal crisis that drove the takeover of the SBC. The winners might claim it was over literalism and inerrancy, sure. But it was literalism and inerrancy in the service of barring women from pastorships.

So yes, it’s sort of like the role slavery played in the American Civil War.

In the case of women pastors during the Conservative Resurgence, those ultraconservative schemers won that fight.

Preventing women pastors is the NUMBER ONE PRIORITY for these guys

By the year 2000, the deed was done—at which point SBC leaders brought forth the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, or BFM2k. It’s like their Constitution. Here is what Article VI says about how a church ought to be structured:

Its scriptural officers are pastors and deacons. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.BFM2k, Article VI

For the past 20ish years, SBC-lings have considered this dictate to be as binding as the Bible itself. (Well, at least the parts that aren’t too uncomfortable to follow literally, like all those strange-seeming dietary laws.) In short, SBC churches aren’t allowed to have women pastors—and the BFM2k wrote that rule in stone.

But then, something happened along the way to the Annual Meeting a few years ago:

“Abuse of Faith.”

Abuse of Faith became a lightning rod of controversy and change

That’s the name that secular journalists gave the SBC’s sex-abuse crisis. Back in 2019, those journalists uncovered and publicly revealed decades of sex abuse and cover-ups in the SBC’s (male) pastoral ranks. This abuse and its cover-ups infested the entire denomination, and it reached all the way up to the SBC’s highest ranks.

As outraged SBC-lings wrestled with this crisis, new calls for women pastors rang out. Perhaps more and more SBC-lings had begun to notice that when demographic groups are disenfranchised from power, they become powerless—and then they become prey for the powerful. After all, the same thing had happened with Black people under “separate but equal” laws. (That’s why our government abolished the entire legal fiction of separate-but-equal. And here, it’s worth noting that the SBC has another long and very troubled history with racism.)

Or maybe SBC-lings just saw women pastors as part of an overarching move toward progress.

Whatever the case, more and more ultraconservative SBC-lings and leaders became alarmed over the new inroads SBC women were making toward positions of power.

It was like the Conservative Resurgence hadn’t even happened!

Leaping into action to solve the biggest problem in the whole entire dadgum dang ol’ world

It’s interesting to me to note that the SBC’s top leaders have fought like three cats in a pillowcase over how to handle Abuse of Faith.

One faction, which I’ve dubbed the Old Guard, wants to do basically nothing about it: let churches handle it however they see fit, but they insist that it’s not the denomination’s responsibility at all. (That worked great for decades, right? At least for the most powerful men in the SBC.) The other faction, which I call the Pretend Progressives, want to tackle it in only slightly more meaningful ways.

The Old Guard viciously attacks their enemy faction for focusing on abuse rather than recruitment. Meanwhile, the Pretend Progressives seem focused on fixing the problem without doing anything too invasive or extensive. As well, both factions are deeply concerned about recruitment levels and tanking retention rates. But each has its own strategy for dealing with those: the Old Guard wants everyone to just Jesus harder, while the Pretend Progressives introduce endless cringey evangelism campaigns that quickly fizzle and fade away.

At least, that’s how things have been going for several years.

But now, women pastors have overtaken the sex-abuse crisis as the factions’ main argument.

Anatomy of a new schism

It’s like watching a particularly-bad reboot of an old movie franchise. Women pastors have become the new argument, the new political football, the new scapegoat for everything that each faction views as wrong with the SBC today.

Last year, at the SBC’s 2021 Annual Meeting, each faction presented a number of initiatives for the denomination to work on during the next year. One of these involved tackling the question of the growing numbers of women pastors in the SBC. This was a solidly Old Guard initiative. But both factions’ leaders officially oppose women pastors. (In the 2021 President’s Address in the Annual Report on page 115, J.D. Greear—a solid Pretend Progressive—states that the SBC’s rules are “crystal clear” regarding no women pastors.)

On page 169 of the 2021 Annual Report, we see an initiative from 2019 that requested the addition of “and function” to Article VI. Its proposer wanted it to read:

While men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office and function of pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture.2021 Annual Report, p. 169

That “and function” is very important right now. SBC ultraconservatives do not want women as pastors. But in addition, they also don’t want women doing anything that even smells like pastoral work.

So during the 2022 Annual Meeting, the question arose again. This time, the initiative’s proposer asked for even more sweeping language in the BFM2k:

“That Article III, Section 1, of the SBC Constitution be amended to add ‘(6) Does not
affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.’”2022 Annual Report, p. 57

And that bit about “affirm[ing]” isn’t accidental, either.

Ultraconservatives don’t just want to attack churches that hire women pastors. They want to destroy anyone who even thinks that idea is fine by Jesus.

Right now, that means Saddleback Church.

Why Saddleback Church is at the center of the maelstrom over women pastors

Rick Warren is the former head pastor of Saddleback Church. He wrote the popular Purpose-Driven Life series.

Saddleback Church itself is a megachurch. Like most of its breed, it is so large that its leaders employ a large flotilla of sub-pastors.

And in May 2021, Saddleback hired three women pastors to be part of that flotilla.

Now, Saddleback Church isn’t the first SBC church to do this. Not by a longshot. The SBC, and in particular Al Mohler, likes to pretend otherwise, but Saddleback isn’t alone here at all. As a hardline Old Guard site pointed out in 2020, the SBC contains hundreds of churches that are pastored by women.

Of course, that’s hundreds of churches out of 47,614 churches (as of 2021). But as those hardliners point out, they tend to be the biggest churches in the SBC:

One writer gave us a list of a whole bunch of churches with pastors without the Y chromosome, but we likewise did a big expose on this too last year, when we discovered that 10% of the biggest churches in the Southern Baptist Convention have women pastors on staff, and another 15% have women functioning in the role of pastor, just without the title. 47 of them based on 466 churches. Add another 35,000 churches to the list, and it doesn’t take much to know we have a problem.Pulpit & Pen

THE HORROR!

They went on to name some of those “biggest churches,” too. (Part of me wonders if their flocks even know they attend an SBC-branded church. Some SBC churches seem to try very hard to obscure that connection.)

But the biggest, best-recognized name in the list is arguably Saddleback. And so Saddleback has become the newest scapegoat in this newest schism.

The retaliation against Saddleback has already begun

Dysfunctional authoritarians, like those we find at the rotted heart of evangelicalism, tend to retaliate brutally hard against dissenters and heretics. However, in modern evangelicalism there are simply so many of those that the tribe has to focus its efforts on those who stand out from the rest. By being such a high-prominence, well-known megachurch, Saddleback has lifted itself into prime position as a perfect retaliation target.

So in the 2021 Annual Report (p. 74), we find someone requesting that the SBC “break fellowship” with Saddleback.” (In Christianese, “break fellowship” means kicking out and ostracizing someone until they mend their ways.) The requester specifically names, as his reason for this request, the ordination of those three women pastors.

In 2022’s Annual Report (p. 60-61), the SBC’s leaders render their verdict. Or rather, their non-verdict:

The Credentials Committee reports. . . that it is unable to form an opinion regarding the relationship of Saddleback Church to the Southern Baptist Convention, until clarity is provided regarding the use of the title “pastor” for staff positions with different responsibility and authority than that of the lead pastor.2022 Annual Report, page 61

Then, they punted to the future. They asked their fellow SBC leaders to appoint yet-another-committee this year to study the all-important question of exactly what the words “office of pastor” mean, then report back at the 2023 Annual Meeting. Then, they can figure out how to handle women pastors. Only then can they decide upon Saddleback’s fate.

Women pastors, and the problems nobody has been able to solve

The attacks on Saddleback are already just incredible in their animosity, as are the arguments around women pastors. I cannot imagine how that’s going to heat up over the coming months.

Rick Warren himself has pronounced the issue “secondary.” He’s right—at least in the grand scheme of things, and for the SBC itself. But in another way, this issue is not only primary but possibly the most important argument in the entire denomination’s recent history.

Here’s why:

Nobody in the entire SBC has ever managed to figure out any way to end their hemorrhage of members, much less to reverse their decline. Nor has anybody in the SBC ever come up with any reliable method of recruitment that actually works, much less any method that their increasingly confrontation-averse flocks are actually willing to do. Every proposal evangelicals have ever put into action on the evangelism front has failed, often hilariously. And cracking down harder on authoritarianism to improve retention has led only to new abuse scandals.

Adding to those woes, now they’ve got this huge sex-abuse crisis that’s now three years old, almost four. It began in February 2019. In those almost-four-years, the SBC has barely managed to fully identify the problem. Addressing it meaningfully might take another four!

For most of those almost-four-years, the Old Guard have simply denied they have any duty to handle the problem, while the Pretend Progressives have either dragged their feet or introduced ridiculous busy-work like Caring Well as a substitute for meaningful action.

In situations like this one, I can easily imagine the sheer relief the leaders of both factions felt when the topic of women pastors crossed their paths.

Clearly, the best way to handle unsolvable problems is to find something else to argue about

In a lot of ways, this fight must feel like a welcome distraction from all those other problems that neither faction can adequately address.

It is also a shorthand, dogwhistle-loaded battle that each faction’s leaders are using to highlight their own imagined superiority over their enemies.

The Old Guard’s leaders sneer: THEY want to “reinterpret the BFM 2000” just like “classic liberal[s]” always do. Stop letting these liberalism-infected elites mangle TRUE CHRISTIANITY™!

The Pretend Progressives piously respond: Oh yeah? Well, THEY want to deny the important historical role of evangelical women serving in ministry, thus rejecting Jesus’ decision to call women to these roles! Stop letting ultraconservatives wreck Jesus’ ineffable plan!

And while the factions wrangle over this question, gaining followers and votes and swaying decisions as best they can, the actual real problems of the SBC—retention, recruitment, and that still-almost-entirely-unaddressed abuse crisis—continue to fester.

I’m absolutely positive that both factions’ leaders hope that by the time any of those three problems become completely unavoidable dealbreakers, they’ll be long retired and living out their sunset years in luxury.

But in the meanwhile, they have a football in play that is clearly acceptable to both factions. The battle over women pastors is, unlike all three of those other problems, a winnable battle.

Whoever wins this fight will control the SBC for the foreseeable future, just as the people who won the last fight won the Conservative Resurgence. It is a proxy fight masking the real priorities of those who fight the battle for ownership over what is still the biggest Protestant denomination in America.

Here’s the link to this article.

But that’s not even close to their biggest problem.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

MAY 19, 2023

Overview:

The 2023 Book of Reports contains several key takeaways: a devastating membership drop, huge losses of member churches, and nowhere near enough bounceback in their baptism metrics.

Of note, the report also provides a little information about an ongoing federal investigation into possible criminal charges over their ongoing sex abuse crisis, as well as some distressing information about their summer recruitment drives for children.

Reading Time: 14 MINUTES

Despite its troubles, the Southern Baptist Convention remains the largest Protestant denomination in America. Every year ahead of its big Annual Meeting, their leaders release a sneak peek at the previous year’s metrics. And this year, that sneak peek has been spectacular. Let’s go over the numbers they’ve just released in their 2023 Book of Reports to see what this beleaguered denomination behemoth is dealing with nowadays.

(Author’s note: The figures I’m citing in this post come from Southern Baptist Convention Annual Reports, which are all available here. Each report covers the previous year’s performance.)

Takeaway 1: The worst-ever Southern Baptist Convention membership drop

Most of the significant metrics can be found on page 8 of their 2023 Book of Reports (page numbers reflect the pages of the PDF file itself). As with all Southern Baptist Annual Reports, these figures cover the previous year.

And last year, their total membership fell from 13,680,493 to 13,223,122. That is a drop of 457,371. That number represents the biggest drop in total membership in the entire history of the Southern Baptist Convention. Since their decline began in earnest in the 2000s, they’ve usually faced drops of about 200k. For example, from 2014 to 2015, they lost 204,409 members. Their previous contender for biggest drop ever came in 2020, when they lost 435,632 people from the previous year’s count.

The last time they stood at 13.2M members was around 1979, when they recorded 13.3M. But those were their halcyon days of explosive growth, as we’ll see in a moment.

Takeaway 2: Baptisms

The 2023 Book of Reports does contain smidgens of good news for Southern Baptists, and their small bounce-back on baptisms is one of those smidgens. Long ago, Southern Baptist leaders decided that their most important focus would be on recruitment. And they’d measure recruitment effectiveness by baptisms. With baptism, new members make a formal statement of affiliation and obedience to both Southern Baptist Convention rules and ideology.

So when baptism metrics falter, Southern Baptist folks get twitchy.

Of course, the pandemic completely destroyed most churches’ and denominations’ performance metrics. This one is no different. Indeed, in 2019 they claimed 235,748 baptisms. But in 2020, they record only 123,160—a precipitous drop indeed. In the two years since, they’ve bounced back by inches: 154,701 in 2021, and now 180,177 in 2022. They are still nowhere near the slow-but-inexorable decline in baptisms that they’ve seen over the past 15-ish years, but they’re hyping this slight increase with all the gusto they can muster.

With baptism, new SBC members make a formal statement of affiliation and obedience. So when baptism metrics falter, Southern Baptist folks get twitchy.

I’d really love to know exactly who’s getting dunked here. Around 2014, a Southern Baptist baptism task force admitted that 80% of their churches weren’t baptizing more than 1 young adults (age 18-29) per year, and that “the only consistently growing age group in baptisms is age 5 and under.” I also know that evangelicals do love to be re-baptized for various reasons (joining a new church, sliding from one denomination to another, wanting to reconfirm their vows to Jesus after periods of laxity, etc).

Takeaway 3: The all-important Southern Baptist baptism ratio

Ever since they began calling themselves the Southern Baptist Convention, these evangelicals have tracked what they call their baptism ratio. This is their ride-or-die, make-or-break statistic. It’s simply a ratio that expresses how effective Southern Baptist recruitment attempts are: the number of baptisms according to the total number of Southern Baptist members overall. It tells us how many Southern Baptist members’ resources it takes to bag one baptism.

If someone doesn’t understand this ratio’s drastic importance, not much else about Southern Baptists will make sense. It’s how J.D. Greear could claim that the Southern Baptist Convention has been in decline for forty years: Their baptism ratio began to tank in the mid-1980s. Even though their membership continued to grow by leaps and bounds, their baptism ratio told the true story: their recruitment simply wasn’t as effective as it’d once been.

Southern Baptist leaders used to really like seeing that ratio in the 1:20 range, but 1:30 was okay in a pinch. It ranged in the 1:20s until the mid-1960s. Then, it ranged in the 1:30s all the way until 1985, when it hit 1:41 for the first time. The denomination flirted with the high 1:30s and low 1:40s until 2001. After that point, they never saw the 1:30s ever again.

If you’re now suspecting that this ratio’s decline is accelerating, you’re quite right. In 2012, it hit 1:50. At the time, I saw a lot of Southern Baptist leaders fretting hard about that and spilling great amounts of digital ink lamenting it. None of it mattered, though, because it just kept getting worse. In 2018, it hit 1:60 (and Southern Baptist leaders were generally silent about it this time). Then, the pandemic walloped them with 1:114 in 2020. They clawed their way back to 1:88 in 2021, and now it sits at 1:73 in 2022.

To put this into perspective, remember that 1979 membership figure, 13.3M? That year, they recorded 368k baptisms for a ratio of 1:36. Had they been operating with 1:73, as they did this past year, that would have given them only about 172k baptisms. That’s less than half what they managed in 1979 with far more effective recruitment. And even then, they already knew their baptism ratio told a story of dwindling effectiveness.

So yes, the denomination’s leaders are trying very hard to celebrate a small bounce back. I don’t think it’ll bounce much further back; most evangelicals seemed to forget all about the pandemic last year and were living life on normal mode again. So I think Southern Baptist leaders will be very lucky indeed if they ever see the high end of the 1:60s ever again.

Takeaway 4: Possibly the biggest-ever drop in Southern Baptist member churches as well

In 2022, the Southern Baptist Convention went from 47,614 to 47,198 member churches. That’s a net loss of 416 churches.

I’ve never seen such a huge drop in member churches. Most reports proudly point to an increase there, not a decrease. In 2018, they lost 88 churches, but normally they gain a few hundred. Even in the sheer chaos of 2020, they added 62 new churches. In 2021, they added only 22, but that’s still a teeny tiny bit of growth.

As I said, this is, of course, a net total. Churches always open and close in the Southern Baptist Convention. Even during their last schism, the Conservative Resurgence that saw almost 2000 churches leave the denomination in 1990, they consistently saw their member church totals do nothing but rise. In the past, I’ve even found specific strategies used by this denomination’s leaders to keep the number of churches growing overall by flinging new churches everywhere to keep pace with closures. Keeping that number rising is a big priority for them.

(Related: Wait, HOW many churches close each year?)

But this past year, nobody could work around or massage that tally into positive net growth.

That drop tells us quite a story on its own

Back in 1979, 13.3M Southern Baptist members squeezed into 35,605 member churches. Now, 13.2M Southern Baptist members spread out comfortably among 47,198 churches. We don’t know what attendance looked like in 1979, since the denomination wasn’t tracking it in their Annual Reports. But since they started recording it around 1992, attendance has fallen from 40-45% of membership to about 35% of it. That’s all perfectly normal. Even the most devout evangelicals can barely be arsed to show up in church every few Sundays. (It’s probably for the best. If the number of Christians claiming rock-solid every-Sunday attendance actually did it, churches couldn’t possibly hold all of them.)

At least, that’s how things looked until the pandemic.

The pandemic decimated attendance figures. In-person counts dropped from 5.2M in 2019 (36.1%) to 4.4M in 2020 (31.5%). So for their 2022 report, Southern Baptist leaders decided to wrap online church participation in with in-person headcounts for their 2021 figure. That got them 3.6M in-person attendees plus 1.4M claimed online participation, for a total of 5.05M (36.9%). For 2022’s counts, they got 3.8M in-person attendees and 1.06M online attendees, for a total of 4.86M (36.7%).

For the past couple of years, though, I’ve been hearing about how the pandemic has destroyed church finances across the board. At the same time, it’s crushed the spirits of many evangelical pastors who began seeing a darker side of their flocks that they really hadn’t known existed. So it’s not just the Southern Baptist Convention’s twin crises of racism and sex abuse that are alienating evangelicals en masse. It’s also the general toxicity of evangelicals and the sheer financial difficulty of operating a church—even with the incredible tax breaks churches get from our secular government.

When a Southern Baptist church closes, then, all of its claimed members vanish along with it. The denomination’s leaders have known for years that large numbers of churches are closing, and their go-to solution has always been to drown out that truth with tons of new church plants. This time, there’s no drowning out a voice that loud and insistent. Even with them adding 917 new congregations to their member rolls (as we see on p. 93), they ended up with that net loss of 416 this past year.

And one interesting omission from the 2023 Book of Reports

Various news articles online about this year’s reports cite an increase in “undesignated receipts.” And yes, they did rise somewhat over last year, from $9.7B to $9.9B.

What’s so strange is that the 2023 Book of Reports doesn’t list total receipts.

They’ve always listed both together before. Even in the 2022 report, we see total receipts ($11.8B) right under undesignated receipts (again, $9.7B). As far back as I can find, they’ve listed total receipts. Even with the pandemic’s devastation, they’ve listed both amounts.

But for some weird reason, the 2023 report doesn’t include total receipts. It’s not happening because this isn’t the full Annual Report, either. In 2021, we had a similar situation with the Book of Reports coming out ahead of the formal Annual Report released after the Annual Meeting. However, Total Receipts is definitely in that report in several places.

Page 77 indicates that total receipts increased by $304M in 2021. That is true. They recorded it in the 2022 Annual Report. But they also don’t tell us what last year’s total receipts were in this current year’s report.

We can make some educated guesses here. If Southern Baptist reports omit figures they usually include, there’s usually only one reason for it.

Also, on page 7 of the PDF in the 2023 report, we can see that Total Cooperative Program donations fell about $500k from the previous year. Though it’s a tiny drop (.11%) percentage-wise, that drop could function as an editorial comment or vote of no confidence, since churches have in the past threatened to withhold funds from that program over squabbles.

So yes, I am intensely curious about this total receipts situation.

Other interesting takeaways

Back in 2013, Southern Baptist leaders realized that almost no members left anything to their churches in their wills. They dearly wanted to get some of that free money. Page 47 of the 2023 Book of Reports proudly reveals that their action in this area has produced luscious fruit. The Southern Baptist Convention went from $23M in future gifts in wills in 2013 to $628M in 2022.

On page 50 of the PDF, we learn that their Ministers’ Financial Assistance program paid out $11.6M in assistance in 2022. That’s a sharp rise from $8.8M in 2021. That money goes to retired ministers in financial distress, as well as their spouses and widows. About 2/3 of recipients are pastors’ widows. This program sets age and tenure requirements, as well as poverty income requirements for larger amounts of help. Someone living under the program’s poverty level cutoff with 25+ years of ministerial service (or marriage to someone who had it) gets a whopping $550/month if single.

However, at the same time, 748 fewer people participated in their personal life insurance plans and 400 fewer participated in their medical and disability insurance plans. Group employee life insurance plans saw an increase in participants.

These are all absolutely awful numbers. Group employee life insurance plans had about 30k members covered. The personal plans cover almost 13k more members. But with 47,198 member churches and who even knows how many paid ministers and staffers beyond just pastors and their spouses to consider, I’d guess that barely 1/3 of Southern Baptist ministers and spouses are covered by any life insurance plans. The medical insurance plans fare even worse, covering about 25k members between group and personal plans.

I also note that most of their seminaries are struggling with declines in enrollment.

A bright spot of better news from Lifeway

On the plus side, Lifeway’s new president, Ben Mandrell, reports that the organization had “revenue growth” last year (p. 62). After how much Thom Rainer, the previous president, apparently mucked things up, I bet Southern Baptist Convention folks will be glad to hear that news.

Of course, in 2019 they closed all of their brick-and-mortar stores. That’ll lower expenses with a quickness.

On page 69, we also learn that Southern Baptist denominational and church leaders unabashedly consider Vacation Bible Schools to be evangelism opportunities. That means they are completely okay with indoctrinating and recruiting children, especially the children of unaffiliated adults who clearly don’t know that these recruitment events are far more than fun, supervised summer activities with a slight frosting of Jesus-ness to keep their kids busy.

The only moral recruitment is their recruitment. And every accusation is a confession. I hope non-evangelical parents are paying attention here.

Personally, I find Southern Baptists’ eagerness to hard-sell their religion to defenseless little kids to be downright sinister. I know they sense that 4-14 window closing fast on Gen Alpha, the children coming up next after Gen Z. However, that doesn’t excuse their desires. There’s nothing divine at all in Christianity, but there’s even less divine about the sheer Machiavellian nature of evangelicals’ intense focus on childhood indoctrination.

And a letter addressing that federal investigation

On page 11, we find a section titled “Significant actions of the SBC Executive Committee.” The Executive Committee is the denomination’s top-ranking group. They make the day-to-day decisions of the denomination all year long, as well as crafting budgets for the various denominational endeavors (like seminaries). In addition, the presidency of this committee has become the most recent battleground between the two current political factions of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Every year, this section runs after the metrics page. In previous years, it offered staffing news. It talked about people retiring, people getting hired or elected. It recounted lists of who occupied the committee’s top roles. Very rarely, we see important votes recorded—like in 2020, when the report discusses the vote the committee held in March 2020 to cancel that year’s Annual Meeting due to COVID-19.

But this year, the #1 item on the list concerns the Department of Justice’s decision to investigate the Southern Baptist Convention for possible crimes committed in its shielding and shuffling-around of sexual predators in ministry.

I looked, but have seen absolutely nothing about this investigation since August last year. But if the January 6 situation has taught me anything, it is that the wheels of justice grind very slowly—but exceedingly fine.

Of course, the letter in the report expresses complete cooperativeness with the federal investigation, as well as ongoing dedication to fully implement reforms to prevent future sex abuse. I’d expect nothing less, though I wonder how they’ll explain that their sweeping investigation has so far seen only one Southern Baptist church (Freedom Church of Vero Beach, Florida) kicked out of the denomination recently for not cooperating with a sex abuse investigation.

Maybe they need to consult their own secret abuser database for more churches to question.

(By contrast, between Fall 2022 and early 2023 they also kicked out one church for being too nice to gay people, as well as five churches for being okay with women pastors. And that first church had voted to leave the Southern Baptist Convention back in 1999. So they were surprised to hear that the denomination had formally kicked them out last year.)

Interestingly, this letter is not signed by any Executive Committee members—except for Willie McLaurin, its Interim President. Since the list is arranged alphabetically, he appears near the end. Drowning out his name, we see various other big-name Southern Baptist officers: seminary presidents, missionary organization presidents, the president of their financial planning group, leaders of important groups like Lifeway, and even the president of the Southern Baptist Convention himself, Bart Barber.

I understand why the denomination felt it was important to show their biggest names supporting the investigation to the hilt, but it’s still such a strange look.

About that Southern Baptist sound bite going around

It’s easy to see why even secular news sites have talked about the 2023 Book of Reports. All of them mention a sound bite mentioned in Lifeway’s article about the report:

The 457,371 members lost is the largest single year numerical drop in more than 100 years.Lifeway, May 9, 2023

That little bit of info appears in almost every article I’ve seen on the topic.

However, I genuinely don’t know where they’re getting that information. All of their Annual Reports are right online. Anybody can look at them and compile information from them. (In fact, every year I do exactly that.) So I went back over their reports from 1920-1925.

There was no membership dip. They grew from about 2.9M members (from the 1920 report) to 3.5M members recorded in 1925, all without a hiccup.

At most, they lost about 800 churches in 1924, 700ish of which were dropped due to an ongoing lack of contact for three year, they said. That same year, they recorded almost 30k fewer baptisms. Otherwise, it was another typical growth year in terms of membership and donations.

That said, I don’t think they’re lying. They’re just not being very specific. Maybe they’re thinking further back, around when a similar pandemic, this time of influenza, decimated communities around the world. If Lifeway mentioned that 100-years figure hoping people would connect their current difficulties to the pandemic we face now, it was a clever move—but I’m not sure that most people would make that connection.

Besides, their Annual Reports from 1916-1920 don’t record anything but membership growth, so that can’t be whatever they’re using as an example.

I’m really curious about what their biggest drop was, if 2022 wasn’t the gold-medal winner there.

I don’t think this Southern Baptist membership drop is just recordkeeping ‘finally catching up’

The director of Lifeway’s research division, Scott McConnell, theorizes that the drop in membership happened because “the record keeping is finally catching up” with long-inactive members. I’m not so sure that’s the reason.

In reality, several factors are contributing to that alarming drop.

First and foremost, churches are closing like whoa. As I said, when a church closes, all of its members leave the rolls. Churches are the ones reporting all of these numbers to each Annual Report. If nobody’s at the church to report those figures, their previous count zeroes out.

Second and almost as important, reporting is purely voluntary and seems to be entirely done on the honor system. The Southern Baptist Convention gathers these numbers through their Annual Church Profile (ACP), which isn’t at all mandatory. Entire state conventions don’t even ask for some of the information appearing in their summary tables.

For example, the Florida Baptist Convention didn’t ask for a total membership count in their ACP, while the state conventions of Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, the Pacific Northwest, and one of the Texas conventions didn’t ask about online worship participation. Moreover, if a church has nothing but bad news to report, nothing stops them from deciding maybe not to report it.

Even back in 2014, that baptism task force lamented that “[m]ore of our SBC churches in recent years fail to see the value of the annual reporting of statistics (Annual Church Profile),” which makes accurate assessment much more difficult. (However, they’re quick to add that their “statisticians” said there was still a baptism decline even if churches weren’t reporting.)

Third, yes indeed, churches are disaffiliating from the Southern Baptist Convention. In the vast majority of cases, they aren’t leaving over the denomination’s entrenched racism (as happened in 2020) or its slow response to its sex abuse crisis. (That said, I’ve found one former Southern Baptist church that appears to have disaffiliated in fear of its abusive pastor being discovered.)

Rather, they’re upset over what they view as an absolutely unacceptable drift toward liberalism. Yes, really.

However, the current Southern Baptist stronghold of ultraconservatism, the Conservative Baptist Network (CBN), still fights hard for control over the denomination. Their officially-stated reason for fighting is simple:

The Conservative Baptist Network believes the United States follows the SBC, seeing the SBC as “one of the few remaining roadblocks keeping liberalism from overtaking the United States.”Editorial in Baptist Standard, April 20, 2022

What a hilariously overblown sense of narcissistic importance! But I’d sure like to learn their second reason, because I’m certain they are even more motivated by the $10B+ dollars the Southern Baptist Convention still rakes in every year.

The upshot of the 2023 Southern Baptist Book of Reports

In this age of Christianity’s decline, the Southern Baptist Convention remains one of the few denominations issuing reports like this every year. They aren’t actually humanity’s Designated Adults except in their dreams, but they do act as a bellwether indicating future priorities and strategies of the Christian Right in general. That’s why I find it useful to keep an eye on them.

With this year’s firecracker of a report, we see a still-failing denomination struggling to find good news to report. Its leaders are trying their hardest to put a brave face on endless waves of bad news. They still haven’t recovered from the pandemic, and they probably won’t ever see their pre-pandemic numbers again.

But at the same time, they’re squeezing more money out of fewer churches. They can also look forward to way more money from dead Southern Baptist members’ estates. All of that extra money helps them stay hyper-politicized. It also helps them fling more and more money at recruitment efforts. They need to be spending more there, too. As their recruitment efforts become less and less effective, it takes ever-increasing amounts of resources to bag each baptism.

Amid it all, though, their factions are still at each other’s throats, there’s that scary federal investigation to look forward to, and they’ve got almost a half million fewer members and over 400 fewer churches total to deal with it all.

Their Annual Meeting next month is going to be interesting. I have no doubt about it.

Here’s the link to this article.

I already wasn’t impressed with the strength of this guy’s arguments. Now I’m unimpressed AND grossed out.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

MAY 07, 2023

Overview:

Joshua Butler recently published a book explaining evangelicals’ extended metaphor about sex and marriage. It has caused an absolute uproar in evangelicalism due to its shoddy theology, its obsession with men’s pleasure, and the ease with which its message can be used to rationalize abuse.

Reading Time: 14 MINUTES

Recently, evangelical pastor Joshua Butler resigned from his church position. This resignation was sparked by his new book about marriage. And that book’s caused an absolute uproar. Now, with evangelicals’ current nonstop sex and sex-abuse scandals, you’d think someone might have stopped him before the book ever came close to publication. You’d think someone might have told the guy much earlier that his ideas perpetuated some really sickening and toxic dynamics between spouses.

But nobody did. Really, nobody even could have. Here’s why nobody stopped him, and why Joshua Butler isn’t backing down at all.

Everyone, meet Joshua Butler—and his weird sex book

I first ran across Joshua Butler in an evangelical book, Before You Lose Your Faith (2021). It’s a collection of evangelical talking points, strawmen, and fallacious arguments that its creators hope will short-circuit deconstruction and deconversion. Butler’s chapter of the book poorly addressed dealbreaker questions involving Hell.

Butler first rose to prominence through his first church, Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon. He’s exactly that kind of evangelical that evangelicals envision as best-case examples of their faith: a socially-conscious culture warrior who embraces evangelical misogyny and bigotry as the most perfect plan a god could possibly devise for humanity. They think he makes their vast cruelty sound divinely loving and compassionate.

As such, Butler’s associated with the extremely evangelical Center for Faith, Sexuality & Gender as a writer and advisor. (This group also pushes Preston Sprinkle’s equally fail-tastic anti-gay book People to Be Loved, which I reviewed at exceedingly great length some years ago.)

In 2018, Butler wrote movingly of his decision to accept an offer to be the co-lead pastor of Redemption Church of Tempe, Arizona. Naturally, he couched the decision as a divine order. In his post, Butler repeatedly asserted that he thought Jesus was calling him there—and that his wife, a real live prophet, had foreseen this major change.

He lasted in Arizona for about five years.

Incidentally, neither his old church nor his new one appears on the master list of Southern Baptist member churches. Redemption certainly seems to be generally of the same mind on a lot of topics, though. In particular, they share the same alarming view of church discipline that all too many Southern Baptist church leaders like to push on their flocks.

(Read: Evaluating the claims of church discipline; Why dysfunctional authoritarians love church discipline.)

This past March, Butler’s newest book, Beautiful Union, came out. Its subtitle reveals that it offers the usual standard-issue evangelical talking points about sex: “How God’s Vision for Sex Points Us to the Good, Unlocks the True, and (Sort of) Explains Everything.”

An introduction to evangelicals’ beloved marriage metaphor: the Bride of Christ

Many hardline evangelical authors offer sites like The Gospel Coalition (TGC) teaser excerpts from their upcoming books. TGC always seems happy to print them. This particular author was no exception to that rule, either. The site published his teaser excerpt on March 1st, 2023.

I want need to stress this point beyond all possible others:

Nothing Joshua Butler says about sex is new or unique. Evangelicals have pushed all of these talking points for decades. All Butler did was regurgitate these tired old talking points back to an audience well-used to hearing them. He just did it in a way they really liked, and then he went into way more detail than that audience is used to hearing.

Evangelicals like to imagine that married-people sex is a metaphor for Jesus Christ and his Church, which is Christianese for the collective group of Christians everywhere. Often, they also describe the Church as a body, and yes, they really do think of it like that. It’s like Voltron: there’s all these separate machines that can do stuff completely separately, but then they can also come together to do the Christian equivalent of kicking some giant monster’s ass into the next galaxy.

In the context of evangelicalism, that “body” becomes the Bride of Christ. The Bible talks a lot about the Bride of Christ. Even Jesus frequently used the same metaphor!

(Feel free to speculate about the rabidly anti-gay nature of evangelicals while their men are apparently completely okay with being the Bride of Christ. Over the years, a lot of folks certainly have.)

So Christians are the bride in the marriage, and Jesus is the husband. That’s how evangelical men rationalize their insistence on virginal brides, and also how they rationalize their extremely misogynistic treatment of those brides. After all, Jesus doesn’t take orders from Christians, now does he?

If you’ve never been evangelical or tangled much with evangelicals, you likely have no idea just how deep this metaphor goes. (<– Pun very much intended.) But it is integral to evangelicalism. It goes all the way from the nitty gritty sticky act of sex itself all the way to parenting and household chore distribution. Evangelicals like to imagine this metaphor as governing every single facet of marriage.

Of course, this metaphor also governs how churches operate. But here, we’re just looking at its treatment of marriage.

Joshua Butler’s ideas about sex aren’t unique at all, nor even new

If you read Butler’s post over at TGC, you will find nothing new there. He offers the usual testimony format:

Act I: He had unapproved sex. Alas, that kind of sex failed to make him happy.

Act II: Moment of epiphany. He figured out that evangelicals’ rules for sex are perfect for all humans.

Act III: A cosmic reversal of Act I. He discovers that evangelicals’ version of sex is awesome!

Here is the climax of the essay (<– Pun unintended, but I’m letting it ride):

This is a picture of the gospel. Christ arrives in salvation to be not only with his church but within his church. Christ gives himself to his beloved with extravagant generosity, showering his love upon us and imparting his very presence within us. Christ penetrates his church with the generative seed of his Word and the life-giving presence of his Spirit, which takes root within her and grows to bring new life into the world.Joshua Butler, TGC

The next two paragraphs detail how the Bride of Christ anticipates and responds to this divine penetration. In the last, we learn: “Their union brings forth new creation.”

Interestingly, the essay doesn’t actually tell us that Butler began following those rules and finally experienced joyful, satisfying sex for the first time. Instead, he pushes a very typical evangelical narrative line: Correct behavior and great results always follow correct beliefs, as the night the day. His implication is that now that he knows exactly what sex means in religious metaphor form, he is now prepared to have satisfying, loving sex with his wife.

I want to stress once again that absolutely nothing in this essay was new to me as an ex-Christian and ex-Pentecostal. It’s gross, but it’s definitely not new. Indeed, these were all standard-issue marriage teachings in the 1980s and 1990s. In somewhat sanitized form, I even heard versions of all of this stuff preached at wedding ceremonies.

All Butler did was take that tired metaphor way, way, way further than evangelicals were used to hearing. As Ph.D scholar Laura Robinson asked in her Twitter thread:

So… that’s it? In conclusion, sex is all about marriage, female purity, and male sexual gratification?

But that’s literally exactly what every other pastor says about sex! Why did Josh write an ENTIRE NEW BOOK about this? He adds nothing!Laura Robinson, Twitter thread, March 1

Indeed. I think Butler managed to make even evangelical men who’d grown up hearing this metaphor their entire lives feel uncomfortable.

Joshua Butler must have thought the world was now his oyster…

Thankfully, some thoughtful soul archived Butler’s post. That’s how we know that TGC was so incredibly impressed with Butler that they had already made him a Fellow with their newly-launched Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics!

(Read: In Tim Keller’s dreams, he is free indeed; The lies Tim Keller tells about death; Tim Keller pushes the myth of Original Christianity for a reason.)

Even more amazingly, we learn in that archived post, TGC had already tapped him to lead a special seven-week-long online course called “The Beauty of the Christian Sexual Ethic.”

I’m not that surprised that they seemed to like this guy so much. After all, they’ve hosted Butler’s bad arguments about other topics for a while now, and they’re the ones who organized and published Before You Lose Your Faith.

… But then the evangelical world exploded at him

Theology professor Beth Felker Jones immediately criticized Butler’s inept theology:

If we imagine the thing this way, I’ll wager most men will insist on continuing to imagine themselves, not as the bride, but as Jesus. And there’s the first problem. If we forget the limits of the analogy, men are going to think they’re like Jesus in a way that women are not like Jesus. And men may also think that Jesus is like whatever sinful twisting of masculinity their culture upholds. [. . .]

It’s a euphoric ode to the glories of ejaculation, which the article characterizes as “gift” and “sacrificial offering.”Beth Felker Jones, March 5

Meanwhile, Laura Robinson neatly summarized it:

In sex, a man is generous by providing semen. Correspondingly, a woman is hospitable by providing a place for semen. [. . .]

Josh apparently thinks the analogy between atoning blood, the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, revelation, and semen is so clear it does not require elaboration.@LauraRbnsn, March 1

Jones also noted the potential for abuse within this metaphor:

The giver/receiver paradigm carries dangerous baggage. Giver/receiver can easily be rephrased as “active/passive” or “Lord/subject.” This can be weaponized; we’re sinners, after all. The built-in asymmetry of power lends itself to abuse, too often telling women to submit in inhuman situations.Beth Felker Jones, March 5 (Archive)

This is absolutely correct. And it’s exactly why evangelical leaders push this metaphor so hard. Indeed, a large number of evangelical women pointed out that their husbands and churches had used this exact metaphor as their permission slip to abuse anyone under their power. All that separate but equal, complementary spheres blahblah evangelicals spout breaks down once anybody remembers why that concept is no longer acceptable under law.

Eventually, TGC realized they’d made a drastic mistake with Butler’s excerpt

If you go to the original URL of Butler’s TGC post now, you won’t see a single bit of Butler’s excerpt. (So I thank you, quick-witted archivist, whoever you are.)

Instead, you’ll see an abject apology from TGC’s president, Julius Kim—and the news that Butler has resigned from the Keller Center and that the planned online sex course won’t be happening at all.

However, it’s unlikely that theology arguments and women’s pain had much, if anything, to do with TGC’s decision-making. Evangelicals have faced both of those for decades now, and it hasn’t had any impact on their misogyny.

Instead, one Christian site, Dissenter, claims that TGC only began to second-guess the wisdom of running that excerpt after they began getting tons of pushback from evangelicals who found the metaphors a little too extended for comfort (<– Pun sort of intended).

Dissenter also notes that some of the big-name Christians who contributed endorsements to Butler’s book have publicly withdrawn those endorsements. Given how endorsements work in the evangelical publishing world, it’s almost certain that those folks hadn’t even read the book. Some of those Christians were also associated with TGC, meaning they’re likely hardline, ultraconservative, Calvinist culture-warrior evangelicals like the site itself is.

TGC might have a fight ahead of them to reestablish their reputation with evangelicals. This incident has even earned a mention at a site that lists examples of “Deception in the Church.” Considering TGC’s positioning, that’s got to smart.

Joshua Butler is not backing down, either

In response to the furor, Joshua Butler resigned last week from his co-lead pastor position at Redemption Church. (They’ve already removed his photo from their staff page.) Butler sent his former congregation a letter about his decision that speaks volumes about why he resigned—and what he plans to do next:

We have found ourselves in an impossible situation. On the one hand, I feel called to step more into these public conversations. I desire to be humble, charitable, winsome, and wise. There are some mistakes I’ve made I wish to own but also deep convictions I hold that I wish to contribute to the broader conversation. [. . .]

I want to affirm that I am committed to a process of repair with any members of Redemption who desire it. For some of you, my lack of greater pastoral nuance in areas of the excerpt evoked pain, particularly for some women with histories of sexual abuse. I want to apologize for not showing greater consideration for how my words in this section could be heard from within your shoes. I’m truly sorry.

I’ve worked with the publisher to make revisions to the excerpt based on a dozen additional sensitivity reviews I commissioned this last month from women (including sexual abuse survivors, counselors, and those who grew up in purity culture). These revisions will be incorporated into the next printing of my book.From Joshua Butler’s resignation letter, presented by this Tweeter (archive)

There is a lot of Christianese in this letter, and it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let’s unpack it like a radioactive knapsack to see what Joshua Butler is telling his former congregation.

The Christianese that tells us everything

Christianese is a context-heavy language that uses jargon and group-specific memes to convey loads of information in few words. We find it mostly in hardline Catholic and evangelical circles. (I’ve noticed that the more off-limits and objectively-false the group’s beliefs, behavior, and goals are, the more Christianese they use.)

“I felt called” is a blatant appeal to authority. Evangelicals believe that Jesus Christ himself hands them assignments, which they term callings. The process of handing them the assignment is Jesus calling them. When evangelicals say they “felt called,” they mean Jesus has asked them to do something. So Jesus told Butler to talk more about his weird evangelical sex ideas. If someone disagrees, then they are disagreeing with the wisdom and judgment of their Savior.

“… humble, charitable, winsome, and wise.” I award him a Miss Congeniality point for using an Oxford comma. However, these are all beloved evangelical self-descriptions. “Winsome,” especially, is seen as a very Jesus-y attribute. To evangelicals, it means presenting ideas in a way that wins people’s hearts. Butler, then, is pushing hard on the purity of his motivations.

“There are some mistakes I’ve made I wish to own…” Evangelicals love to hype up how totally accountable they are for their behavior (and by contrast, how much they think heathens hate to be accountable). When they talk like this, they mean accountability to Jesus, not to people. In reality, no evangelical wants to really own their mistakes. It’d open them to attacks. In this case, real accountability would require a lot more than gaining buy-in from a bunch of sensitivity readers and a carefully-couched not-pology worded in the most ego-defending way imaginable.

“Deep convictions” are related to callings. Evangelicals think that Jesus himself hands certain opinions to his best, most dedicated followers. They call these divinely-given opinions convictions. Similarly, when they talk about feeling convicted, they mean that Jesus has personally made them feel guilty about something.

“Pastoral nuance” is what most other people would call empathy and common sense. In this case, Butler concedes that as a pastor, he perhaps should have known better than to push the particular ideas he did without tons and tons of qualifications and asterisked conditions.

What this Christianese means

Dude’s coming out swinging.

He’s not sorry for what he wrote, only in how he worded it. The basic concepts remain, in his opinion, completely correct. He just forgot to make the usual evangelical mouth-noises about not taking Jesus’ metaphor as permission to abuse—which I guarantee every abusive evangelical husband has already heard and enthusiastically supports, because they would never.

It’s true: There is a way which seems right to a man. Except in this case, that way doesn’t lead to death, but to a crown and scepter in most evangelical churches.

However, Butler’s church isn’t willing to go down fighting with him. They clearly don’t want any part of the media firestorm that has already come Butler’s way.

And I’m guessing that they most especially don’t want to be known as a church that implicitly signs off on, condones, or agrees with Butler’s extremely extended metaphor about the divine power and cosmic value of men’s orgasms or their ejaculate and ejaculation.

That said, I’ve no doubt in the world that Butler’s message to evangelical men will find a receptive audience. (<– Pun unintended, but c’mon.)

Why evangelical marriage metaphors break down so spectacularly in real life

Joshua Butler is not the first person whose attempt to wrestle with evangelical metaphors has run afoul of reality. With great regularity, evangelical marriage and sex books do exactly the same thing.

In 2020, Emerson Eggerichs’ Love and Respect: The Respect He Desperately Needs sparked controversy for the exact same reasons:

[Blogger Sheila Wray] Gregoire says she’s heard from hundreds of women who say one of the book’s main themes — that giving a husband “unconditional respect” can lead to a happy marriage — contributed to abuse in their marriages. She wants Focus on the Family, which originally published the book in partnership with Integrity Publishing, to drop its endorsement.Religion News Service

Please note that evangelicals often slide between two completely different meanings of “respect.” Often, they do this within the same sentence. The word can mean either complete deference or polite civility. Context alone will show you which flavor of the word is meant; in this case, it’s obvious that “unconditional respect” means complete deference.

In the case of power-hungry evangelical men, they deserve next to no deference. But most of them ache for it, thanks to their membership in an extremely toxic, dysfunctional authoritarian system. Deference means safety as well as personal power that can be flexed at will. These men all believe that the women around them should show them this deference, which they have earned simply by accident of birth. Their wives should show them even more deference.

Unwarranted power is a poison that rots the spirit. Power without real accountability is a curse to everyone who comes into contact with the person holding it. And the power given to evangelical men in marriage is both of these.

(Related: Extended review of another evangelical marriage book, Gary Smalley’s If Only He Knew.)

How evangelicals rationalize the abuse caused by their teachings

In response, Eggerichs simply said that, gosh, any book’s advice could be misused by bad-faith actors. His publisher, Focus on the Family, issued a statement along similar lines:

“The fact of the matter is that we believe Mrs. Gregoire has seriously misread and misjudged various aspects of Love & Respect, and we further maintain that its central message aligns both with Scripture and with the common-sense principles of healthy relationships.”Religion News Service

They further stated that the examples of abuse that Gregoire and other women described were clear examples of “one or both spouses misapplying the text, not as the result of the book’s actual message.”

Of course. I’d expect them to say nothing else.

Evangelicalism is a broken system. Its groups long ago lost their ability to achieve their own stated goals. Instead, evangelical leaders use this system as a means of amassing power at members’ expense.

In broken systems, their message is always perfect. It can’t be questioned or criticized. If anyone has trouble with making the message work the way the system’s masters say it should work, that never reflects a problem with the message. People are the only weak link in that entire sequence, so they must have done something wrong in applying the message.

So naturally, if any woman faces spousal abuse after her husband absorbs messages like the ones found in Butler’s and Eggerichs’ books, her husband just misapplied the message.

Real accountability requires the examination of the message that keeps getting used to rationalize abuse. If it’s so easy to misapply even by the very most devout and pious of all real true Christians, then it can’t possibly be all that divine.

But the evangelical world is facing unprecedented scrutiny and pressure

Joshua Butler didn’t tell evangelicals anything new in his book. However, the evangelical world has changed significantly in the last five years, and I don’t think Butler ever got that memo.

Between the nonstop sex scandals and the abuse crises being revealed, evangelicals are more sensitive these days to misogyny and doctrines that encourage abuse. They’re not sensitive enough to question their broken system as a whole yet, but they have begun to realize that concepts like “the Bride of Christ” only open the door to abuse within marriage. They’re starting to understand why representation at all levels of power is so important in preventing abuse and encouraging real accountability. And they’re noticing that in systems like theirs, powerful networks exist to prevent that accountability from ever striking too close to home.

An entire book about how women perform hospitality for men by acting as receptive receptacles for men’s divine gift of semen might have been a bridge too far even for some of the extremists among them. Even TGC regulars couldn’t stomach that.

And the things evangelicals will never, ever ask Joshua Butler

As we’ve already read in his 2018 essay about heading for Arizona, Butler prays about all of his decisions. He even tells us that his wife is a real live “prophet,” which means in Christianese that she gets divine messages straight from Jesus. I’m assuming that every other person associated with his sex book prayed about getting involved with it. And I’m assuming that Julius Kim and TGC pray about their hiring and publishing decisions.

In The Hunt for Red October, there’s a line in it that perfectly describes evangelicals. Admiral Painter listens to Jack Ryan’s excited chatter about intercepting Captain Ramius in his state-of-the-art submarine. Then, he asks a direct question:

Adm. Painter: What’s his plan?

Jack Ryan: His plan?

Adm. Painter: Russians don’t take a dump, son, without a plan.The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Painter means that a man like Ramius wouldn’t even have begun his trip without knowing ahead of time exactly what he’d be doing with the crew, the sub, the route, and everything else. The Americans don’t need to worry about any of that stuff, because Ramius has already figured it all out. All they have to do is help him with his plan.

Evangelicals are much the same way. Though I don’t think they pray nearly as often as they claim to do, I do think that they pray before every major decision. We’ve got TGC, publishers, endorsement writers, editors, proofreaders, family members, church congregations, and who even knows who else—and not one of those hundreds, even maybe thousands of people heard a peep out of their ceilings about this book’s serious flaws.

So why did Jesus fail to tell a single one of these praying Christians that this sex book and its TGC excerpt would be such a stunning disaster? How is it even possible that so many people in so many different organizations utterly failed to notice how easily Butler’s writing could be bent toward rationalizing abuse?

I mean, non-believers already know why. Evangelicals, however, might consider wondering a bit about the matter.

Here’s the link to this article.

It’s no accident that evangelical abusers keep referring to their dark deeds as ‘sin.’

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

NOV 28, 2022

Overview:

The sin script may have gotten seriously rolling in the late 1980s. Since then, it’s been honed razor-sharp. It helps evangelical leaders who are mired in scandal to keep their jobs—and their followers’ trust and love. But it sure doesn’t help any of the people victimized by these leaders.

Reading Time: 12 MINUTES

When abusive evangelical pastor Christian Watts tried to downplay his grooming of a teenager decades earlier, he described his predation as ‘my past sin.’ That’s a time-honored tactic for people caught in his exact circumstances. Let’s take a closer look at this tactic to see why it works so well in evangelical culture.

Those who are without sin, cast the first stone

In the Bible, a famous passage describes Jesus’ defusing of a very sensitive situation. Jewish leaders in Jerusalem asked him to adjudicate the case of a woman caught committing adultery. By Jewish law, the community was now compelled to stone her to death. (That means throwing rocks at her until she died. God of love, everybody!) But the city leaders wanted to “test” Jesus by seeing how he’d handle the situation.

Instead of answering them, Jesus knelt and wrote in the ground with his finger. The story does not relate what he wrote. But when they pressed him, he finally told them something that’s so famous that even non-Christians usually know it:

“Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.”John 8:7

Apparently, that suggestion so embarrassed the city leaders that they left the scene. Finally, only Jesus was left with the woman. And he told her he wasn’t going to condemn her. Instead, he released her, telling her to “go and sin no more.”

We never learn anything else about the woman. She simply drops out of the story.

Christians love to quote that one line from it, though, especially when defending one of their own who has been caught doing something illegal or distasteful.

Not too illegal or distasteful, of course. If one of the flock does something completely beyond the pale, that person becomes a fake Christian. The rest of the flock strips the label of “Christian” from them just like the Skeksis strip the Chamberlain’s clothes from him after he loses the duel in The Dark Crystal, and for the same reasons.

However, it takes a lot to move an evangelical pastor across that line.

What evangelicals mean by ‘sin’

In Christianese, the word sin does a lot of heavy lifting. First and foremost, it means the commission of any deed, word, or thought that offends Jesus.

Second, it means any deed, word, or thought that didn’t happen but needed to, thus offending Jesus. You’ll often hear this second meaning expressed as “missing the mark,” an allusion to 1 Timothy 1:6. In this verse, evangelicals learn that “mark” means a shooting target. And their god, of course, is the one who sets the target up for them to hit. When people talk about “sins of omission,” this is what they mean.

You might notice that sin has nothing to do with hurting other people, however. Sin only concerns evangelicals insofar as it offends their god. His opinion is the only one that matters to them.

As a result of this focus, sins are often completely victimless. Consensual sex between two adults who are not married is utterly sinful. Even if they marry, if they are of the same sex then it’s still sinful. Almost all evangelicals regard masturbation as sinful as well.

And because Jesus’ opinion is the only one that truly matters to them, evangelical abusers tend to be curiously callous toward their victims—just like their god.

Because victims get swept aside in the rush to seek Jesus’ forgiveness, evangelicals tend only to focus on that forgiveness above all. Thankfully for them, Jesus is quick to forgive literally anything. Once he forgives, he forgets. And so must everyone else, or they risk Jesus’ wrath for remembering what he has already forgotten.

Most importantly, evangelicals believe that all sins are equal in Jesus’ eyes.

I could not design a better system for shielding abusers and perpetuating abuse—not even if I had ten years, a million dollars, and a mission statement etched in gold above my throne.

How abusers use sin to minimize predatory behavior

On November 2nd, Christian Watts wrote a Facebook post to his followers. It read in part:

I know these past several weeks have been difficult and I am so sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced as a result of my past sin.From a screengrab of Christian Watts’ November 2nd post

His “past sin,” of course, was grooming a 13-year-old in the youth group he led as a married Southern Baptist youth pastor, then initiating sex with her once she turned 16. This abuse lasted until she left town for college. To my knowledge, he’s never apologized to his victim. He insists that because it was technically legal at the time for him to have sex with a 16-year-old, he’s done nothing really wrong. But here he is apologizing to his congregation for having sinned.

They’d already forgiven him, though, if their own comments to his earlier statements are anything to go by. One even specifically referred to the stone-throwing story from the Gospels.

And why wouldn’t they fully support him? He’d invoked the S-word. They’ve been primed since birth to respond exactly like this. Evangelical leaders have taught them for decades how to react to their leaders’ confessions of sin.

The template for excusing dark deeds with sin

They’ve been at it since at least 1988, when televangelist Jimmy Swaggart famously confessed to sin after being photographed with a sex worker. At the time, he said:

“I do not plan in any way to whitewash my sin or call it a mistake,” he told his tearful but apparently forgiving congregation. “I call it a sin.”The Crimson, 1988

If confessions exactly like his weren’t already a template, they sure became so afterward.

After Ted Haggard got exposed for drug-fueled sexcapades with another man, he drew upon the sin template to write a 2013 blog post criticizing evangelicals’ focus on “image management and damage control”:

My sin never made me suicidal, but widespread church reaction to me did. [. . .]

Jesus has been faithful to all of us in the midst of our pain, our suffering, and our disappointments. Why don’t we tell that? Every one of us have had sin horribly intrude in our lives after being saved and filled with the Holy Spirit, and God is faithfully healing us or has healed us. Why don’t we tell that?“Suicide, Evangelicalism, and Sorrow,” Ted Haggard’s blog, 2013

He’s ostensibly talking about two children of major evangelical figures who had recently died by suicide. But he can’t help but link the parents’ anguish and their children’s own shortcomings to his own sin, meaning the drug-fueled sexcapades. He’s got something to say on that score:

Everyone I’ve mentioned here has fallen because of obvious sin. But I did not mention the proud, envious, gluttonous, angry, greedy, blamers and scrutinizers in the body of Christ who have equally fallen but their sins are acceptable in our culture so they do not even realize their sin or need for repentance. Why? They are too busy with the sins of others.“Suicide, Evangelicalism, and Sorrow,” Ted Haggard’s blog, 2013

And that, he insists, is what actually “stimulates sin,” especially in evangelicals.

Very quickly, evangelicals learned to accept this template

Haggard’s comments are filled with Christians who agree completely with him:

JohnR: We are all sinners, it makes no difference what the sin is, it’s still sin, and we will continue to sin until we all meet at Jesus’ feet.

Eric Cowley: Our Lord Jesus said, he that has not sinned cast the first stone. I have friends in the ministry who have committed adultery and I will not judge them as it is by the grace of God we go. I am thankful you bring up the point that what is the difference between sexual sin and other sins.

laurakthompson: Pastor Ted could easily have disappeared from public life after his tragedy. Goodness knows that there were enough people who wanted him to do just that. But his message of hope for the hurting, grace for the sinners (read: every single one of us), and restoration for the fallen is so powerful and true, I am thankful he chose to heed the voice of God instead of the voice of the Pharisees.

Yolie Parsons: We are ALL sinners saved by grace by a loving God. Why are we surprise when somebody sins? Why don’ we have each other’s back?

Scott Helsel: Three and a half years ago my wife and i left a church that we planted because of my sin. We had been married 17 years and I hid my unfaithfulness from early in our marriage. . . I know that it was my inability to face my fears of exposure and my intense need to be pleasing in the sight of man that kept me in hiding.Various comments to Ted Haggard’s blog post

They’ve learned well.

Just call it sin, and watch the criticism fade!

In December 2016, Clayton Jennings decided to issue a confession of sin. The handsome, puppy-dog-eyed evangelist and author’s timing was impeccable. At the time, six different women were accusing him of manipulating them into “sexual behavior.” One even claimed he told her to take a morning-after pill after they’d had sex, because “his entire ministry would be ruined if [she] were to get pregnant.” Once he’d gotten what he wanted from these women, he ghosted them with claims that he was dying or had to tend to a sick relative.

These are devastating claims, but Jennings used the usual sin script to get out of them:

“I never claimed to be perfect and I never said I was sinless. Presenting you with a fake facade of greatness is never why I got in this,” he said in the video. “I want you to know this: I’ve sinned—a lot.”

“I could tell you stories of my past sin, but I wouldn’t know when to stop.”“Promiscuous Preacher Caught in Sex Scandal Aims for New Year Comeback Despite Elders’ Counsel.” Reprinted at Bishop Accountability. Originally from Christian News Network, December 30, 2016.

At the time, he attended his dad’s church. That church’s elders strongly urged Jennings to take a break from ministry for a while to focus on “repentance,” which is the process of getting forgiveness-and-forgetting from Jesus. Jennings chose to ignore this good advice. Instead, he scooted across to another church that had offered him a ministry position despite the scandal. In relaying that news, Jennings wrote in an email:

“I understand that being a public figure comes with attacks from people and the press. I also understand that I am guilty of certain sins in the past that I wish I could take back. Thankfully, God forgives and forgets, even when others try to hold it over your head and gossip/lie about it.”“Promiscuous Preacher Caught in Sex Scandal Aims for New Year Comeback Despite Elders’ Counsel.” Reprinted at Bishop Accountability. Originally from Christian News Network, December 30, 2016.

Like jeez, why was everyone still talking about him preying on young women? That was, like, months ago!

But I’m not sure he’s been doing much since then. He has a very sparse Facebook presence and a YouTube channel containing some old “spoken word” evangelical poetry of his. If he holds any public-facing ministry positions, I haven’t found anything about it.

Maybe his 2019 arrest for assault against a woman might have something to do with his radio silence.

All across the Christ-o-sphere, sin abounds

In May this year (2022), an Indiana pastor named John Lowe II resigned his position at New Life Christian Church and World Outreach. Twenty years earlier, he told his congregation, he’d “committed adultery.” He left out exactly how, though. He took a 16-year-old girl’s virginity on his office floor after apparently grooming her for a while. Once it began in earnest, the sexual abuse continued for many years, according to her husband. It was witnessed at least once by her brother.

My personal guess is that Lowe realized the jig was up and he was about to be exposed. So he chose to proactively resign. To do it, he used Jimmy Swaggart’s sin script, telling his congregation:

“I committed adultery. It was nearly 20 years ago. It continued far too long. It involved one person, and there has been no other nor any other situations of unbecoming conduct for the last 20 years. I will not use the Bible to defend, deflect, protect my past sin. I have no defense. I committed adultery,” Lowe said without sharing any specifics.Christian Post, May 2022

But he didn’t commit adultery, as that Christian Post article points out. He committed an actual crime against a child. In Indiana, the age of consent is 16, yes. But if an adult “in a position of supervision or trust” engages in any kind of sexual activity with someone that old, that’s a crime. Unfortunately, because of how long ago it happened, he probably won’t ever face justice for abusing that girl.

But this time, the sin script went pear-shaped

After Lowe finished his statement, the victim and her husband came to the microphone to set the record straight. To the church’s credit, they overwhelmingly supported the victim.

Once the victim and her husband had finished revealing exactly what Lowe had done to her, Lowe went back to the microphone to try to sweet-talk the congregation into not throwing stones at him:

Lowe took the microphone and confirmed that he began having sex with the victim when she was a teenager.

“You should have went to prison,” a voice shouted back at him.

“It was wrong. … I can’t make it right,” Lowe said. “All I can do is ask your forgiveness. … I’m doing what the biblical process is. I am stepping down, stepping aside. … I deeply hurt them, I deeply hurt you. I ask you to forgive me.”Christian Post, May 2022

Incredible! But I don’t think they were having it. The church’s website is now completely dismantled. I think they took it offline a few days after the Christian Post story ran. And I can see why. At the end of May, a protest sprang up outside the church. On June 1st, we learned that the state police were looking into the situation. The rest of the church’s leaders decided to call off services for a few weeks, but I wonder if they’ll ever reconvene.

It’s refreshing to see an evangelical church take abuse seriously.

What’s happening when an evangelical leader uses the sin script

When an evangelical leader reaches for the tribe’s sin script, it’s not being done accidentally. These leaders know exactly how this script manipulates the flocks’ minds and hearts.

First, it zings them with the entire force of their indoctrination. They only know one punishment for sin, after all: Hell. Only Jesus’ forgiveness-and-forgetting prevents this penalty from landing on their own heads.

Further, all sins are considered equal to Jesus. When I was just a little Catholic girl, my aunt-the-nun taught me that even if I’d been the only human ever born, my sins would have been enough to make Jesus need to die for them.

At the time, I was mightily dubious. I mean, I was eight years old. I knew that I hadn’t ever done anything that bad. But my aunt insisted. Just being born meant inheriting the full weight of humans’ sins against Jesus.

Later, in evangelicalism, I heard exactly the same teachings. All sin made Jesus sad and unhappy with us. And everybody sinned.

It’s not hard to find evangelicals trying to amend this shoddy teaching. Even Billy Graham’s site tries, bless its cotton socks. But for the sin script to work, that’s how it must be. The person using it needs their audience to put their offenses on the same scale as the sins they themselves commit/omit.

And a quick yank of the leash before anyone thinks twice

The idea of Jesus’ forgiveness always looms large in these scripts, too. It must. Once Jesus has forgiven a sin, he forgets it. It’s washed away by his blood, as the macabre evangelical saying goes. So refusing to forgive a sinner, or refusing to forget about the sin, becomes sinful in and of itself. It’s like slapping Jesus in the face.

That’s why Clayton Jennings specifically referred to how Jesus “forgives and forgets.” He contrasted that sublime state to how sinful evangelicals refused to do that. Instead, they were “holding it over [his] head.” They were “gossiping/lying” about what he’d done.

You’ll look in vain for any explanation of exactly what such critics are gossiping or lying about. Same for Christian Watts, who claimed that a news site’s article about him contained “gross inaccuracies.” He’s never specified what wasn’t accurate. Somehow, that info never seems to make it into an abuser’s defiant statements. But he, too, praised Christians who “see [him] through the eyes of Jesus.”

It’s also why John Lowe specifically invoked “the biblical process” for confessing his sins to his congregation. He wasn’t really following it at all, but that’s not the point. By yanking his congregation’s attention to the Bible (probably Matthew 18, which contains a set of instructions beloved of evangelical abusers), Lowe hoped to jump-start their obedience to their indoctrination. Thankfully, it did not work.

When one’s myths revere the forgiven, forgiveness becomes mandatory

For centuries, Christians have thrilled to stories of sweeping personality changes induced by Jesus’ forgiveness. They love hearing about the guy who made the song “Amazing Grace,” even if their mythology differs from reality in some key respects. The point, they think, is that Jesus totally changes people who put their faith in him. Even if that offer contains a lot of asterisked terms and conditions, and even though it fails to happen more often than not, they still take it as a canonical belief.

That’s why so many of Christian Watts’ congregation referred to this myth in their replies to his social media posts. One replied, “Obviously the publication doesn’t understand God’s redemptive and restorative power.” Another thought that Watts’ past had better prepared him to be a better leader for their church. Their meaning is clear: Jesus had clearly forgiven-and-forgotten what their pastor did. They felt that he’d learned from his sinful past. And they refused to throw stones at him.

But it wasn’t their stones that Watts should have feared.

It was those of his victim.

Why sin is such an evil concept

Christian Watts’ congregation had nothing to forgive him for doing.

Neither did Jesus.

The person he’d really offended was his victim.

Only her forgiveness has ever mattered here.

And even if she ever forgives him, evangelicals still have a moral duty to keep abusers out of ministry positions. No matter what this guy claims to have learned through his abuse of her, no matter what divine grace he claims to feel after appealing to Jesus for forgiveness, he has permanently disqualified himself from ministry forever. He needs to find something to do that will keep him well away from future victims for the rest of his life. He needs to begin a new career in, I dunno, drain cleaning.

[Note: That’s what Watts has actually been doing lately for money.]

By cutting his victim out of his entire sin narrative, Christian Watts—like his fellow predatory evangelical peers—was able to forgive-and-forget the harm he’d done to her. As long as he kept that abuse secret, it might as well not have happened at all.

Even after the news reached the public, he tried to use the evangelical sin script to avoid repercussions for his decision to abuse a child. He tried to minimize what he did. To manipulate his flock into embracing him and keeping him firmly ensconced in his pulpit.

I’ve never heard a single word from him or his congregation about the person he abused. I’ve looked. Nobody has expressed a single word of concern for her or her well-being. She might as well be a character from a morality play starring Christian Watts as Everyman. When all that happened to her is Sin, then the solution is just more Jesus-ing for her and her abuser both.

We need to pay attention when evangelicals ascribe their criminal, predatory, hypocritical, and most execrable behavior as sin. They always do it for a reason.

Here’s the link to this article.

The theme of that decline is still Christianity’s loss of coercive power. And the solution is still just as dark as its reacquisition.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

JAN 10, 2023

Not long ago, some readers linked me to a piece in Grid about Christianity’s decline in America. As well, a few new books have popped up on booksellers’ shelves about the topic. These insights join credible recent research about Christianity’s ongoing decline in America. None of it’s looking good for that old-time religion, so to speak, but it does highlight one ongoing theme observers have noted for years: Without Christians somehow regaining their powers of coercion, Christianity will inevitably become irrelevant in America.

The worst part of this situation, though, is this: A lot of the worst-of-the-worst Christians are well aware of that fact.

Christianity’s decline began with a trickle of information

For years now, I’ve kept track of the incredible—and astonishingly swift—decline of Christianity’s cultural power, membership, and credibility in America. Since the mid-2000s, Christians have been in freefall on all three counts.

If someone had told me when I was Pentecostal, in the 1980s and 1990s, that this would one day happen, I’d have simply assumed this decline to be part of the Endtimes prophesied in the Bible. But if I’d heard such a prediction in the early 2000s, I’d have thought it was simply impossible.

Yet here we are.

When I began writing about religion in the early 2010s, I noticed a few signs of what was coming. Pastors were complaining more often about falling attendance on Sundays and blaming it on the strangest things: a lack of parking, the rise of youth sports leagues that played that day, etc. Youth pastors, in particular, were starting to talk about a sharp rise in the number of young Christians who were abandoning the faith as soon as they got free of their parents’ control.

As well, the few surveys and studies I could find on this subject all indicated that a sea change was coming for Christianity. None of this research offered Christian leaders any hope of surviving that change with their cultural power, membership numbers, or credibility intact.

Nowadays, we’re surrounded by this research. An unthinkable number of churches from every flavor of Christianity are closing each year. Once-powerful denominations are sliding more in membership and credibility with every passing year. No relief is in sight, no matter what Christian leaders propose to end their slump. Kids entering college this year might not even remember a time when Christianity wasn’t in decline.

Well, now we have a few more experts weighing in on that decline.

Pew Research recently modeled Christianity’s decline

In September 2022, Pew Research offered up a three-part model of Christianity’s potential future in America. For their model, they envisioned three different scenarios. These scenarios involved Americans’ rate of religious switching. For our purposes, that term means Christians changing their flavor of Christianity—or entering or leaving the religion itself.

If no more switching occurs by 2070, only about 54% of Americans would still consider themselves Christian. However, if switching continues to occur at the rate it does now, 46% of our population will profess Christianity. And if disaffiliation continues to rise, then 35-39% of Americans will be Christian. Here’s their graph:

These scenarios may still be a little optimistic. None of the declines charted match the steep, unparalleled decline noted prior to 2020. Still, they’ve got good reasons for modeling their numbers this way. For now, I’m content to bow to their almost-certain-to-be superior statistical understanding while also waiting with a sly smile to see if the real results bring about a revision to the model.

If there is one thing that Christianity’s decline has taught observers, it is that we should be careful about underestimating it. It is happening so much faster and more completely than anything we ever dared to dream might happen.

Where we are now, I once did not expect us to be until decades after my death.

Two recent books that each highlight different aspects of Christianity’s decline

Lately, two books on the topic of Christianity’s decline have hit booksellers’ shelves and sites. A large Catholic site, NCR Online, recently reviewed both of them.

Brian D. McLaren’s book, Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned, came out in May 2022. It offers its audience two major sections. One devotes itself to answering “yes” to its titular question, the other “no.” The book has generally high ratings from readers on Amazon.

Its author used to be a major voice in evangelical leadership. But he began to break from lockstep around 2010 or 2011. He’s still Christian, but more emergent than evangelical these days.

(Emergent Christianity is a movement within more liberal, progressive Christian flavors. In its heyday in the mid-2010s, evangelicals seriously ranked it right up there next to Communism and Islam as threats to their dominance.)

Of interest to observers of Christianity’s decline are McLaren’s criticisms of how American Christianity has failed Christians and America alike. He criticizes Christian leaders for substituting strict orthodoxy and checklists of doctrinal beliefs over charity and compassion for others. This criticism is 100% on point, and it happens for a very good reason: it’s a lot easier to justify oneself that way when one doesn’t want to do all that boring stuff Jesus explicitly told his followers to do.

In addition, McLaren points out that all the horrific stuff that Christians have done over the centuries was stuff they could all easily justify in the exact same way that Christians justify their behavior today: with Bible verses galore, wordplay, and redefinitions of common words like “love” and “respect.”

Focusing on fixing the present to get to the future

Bob Smietana’s book, Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters, came out in August 2022. Smietana is a Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist who focuses on religious matters. He used to be the senior editor of Christianity Today. These days, his work can be reliably found at Religion News Service.

Instead of offering advice to doubting Christians, Smietana instead focuses on what McLaren calls “the failed project” of American Christianity. He tracks more recent developments in the religion, including the deep hypocrisy, scandals, and abuses of its biggest names, as well as the shocking failure of American Christians overall to even bother pretending that they take their Savior’s commands even a little seriously.

Smietana believes that Christians need to reject the lies their leaders have told them about the past, realign themselves with the truth about their religion’s flaws, and fix their most glaring issues. If they can’t, he warns, then they absolutely will not be able to attract new generations to their churches.

An interesting takeaway from these two books

It’s interesting that NCR Online’s takeaway from these two books revolves around the deep need for American Catholics to reinvent their communities and institute changes in how they do church, to borrow the evangelical Christianese:

What lies ahead is speculative, but it involves change both institutionally and personally. Any change, however, will rest on the foundation that proceeds from an honest assessment of what is. And that assessment is the most valuable contribution by McClaren and Smietana. The inconvenient truths won’t disappear because we ignore them.

Yes. Because as we all know, if there is one eternal truth about American Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, is that its leaders and members alike are eager and willing to carefully examine themselves for errors, to fully own their mistakes, then to dismantle those mistakes, and finally to build a whole new group paradigm that looks ahead to the future.

Oh wait. Actually, the reverse is true.

In truth, Christians’ absolute unwillingness to do a single bit of that is exactly why nobody credible gives them a single chance in hell, if you’ll pardon the pun, of returning to their former dominance.

What Grid gets correct about Christianity’s decline: “Why now?”

Other countries that were once dominated by Christians began secularizing decades ago. What Americans are seeing now happened in those other countries in the 1990s or so. We’ve always lagged behind Europe and the UK by decades in these religious trends.

Another Christian writer, Stephen Bullivant, has tried to answer the question of why American Christianity has taken so long to hit its big decline. He’s a Catholic educator who’s just published his own book, Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America, in December 2022.

(He also published Mass Exodus: Catholic Disaffiliation in Britain and America since Vatican II, in 2019. As you might guess from the subtitle, he is not a fan of those reforms at all. Like many Catholic hardliners, he may blame Catholicism’s steep declines in membership and credibility on them.)

In Nonverts, Bullivant points out that America may have lagged behind other secularizing countries because of how patriotism got indelibly linked with intense Christian faith. To be atheistic, to criticize Christians’ stranglehold on government and culture for any reason, was to implicitly declare oneself a traitor—and even the enemy of all that was good. In particular, Americans linked communism, which was their big enemy during the Cold War, to atheism.

This is correct. It fits in with all the reading I’ve done of Christians during this period of time.

What Grid completely misses about Christianity’s decline: How that link got established, why, and by whom

As each new generation got further and further away from the Cold War and its moral panics, Bullivant asserts, the less the people within it felt forced to adopt and display Christianity as a way of demonstrating their patriotism and social acceptability. Their culture provided more room not only to question Christianity, but to carve out a life entirely free of it.

The discussion in Grid makes this progress sound like it all happened accidentally, almost incidentally.

In truth, Christian leaders worked with conservative Republican politicians to engineer the Red Scare. They created this moral panic deliberately, and they did so with one goal in mind: to return power to themselves that had been steadily ebbing away for years.

Particularly after World War II, Christian leaders lamented their lack of power and authority over Americans. I own a book written around that time frequently referencing that complaint, As We Were: Family Life in America 1850-1900 (printed in 1946; author Bellamy Partridge, with copious images from Otto Bettmann, and yes, it’s the Bettmann Archives fellow).

As We Were captures the roots of the Red Scare. Its author was a rural lawyer who despised the trends of his time, but not enough to reject a lucrative offer from Hollywood to adapt his bestselling book Country Lawyer for film. Unfortunately, America’s entry into WWII stymied the project. Perhaps losing it gave him time enough to write a book lamenting Americans’ increasing distance from the gauzy religious sentimentality and intense nostalgia he peddled instead.

Clearly, many American Christians agreed with him.

One of the Christian leaders who came to prominence in those same days, Billy Graham, became a powerful voice for decades by asserting the imagined links between faith, American-style democracy, and patriotism. The high-level politicians he advised, like Dwight Eisenhower, came to “evoke faith as a weapon against communism, just as Graham had done.”

In this environment of hypercharged Christian nationalism, anything less than devoted faith became an implicit declaration of treason.

And quite a few Christians liked it that way.

How American Christians kept their cultural dominance for decades after WWII

Even now, America contains many communities that never knew the Cold War ended. In these mostly-evangelical communities, Christians dominate at all levels of society: legal, cultural, legislative, you name it.

In these Christian-dominated communities, Christians control what schoolchildren in taxpayer-funded schools learn (and more importantly, don’t learn) and read (or more importantly, do not read). If their state happens to have laws against what they’re doing, or if their desired courses of action violate big swathes of federal law, they simply ignore those obstacles.

In these communities, dissenters do not ever dare to raise their voices against the Christians oppressing them.

The penalties for open dissent are simply too much to bear: vandalism and property theft/destruction, threats of violence and occasionally actual violence, loss of livelihood and income, perhaps the loss of one’s home, and more. Those penalties are guaranteed to fall upon the heads of not only the transgressor but also the transgressor’s entire family and their friends.

When you hear about some Christian-dominated community’s shocking overreach, remember one thing above all:

This is how these communities usually worked in the past almost everywhere. They only stopped if someone with more power than they had forced them to stop. If these obstacles were ever removed, they’d instantly revert back to their former behavior.

Even now, when Christians decide to start intensely-Christian communities that are run by Christian-centric rules, more often than not we soon hear about the abuses and scandals erupting out of those communities.

The fly in the Vaseline: the rise of the consumer internet

So nothing about Christians’ dominance of post-WWII America was accidental or incidental. It was, rather, the result of stoking endless and deliberate moral panics and allowing conservative politicians to purchase their votes through cheap, tawdry pandering. After achieving their desired results, guarding their dominance was as simple as allowing local Christian communities to stomp on anyone who dared reveal that they were anything less than true-blue, gung-ho Christians.

When I first ran across a 1959 evangelical-written book about evangelism, its overly-simplistic suggestions seemed completely surreal. In fact, I’d gotten my hands on a 1981 edition of the book. It still bore no resemblance whatsoever to personal evangelism in the mid-to-late 1980s. Absolutely nothing its author suggested worked then. In all likelihood, those suggestions have worked less and less well since then.

But I hadn’t quite reckoned with exactly how oppressive Christianity was in 1959. Even in the early 1980s, Christians hadn’t yet come to terms with their diminishing power. Its author had never really dealt with people who had no reason at all to buy his product. (The product is always active membership in the evangelist’s group.) More importantly, he’d never dealt with people who had very little fear of what these ambassadors of the Prince of Peace and Lord of Love would do to them if they refused the so-called “good news.”

His head would have exploded like that guy on Scanners if a time-traveler had told him about the rise of the consumer internet.

Very quickly, the internet connected people. It also gave them spaces to build communities of their own that entirely lacked Christian control and oversight. In those spaces, doubting Christians could network with other doubters and find answers. Often, these were not the hand-waving “Sunday School answers” that their church leaders gave—or approved. When these Christians deconverted, their online communities provided them with space to deconstruct their beliefs and discuss their frustrations.

For countless ex-Christians, they still do.

Why Christianity’s decline won’t be ending any time soon

Bullivant recognizes the power of the internet in destroying Christian control over America, at least. He also understands that even if churches realign themselves with modern American values and mores, that won’t bring people back to their groups. He just doesn’t seem to connect the dots as to why a realignment won’t work, any more than NCR Online grasps why realignment won’t ever happen, ever, and really can’t.

Christian groups are like any other group. People join them and stick around because they find membership meaningful and rewarding. When membership stops feeling that way, they look around for another similar group to join. Or increasingly, they leave and don’t bother seeking another like that.

And for decades, Christian leaders were happy to market their groups in exactly this way. They were happy to evangelize along similar lines: Join us, obey us, and you will get rewards beyond your wildest dreams in both this life and the next.

Unfortunately, people don’t often join Christian groups to do real work, challenge themselves, or deny themselves stuff they really want. Instead, they align themselves with flavors of the religion that mostly already agree with their worldview and ambitions, then make peace with or work around the rest.

In Divided by Faith, we find this hefty dose of wisdom:

If we accept the oftentimes reasonable proposition that most people seek the greatest benefit for the least cost, thy will seek meaning and belonging with the least change possible. Thus, if they can go to either the Church of Meaning and Belonging, or the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging, most people choose the former. It provides benefit for less cost. Prophetic voices calling for the end of group division and inequality, to the extent that this requires sacrifice or threatens group cohesion, are perfectly free to exist, but they are ghettoized.Divided by Faith, quoted by vialogue

And that about covers flybys. If churches realign too much, then whatever meaning and belonging their remaining congregants derive from membership will end. But they will never be assured of drawing back those who’ve already rejected them.

Evangelicals, in particular, have been indoctrinated for decades to believe that any such realignment is nothing more than evil compromise, and they will reject and trample anyone suggesting it.

Summary: How it started vs. how it’s going now

In the social chaos occurring after World War II, American Christian leaders got handed an unimaginable prize: dominance.

Of course, what they did with this prize is exactly what similar Christians have always done with it: they immediately began using it and pushed it to its utter limits for as long as they possibly could, stopping only when forced to stop by forces greater than themselves.

“Jesus” has never stopped Christians from abusing their power. But laws enforcing individual freedom of religion and America’s status as a secular country certainly have done a lot to make it safer and safer for dissenters to reject Christian overreach.

At first, it was dangerous to do that. But Christians’ ability to retaliate drops with every new target that enters their arena. Before too long, only the highest-profile dissenters needed to fear that retaliation—and those still trapped in the few remaining pockets of Christian dominance.

Americans find ourselves now in a situation that is completely unprecedented. Our government is dominated by Christians, evangelicals in particular. Our government’s religious makeup looks less and less like the face of America itself.

Culturally speaking, Christianity has little power in America. Americans don’t care what this or that Christian leader thinks about much of anything. Christians’ credibility is at an all-time low, along with their membership numbers.

But that’s not where the real power lives.

Power is the key to Christian dominance, and it always was

The real power lives in the government. At local, state, and federal levels, its three branches (executive, legislative, judicial) tend to be completely swamped by people seeking Christians’ approval.

Here’s one example of what I mean. In 2015, a high school football coach had a habit of showboating his religion after games by praying ostentatiously. The school district rightly told him to cut that out. In response, the coach sued them. His lawsuit got all the way to the Supreme Court. This summer, we discovered that the highest court in our land is equally full of approving fellow Christians who somehow don’t see how coercive that coach’s behavior was, nor what message it sent to the children in that taxpayer-funded school.

The coach was sublimely unconcerned about Jesus’ direct command to his followers to avoid ever praying in public. (In fact, Jesus said in the verse preceding that one that public prayer was something that only hypocrites did so they could get the approval of other people. I guess the Bible isn’t always wrong, because that’s always seemed like the coach’s motivation.)

Sure, very few of that coach’s players, their families, and their allies will think fondly of control-hungry, power-grabby Christians forever after.

But do you honestly think that coach or his Christian pals care about that?

Christianity’s decline is about power

No, they absolutely don’t. If they cared what people thought of their childish and hypocritical antics, they wouldn’t do that stuff in the first place.

What they care about is power. A high school football coach in a small town likes to swan around at the 50-yard-line after games, staring earnestly and worshipfully at his idol-football as he kneels in prayer to it. In a very real way, he’s thumbing his nose at all the people he knows don’t like what he’s doing. He’s expressing his sense of dominance over his critics.

Yes, I’m comparing these power-hungry Christians to catcallers. It’s not about worshiping Jesus or putting him first in their lives, any more than catcallers just want to vocalize their appreciation of women’s attractiveness. It’s about power.

It always was. It always will be.

Some years ago, I wondered if American Christian leaders recognized lost coercive power as the reason for their decline. Now, I don’t wonder at all. I know they’re aware of it, simply because their strategies all seem to center around regaining that power specifically. They expect that once they have it again, they’ll be able to trample dissenters back into silence, if not back into the pews themselves.

Hey, it worked during the Red Scare!

And if you don’t believe me, check out this video and the commentary around it. (Archive link to video.)

Yes, they know.

If lost coercive power caused American Christianity’s decline, then it sure doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that the fix involves getting it back.

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Here’s the link to this article.

Evangelicals love revivals like kids love cake and ice cream. But the recent Asbury Revival was even more special than usual.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

MAR 08, 2023

Reading Time: 9 MINUTES

Evangelicals recently celebrated the emergence of what they have come to call the Asbury Revival. Outsiders to their culture might not understand the sheer significance of this event, nor understand why they go to such lengths to participate in it and events like it. It helps to know that revival as a concept is integral to their self-image. To understand evangelicals better, let’s examine the concept of revival in evangelical culture.

Joy unspeakable and full of glory

A church in the smack middle of a revival thrums with excitement and anticipation. This is the ancient joy of fundamentalism, the catharsis and ecstasy that offsets all of its burdensome rules and choking authoritarian yokes.

Every person there knows that at some point in the service, things are gonna get rowdy. The pastor, for his part (and it is almost always “his”), probably just hopes he’ll get through his sermon before the chaos breaks out.

Because it always will.

A church in revival is a group operating in synergy, each person’s eagerness and anticipation bouncing off the next, until all that emotional energy just explodes. People visit, sometimes from miles away, to see if they can rub off just a little of that feeling for themselves. Many stay and become members, at least for a little while.

I’ve been there—and if you’re into that kind of thing it is definitely a lot of fun. At the time, I thought only Jesus could possibly have made that feeling—that environment—possible. Since then, I’ve felt that way in many other situations, all of them completely non-Christian. And I’ve learned that many cultures and religions have their own ways of letting loose that look strikingly similar.

Yes, I know better now.

But as a fundamentalist teenager, wow, it was impossible for me to imagine a revival being purely earthly in nature. It just seemed impossible that humans could work themselves up to that level of excitement. Nobody around me at the time told me otherwise.

Situation Report: The Asbury Revival

Asbury University is a small, private Christian college in Wilmore, Kentucky. Though officially nondenominational, its catalog defines the school as broadly evangelical. It has about 1800 students and costs about $16,000 per semester to attend. Its financial aid page claims that every single one of its students gets financial aid or grants. Asbury aligns itself with the Wesleyan-Holiness movement, a style of Jesus-ing that entails the observance of very strict behavioral rules. It also imposes a dress code that sounds similar to Pentecostals’ holiness standards. This movement also explicitly rejects Calvinism.

Asbury University claims a long tradition of hosting revivals. After its establishment in 1890, the school enjoyed its first revival in 1905. The most recent occurred in 2006 and lasted for four days, apparently. So perhaps they felt they were a bit overdue.

Starting around February 8, 2023, students at Asbury University began experiencing a huge surge of piety and devotion during a chapel service. When the service ended, instead of going to class, they stayed to Jesus some more. In fact, according to one Fox News article, they “refused to leave” the chapel. Refused.

Soon, the school’s president sent a message out to the student body to invite them to join these students. After that, the news quickly picked up steam on social media, particularly on TikTok. Evangelicals quickly designated this event the Asbury Revival.

Before long, many thousands of people flocked to Asbury University’s chapel to join the worshipers there. Most appeared to be Gen Z, which makes this gathering huge news for a whole lot of reasons.

By February 20, the sheer number of eager evangelical tourists had begun to overwhelm the facilities of the small school and its small town alike. The school began seeking to move their worshipers off-campus, a decision that seems to have wrecked the movement’s momentum. By the 24th, it was largely finished. That’s also when we found out that an unvaccinated student had attended the Asbury Revival on the 18th while infected with measles, making this event a potential disease superspreader.

Revivals and Great Awakenings are the real goals here

In evangelicalism, a revival is a huge burst of devotional activity that results in many conversions to the church(es) hosting the event. One major past revival was the Azusa Street Revival of 1906.

When this burst of activity lasts for a very long time and results in tons of conversions, then it’s called a Great Awakening. America has had a few Great Awakenings. Its first began in the 1730s and lasted about 10 years. The Second Great Awakening ran from about 1790-1840. Officially, a third one ran from roughly the 1850s to the 1900s. However, evangelicals haven’t quite decided if they like calling it that. Some scholars even think there’s been a fourth one, which ran from the 1960s to early 1970s, roughly during the Jesus Movement. (Personally, I agree. That movement changed evangelicalism forever—and not for the better.)

That said, you can easily find evangelicals openly pining for a “Third Great Awakening.” For ages now, they’ve been certain that it’s coming any day now. Even mere revivals are growing rarer and rarer.

But sometimes evangelicals must settle for these

Most often, the burst of activity does not result in a lot of conversions at all. Instead, it just gets existing evangelicals very excited. They call these a renewal, a blessing, or a refreshing (or sometimes even an outpouring) since that’s how their participants feel.

None of these terms are strictly official. Often, you’ll also find overlap and blurring definitions.

The Toronto Blessing of the mid-1990s, for example, got called a blessing because very few people outside of evangelicalism even knew it was happening. Fewer still converted. However, it completely rocked the evangelical world. Similarly, I’ve seen evangelicals call the Lakeland Revival of 2008 a blessing for the same reasons. Generally speaking, if normies have no clue it’s happening and few new people join up, then it’s not really a revival or an awakening.

Refreshings and renewals don’t tend to get names. They’re fairly mild compared to the other events. However, evangelicals still like to hear about them.

How evangelicals view all of these events

Back when I saw my first revival, these were largely fundamentalist events. Evangelicals had their own version of it, of course, but theirs didn’t come anywhere near that level of rowdiness. Since then, evangelicals and fundamentalists have fused together—imperfectly, perhaps, with a seam that splits and zigzags here and there, but still. So the Asbury Revival, like others of its nature, looks almost identical to what I saw back in the 1980s and 1990s. For our purposes, then, I’ll simply refer to revival-loving Protestants as evangelicals.

Evangelicals believe that their god sparks all of these events and keeps them going as long as it pleases him to do so. But Jesus only pours out his magic pixie dust if those involved with the beginning of the event are obedient to him and properly devoted and fervent in their worship.

Also, even though all of these events work to strengthen Jesus’ churches and his followers’ faith, they must ask him very very intently—often for a while, as well—to grant them a revival. Sometimes, he just doesn’t feel like cooperating.

Whatever the event turns to be—revival, awakening, refreshing, blessing, renewal, whatevs—evangelicals can look forward to a rousing, rowdy good time there. Many feature frenetic dancing, musical performances of all kinds, testimony-giving and -hearing, hopping around, speaking in tongues, racing up and down the aisles of chairs or pews, singing, baptisms, and even miracles galore.

Evangelicals are drawn to revivals for the same reason that they love miracles, bombastic testimonies, and exorcisms. All of these, they feel, demonstrate the veracity of their overall religious claims. As one Free Methodist Bishop put it, the Asbury Revival couldn’t possibly have sparked to life on its own because the chapel’s worship team and preacher were “unremarkable.”

Not with a bang but a whimper, ends the Asbury Revival

Sara Weissman, writing for Inside Higher Ed, speculates that the largely Gen Z attendees of the Asbury Revival might have been seeking a release from the last few years of tumult and fear. In addition, young evangelicals in particular might have loved feeling something they mistakenly perceived as authentically, genuinely divine in their faith system, just as my young Gen X crowd did back in the 1980s.

On February 25, Paul Prather, writing for Religion Unplugged, even wondered if the Asbury Revival could “last 100 years like the Moravian Revival in Germany.” He quickly hedged that bet by pointing out:

Whenever a spiritual visitation such as this arrives, you just never know. That’s part of the excitement.Paul Prather

Alas for Prather and like-minded evangelicals, eventually Asbury University had to offload its revival. It, and its hometown, were getting overwhelmed. Christian leaders in the area swooped in on the action, particularly Nick Hall of a ministry called Pulse. (For a while now, he’s been trying hard to kickstart a revival for Gen Z.)

Like most bursts of catharsis and ecstasy, though, this one expended itself and then petered out.

Of course, none of this has stopped yet another bunch of pandering evangelicals from claiming that the revival is totally linked to their own for-profit endeavor. On February 21, the director of Jesus Revolution said that “there’s a divine hand on the timing” of his movie’s release, since it came out right at the end of the revival. Unfortunately for him, apparently Jesus couldn’t do much about the bowdlerized story’s glaring flaws.

Not all evangelicals agree on the Asbury Revival

And now that the event is over, evangelicals have begun playing another of their favorite games: arguing about it.

One evangelical blogger, Samuel Sey, criticizes the Asbury Revival on several grounds. Sey’s post is a good example of what I’m seeing in evangelical writing these days. To start, he’s concerned that the evangelicals who like the Asbury Revival are attacking those who doubt it was really a revival at all. It contains a number of accusations of infighting about the status of the event.

And an argument can definitely be made there. I’ve heard nothing of the event continuing elsewhere around the area after the school ended their hosting of it. Nor have I heard about any great wave of conversions as a result of it. That lends credence to the argument that what happened at Asbury wasn’t technically a real revival—as powerful as the experience no doubt was for many participants.

Moreover, Sey thinks Asbury University’s leaders and teachers aren’t Jesus-ing correctly at all, and that the revival’s preachers didn’t present “the gospel” correctly or often enough.

(The gospel, when written with a lowercase g, means the evangelical recruitment pitch: Psychically apologize to Jesus and swear eternal to him, or he will torture your ghost forever after you die.)

Those accusations are equally common in evangelicalism. For years now, evangelicals have engaged in an endless game of More Hardcore Than Thou. But Sey adds a very interesting criticism near the end of his post that speaks to evangelicals’ possible motivations in flocking to that little Kentucky town:

It’s concerning, however, that so many of us are seemingly bored by ordinary worship at a local church that produces extraordinary change in one soul. [. . .]

After centuries of Christianity influencing our culture, many of us have now accepted that not only do we live in a post-Christian culture—we live in an anti-Christian culture.Samuel Sey

I think he’s onto something here.

Revivals come and go, come and go

For almost two decades now, evangelicals have been in decline. Perhaps for even longer, they have been asking their god for a really big revival. When I was fundamentalist myself, my church regularly prayed for our god to send us a revival. We scheduled revival weeks, hoping that they’d turn into the real thing. And because of the nature of groups explicitly seeking emotional release, that is generally what happened. I’ve even got a photo of one I attended around 1988:

Everything that Asbury University claims about their revival happened at this one, right down to the claims of magic healing. But this older revival also saw many dozens of new people join the churches that participated.

In fact, I learned a few years ago that at the time I took this photo, two of the men sitting in front of the choir were dealing behind the scenes with a very serious sex abuse accusation against a youth minister in the denomination. And somehow, Jesus still poured out his magic pixie dust upon that revival.

Something something not a TAME lion something something, eh?

Mostly, though, they just dwindle back to baseline

By now, even the internet has forgotten that this 1988-ish revival ever took place. Almost all of the people who joined during it eventually drifted out again. Indeed, Pentecostals got hit with the same decline that everyone in the Christ-o-sphere began facing after the mid-2000s. And somehow, Jesus has seemed completely disinterested in changing anything for his followers. (He seemed similarly disinterested in 2014, when a bunch of his most devoted followers decided to sorta-kinda hunger strike to end equal marriage!)

When Asbury’s situation made the news, evangelicals thought that maybe their god had answered their prayers at last—and that maybe their decline had finally reached its bottom.

That’s doubtful at this point.

The event at Asbury, be it a revival or a refreshing or a blessing or an outpouring or whatever else evangelicals eventually decide to call it, certainly might shore up the faith of a few Gen Z evangelicals who might otherwise have left their churches.

On the other hand, it’s a lot easier for those young evangelicals than it was for Gen X to find out how common these sorts of experiences are around the world, in situations and venues as varied as music, dance, film, drugs, and religion, and through recorded human history. And once they find out that revivals aren’t the only way to fly, so to speak, then they may feel rather deceived, as I once did, to hear evangelical leaders try to claim that revivals are the only real deal catharsis-and-ecstasy source in the universe.

If there’s anything this life has taught me, it’s this: Anyone who tries to claim a monopoly on any aspect of the human experience is trying to sell you something that isn’t good for you.

Here’s the link to this article.

Christians keep missing this key component to their religion’s decline.

by CAPTAIN CASSIDY

MAY 15, 2023

Overview:

Yet another Christian has offered up his ideas about fixing Christianity’s decline. And as usual, he’s missed the most important reason for that decline.

Reading Time: 13 MINUTES

A recent Medium piece about Christianity’s decline has been making the rounds on social media. In it, a Christian makes three assertions about his religion’s decline. Two are partially correct. But the last reflects a beloved but completely untrue myth that Christians almost universally embrace. Let’s examine each of these assertions to find an answer to Christianity’s decline that makes a lot more sense.

Christians love to speculate about what’s causing Christianity’s decline

For almost ten years now, Christians have been aware that their religion is in a solid decline. Many even understand that no reputable researcher has given Christians a chance of ever regaining their cultural dominance.

But none of them really want to engage with the real reason for their decline. That’d be too painful. (We will explore that real reason shortly.) Instead, they make up more comfortable reasons that they think explain Christianity’s steady decline.

These guesses will always center on Christians who are somehow Jesus-ing incorrectly. They will never touch on fundamental problems within the religion, its overall ideology, or its adherents. It’s a blame game, nothing more, a rationalization that keeps Christians’ minds from getting too close to the truth.

It reminds me of something Buttercup does in the book version of The Princess Bride. A beautiful Countess visiting Buttercup’s family farm begins staring amorously at Westley as he does his chores. And Westley looks back at her. This bothers Buttercup enormously, but then she decides that the Countess was simply infatuated with Westley’s perfect teeth. Yes, that’s it, the impossibly gorgeous and wealthy Countess simply felt attracted to Westley because of his teeth!

That idea comforts Buttercup for a few minutes—until she remembers that nobody stares at anybody like that because of their teeth. That’s when she gives herself up to anguish over the idea of losing her Farm Boy to the Countess.

That’s what Christians are doing, except they haven’t had that realization yet that none of their guesses actually explains Christianity’s decline. It’s just a bandage they’re slapping over a painful truth to keep from seeing it for a little while longer.

Ten years ago, I thought they might still have time to fix things. But now, I no longer think so. They’re not even at the stage of accurately describing the reasons for their decline, much less finding real solutions to it.

Our latest set of guesses comes to us from Dan Foster over at Medium. I’d never heard of him before, but he’s apparently associated somehow with a pay-to-play online group called Backyard Church. It specifically seeks what I call churchless believers—Christians who still identify as such, but who have abandoned their church memberships for various reasons.

Assertion #1: Government favoritism is causing Christianity’s decline

“When churches start to cozy up to the state,” writers Foster,

they can get lost in the sauce of politics and forget about their mission to spread the good news, love God and love others, and serve the poor and unfortunate. Instead, the focus shifts from being all about love and kindness to being all about power and privilege. State-funded churches end up losing their soul and driving away those who actually have some spiritual integrity.

What is worse, when the church starts to throw its weight around and force its conservative beliefs on people who aren’t interested, it just causes resentment. Consider the church’s appalling treatment of the LGBTIQ+ community as an example.Dan Foster, Medium

He also cites research that supports the hypothesis that when a government shows favoritism to a religion, that religion goes into decline. Indeed, we’ve seen this happen in Europe for decades now. It also seems like the harder the Christian Right tries to usurp and hijack the American government, the harder they alienate not only existing Christians but potential new recruits as well.

Of course, politicization works in the opposite direction as well. I’ve heard about pastors who openly, vocally support liberal political causes and subsequently alienate followers who are either more conservative or don’t like the notion of politics mixing with their observance of religion. Indeed, that’s the entire basis of the classic 1969 book The Gathering Storm in the Churches by Jeffrey K. Hadden. It examines how pastors across Christianity dealt with the Civil Rights Movement, and how their congregations responded. (Spoiler alert: Congregations usually were not enthused at all.)

The truth about government favoritism

However, Foster is only half correct. Christianity has almost entirely lost its ability to hurt dissenters, heretics, and apostates. Their leaders also once had the power to force everyone to join and support churches, but they’ve lost that power in recent decades. In past centuries when Christians still had that power, nobody could have called Christianity a declining religion. It grew, and it grew precisely because nobody had a choice about joining and supporting Christian churches.

This religion gained power and cultural dominance through such coercion. The moment Christian leaders gained that kind of temporal power over other people’s lives, they began using it. They kept using it until governments wrested it away from them. And they still dream of getting it back again. Jesus has never, ever stopped Christian zealots from seeking power—or misusing it.

It was literally only in the past 50 years or so that people were finally free to reject Christianity—and only in the past 20ish years that anyone could safely raise the alarm about predatory, hypocritical Christians.

Coercion is the key element here that Foster can’t perceive. Government favoritism in an atmosphere of purely voluntary affiliation contributes to religious decline, not favoritism in and of itself.

Assertion #2: The Christian Right is causing Christianity’s decline by being completely repulsive

Here, Foster sees evangelicals’ literal idolization of Donald Trump as a major tipping point in Christianity’s decline:

Meanwhile, in the United States, conservative Christians have become involved in politics, fighting tooth and nail to uphold their precious “Christian values” and take America back for God. The only problem is that as Christianity has become more politicized, the country has actually experienced a decline in Christian belief, ironically achieving the very opposite of what these so-called Christians want to achieve.

Enter Donald Trump.

In the Evangelical world, whether or not a person was a good political candidate was dependent not on their policies but on their profession of faith — even if the content of their character was at odds with that profession of faith. They merely had to hold up a Bible and stand in front of a church, and they would get the Evangelical vote, much to the chagrin of those looking on. Yes, the more Christian nationalists with the Republican Party push their agenda for a “Christian” nation, the more Christianity is despised, and the less likely they are to ever obtain that which they seek. What is more, they will destroy the church in the process.Dan Foster, Medium

We’ve also already seen him mention the Christian Right’s bigotry as a turnoff to many Americans. Elsewhere in the essay, he discusses the distasteful way that these extremists seek to drown out competing religions:

Some Christians believe that their faith is declining because there are too many other religions being given equal footing. And when they feel threatened by those pesky minority religious groups, they turn to the state for help to implement laws and principles that protect their so-called “Christian values.”

And if that’s not enough, they can resort to trying to keep people of other faiths out of their countries altogether.Dan Foster, Medium

It’s very clear that Foster does not approve at all of any of this behavior or these political goals.

The truth about repulsive Republicans

Here, again, though, he is only half correct. This charge is true only because Christians have lost their former powers of coercion. Not only do people more easily and quickly find out about the hypocrisy and cruelty of the Christian Right, but we can talk about it in public spaces without fearing the vicious retaliation of “Christian love” or fears of our government’s retaliation. The most these control-hungry Christians can do to their critics, especially online, is whine about feeling totally persecuted fer jus’ bein’ KRISchin.

All too many Christian leaders are repulsive, hypocritical, and cruel. They always have been. Study the history of Christianity, and you’ll soon find endless uncomfortable essays about pederasty and other forms of hypocrisy. Jesus has never held back Christians’ hands from the innocent. And this degeneracy appears to have been an open secret among Catholic laity, with priests frequently showing up in secular stories about extramarital affairs and deceit. Thanks to Catholic leaders’ powers of coercion, however, people could only safely raise even the hint of an accusation in roundabout ways.

Until shockingly recently, it didn’t matter how Christians or their leaders behaved. Nobody would find out, and it wouldn’t matter even if anybody did. Nobody was allowed to reject them on the basis of their behavior—or for any other reason.

In an atmosphere of voluntary affiliation, though, Christians’ behavior matters a lot more. And now that their behavior actually matters, they steadfastly refuse to behave in ways that reflect their own stated beliefs. It obviously bothers them a lot that people reject them because of their hypocrisy, yes. But instead of cleaning up their behavior, they instead try to shame and police the boundaries of those who rightly reject them on that basis. Ironically, these attempts only confirm that people are right to reject them.

Assertion #3: Christianity’s rise occurred because Jesus grew it the right way

These past few decades, Christians’ recruitment attempts fail more and more often. Often, they even fail spectacularly—like when the Southern Baptist Convention’s leader asked for a solid one million baptisms for 2006. They only bagged about 360k baptisms that year. Worse, that number represents a slight drop for them.

So naturally, Christians see their recruitment failures and wonder how their lack of success squares with their belief about their religion’s early growth. They wonder what they’re doing that is so different from what the earliest Christians did.

That belief is a beloved and nearly-universally-embraced myth in Christianity. It leads them to glaringly incorrect conclusions that spark flawed plans in turn.

Illustrating this chain of errors, Foster writes:

One thing is certain. Jesus Christ was not interested in political power, or he could have had it. He arrived in human history precisely at the right moment to lead an uprising against the rule of his Roman conquerors. [. . .]

Yet, he did not.

The movement that he started required no armies, governments, or rulers to champion its cause. It can be practiced with or without the approval of any state and, therefore, can never be legislated out of existence. Neither is it threatened by those who believe different things. It is the movement of the human heart that takes place when one resolves to simply love God and love others.Dan Foster, Medium

To fix Christianity’s decline, then, Foster asserts that compassionate, loving Christians must start recruiting like Jesus did.

Combined with disavowing the Christian Right, this plan will end Christianity’s decline.

Tra-la! It’s that easy! Amazing how no Christian has ever thought of this idea before, isn’t it?

(Incidentally, Jesus may well have been seeking exactly that uprising. He just expected it to happen through divine aid, not through mortal war-making. This paper offers a tantalizing possible explanation for his absolutely bizarre behavior at the Mount of Olives, as described in the Gospel of Luke. (Archive))

The truth about Christianity’s apparent early explosive growth

Unfortunately for Foster and the many, many Christians who think like him, their belief about Christianity’s early growth is completely untrue. It’s not even half true. It just isn’t true at all.

For their religion’s first few centuries, Christian evangelists struggled hard to make and keep converts. They squabbled constantly among themselves, too. We see hints of these troubles even in the New Testament itself.

These people left our churches, but they never really belonged with us; otherwise they would have stayed with us. When they left, it proved that they did not belong with us. [1 John 2:19, New Living Translation]

Now the Holy Spirit tells us clearly that in the last times some will turn away from the true faith; they will follow deceptive spirits and teachings that come from demons. [1 Timothy 4:1, New Living Translation]

Even some men from your own group will rise up and distort the truth in order to draw a following. [Acts 20:30, New Living Translation]

I appeal to you, dear brothers and sisters, by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, to live in harmony with each other. Let there be no divisions in the church. Rather, be of one mind, united in thought and purpose. For some members of Chloe’s household have told me about your quarrels, my dear brothers and sisters. [1 Corinthians 1:10-11, New Living Translation; this time, the fight involved how individual Christians described themselves as followers of particular leaders like Paul, Peter, Apollos, or others, rather than just as followers of “Jesus”]

But I will keep on doing what I am doing, in order to undercut those who want an opportunity to be regarded as our equals in the things of which they boast. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ. [2 Corinthians 11:12-13, Berean Standard Bible]

I am amazed how quickly you are deserting the One who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel—which is not even a gospel. Evidently some people are troubling you and trying to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be under a curse! [Galatians 1:6-8, Berean Standard Bible]

Even that question [of circumcision] came up only because of some so-called believers there—false ones, really—who were secretly brought in. They sneaked in to spy on us and take away the freedom we have in Christ Jesus. They wanted to enslave us and force us to follow their Jewish regulations. [Galatians 2:4, New Living Translation]

Even Jesus talks about the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13: If a farmer sows his seeds on barren, shallow, or rocky soil, then they can’t produce a crop. Even in 85 CE when this book is thought to have been written, its writer already knew that most people who heard “the good news” rejected it.

For that matter, the Book of Acts (generally thought to have been written around 80-90 CE as well, though it might have been written decades later) records early Christians lying to their communal groups (Acts 5) and the earliest evangelists having to deal with a sarcastic slave-girl who mocked them for days (Acts 16). This is the reality of Christian groups and evangelism today, in the same atmosphere of voluntary affiliation.

In the few surviving early extra-biblical accounts describing Christians, we see serious criticisms leveled against them as well. These criticisms cover the usual ground that modern Americans are used to seeing in the headlines: hypocrisy, sexual predation, cruelty, and more.

In recent years, some Christians themselves have refuted the entire concept of explosive early growth. In reality, Christianity grew about as quickly then as it grows nowadays. One can easily understand why, too. For those early decades and centuries, as they do nowadays, Christian leaders operated without coercive power.

Temporal power changed the entire game for the struggling early religion

Things didn’t really turn around for Christianity until big-name Roman rulers began using the religion like a political football. When the right horse won the right race, those rulers began to grant Christian leaders more and more temporal power. And once Christian leaders gained that power, they began to use it to its fullest extent. They used this power both to provide enough cover to themselves to act in flagrantly hypocritical ways, and to coerce other people into joining and supporting their religion.

And they didn’t stop until someone more powerful made them stop.

Christians love to imagine that Jesus had some magically delicious means of recruitment that worked wonderfully well, and that he perfectly set up his new religion. In other words, their religion began on the right foot. Over time, they believe, the passage of time and sinful maneuvering and politics (and possibly demons) have corrupted Christianity. So they have fantasized for decades that if they can only get back to that gauzy notion of Original Christianity, then they can set everything back to rights!

Except none of that is true. Jesus was so meaningless to the Jewish and Roman writers of his time that not one single contemporaneous document exists from the years 30-40 CE to tell us about a single thing that he or his followers did. His offshoot of Judaism took a long time to find root and become its own branch of the tree, and it struggled the entire time with exactly the same squabbles, power grabs, and backbiting we can see in almost every single church in the world.

(By the way: Go ahead and look for any such account. I did exactly that as a Pentecostal in college and recently again through my First-Century Fridays series. You won’t find even one contemporary account about Jesus or his followers written during those critical years of 30-40 CE. Incidentally, that discovery was a serious blow to my faith back then.)

The real key to Christianity’s decline

I get what Dan Foster’s trying to do here. He wants a Christianity that’s way better than anything these extremists are pushing. He wants a religion that grows, yes, but one that grows for the right reasons. He’s not even saying anything new or weird or different in his essay that his religion’s adherents and observers haven’t seen a thousand times already. So I’m not mad at him or trying to pick on him. He means well, and I’d certainly like to see more Christians practicing his best-case form of the religion that focuses on charity, loving community, service, and mercy.

He just doesn’t understand that Christianity itself does not have much appeal. It promises divine help that doesn’t ever manifest, a system of morality and ethics that somehow utterly fails to reliably produce decent human beings, groups that aren’t worth the price of admission, and a whole series of untrue claims that believers must embrace to belong to the religion. Almost the only difference between Foster’s form of Christianity and that of the repulsive Republicans he criticizes is exactly which untrue claims they each think believers must embrace to earn the title of “Christian.”

(Did you catch his attempt to invalidate his tribalistic enemies’ use of their shared label of Christian? “So-called Christians,” he called them. Of course, they’d try to do the exact same thing to him. It’s really too bad that they don’t have a universal membership guide that could unequivocally tell them what a Christian must believe and do to be considered a Christian. If they had such a thing, they could make sure every member had it. It’d be so grand!)

In centuries past, Christianity always suffered from that same lack of intrinsic appeal. Big growth always required an artificial external factor that forced consumers to purchase it. That factor was coercive power.

Loss of coercion is the key to Christianity’s decline. It’s not happening because of Republican repulsiveness, nor its lack of proper Jesus-ification, nor even the erosion of America’s wall of separation between church and state. All of those qualities existed in many countries for centuries, but Christianity wasn’t declining then. It only began to decline once it became safer for people to reject affiliation with the religion.

The trend of decline that we’re seeing now would have been over decades ago if evangelicals hadn’t engineered a series of moral panics aimed at gaining them more cultural and political power. But they only delayed the inevitable.

Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that control-hungry Christians have finally begun to understand this point.

Christianity’s growth had nothing to do with Jesus, and its decline has nothing to do with a lack of correct Jesus-ing

Ten years ago, I didn’t think the Christian Right yet understood the importance of coercive powers. But since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, I think they have begun to figure it out. They’ve all but given up the fight to regain cultural dominance. Their few attempts to grab for relevance are cringey and obviously driven by self-interest. Instead, they are fighting to keep and grow political dominance.

With political dominance, they can certainly maintain their feeling of having control over others. They’ll feel safe in their Ignorant Tight-Asses Club authoritarian enclaves, thanks to Big Daddy Government protecting them. (The only moral Big Daddy Government is their Big Daddy Government, after all.)

As well, they can certainly try very hard to enshrine their rights-violating, spirit-crushing social rules into law—and then enforce them even against people who aren’t even members of their religion. I’m sure getting some anti-blasphemy laws into place would be among their first priorities.

And that’s all bad news. Nobody sensible, not even Christians, wants to see evangelicals or hardline Catholics get their dreamed-of theocracy. If human history is anything to go by, we know that a Christian theocracy in America would look more like the Republic of Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale than any sort of Happy Jesus Fun Christian Land of authoritarian Christians’ dreams. It is of utmost importance that we continue to slap down their grabby little hands at every single sign of religious overreach.

But to reverse Christianity’s decline, political dominance needs to Christians regaining the powers of coercion that Christians once held. Just gaining political dominance itself is a half-measure if people can still vote with their feet and their wallets.

Unless Christians regain their lost ability to force everyone to join and support their churches, nothing will reverse their decline. That decline will eventually bottom out, of course. The number of Christians will settle at its natural point of market appeal. Growth past that point is very unlikely, though, without coercive powers re-entering the picture.