Theres plenty of reasons people are done with organized religion, Trump is merely one of those reasons.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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Yeah I'd say he's more a symptom of the overall issues driving people away from churches.
I am as anti Trump as the next guy, I think anyone that wants to follow that political ideology has lost their minds .... but I was thinking the same thing about the reasons why people are moving away from religion ... It was happening anyway .... "correlation does not imply causation"
It's just a continuation of the John Birch society and their ilk, whether they realize it or no
I doubt Trump is even a major one. It's probably a much bigger factor that baby boomers are dying off and boomers are much more religious than GenX, Millenials, or Gen Z.
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The mixing of politics and religion is one of the big reasons.
For me, the way churches and church people have treated the pandemic was absolutely disgusting. They preach about loving each other, but showed a complete lack of empathy towards vulnerable people by continuing to hold services despite the risks involved. Also, most people in church were either wearing masks under their chin, some not wearing one at all. I got covid from church.
Working in a restaurant shows how disgusting Christans are. The Sunday brunch/lunch crowd are rude, impatient, dirty, and tip poorly. They come from a place where they're ostensibly being told to love everyone and then forget everything before they get in their car.
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Coincidence is not causation.
People waking up to conservatives using religion as a cudgel for decades is not something that should be laid at one person's feet, he is just riding along for the ride. Wish the media would stop slapping his stupid name on everything conservatives have stood for far longer than he claimed to be a Republican.
conservatives using religion as a cudgel for decades
True, but the orange grifter has taken it to astounding heights.
People waking up to ~~conservatives~~ people using religion as a cudgel for ~~decades~~ centuries.
This isn't a FTFY, its just that some demographics have and continue to be oppressed and/or controlled via religion.
They aren't leaving church because Trump.
They are leaving church because church leadership worships Trump.
Religions with members who don't support Trump are doing just fine.
Religions with members who don’t support Trump are doing just fine.
Curious, do you have the numbers to back this up?
Anecdotally, I’m a former pastor who hasn’t stepped foot inside a church in four years because of Trump and these people.
I almost walked out of church in 2016 when the head pastor thanked God for Trump from the pulpit. I hung on till the pandemic and when the church insisted on becoming centers for disease, I was just through.
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Thanks. It’s been very difficult because I’m not an ex-Christian, but I’m not one of them anymore either. I doubt I ever really was.
I still want to be a pastor though, to talk about God and theology and support others as they go through life. It was my entire adult life.
I just don’t think there’s a puzzle out there that will fit my jagged little piece.
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What's funny to me is my ex mother-out-law (mom of the long term ex I never married) told me recently she could not find a Christian church she agreed with. She said they are unchristian, so I asked "not welcoming to the poor and immigrants? Too focused on dogma and not the spirit of Christ? Prosperity Gospel nonsense?".
No, apparently the Christian churches were too "woke" for her. Too nice, not enough conservative politics in the sermons. Oh my goodness, but I think at least my questions landed.
So she may be part of this number of dis-churched people but not for the reasons we might hope.
There's a whole movement of people leaving churches because they aren't radical enough. The bad part is they conglomerate to echo chambers of unbridled hate.
Fantastic opening:
Donald Trump, a 77-year-old Bible salesman from Palm Beach, Florida, has emerged as the nation’s most prominent Christian leader.
The cornered rat has entered the chat...
The more the "Christians" try to prevent change, the more people they will drive away from the church.
Don't do that, they are indeed Christians not "Christians". I don't accept the no true Scotsman fallacy, these people are indeed Christian, they are the dregs of what that religion teaches. Own it, fix it, don't just claim everyone who sucks in your religion isn't a "true Christian"
I disagree with this on the basis that Christ explicitly teaches His followers to Love unconditionally, care for the vulnerable and needy, and makes an example of those who use the sanctity of the Temple for personal gain. People who call themselves "Christian" while very deliberately doing the exact opposite of the things Christ taught are very literally not "True Christians", because they do none of the things commanded of them by Christ. This differs from the "No True Scotsman" because there is a whole specific list of criteria differentiating a True Christian from a false one.
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I agree for the most part, and I left the Catholic Church I grew up in for that and many other reasons.
However, isn't Christ's message supposed to be "you shall love your neighbour as yourself"? When it becomes "hurt your neighbour as much as you can" does it make sense to still call it Christianity?
Since it's been that way basically from the beginning though, maybe well meaning Christian people should just step away and start over.
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I'm legitimately surprised there is any conscious uncoupling happening. But...I guess that's something?
Yeshua (i.e. "Jesus"): "Treat everyone with love and respect. Welcome the stranger. Don't worry about other people's perceived shortcomings, worry about your own; live and lead by example. Pay your taxes. Share everything you have with others, especially the less fortunate, the needy, and the hurting. All of it. If you are rich, you aren't doing this, and you will not enter the Kingdom of God. Profit from my faith and I will end you."
Religious MAGAs: "Kill foreigners. I'm "good people" but those others who want to be left alone and live differently than me need to be beat into submission. Taxation is theft. And socialism! My bank account is God's will! Let those poors pull themselves up by their bootstrings. My pastor needs a new limousine to spread the Good News of supply-side Jesus! Hey, why are all the people leaving the church?"
Trump may be accellerating the issue, but people have been turning away from religion for at least the 5 decades I've been on this planet. I think it's more that younger people take a more critical eye to the idea and realize that if you look at organized religion in general, none of it makes the least bit of sense.
I'd love to see a CinemaSins style video on the Bible.
This is my own personal experience, so your experience may vary significantly. But I was born in the early 70s and I think my generation was really the first generation that may have had strict, God-fearing parents, but were the first generation to actually start thinking critically about it instead of just blindly accepting the religious ideas being passed down by our parents even if we know they don't make sense. In turn, we raised our children either without religious influence at all, or at least a heavily scaled down emphasis on religion, while allowing our children to make their religious decisions on their own, assuming they bother practicing religion at all. All things considered, the increasing trend of abandoning religion entirely should not only be no surprise, but should also accellerate as the next generation will likely be raised by mostly atheist parents, or at least non-practicing parishioners, who's children will look at religion as a relic of the past that their great grandparents cared about back in the day.
I think in a few short generations, our descendants will look at religion the same way we look at medieval practices of using leeches to cure disease.
I'm sure we weren't the first generation to question religion, I'm your age and my dad did, and there were hippies and beatniks and I'm sure some version of freethinkers before that. My mom used church more like a social group and I think we ARE missing that in society now. But agree it's reached a critical mass now in my kids' generation, their friends from school mostly are nonreligious, a few are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu but overwhelming majority just not religious.
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It's not CinemaSins style, but Satan's guide to the Bible is certainly an interesting watch.
Your last paragraph - I sure hope so.
My extended family all complains about how their church attendance is declining and people are being let go from leadership because the tithing isn't coming in like it used to and etcblahetc...
I don't fucking care. Burn. Topple. Go away. We'll all be better off.
Religious affiliation often goes up under harsher times. If economic woes and global warming continue, I think we'll see the trend reverse.
Which doesn't necessarily mean Christianity, mind you. It might be some form of neo-paganisim. I've been noticing this trend among some of my ex-Christian friends.
Was also born in the 70s, feel the same way. I was raised Catholic, but we were taught that abortion and gay people were absolutely fine no matter what the church said. When I left home I left Catholicism simply because I didn't relate to it, what does a voluntary eunuch have to say to a young woman about her life, was my reasoning?
But in the last few years I started going to a very lefty inclusive and completely welcoming non-denominational Christian Church. I still think much of the Bible is loony tunes, but applying some of the wisdom of the teachings of Christ to life is appealing to me, and there's just something about singing in an old building with stained glass windows on a Sunday morning that feels sacred in a way nothing else does. This church is actively trying to find a path forward to be good humans together while acknowledging and trying to repair the damage Christianity has done, we have openly gay and trans people who attend and participate fully, and I don't know why they all can't be like that. Conservatives suck the life breath out of everything they touch.
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That’s correlation, not causation, at best. In fact, it might be the other way around.
The precipitous decline in Christianity is more likely the reason they’re getting more aggressive.
Yeah. Actually it wouldn't surprise me that he makes a trump church and urged ppl to go to that instead.
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The precipitous decline in Christianity is more likely the reason they’re getting more aggressive.
Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of U.S. adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” This accelerating trend is reshaping the U.S. religious landscape, leading many people to wonder what the future of religion in America might look like.
It's a 35 year old trend they're trying to pin on the wannabe fascist in chief.
My parents pretty much gave up on church over 40 years ago.
Growing up they went to church regularly, and then they moved deep into the "bible belt" and the churches never were about community but all about "you all are hellbound sinners" and that just didn't seem constructive.
Say it with me now: RELIGION AND POLITICS ARE EXPLICITLY FORBIDDEN FROM JOINING EACH OTHER ACCORDING TO THE WISHES OF OUR FOUNDING FATHERS. SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
Secular state. Ask France, they are experienced at it. And at atheism state.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Sure, but this article is talking about how it causes it. It might be dubious and disagreeable.
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Trump the Bible salesman.
Okay then.
Nice. I remember thinking even in his initial campaign for 2016 that if he wins, there might be a silver lining of benefit we could get out of it, in the same way that a hangover is beneficial for an alcoholic: it'll suck, but it might slap some sense into people who wake up that next morning and decide they're never letting that happen again.
...unfortunately that didn't really happen on a large scale, but this hits close enough to that mark that I'll take it.
Gave up my churching before orange buffoon came stompin. And his malarkey plays no part in keepin it that way.
Well, silver linings and all that.
Might actually be the best thing this piece of shit has done.
What percent of people visited church on christmas?
It's hard to say if this claim is correct or not without looking at the data. Religiousness was already on the decline before Trump took office. We'd need a graph that shows that decline speeding up since 2016, and probably even more in recent years as evangelicals have gotten more and more unhinged.
Weird opinion article with unfounded assertions.
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