Study finds most people who stop going to church do so for the banal reason that they love money and status more

 Enthusiast for the Christian communist Bruderhof Gang Jake Meador, here:

Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.     

Same as it ever was.

Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

-- Matthew 6:24; Luke 16:13

For the love of money is the root of all evil.

-- I Timothy 6:10

On the inevitability of income and wealth inequality

Experience teaches it, to be sure, and it's an old enough piece of common sense wisdom that it got enshrined by the Torah. Subsequently it was gifted to us by Christianity, in Pharisaical form, as crystallized by the tyranny of the Pauline consensus contaminating the gospels.

For the poor shall never cease out of the land . . ..

-- Deuteronomy 15:11a

For ye have the poor always with you . . ..

-- Matthew 26:11a 

For ye have the poor with you always . . ..

-- Mark 14:7a

For the poor always ye have with you . . ..

-- John 12:8a

For Paul, "poor" is what it has always been, an explicit category which is "other", and is not the essential element and mark of Christian self-definition, let alone Jewish:

only they would have us remember the poor, which very thing I was eager to do.

-- Galatians 2:10

Except Luke will have none of it.

He alone avoids the saying because it destroys the binary. Luke knows that voluntary poverty is the mark of true repentance qualifying one to be the disciple of Jesus, to be one of the few who will escape the imminently coming judgment. Luke's Jesus does not imagine a "church" which will feed and clothe the poor, let alone one which has enough substance to feed and clothe itself and "therewith be content". The choice is only binary, God or mammon.

Hence the unique Lukan witness, which takes the place occupied by "you have the poor always with you" in the other gospels:

So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple. 

-- Luke 14:33

Not very commonsensical, not very Jewish, either. Moses Maimonides did not approve. And Christians today avoid talking about it like . . . well . . . the plague.

Coronavirus catastrophe exposes fraudulent Christianity at the heart of Trumpism: Love of money is the root of all libertarianism, more important than life itself

Texas lt. gov.: Grandparents 'don't want the whole country to be sacrificed' amid coronavirus closures:

“You’re basically saying that this disease could take your life but that’s not the scariest thing to you. There’s something that would be worse than dying,” Carlson said. “If I get sick, I’ll go and try to get better, but if I don’t, I don’t, and I’m not trying to think of any kind of morbid way, Tucker, I’m just saying that we’ve got a choice here and we’re going to be in a total collapse, recession, depression, collapse in our society if this goes on another several months, there won’t be any jobs to come back to for many people,” he said. ... “But the point is, our biggest gift we give to our country and our children and our grandchildren is the legacy of our country." 

And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. 

-- I Timothy 6:8ff.

The priority of the very words of Jesus was recognized even by the Paulinist author of 1 Timothy

If any man ... consent not to ... the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness; He is proud, knowing nothing ... from such withdraw thyself.

-- 1 Timothy 6:3ff.

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:

-- Matthew 7:26

For too many the name of the Christian God is Ka-Ching ...

"who suppose that godliness is a means of gain" (1 Timothy 6:5f.), when it's the other way around: The godliness is the great gain.

The Paulinists compromised Jesus' asceticism

So if we have enough food and clothing, let us be content. -- 1 Timothy 6:8

"That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn't life more than food, and your body more than clothing?" -- Matthew 6:25

When It Was OK To Be Poor

 

If we have food and clothing, with these we shall be content.

1 Timothy 6:8