Queer Jesus has gone "mainstream" because 13.7 million sane people have already left the formerly mainstream churches

Queer Jesus Goes Mainstream at Churches, Divinity Schools

John Murawski, RCI

 

United Church of Christ membership is down 64% to 0.8 million from 2.2 million. The queer-affirming church performs nuptials for polyamorists where multiple partners marry each other.

United Methodist Church membership is down 47% to 5.7 million from 10.7 million. The church aims to be the first to ordain a drag queen.

Presbyterian Church USA membership is down 74% to 1.1 million from 4.25 million. In Iowa they worship the god of trans being, the great they/them.

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America membership is down 42% to 3 million from 5.2 million. It elected a transgender bishop two years ago.

The Episcopal Church in the United States is down 53% to 1.7 million from 3.6 million. It has a priest who maintains that promiscuous people are simply being hospitable. The real sinner at Sodom was Lot, who refused the hospitality of the rapists trying to break down his door.

There's nothing mainstream about the 12 million still left in these churches.

Millions of Americans have fled into non-denominational Protestantism. And there are at least 30 million Baptists of one kind or another, while Roman Catholics number 70 million.

The USA has 210 million nominally Christian people. But Africa has 685 million. Latin America about 601 million. Europe 571 million.

America is fast on the road to becoming a Christian backwater. The main show is elsewhere.

Some results from the decadal Religion Census of the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies for 2010-2020

 As reported here in The Economist:

the ranks of all religious Americans rose by 10.6m (7%) ...

overall population grew by 7.5% ...

the number of Episcopalians and Methodists dropped by 19% each ...

the Lutherans plunged by 25% ...

Presbyterians lost nearly 1m (40%) ...

The Southern Baptist Convention shrank 11% ...

non-denominational Christian churches recruited 9m new members ...

Catholics claim they gained nearly 3m members (a 5% increase) despite closing over 1,100 churches. 

      

Color me skeptical.

Start with the big number.

Average population grew 7.1% or 22 million over the period, according to POPTHM, which is the data of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, not 7.5% as stated in the story.

The data of the U.S. Census, as shown by POP, shows average population grew by even less over the period: 6.97% or 21.6 million, not 7.5% as stated in the story.

Obviously these are estimates, not counts, but the reported overall population growth claim in the story is up to a half-point larger than these big baseline numbers reported by the official organs of the U.S. government.

One half point of 310 million is 1.55 million people. One false move and you've just wiped out the entire denomination of the American Baptist Churches USA. When you study religion in America, you are discussing a bewildering number of splinter groups, many of which are simply microscopic in size.

It's extremely difficult to get data about groups like that right. Fully 40% are left out of even good surveys.

We are then confidently given to believe that hardly half the population growth went on to affiliate with a religion over the period: 10.6 million out of something north of 22 million, but by the end of the story you then have to believe also that 9 million new non-denoms plus 3 million new Catholics still equals 10.6 million.

Hello, is there an economist in the house?

Separately, there is the recent claim, supported by Pew, that Mormonism is the fastest reproducing American religious group, the implications of which go wholly unaddressed by the story.

On the other hand, reported Mormon membership in the U.S. grew by fewer than 700k 2011-2023, according to the latest Mormon data.

As pointed out previously, Christians themselves variously and significantly exaggerate how much money they give to their churches. Relying on their statements of membership in surveys even such as this one is . . . problematic.

They resemble in these respects nothing so much as the wider culture of exaggeration.

I'm doing great. Everything is fine. Awesome, in fact.

57% can't afford a $1,000 emergency. 85% say the country is headed in the wrong direction. The world is going to end in 2031 if we don't address climate change.

The proverbial Lutheran legacy of guilt is so ubiquitous it once got a big round of knowing applause

 "I am just a towering mass of Lutheran mid-western guilt".

-- David Letterman, October 2009, after the two-minute mark

Hysteria characterizes academic literature on Christian nationalism today

 From the story here:

If a conservative Presbyterian who has long argued that the church should stay out of politics tests positive for Christian nationalism, someone could wonder if sociologists need an equivalent to what epidemiologists have in asymptomatic carriers of COVID. Can a class of Christian nationalists exist who have no strong symptoms of this political virus? If so, do they need to be in political isolation? 

Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) this summer rejected by 75% a statement condemning political violence

Reported here :

Elders on the debate floor objected to the resolution. One elder speaking against the statement said that without political violence, the Protestant Reformation and American Revolution wouldn’t have happened. “We’d all still be genuflecting and using holy water,” he said. 

The squeamish, elitist minority claims in response that “It’s not uncommon for evangelicals to not be too concerned whether there is historical pedigree to something they think is biblical.”

Yeah right, there's no historical pedigree WHATSOEVER, lol:  

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

David French, call your office

The Presbyterian clergy are the loudest, the most intolerant of all sects; the most tyrannical and ambitious, ready at the word of the law-giver, if such a word could now be obtained, to put their torch to the pile, and to rekindle in this virgin hemisphere the flame in which their oracle, Calvin, consumed the poor Servetus, because he could not subscribe to the proposition of Calvin, that magistrates have a right to exterminate all heretics to the Calvinistic creed! They pant to re-establish by law that holy inquisition.

-- Thomas Jefferson to William Short, April 13, 1820

LOL, Presbyterian David French is completely unfamiliar with the far-right road show in revolutionary America which repeatedly called the people to arms from Protestant pulpits

He's shocked, I tell you, shocked:

 If you think it’s remotely unusual that a truly extremist event (which included more than one person who’d called for hanging his political opponents) was held at a church, then you’re not familiar with far-right road shows that are stoking extremism in church after church at event after event. ... We know that fanatical religious subcultures can do an immense amount of damage to the body politic. ... what we face is an Christian subculture that is full of terrible religious purpose. The seeds of renewed political violence are being sown in churches across our land.

 More.

In 1776 the David French of 2022 would almost certainly have been a Loyalist, and the sworn enemy of the Presbyterian Rebellion condemned by George III.

Unlike today's fire-breathing right-wing lunatics, French is a proud proponent of "elite Evangelicalism" and "elite American culture" for whom "Christian nationalism" is an oxymoron. Those crazy Pentecostal patriots supporting Donald Trump come from the other side of the tracks, in case you needed reminding. David French is above all that, and stands for everything good, proper, and reasonable, you see. Like the Pharisees did. He is not like other men.

But his idea that a "new insurrection is being organized, in a sanctuary near you" is just as crazy as his idea that January 6th actually was one.

How a now de-Christianized America is suddenly going to embrace a bunch of religious fanatics with their hair on fire is not explained, but the "apocalyptic message" of "national doom" comes for us all, including for David French.

Is there a public Christian today who is more out of touch with the deeply political nature of the history of Protestant experience in America than he?

Another Lincoln and state worshiper pretends that local militias and the Union Army weren't mobs

Uniforms are placed upon them from the start to help obscure this fact. In the end, the winners' mobs are always anything but mobs, especially to their partisans.

Like John Bicknell, here, in "The Philadelphia Bible Riots":

In Philadelphia, after some stops and starts, the civil authority in the form of local militias defended order. ... In Illinois, the civil authorities sided with the mob. Philadelphia’s Catholics survived. Nauvoo’s Mormons, having seen their government abandon them to the mob, fled.

Six years earlier in Springfield, a mere 130 miles from Nauvoo, a young Whig lawyer had warned that “if the laws be continually despised and disregarded, if their rights to be secure in their persons and property, are held by no better tenure than the caprice of a mob, the alienation of their affections from the government is the natural consequence; and to that, sooner or later, it must come.” As would so often be the case, Abraham Lincoln was prophetic. ...

But the useful lesson from the Philadelphia riots of 1844, the mob assassination of Joseph Smith, and countless other examples across the centuries, is that those with power will always act to defend that power and are not too particular about how they do it. It makes little difference if that power is derived from positions of authority in government, business, religion, the media, academia, or any other institution. If mobs, in the street or online, will help them achieve their ends, they’re willing to exploit them, ignoring Lincoln’s admonition that “there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” The question—in 1844 as it remains today—is whether the authority of the state will be employed to quell the mob or to augment it. The former is the foundation of ordered liberty. The latter is something else entirely.

I'm sure that the British crown thought that sending 24,000 Redcoats to Long Island in August 1776 was meant to maintain ordered liberty, too, against the Presbyterian Rebellion, just as Lincoln came to think both disunion and slavery were grievances which had become quite fit indeed for redress by force of arms. Eventually the chartered rights of Englishmen in New York prevailed over the forces of a foreign king, only to suffer loss 89 years later from the Bluebellies of a domestic tyrant.  

As Bicknell otherwise rightly says,

Human affairs are morally complex and attempts to simplify them—even for supposedly well-intentioned purposes—are almost always bound to come up short.

When the Presbyterians were the fanaticks

 

The presbyterians, and other fanaticks that dangle after them, are well inclined to pull down the present establishment.

-- Jonathan Swift

If only this ignoramus knew about The Presbyterian Rebellion he'd be crowing more than he usually does about how right he is

 

"Huge majorities" of the Presbyterian Church in America twice "voted to uphold the Christian sexual morality of the last two millennia"

But its elites "are out of touch with the denomination's grass roots."

More. 

Not to be confused with the pro-gay PCUSA, which had 3.1 million members in 1984 (now down 60% in the 35 years to 2020).

 

1.24 million members

0.38 million members

The incapacity of Catholicism to rebel against evil is a feature, not a bug

Submission is the meaning of both Islam and Catholicism. It's not for nothing that the American Revolution was called a "Presbyterian Rebellion". A Catholic America is a supine America.

A Paulinist who wears cultural appropriation like a badge of honor

Christians are big time cultural appropriators. ... We have done much more than pinch a few pagan festivals and Christianise them. ... If we were to follow our sensitive compatriots [Paul] is clearly a hegemonic, imperialist Zionist/Christian cultural appropriator.

In I Corinthians 9:19-23 Paul boasts, ‘I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.' To the ever sensitive this is nothing less than a deliberate attempt to appropriate the culture of others in order to gain control of their minds and manipulate them. A vicious plot to destroy centuries-old indigenous belief systems and replace them with the beliefs of the powerful. Cultural appropriation of the very worst kind.

More here.

As with the American Revolution, "Presbyterians" to blame for starting the rebellion, but now against American immigration laws

But these Presbyterians might have been drawn and quartered by their forebears in 1776.

Increasing number of churches agree to protect immigrants from deportation:

The modern sanctuary movement in the U.S. dates back to the 1980s and Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona. ... Hundreds of churches have said they are willing to take in an illegal immigrant, but only several dozen are actively hosting someone and there has been a drop in migrants entering sanctuary in 2018.

The good news is the bad news: "It is FIRE which I came to throw upon the earth!"

πῦρ ἦλθον βαλεῖν ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν -- Luke 12:49

His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. -- Matthew 3:12

His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. -- Luke 3:17

Of stingy Catholics, zany Pentecostals and honest (sort of) Presbyterians

Have you ever noticed that Catholics are stingy, and not just with money?

Visit comments sections at websites frequented by Catholics and you will find relatively little upvoting even between Catholics who agree with one another.

It sort of gives the lie to this New York Times article from 1994 which chalked up Catholics' financial stinginess compared with other denominations to "dissatisfaction with being left out of financial decisions". No, they really are stingy, and they (honestly) lie about it almost as badly as do Baptists, who are the worst. 

To wit: The study which was the basis for the Times' story is interesting for the discrepancies between what congregations said their households gave on average and what the individual households said they gave:

Congregational reports per household vs. members' reports:

Assemblies of God $1696 vs. $2985 (members said 76% more)

Baptists $1154 vs. $2479 (115% more)

Presbyterians $1085 vs. $1635 (51% more)

Lutherans $746 vs. $1196 (60% more)

Catholics $386 vs. $819 (112% more).

Apart from the fact that the congregational reports neatly ranked these denominations in an order which also reflects the degree of "religious enthusiasm" commonly thought characteristic of their respective theologies, from zaniest to sanest, the Presbyterians nevertheless come in first for honesty, if an exaggeration-of-giving rate of only 51% can be called honest.

Presbyterians. The golden mean, the solid middle.

Baptists who want to extend religious liberty to people who want to kill us are clearly insane

You know, like Russell Moore.

And Presbyterian NeverTrumper David French here in National Review defends him:

At the same time, the ERLC was working diligently to try to bridge persistent racial divisions in the SBC and the Evangelical church more broadly and to persuade the public that religious liberty wasn’t just a Christian concern, but a deeply American value. Towards that end, it controversially (to some) signed on to an amicus brief defending the religious liberty of Muslims seeking to build a mosque in New Jersey. (To criticize this decision is particularly odd given the ERLC’s explicit mission to preserve religious liberty. The same legal standards that apply to mosques will also apply to churches.)

Meanwhile refugees from the PCUSA appear to be agitating in the comparatively tiny PCA over long ago settled "women's issues"

Reported here:

One of the reasons that the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) left the Presbyterian Church in the United States 40 years ago was because the new denomination opposed women in church leadership.

Last week, the PCA General Assembly voted to form a committee to take up the issue again. The seven-person committee will look at the biblical basis and theology of ordination and of the office of deacon, then report back to the General Assembly any changes to consider. ...

Over the last five years, the denomination has added 68 churches, 374 ministers, and almost 19,000 members. The PCA now has 370,000 members.

Membership in the PCUSA has dropped 48% in the last thirty years, the pace of decline increasing by 75% since 2010 when it gave in to the gay mafia

Membership has dropped from 3.1 million in 1984 to fewer than 1.6 million in 2015.

Since 1965, before Presbyterians united in the PCA, membership has fallen 63%, from 4.25 million.

In the five years after 2010, when the PCUSA began to conform to the LGBT agenda, the average annual decline in membership has been 4.9%. In the prior five year period the average annual decline had been only 2.8%.

The denomination has been notably anti-Israel since at least 2004 because of Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank, which it likens to South African apartheid.

Dimwit religion professor from Alma College blames Constantinian Catholicism for the tyranny of orthodoxy

One Kate Blanchard, here, who seems to be as seriously in thrall to an idyllic albeit anarchic world pre-Constantine as the Pentecostal fanatics among us are to its "Spirit-filled" environment. Well, Alma College was a Scottish Presbyterian institution where the Catholics must have been guilty of something, sometime.  

'There is no simple way to explain why some of us submit to the whole shebang and others don’t. In the spirit of gross oversimplification, I blame not social media but Constantinian Catholicism—not for intra-religious diversity, but for the idea that life should be any other way. Before 325 CE there existed a vast network of small clusters of pagan and Jewish Christians around the Mediterranean, mostly meeting in people’s homes, sharing a collection of related but not uniform sacraments and stories about Jesus.

'But when Constantine became the Roman Caesar he decided he needed to build a more uniform religion for his empire. The religious power elite saw their chance and spent the next decades fighting over which version of Christianity would prevail, developing a biblical canon, determining official formulae for Jesus and the Trinity, and approving only certain ways of doing baptism and communion. By the end of the century, Theodosius I would outlaw all “wrong” forms of Christian belief and practice and punish them severely.'

This is just plain silly. Constantine didn't submit to the "whole shebang" himself, and encouraged a process meant to achieve consensus among the fractious Christians, not "orthodoxy", even as he maintained religious freedom for non-Christians throughout his tenure. He was baptized on his deathbed by a heterodox Arian, Eusebius. It is anachronistic to speak of "Constantinian Catholicism", which is a relic of the medieval Roman Catholic imagination.

The passion for orthodoxy is hardly a Catholic invention. The idea is built into the Christian religion, and is at least as old as Paul himself, who in 1 Corinthians 16:22 anathematizes those who do not love the Lord, and in Galatians 1:8f. does the same to any who preach a different gospel than his.

Last time I checked, this Paul was a hero of the Presbyterians, but apparently no more, at least at Alma College.

For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.

 

-- 1 Corinthians 11:19