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

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

"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

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

Bible church pastor realizes that Donald Trump is not an evangelical

Here:

When asked if asking for forgiveness was central to his faith, Mr. Trump replied, “I try not make mistakes where I have to ask forgiveness”. When pressed about repentance in an interview with Anderson Cooper of CNN, he replied, “I think repenting is terrific. Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness if I am not making mistakes? I work hard, I’m an honorable person.”

He really does speak for many Americans. His theological Shibboleth rings true in many ears.

With the media ... lurching forward with everything this guy says, just waiting for him to bury himself, it is fascinating media. I read some who thought his Iowa comments would spell the end of him. “How could any evangelical vote for him after he said such things?”

I laughed. [He] is actually resonating with many spiritual Americans who are untethered [from] biblical Christianity. Far from marking the end of Trump’s relevance, his comments make relevant in a whole new way. “Trump’s a guy who works hard, knows he’s not perfect, and tries his best? And, he is religious. See, he just said so. This is a guy like me!”

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That's right.

Donald Trump is a mainline Protestant of the Presbyterian variety. For him as for many others of his ilk the specific Biblical language about repentance and being made "new" might as well be Swahili. But this country used to be full of such people, and they helped make America great. Since 2007 their numbers are down about 5 million, to 36 million adults, mostly white.

Pew has the data here.

The thing is, their numbers are actually larger since they've unaffiliated or reaffiliated outside the mainline.

And that's one reason why Trump is polling in first place for the GOP nomination as we speak. This is still a Protestant country, at least for a little while longer.

Parochial Joel Miller is offended that Donald Trump doesn't venerate the host

Here:

Trump went on to explain the role of the eucharist in his routine. “When I drink my little wine . . . and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness,” he said. Little wine? Little cracker? I winced both times I read the word. He might as well have said adorable or dainty. Frankly, even Trump’s flippant toss of the word cracker is off-putting. Even if the thing in his hand is identifiably a cracker, it’s not a cracker. It is the bread of life, the broken body of Christ, the bread of heaven, the food of angels, the medicine of immortality. This is how the Bible and early Christians spoke of Trump’s crumb. For him to call it a cracker is to demonstrate he knows nothing of what he is doing.

This may come as a shock to Joel Miller, but hostility to wafer-worship is as American as the father of our country, George Washington, who declined to attend communion so often that when his pastor complained he was setting a bad example stopped coming to church altogether on communion Sundays.

That, too, would no doubt exasperate Miller because the Orthodox and the Catholic cannot imagine a service without the Mass.

Trump, a Presbyterian, has gone to his communion enough times to describe accurately the typical mainline Protestant version of the sacrament, which is more than can be said for the surprisingly parochial Joel Miller.

15.7 million black Christians say Presbyterians must repent for sin against the church for redefining marriage

Seen here:

"NBCI and its membership base are simply standing on the Word of God within the mind of Christ. We urge our brother and sisters of the PCUSA to repent and be restored to fellowship."

"PCUSA's manipulation represents a universal sin against the entire church and its members. With this action, PCUSA can no longer base its teachings on 2,000 years of Christian scripture and tradition, and call itself a Christian entity in the body of Christ.  It has forsaken its right by this single wrong act."

"No church has the right to change the Word of God. By voting to redefine marriage PCUSA automatically forfeits Christ's saving grace. There is always redemption in the body of Christ through confession of faith and adhering to Holy Scripture."

"In this case, PCUSA deliberately voted to change the Word of God and the interpretation of holy marriage between one man and one woman. This is why we must break fellowship with them and urge the entire Christendom to do so as well."

Peter Leithart Hates America And The Protestantism Which Gave Birth To It

 

Where else? In "grace and cooperation with grace" First Things, here:

The Reformation isn’t over. But Protestantism is, or should be.

Protestantism is a negative theology ... 

Mainline churches are nearly bereft of “Protestants.” ...

Though it agrees with the original Protestant protest, Reformational catholicism is defined as much by the things it shares with Roman Catholicism as by its differences. Its existence is not bound up with finding flaws in Roman Catholicism. ...

Protestantism has had a good run. It remade Europe and made America. It inspired global missions, soup kitchens, church plants, and colleges in the four corners of the earth. But the world and the Church have changed, and Protestantism isn’t what the Church, including Protestants themselves, needs today. It’s time to turn the protest against Protestantism and to envision a new way of being heirs of the Reformation, a new way that happens to conform to the original Catholic vision of the Reformers.

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Flattery will get you nowhere, Peter.

"By definition, Roman Catholic is an oxymoron."