politics

Theres plenty of reasons people are done with organized religion, Trump is merely one of those reasons.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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

Correlation does not equal causation.

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.

Well, silver linings and all that.

Gave up my churching before orange buffoon came stompin. And his malarkey plays no part in keepin it that way.

What percent of people visited church on christmas?

Might actually be the best thing this piece of shit has done.

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.