“More than one in 10 Americans — around 40 million of us — stopped attending church in the last 25 years,” reported Christianity Today. “There’s no denying the decline in church attendance.” But there is denying it. Focus on the Family argues that stories about evangelical church decline are a “myth” promoted by liberals and that “liberal churches are hemorrhaging members” while “biblical churches are holding strong,” growing or even exploding. In May, the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical denomination, reported losing 457,371 members from 2021 to 2022, its “largest single-year numerical drop in more than 100 years,” according to the SBC’s Lifeway Research. “In total, Southern Baptist churches have suffered membership declines of about 3% annually the past three years.” “Despite what you may hear, conservative, evangelical churches are, in fact, growing.” Yet in July, Focus on the Family again promoted its contrary claim: “On the surface, it may appear that Americans are leaving the pews in droves. And there is some truth to that. However, that’s not the whole truth. Some churches are losing members. But it is actually the more liberal churches that are dying. … Despite what you may hear, conservative, evangelical churches are, in fact, growing.”

This is a lie that evangelicals had been telling for a while but the evidence now clearly shows evangelical churches are now also in decline and have been for years. (According to one account, evangelical decline just started later than main Protestant denominations'.)

“White evangelicals should panic,” wrote the late Michael Gerson, who decried the great dechurching in a 2019 column: “About 26% of Americans 65 and older identify as white evangelical Protestants. Among those ages 18 to 29, the figure is 8%. Why this demographic abyss does not cause greater panic — panic concerning the existence of evangelicalism as a major force in the United States — is a mystery and a scandal.” Focus on the Family promotes panic about many cultural trends. Why no panic about evangelical church trends?

Turns out evangelical leaders *are* panicking. Which is part of the reason they are trying to de-emphasize their anti-LGBTQ bigotry -- to where some LGBTQ people only find out how hateful their church is toward them *years* after they started attending.

But with churches closing all over, evangelicals often feel they can't afford to reject anyone -- which is why many evangelical churches now are unwilling to admit to new parishioners that they are non-affirming.

(I wonder how clear Tim Keller's Redeemer Presbyterian Church ever was about that to new members?)

You guys are generalising these blaze posts as Catholic a bit too much. As someone who has grown up surrounded by weird Catholic shit exclusively, a lot of this is for certain above my pay grade. I think we need to point fingers at the Evangelicals more.

"the babylon bee" documents, in such a damning and ugly way, the transformation of american conservative christianity from "group that claims to value love and caring for humanity while behaving the opposite" into "group that expressly values hatred and cruelty for its own sake"

around the time it launched the babylon bee was a christian satire site that primarily satirized intra-community issues (mega church pastors, 'trendy' worship services) and occasional jabs at Teh Liberals, with equal amounts of mocking evangelicals for supporting Trump

now it's like *"I hate my wife" joke* *joke about violent immigrants* *"women be shopping" joke* *joke about trans people grooming children into a sex cult* *racist joke* *calling women sluts* *calling women fat and ugly* *rape joke* *racist joke*

babylon bee was always making garbage "blue hair and pronouns" type jokes but this is a whole other fucking level.

back in 2015 i was in a conservative christian homeschool group and I cannot IMAGINE being shown the above screen shots and being told they are from The most popular christian satire website. the level of naked cruelty and prejudice would have been completely shocking.

it is crazy to me that if you tell your child their whole life that they are evil, broken, inherently awful human beings its considered emotional abuse.

but under christianity its just freedom of religion.

no child should belive that about themself.

d.d

shoutout to everyone forced to go to church, church events and/or interacting with people you don't want to.

you are not "failing to stand up for yourself" if you can't say no. I know how terrible it is to balance the harm of going to church, etc, and the backlash if you don't.

you are not a failure if you are an adult living with a toxic family. Not at 18, not at 19, nor 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 + !!

you are not a failure if you are an adult living on your own but can't go non-contact yet

you are not a failure if you are a minor and are not as "brave" as you wished to be, or believe you won't be able to move out at 18

you are not a failure if you moved out and had to go back. No matter the reason!

whatever your situation is

you are not a failure

don't victim-blame yourself

❤

it’s very funny to talk about Christianity with my best friend, because some part of me is so ridiculously Catholic it refuses to learn anything about the Christian denominations that make up her research. I swear she’s explained the difference between Methodists and Presbyterians eight separate times, but not a single thing stuck because some pre-Vatican II neuron was too busy slamming pots and pans together while screaming ONE HOLY CATHOLIC AND APOSTALIC

It's so hard being a Romani lesbian. It feels contradictory at best, unthinkable at worst. You are raised with the explicit goal to become a wife and to have children one day. I can't remember the first time my mother talked to me about marriage, but I remember being around 6 and being told that I will have a wedding one day, that it will be the most important day of my life and that I would make my family so happy. Growing up I'd constantly, almost daily hear about having children and having a boyfriend and getting married some day. It was always one of the most important topics of conversation. Your relatives - even your female relatives - don't seem to think you can make decisions by yourself, for yourself. Everything you wear, everything you say, everything you do is about appealing to men. When I was 5 I asked my mom if I could wear a dress to go outside because it was very sunny and she just told me I wanted to dress that way because I was in love with the male friend that I had. If you want to wear jewellery, if you wear "revealing clothes", that means you want to flirt with a man. This is not even an inconscious, internalized mindset: it is very overt and I was explicitly told that anything I did was because I was in love with a man - a classmate, a friend, a neighbour, an adult family friend (yes, even if I was 8), a male relative. I felt disgusting anytime I wanted to dress the way I wanted because I felt I was inviting men to have sexual thoughts about me.

As a Romani little girl you are groomed to accept relationships with men, especially older men. When I was about 8, my then 15yo sister invited me to her bedroom and showed me condoms and told me that I would need them one day. When we were 12, my female cousins all had boyfriends. My female cousins usually got their first serious relationship at 14-15yo. Two of my cousins had their first kid before they turned 17 (one was with a 28yo man). And this is seen as normal and you're weird for criticizing them. Any heterosexual intercourse is seen as good, as a positive value. The majority of my Romani female relatives sided against another relative of ours who had been raped by her stepfather. My mother and my sister also sided with my abuser and told me that I was being unfairly mean to him because he is my stepfather and I should be nicer, actually.

When I was 12, I had never had a boyfriend. All my other relatives, both male and female, started piling on me. We had family gatherings almost every couple of weeks, and the conversation would always somehow land on me. I was told I was weird, I was a dyke, I was probably a lesbian, my mother usually said she didn't want me to be some ugly dyke but she would also say that I was so mean to her for not coming out to her. This was discussed among my relatives while I was in the room. My mother usually pressured me every couple of nights to tell her if I was a "dyke". Because even though my group doesn't practice child marriages anymore, it's still the norm for Romani girls to be in serious relationship with (older) men when they are in middle school, and you are the weird one for not fitting that norm.

When gay marriage was being debated in my country, I was in middle school and my mother's favourite joke was about a gay teenager committing suicide. It was a joke made by a stand-up comedian and she would listen to it once in a while when driving me to school.

And I am so lucky because my family isn't even very traditional. They aren't even religious. Most Roma are very intense about religion. In my country, there are a lot of Evangelical Christian Roma, who told me that lesbian Roma should be murdered, should be ousted, that gay Romani teenager should be beaten by their parents, should be thrown on the street, that lesbian Romani Holocaust survivors should have been killed. All under the guise of "culture". Because a lot of those people have a "let it be" attitude when it comes to non-Romani LGBT people, but they don't extend that attitude to their own kids.

And then I talk to antiracist and "progressive" Romani activists, usually male, usually straight, who tell me that "being Romani is about being raised with Romani culture and embracing and respecting that culture", but what does that mean for LGB Roma who are constantly being bullied and abused by their own family and community? Heterosexuality lies at the core of Romani culture and LGB Roma won't be free until we start challenging religions and the patriarchal and homophobic bias engraved in Romani culture

I have c-PTSD so I will randomly be hit with dread and panic throughout the day and in my monkey brain it feels like I’m being hunted down by a tiger. Just saying I feel anxious doesn’t fully describe what I’m experiencing. So my partner and I refer to my anxiety and panic as the tiger that’s hunting me down and it allows me to easily let him know if something is wrong and I can easily communicate how I’m feeling at any moment by saying how close the tiger is. Mildly anxious? The tiger is hunting me and about 10 miles away. Feeling like I’m dying? The tiger is hunting me and it’s literally in the room with us. It’s a validating and kind of secretive way to let my partner know how I’m feeling instead of just saying “I’m anxious.”

I'm revisiting a part of The High School Survival Guide: Making the Most of the Best Time of Your Life (so far) by Adam Palmer. It's a Christian book despite the fact that the title makes it seem totally areligious, and I read parts of it when I was in high school. It was the first time I ever read about being gay in a book. I found a free version online and while I didn't think the Bible could shock me anymore my mouth dropped open at this:

Apparently the MSG version of this passage really says the quiet part out loud. Gay people aren't even human / lose the knowledge of how to be human. Not sure how that works. There's such a dissonance between the tone of this verse and the tone of the text in the book too.

GEE I WONDER WHY??? How strange that Christians, who believe their sacred text claims that homosexual acts strip people of God, love, and their humanity, view homosexuality as 'icky' and 'gross.' In fact, I would think they'd think much worse in that scenario and treat gay people far worse. In fact, it kinda seems like you're downplaying the absolutely brutal treatment and systemic discrimination of gay people that was carried out in the name of Jesus.

And all of this is being aimed at (presumably Christian) teenagers who think they might be gay. There's no real advice here other than to surrender to god and to seek accountability.

I was keenly aware as a gay Christian that I was at the center of a culture war I did not want to be a part of. People out beyond my religious community were fighting for an acceptance and celebration of homosexuality that I thought was harmful and sinful. People inside my religious community had all kinds of incorrect ideas about gay people and I didn't think there was much space for me to be "out of the closet" even if I stayed single, celibate, and god-fearing. And I had no idea what to do about any of it.

I didn't come out to anyone until after high school. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed, and the weight was still heavy. God did not make it easier, did not lift the burden of homosexuality from me. I had plenty of accountability in my life, constantly watched by helicopter parents with Internet filters, confessing sin regularly in men's groups (both before and after I started to tell people I 'struggled with same-sex attraction). 'Accountability' only served to intensify my shame.

The only time things got easier was when I started to take God out of the equation, when I started to see my sexuality as a part of myself to embrace rather than excise. Christians will drone on and on about how Christ sets people free from their sins. In my experience, to be free of my sin I had to first be free of Christ.

Here is "progressive evangelical" Kristin Du Mez's "clear as mud" statement about her relationship to evangelical LGBTQphobia.

She is a very good writer. That I am not able to discern what her own evangelical conception of LGBTQ people's status should be within and outside "the Church" is probably intentional on her part.

I post this because this is completely typical of "progressive evangelicals". They describe some other evangelicals as homophobic, but don't say what they themselves think about the "clobber passages" in the Bible.

"Progressive evangelicals" are a new thing since I came out and was involved in gay activism decades ago. Back in the day, they were all straight up homophobes. There was not this current "nuance"/evasiveness.

I have more feelings and hopefully more to say about these people.

Y'all want postcards from my visit to Twitter? Full disclosure all of these people are Nazis so be aware that I mock them without the slightest minuscule grain of good humor

Normal things to type with your hands huh

Anyway I'm hit so hard these days by how contemporary fascism shares like 90% DNA with Conservative Evangelicalism.

And that's really what frustrates and frightens me about contemporary Christianity, because there are people in it whose political beliefs uncertainly approach "liberal," who want to grapple with racism and sexism in the Church, but a lot of the writers and thinkers that were foundational to their worldview are now viewed by them as good-naturedly misguided, when their ideas were Very Much Fascism. Being a philosopher or theologian with a mild mannered affect doesn't make them not a fascist. Being well-intentioned in a twisted way doesn't make them not a fascist. Failing to realize that what they were supporting and proposing is fascism doesn't make them not a fascist.

There is just not a sufficient recognition of the horrible seriousness of the "culture war" and how the topics that were battlegrounds in the "culture war" were selected for monstrous political purposes.

There is a continued effort to "save" or "salvage" things like being pro-life and supporting abstinence until marriage, and this, to me, reflects a continued failure to seize the fascist abomination Evangelicalism has become and truly tear it up by the roots. Can you be personally uncomfortable with abortion or personally in favor of sex within a committed relationship? Of course. But these things would not be political issues without the influence of fascism in culture and politics. They would not occupy your head like this. They would not be the main subjects of your moral universe without the consuming sense of anxiety that your society is increasingly descending into moral degeneracy, partly to the increased visibility and dominance of groups that are culturally "other," posing an existential threat to the integrity and stability of your culture—which is an INTEGRAL CHARACTERISTIC OF FASCISM

It's at the point where exchanging ideas with conservative Christians, as a more progressive Christian, drags you down more than it could ever lift them up. It's like you're trying to carry a backpack attached to a chain and the other end of the chain is attached to a rabid wolf.

It doesn't matter how important the stuff in the backpack is to you. You cannot go back for it. And if your buddy insists on going no further unless the backpack can come with you, you'll have to make a decision, because that wolf's eyes are lit up with sightless sickly fire and his jaws are foaming and snapping.

I trust you

the same way

a lamb trusts the hand

guiding it towards slaughter

🖤The Cryptid System🖤

We are a 25 yr old queer polyfragmented HCDID system living with bipolar 1, PNES/FND, BPD, and chronic pain from suspected hEDS, sciatica, and GI issues.

We're adopted, mixed white and indigenous, (quechan) and pagan.

We were diagnosed with Autism but want to be reevaluated because we're not sure if it's autism, adhd, both, or just our CPTSD/DID.

We are an ex evangelical RAMCOA survivor, and actively speak out against evangelical ideals and beliefs. We are a programmed system and do discuss this here. If this is triggering to you, don't follow us.

We are an addict. We do post about our drug and alcohol use and our recovery under the tags #drugs #tw drugs and #sobriety

There's approximately 100 alters in our system that we are currently aware of. Most of them don't front often.

DNI

TERFS/SWERFS

anti-xenogender + mogai

people who think its fun to misuse the world "cult"

Trans-ID folks

evangelicals

pro-israel (or anyone who is pro-genocide)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the perception of good and bad and self-image when recovering from extremist religious upbringings.

I’ve realized that my idea of being a “good person” is warped beyond what I’d originally thought. Fundamentalist christianity teaches that morality is only defined through the word of god. People without it have no moral compass. So you’re raised in it, indoctrinated, and when you come out you have no sense of self when it comes to judging the morality of your own behavior. Wanting to be a good person then becomes a hindrance that causes unhelpful behaviors that ultimately hurt you and your relationships.

Disagreeing with an authority figure doesn’t make you a bad person.

Saying no when people ask for your help doesn’t make you a bad person.

Neither does anger, jealousy, self-indulgence, confidence, vanity… these things SHOULD exist in balance. Feel how you feel. Do what is right for you. Hurt as few people as you can in the process, but know that sometimes it has to happen.

i made a sanrio oc who is an old man deeply afraid of going to hell