Donald Trump Destroys Whatever He Touches. It Stands to Reason the Evangelical Church Would Be One of Many

 

Holy People Gather To Make
A Mockery of God

Hallelujah!  There has been a precipitous drop in the number of Americans who identify as evangelical Christians from 23 per cent of the population in 2006 to just 14 per cent in 2020.  There has also been an increase in the numbers of white mainstream Protestant Christians who now represent 16.4 per cent, well above the evangelical presence.

For several decades, a prevailing narrative of white American Christian life has been about the decline of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, and other once-dominant Protestant sects. In this telling, the “mainline” became the “sideline,” as congregations fled the moral relativism of out-of-touch pastors, who replaced God’s word with liberal politics. Having been baptized a Presbyterian, grown up as a Congregationalist, and spent my adult life as a Methodist, I watched this decline close up. Churches closed, congregations aged, and the image of Christianity in the popular mind came to be one of sexism, libertarian capitalism, and a pervasive individualism—the idea of God as, above all, a “personal savior.”

The fade of that brand of evangelicalism in America—the P.R.R.I. report shows that its cultural hegemony is increasingly confined to the Southeast—is not a great shock. As early as 2007, researchers were picking up strong signals that young people weren’t as inclined to follow those churches on key cultural issues: eighty per cent of even young churchgoers reported, critically, that their strongest perception was that Christianity was “anti-homosexual”—not an illogical conclusion given the amount of time that evangelicals spent on the issue (oddly, since the Gospels never mention it).

Broken on Trump's Wheel.

Eventually, most white evangelical congregants tied themselves to Donald Trump—in 2016, eighty-one per cent of white evangelical voters chose him and, according to a P.R.R.I. poll from 2018, he had a seventy-two-per-cent approval rating among them—despite the fact that he showed not the slightest sign of Christian understanding or behavior. As a result, at least in part, some prominent evangelicals started to leave their churches.



Comments

  1. GyorJuly 18, 2021 at 2:31 PM

    Wicca and Neopagan Faiths are growing very fast and might soon eclipse Evangicals as well soon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibJuly 18, 2021 at 4:20 PM

      I always had you figured for a Neopagan, Gyor. What with all the blood sacrifices and everything.

      Delete
  2. TrailblazerJuly 18, 2021 at 5:05 PM

    Never underestimate the power and influence of the evangelicals.
    They are at heart, , organised and well funded.
    At the 'end of the day' !! they have nothing to lose.
    Trivialising the end of times is as dangerous as dismissing Muslim fundamentalists.
    They , the US fundies are but an extension of ; or perhaps the origins of the US trend of believing in conspiracy theory!
    It's been mainstream US politics since the Pilgrim settlers.

    TB




    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibJuly 19, 2021 at 7:01 AM

      Hey, TB. I don't believe any "received religion," and especially those that push the nonsense about scriptural inerrancy.

      Chris Hedges, in his book "American Fascists," eviscerates this inerrancy idiocy. The son of a Presbyterian minister and having earned a Masters of Divinity from Harvard, Hedges bores holes through the Bible, especially the Old Testament.

      Delete

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