Thread by @mcjulie

I wrote a transcript of the video and a response to the transcript, thread follows. Please enjoy, if enjoy is the right word.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1387521397098831873

RCSJ: "why do people leave the church
well to hear tell from the people who have left the church it's because the people in the church are such horrible big fat jerks"

This is variant of strawman fallacy that I like to call "haters gonna hate" -- to construe all criticism as coming from a place of irrational "hatred" which therefore does not have to be addressed on substance.

"Horrible big fat jerks" is such a self-serving way to characterize complaints like "abusive" "dishonest" "hypocritical" "untrustworthy" "morally bankrupt" and so on.

If somebody just thinks you’re a jerk (for NO REASON), there’s nothing you can really do about it.

“Oh, well, you think I’m a jerk, that sounds like a you problem.”

RCSJ: "you never
not never that's a little extreme
you rarely hear someone say "well i left because I was no good" it's always the other people who are no good"

Wow, and I thought he was self-serving with the "horrible big fat jerks" line. Now he seems to be building up a case that people leave the church because they're just not good enough for the church.

Which.

Yeah, sure, dude, you go on believing that, we'll go on leaving.

RCSJ:
"and so we're presented with this great sense of shame and guilt
because we weren't loving enough, we weren't kind enough in order to keep this person within the fold"

This seems like a weak characterization of why people leave. “Not loving enough” suggests a prayer group that should have been more attentive, not “an entire church structure that is not only not loving, but is in fact actively hostile toward the very concept of love”

RCSJ:
"well
it's perfectly true that we're not as loving as we're called to be
we're not as kind as we're called to be
we have plenty of guilt to go around
but then so does the one leaving"

Wait.
Did he just tell me that, as a leaver, I share in the "guilt" of my leaving?
Dude, you can fuck off all the way into the sun with that bullshit.
If my own family couldn't "guilt" me into staying with the church, some youtube pastor guy isn't gonna cut it.

RCSJ:
"at the end of the day i would suggest in fact that the principle motivator though not one likely to be admitted to by the leaver that the principle motivator of the ones who leave
is that they don't like being there
because it makes them feel guilty"

I think I know where he's going with this, and it's a lie, but there's an accidental truth here -- a lot of us DID have the experience of sitting in church and being made to feel guilty, and no, we didn't like it.

Because we were KIDS.
We hadn't DONE anything.
We were made to feel shame and guilt and fear, basically, just for existing.

But also, we were kids, so we accepted that guilt and shame and fear, internalized it, built our identities around it, took it for granted.

I didn’t LEAVE over that sense of guilt. It wasn't until I'd already been gone for decades that I even had a sense of the guilt as anything apart from me, anything I COULD escape. And now I kinda feel like it’s too late, I am who I was made to be.

The best healing I’ve found, so far, is writing a fictional series where religious abusers get eaten by werewolves.

Catharsis!

RCSJ:
"now
the reality is
we are guilty
and anyplace that doesn't make us feel guilty is probably doing it wrong"

Again, my dude, you can fuck off all the way into the sun with that
Making people *feel* guilt for the sake of guilt is emotional and spiritual abuse
If "we ought to make everyone feel guilty" truly is the basis of your faith, your faith is garbage

We have this idea — it shows up everywhere in our culture, not just in religion, but Christianity may be where it comes from — that you can apply shame and guilt to people and this will get them to do what you want, but it’s just not true.

Shame and guilt make people feel bad emotionally, but there’s no necessary connection between that bad feeling and their behavior changing in some specific way that you want it to.

People can even use guilt to avoid change — “aren’t I doing enough for you, look at how bad you made me feel”

And the worst among us (people like Trump) are utterly shameless.

RCSJ:
"that's not to say that we shouldn't be a church where we celebrate the grace of god and the forgiveness of god
but that forgiveness is for the repentant and for the humble"

"The repentant and the humble" huh, well, buddy, you're out on both counts.

RCSJ:
"so
why would people leave?
because they don't see themselves as guilty while others may see them that way"

He's obviously trying to insinuate here that the people who leave are, in fact, guilty, they just don't like having it thrown in their faces.

But what are they guilty of?

Hmm, let's see.

RCSJ:
"the story's told i hope i have the details right by tim keller, who serves as the pastor of redeemer presbytyrian church in manhattan, he's the author of multiple bestselling books, very highly respected and regarded pastor"

Oh, great, now he's dragging Tim "therapeutic self" Keller into it.

RCSJ:
"who one day happened to be meeting with a former member, somebody who had left his church after going off to college, and this person began to explain

"well, I went to college, and I learned this about the authors of scripture and i learned that and i began to have doubts about this other thing and yadda yadda yadda"

"and Tim Keller listened patiently and when the fellow finished he said, "what's her name?" the man said "what do you mean what's her name?" he said "what's her name?" "what's who's name?" "Well. The girl you're sleeping with."

The correct response to that question is "none of your damned business, you smug ghoul, and thanks for reminding me why I left the church --

"because you don't have any good faith defenses for any of the doubts I just presented to you, and instead resorted to accusations about my private life as a deflection."

The kid in this story -- note how he goes from a "person" to a "fellow" to a "man" by the end of it -- is a dude, so maybe he wasn't pre-emptively slut-shamed for wanting to leave the church, but I can tell you, as a teenage girl, I sure was.

As an adult looking back, the idea of slut-shaming a teen virgin seems ironically funny, but it didn't feel funny when it was happening.

Sometimes it felt like shame -- adolescent girls in our culture are sort of pre-slut-shamed just for existing -- but sometimes it became rage, the kind of rage humans often feel when we think we're being shamed inappropriately, for something we haven't done wrong.

But also, it does nothing to address the actual reasons we want to leave the church.

If I come to you saying, "My religion just doesn't make any sense to me anymore" you screaming back "ARE YOU HAVING SEX??? IT'S SEX ISN'T IT!!!!!" not only does nothing to address my doubts, it also ensures that I'm not going to want to talk to you about it.

Young people aren't as easily deceived as you seem to imagine. We can tell when our theological questions aren't being answered. We can also tell when your supposedly high-minded insistence on sexual purity is enacted with hypocrisy and double standards.

The same church that embraced Donald Trump as a kind of earthly savior has no business lecturing anybody about sexual purity ever again.

Maybe Tim Keller or this guy aren’t Trump defenders, and yet, you would think that the wholehearted embrace of Trump as a figure of veneration among so many Christians (more than 80% of white evangelicals) would give *all* sexual-purity Christians a bit of a pause.

You’d think they might wonder, “Is that really what the church is teaching? That sexual abuse and complete disrespect of women, not to mention lies, fraud, wanton cruelty, and an attempt to overthrow democracy itself are all just fine as long as you’re a politician we like?”

"What if we've turned sexual purity itself into an idol, which we worship to the exclusion of every other message in the gospels? What if, in fact, we worship an abstract, idealized notion of purity more than we love God or our fellow humans?"

“What if our demand for a specific kind of sexual purity -- which, for some peculiar reason, never really seems to affect powerful white men -- is not an example of striving for God's grace at all?”

“What if, instead, we're using scripture to support traditional oppressive hierarchies and power structures based around gender, which are all entirely human in origin and born out of our most corrupt desires — for exploitation, abuse, and sadistic cruelty?”

If I were still in the church, I'd be asking myself those questions.

But then, I asked very similar questions thirty years ago, got bad answers, and I'm no longer part of the church.

In the thirty years since, the answers have not improved.

RCSJ:
"you know that's why he left
all the highfalutin' arguments that supposedly dinged away at the confidence he had in his faith
were not the real reason
the real reason was, he wanted to have sex with this girl
and knew that the Bible forbade it"

HANDS UP IF YOU WERE STILL A VIRGIN WHEN YOU LEFT THE DAMN CHURCH

But also, as much disgust as I have for this narrative — that people leave the church because they want to boink and for no other reason — it’s also a bit telling.

So, my dude, you believe that your faith is such a shallow and weak thing that it’s easy to leave behind just because you want to have sex? What good is such a faith?

Supposedly you worship a God who made the whole damn universe and somehow he's too weak to stand up against the almighty force of sex? Which, incidentally, he also made?

Is your argument here really intended to be “yes, as a matter of fact God CAN make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it, and that rock is SEX”

RCSJ:
"well
that happens
sometimes people stay
and they deny their guilt
sometimes people go because of their guilt"

And sometimes virgins leave the church, which by your logic would NEVER happen.

RCSJ:
"but i think it's important for us to
share the shame if you will
that is, yes of course, let the church be careful and thoughtful in how have we spoken to those who are struggling with sin"

As if “sin” is the only thing anyone ever struggles with, in the church.

Genuine religious doubts apparently don’t exist in this guy’s world, which must be very comforting for him, but it doesn’t change the reality.

RCSJ: "are we shooting our wounded or are we leading them back"

But what if church is what wounded them in the first place?

This is the biggest stumbling block that men like this dude & Timothy Keller seem to have regarding church-leavers: they cannot seem to comprehend that our experience in the church was one of genuine, lasting harm --

Harm which was done to us when we were too young to have a say in the matter or even properly understand what was happening. And they have no answer to all of that.

Yes, the church “successfully” filled me with shame, guilt, and fear, all according to plan.

But none of that made the church true or good or meaningful.

So eventually I left.

But all that emotional baggage is still there, just hanging around. Fear of a hell I no longer believe in, shame over taboos I no longer agree with, guilt for imaginary sins. It all just rattles around in my head with nowhere to go.

It is my belief — and nothing these defenders of the church have to say for themselves has managed to convince me otherwise — that church is supposed to “work” by deliberately instilling a type of anxiety for which church is also the cure.

There is no wonder-working power, no “filled with grace” or whatever it’s supposed to be, just anxiety that one is not truly saved/worthy/good, and the temporary relief of that anxiety.

Further, I believe that this anxiety does the most damage to those who take it the most seriously — the ones who really DID come to believe that we were the lowliest of worms, hideous loathsome sinners who deserved nothing but shame, scorn, and eternal torment.

In my case, the church did that particular job far too well. I believed utterly in my own damnability — so much so that, no matter how hard I tried, I never could manage to believe in my own salvation.

The anxiety dug in deep, but the remedy never worked.

Doubt in my own salvation became doubt in the church itself, doubt became disbelief, disbelief became apostasy, and here we are.

I don’t think MOAR GUILT is really the answer here, my dude. I already got about as much guilt as I think I can survive, and I very nearly didn’t survive it.

RCSJ:
"those are legitimate questions and i'm not arguing that the church is flawless, of course it's not
but i am arguing that our lord is flawless"

So what?

I mean, maybe Jesus IS flawless, right, but I’ve never seen Jesus, and neither have you.

I’ve only seen his followers, men like you and Tim Keller, and you’re not even the worst of them.

The Capitol Insurrectionists, white supremacists who tried to overthrow the federal government to install Donald Trump as dictator, they were Christians who thought they were doing God’s work.
washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/0…

The man who slaughtered eight people in Atlanta, he was a Christian. In fact, he was a Christian who felt very strongly about sexual purity and how important it was.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Atla…

Jerry Falwell Jr. professional hereditary Christian, was caught cavorting on a boat and forced to resign from professional Christianing.
cnn.com/2020/08/30/us/…

While I was writing this, Josh Duggar, famously Christian, just got arrested by the FBI for child porn.

https://twitter.com/KEBrightbill/status/1388259246786101248?s=20

If the role of the church is to SHOW Jesus to the world, it’s doing a heckuva job, I must say.

This is something no Christian defender of the church ever seems to understand: God, Jesus, all the saints and angels you believe in, they might exist in some realm beyond, but your fellow humans don’t see them, they only see you.

You can say “I’m only doing this thing because God told me to” and you can believe that all you want, but I don’t hear the voice of God in your head, I only hear you.

The reason I have no respect for the church is not that Christians are “horrible big fat jerks,” although many are.

The reason I have no respect for the church is that Christians are, on the whole, no better than other people, and frequently considerably worse. And if that’s true, then the whole religion is based on a lie. There is no “there” there.

If Christians are just as petty, selfish, dishonest, bigoted, cruel and abusive as everyone else — what’s the point?

And if they’re worse — more petty, more selfish, more dishonest, more bigoted, more cruel, more abusive — there’s not only no point to the church, the church is an active force for bad in the world.

And yet, here are these mighty defenders of the church, out here taking other people to task for "unauthorized" consensual sex between adults.

This is why we can't take you seriously.

RCSJ:
"and that he calls us to be a part of the body
remember the story when peter has been fishing and he's been unsuccessful and he's been out all night and jesus says throw your net off the other side of the boat and peter does it somewhat reluctantly probably

"and of course the nets began to be strained because of such a great haul and when he's finished peter doesn't jump up and down and say thank you jesus for saving my business, he says depart from me lord for i am a man of -- i'm an unclean man"

Cool story bro.

RCSJ:
"the presence of the holiness of christ
made peter want to escape
that can be the case as to why some people leave"

hahahahahahaha
no seriously
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The presence of the holiness of Christ.
Right.
Because that’s totally a thing that exists in every church, yup, you just walk right in and there it is, holiness, hanging around like that new carpet smell that never seems to go away.

RCSJ:
"it can also be the case by the way that the church not only is not a place where we meet the holiness of god, not because we're too judgmental but because we're too worldly"

Wait. Did he just inadvertently admit that people DON’T find the presence of God in the church? That maybe they walk away because eventually, after much searching, they conclude it really is, after all, just a building with some people in it?

But also... "too worldly" huh.

Somehow that never means "too political"

It never means “too conservative”

It never means “too wealthy”

It never means “too dishonest”

RCSJ:
"maybe there's no reason to be there"

The first really true thing he’s said.

RCSJ:
"i've often said, that if you think you can attract people by being a better stand up comic as a pastor or having a better band than someone can hear at a night club somewhere, you're not gonna work"

“Maybe people are leaving because you’re trying too hard to make church entertaining” is totally on my church apologetics BINGO card.

Since apparently everyone who bothers to write an editorial on this topic is in agreement, you have to wonder, who are the rock bands and espresso machines FOR?

20 years ago: “We’re losing the young people! We need to add rock bands and espresso machines!”

Today: “We’re losing the young people! We must have too many rock bands and espresso machines!”

Dudes. It’s not the rock bands and espresso machines.

RCSJ:
"you're not gonna get people out of bed early on a Sunday to come hear you
but if you have the words of life
than you just might"

Then again, you might not.

People who stay with the church, I guess, are very stuck on this idea that the salvation of a dying church must be MOAR CHURCH but they're not willing to consider that the problem might be what church IS.

Leaving aside the corruption and hypocrisy, church as a place where you sit in the pews and a guy talks at you for an hour, is that really what it's supposed to be? What it needs to be? Is that really where you should *expect* to find the presence of God? At a lecture?

I've sat through hundreds of sermons in my life and only remember three of them. With two of those, it's because I thought they were unusually terrible.

What if the biggest problem with the church is that it pretends to be set apart from the world, but really, it’s just more of the same? The same old prejudices, the same old hierarchies of wealth and power, the same old white men in charge of everything?

Maybe this is where you find the words of life.
billboard.com/articles/colum…

Maybe the words of life are all around and it’s the church that isn’t listening.

RCSJ:
"why do people leave the church?
sin"

Accidental truth, because I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean “the sins of the church”

And there it is, R.C.Sproule Jr’s opinion about why people leave the church. You can’t ask the people who leave, because they’ll talk about hypocrisy in the church and doubts in the theology, but he knows the truth! It’s really always about !!!!SEX!!!!

I’ve encountered some terrible takes on the question “why do people leave the church and what can be done about it?” but this one — pre-emptively slut-shame leavers for their “sin” — is pretty much the worst I’ve seen so far, and there’s a LOT of competition.

I have two conflicting reactions. One is outrage — how DARE you suggest that I wasn’t good enough for the church, that temple of every kind of corruption and lies, that whited sepulchre, that rotten tree bearing nothing but poisoned and decaying fruit.

And the other is a shrug. C’est la vie mon frere. If your idea of how to save your own dying church is to point a trembling finger of blame at the ones who left — ah, shame! Ah, sin! Well, maybe that makes you feel better, but — they’re gone, dude, they don’t care what you think.

I mean, they don’t care, except for the kind of morbid curiosity that got me to write this little essay.

And that's the end!

Enjoy your weekend.

And look out for the !!!!SEX!!!!!