Thread by @mcjulie

Looks like the Christian Post is at it again, Starting with this headline that sounds like a joke, “Heckle Christ’s bride at your eternal peril”

https://twitter.com/ChristianPost/status/1392611795756625921

This is a republish of an article that originally had a less attention-grabby but equally evangelical-centric headline: “How to Stay When the World Says Leave”

This is a very common framing for evangelicals, that “the world” somehow exists over THERE, while evangelicals are over HERE being “in the world but not of it”

I don’t buy it.

As a kid in the church, I used to think this sentiment was just people wanting to get all melodramatic and feel important.

But as an ex-evangelical adult, I see it as a deliberately deceptive ploy to avoid taking responsibility for the fact that evangelicals very much built “the world” as it currently exists.

The evangelical self-narrative is one of Christianity as perpetually a brand new light pushing back against the spiritual darkness of old.

But Christianity has dominated huge portions of the planet for hundreds of years.

If anything out there represents the spiritual darkness of old, it’s Christianity.

From the article: "For the first time since the Gallup organization started to track the data, fewer than 50 percent of Americans now belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. "

This fact is causing a lot of consternation, isn’t it? I feel like that’s why there’s been such a flurry of conversation around the topic lately. Below 50% is an “oh no!” point.

Below 50% means you’re a minority.

But also, that means committed religious folk are a minority for the FIRST time. In fact, as recently as 2000, religious membership was 70%. So they are in NO WAY a historically OPPRESSED minority.

But also, from 70% to 47% in 20 years. That’s quite the precipitous fall, isn’t it? What are churches doing wrong, do you suppose?

"Behind these numbers are, among other factors, the trendiness of not only leaving church"

Trendiness
Oh, of course, that’s what it is. People are just trying to be trendy. Leave your religion behind, it’s the new ice bucket challenge!

I only WISH leaving my evangelical faith behind was as simple and trouble-free as these goobers make it sound. Not only was there the whole "estrangement from family" aspect, there was so much soul-searching, so much doubt and fear and shame, so much despair and guilt.

But also, it’s funny how weak these essays make the faith sound. We promise a faith that will shake the very foundations of the earth!

Oh but we can’t compete with trendiness.

Or sex. We can't compete with that either.

"but announcing it on social media with a bit of shaming and blaming thrown in for good measure.
"
The “shaming and blaming” is a reference to #LeaveLoud which is specifically a movement of Black Christians leaving churches over issues of racism.

https://twitter.com/thearmchaircom/status/1392296333319495680

If you aren’t ready to be shamed and blamed for your racism, buddy, no wonder people are leaving.

But also, it’s pretty rich to see the church crying foul over getting “shamed.”

Aw, what’s the matter hon, you can dish it out but you can’t take it?

"Many are not only leaving a particular house of worship but joining a growing demographic known as the “nones,” rejecting all religious affiliation. The Christian version of those who grew up in the Church but have become “nones” often go by another label: “exvangelicals.”"

This is sooooo evangelical to say “the Christian version” of people who left the church is “exvangelicals”

I mean, Catholics are leaving too. Probably Episcopalians & whatnot.

Also, NOT ALL EXVANGELICALS ARE “NONES”

There are plenty of people who leave evangelical Christianity for a different faith, including different forms of Christianity. “Exvangelical” is about where we CAME from, not about where we ended up.

But also, it's very evangelical to just sort of assume a person is evangelical or nothing.

"Other times, these narratives center on hurt that exvangelicals claim comes from the truth claims of the Christian faith."

“Truth claims”

This is so disingenuous. "Hey, just living my truth here, sorry if the truth hurts."

"For example, many exvangelicals cite the Bible’s teaching on sexuality as the primary reason for their exit."

Still hiding behind the Bible, I see.

It’s the CHURCH teachings & practice around sexuality that we claim causes harm, and your insistence that it’s just “The Bible” is frequently one of our grievances.

In fact, when I was young, 12 or 13, long before I left the church entirely, I realized I didn't believe usual church teachings on LGBTQ matters, and I came to this conclusion THROUGH Bible study.

That is, I looked through the Bible for the kind of clear, direct, unequivocal "being gay is the worst thing!" that church practice had led me to believe MUST be in there, and did not find it.

Instead, what I found was a bunch of passages that *could* be taken to support the usual church position, but only when looked at in a certain way, and only with aspects of the context removed.

But, even though *some* church anti-sex teachings can arguably be spun to have a Biblical justification, the larger context of church PRACTICES around sex, gender, and reproduction are not only extremely harmful, they're not Biblical at all.

The #ChurchToo movement has exposed that "purity culture" is selectively enforced against women, LGBTQ people, children, and others with less power in the church hierarchy, while those with power -- white patriarchs in good standing -- are excused for even the worst abuses.

"I was more punished for being abused than my abuser was for harming me" is an incredibly common story from those who were abused in churches.

There's no Biblical justification for exploitation and hypocrisy.

But even if your boundless evangelical sophistry leads you to be able to construct a justification that pleases you, know this: hypocrisy does not go unnoticed.

Evangelicals are SO concerned with the “ministry” of how they appear to others, going out of their way to conceal emotional strife and other negative things in order to avoid “reflecting badly” on the church.

Yet, somehow, they think a giant festering wound of hypocrisy won’t be a problem.

“Always smile” so that the faith looks good!

“Defend Josh Duggar” so that the faith looks… good?

Back to the article: "In reality, however, many of the folks in this camp have already rejected other cornerstones of orthodoxy, such as the authority of Scripture, the reality of sin, the necessity of Jesus’ atonement, and the deity and exclusivity of Christ."

So?

I mean… what point are you actually trying to make here?

“The people leaving the church *say* they disagree with our sex teachings, but the reality is, they also disagree with all these other teachings too!”

Shocking.

Evangelical faith is taught in a rigid, legalistic way that basically DEMANDS that if one part weakens at all, the whole thing crumbles.

This is a side effect of legalistic doctrinal rigidity and intolerance for debate and diversity.

What happens in the church if, for example, you start to question the existence of a literal hell?

Is there a place for you to say “actually, I think hell is a metaphor for our fear of death” but remain in the church? Not really.

So, if you stop believing in a literal hell, of course you leave, what choice to you have?

People are leaving because you TOLD them to.

Don’t believe in patriarchy? Go. Don’t believe in a literal hell? Go. Don’t believe you have to vote for Republicans? Go. Don’t believe in Christian supremacy? Go. Don’t believe in a fundamentalist reading of the Bible? Go.

Have a hard time listening to lectures about the all-importance of “sexual purity” from people who offer succor to abusers and condemnation to the abused? Go.

Go, go, go. So we went.

"Tragically, high profile figures who [..] publicly broadcast their “deconstruction” stories, now often have unraveling lives. Divorce, marital unfaithfulness, or newly professed homosexuality are disproportionately found [..] in the wake of faith deconstruction."

This is SO gross and SO disingenuous. You HAVE to know that people often start to deconstruct BECAUSE they're having a life crisis, and often, the deconstruction begins because the church lets them down in a particular way.

"The church said to follow these teachings and my marriage would be happy, but I did and it wasn't.”

“The church said to go through this program, and I wouldn't be gay anymore, but I'm still gay."

Deconstruction can begin with stopping a pretense: “I’ve been lying to everyone about who I am and what's going on in my life, I'm going to stop lying and see where it takes me."

When you stop lying, sometimes, it can look like you're falling apart. But you were falling apart the whole time, you were just hiding it. Being honest is the first step toward putting your life back together.

Also, mere days after Josh Duggar was arrested by the FBI for possessing child sexual abuse materials, how DARE you pretend that people in the church are doing any better, that their lives are worth emulating or admiring.

People still in the church aren't doing better, they're just lying about it.

"Are those who leave church and lose their faith more susceptible to bad habits and decisions? Or does practicing bad habits and making bad decisions leave one more susceptible to losing one’s faith?"

How about this: does being very publicly Christian predispose one to abusive behavior and deception?

There's not actually a link between "leaving the faith" and "caught doing bad things."

The difference is that if a man cheats on his wife but stays IN the church, you make excuses for him.

"Of course, every “leaving church” story is different. Sometimes, real harm has been done."

“harm has been done”

Nobody actually did it, of course. It was just done, somehow. And, what kind of harm? Are you willing to even talk about that?

I need a name for this rhetorical trick — I think I’ll call it a “to be sure”

I see it a lot when supposed centrists or liberals want to make an extremely right wing argument. “To be sure, harm has been done by [x], but…”

"Sometimes, there’s been a failure of catechism and teaching. "

EVERY
SINGLE
TIME

Every article where an evangelical apologist speculates about people who left the church, the suggestion "maybe they just weren't taught proper doctrine" comes up.

But I have to wonder, what EXACTLY do you imagine I could have been taught, that would have kept me there? What do you imagine your churches failed to teach me? Can you point to a specific doctrine or practice?

Daily Bible study and prayer? Check. Weekly church and youth group? Check. Rallies, altar calls, summer camps? Check. Read the Bible in a year? Check. Consulting with adult believers? Check. Reading concordances and commentaries about the Bible? Check.

So, what? What’s that ONE thing that you think I SHOULD have been taught, that one magical thing that would have kept me in your church?

Evangelicals are like that annoying college boyfriend who just can't accept that you're unimpressed by his favorite movie and keeps trying to make you watch it in different ways, sure that THIS time... THIS time you'll see the same magic he does.

Sometimes I get pretty salty about it.
I will NOT be blamed for the church’s failure to hang onto me. That isn’t MY flaw, it’s yours.

You were given free rein over the first eighteen years of my life, to shape me however you wanted, indoctrinate me however you chose, and you FAILED. Deal with it.

Back to the article: "Sometimes doubt results from the impression that the Bible doesn’t allow Christians to ask tough questions."

It wasn’t the Bible that failed to answer my questions about itself, buddy, it’s not the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Bible is a book. It just sits there, until you read it and put a certain interpretation on the words inside of it.

Evangelicals like to play a game where they claim they’re not “interpreting” the Bible, they’re just getting the plain, obvious, 100% literal reading, but that’s nonsense on the face of it.

Of COURSE the Bible has to be interpreted. ALL language has to be interpreted.

People have to interpret — and can interpret wrong — a Tweet, written in English, TODAY

The Bible was written 2,000 years ago when English, the United States of America, and evangelicals themselves didn’t exist yet.

It’s a cheap cop out to pin your views on “the Bible” as if the Bible just sort of magically interprets itself without any human intervention.

Back to the article: "Other times, however, bad behavior, bad habits, or even the neglect of good habits, can breed unbelief."

More deflection of responsibility. Bad habits — of the unbeliever — are what lead to unbelief! So simple!

Bad habits like critical thought.

Bad habits like reading the Bible and trying to make it make sense.

Bad habits like expecting moral consistency or integrity from the leaders in the church and getting hypocrisy and deception, looking for charity and finding greed, looking for grace and finding cruelty.

Those are, indeed, bad habits if you want to remain an evangelical.

"Years ago, Pastor Tim Keller was widely criticized for reporting that whenever a student returned from college claiming no longer to be a Christian, he’d ask them who they were sleeping with."

Because it’s a terrible question. Not only is it none of his damn business, but it’s also clearly intended as a “dunk” or a “gotcha” rather than a serious act of religious mentorship.

It’s the same thing I saw when Keller was arguing with Chrissy a few weeks ago: a clear urge to “win” the argument in a rhetorical sense, but no serious consideration of his role as a pastor or religious leader.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1382698011357294592

I mean, if his goal was simply to pat himself on the back and say, “Keller, you genius, you’ve done it again” good job, but you’d think he’d have even a the teeniest-tiniest desire to represent the faith in a positive way?

Maybe he'd want to try to steer some of those college kids BACK to the faith they're straying away from?

At least my own family pastor at that point in my life gave me a copy of Who Moved the Stone? to read. It didn’t work to keep me in the faith, but it didn’t make me feel disrespected and resentful, either.

Back to the article: "I’ve worked with enough students over the past two decades to know, it’s a good question to ask. And not just to college-aged students."

Why? Why is it a good question to ask? Does it ever help steer anyone back to your faith? Or does it just make you feel better about them leaving? “Ah, naturally we couldn’t hang onto THAT one, they discovered sex!”

But isn't that how you ended up here, at less than 50% church membership for the first time, that magical number that’s got you in such a panic?

Every time a young adult felt their faith start to waver, and your only response was to quiz them about their sex lives, you lost them. They didn’t come back. You gave them no reason to stay.

Even if you we assume, for the sake of argument, that all teachings of Christian purity culture are entirely correct and there's no hypocrisy or abuse at work in its practice, is sexual purity really ALL THERE IS to the Christian faith? The sex you’re not supposed to be having?

"We may look at the trendy exvangelical stories and conclude that that could never happen to us. "

I left the church in 1989, ooo, so trendy.

The recent trend isn't people leaving the church, they've been doing that for a while.

What's new is the CONVERSATION we're having.

The church, as an institution, has a huge amount of money, influence, and power. Before movements such as #LeaveLoud or #EmptyThePews, the people who walked away from church were individuals, alone, without much of a voice.

Every leaver was a one-off, making their own way, and, largely, not included as part of the conversation. Church leaders were brought into mainstream news media for commentary, even when the topic was people leaving the church, while the leavers were never asked to weigh in.

You could look at the numbers — younger generations of Americans were less and less likely to be religious — and see this day coming. But, until fairly recently, nobody was talking to the people who left.

Without a voice, it was easy for the church to ignore us. Articles like this one make it clear: they are still trying to ignore us. Even when they're talking about WHY we left their church, they don't want to talk TO us about it, they'd rather talk OVER us and ABOUT us.

Back to the article: "Another essential that Christ has given us is His Church. Imagine someone heckling your bride as she walks down the aisle toward you. How would you respond to that person?"

Heckling.
Sure. That's what it is.
Heckling.
But notice this — the person speaking here is supposedly that bride herself, speaking on her own behalf.

“I’m the bride of Christ how dare you!”

Buddy, what if you THINK you’re the Bride of Christ, but you’re actually 20 rabid weasels in a white trenchcoat?

"The Church is not above our critique, of course"

To be sure

"but too many who embrace the habit of criticizing her soon find themselves as no longer part of her."

Wait, was this whole thing simply intended to argue against criticizing the church?

“Hey, I know we suck, but if you talk about it too much, you might be on the road to apostasy, so could you just keep quiet?”

Oh, yeah, that’s going to keep ‘em in the pews. Good job.

"Make no mistake, the Church is Christ’s bride. She will outlast the world."

I doubt it, but technically I can’t prove this wrong until the world ends, so…

"As her members, we work toward her sanctification, but we should be incredibly wary about shouting her imperfections from the pews, especially to those outside the building."

That’s okay, buddy, you don’t have to shout about the flaws in the church, those of us who left have got that pretty well covered.

However... don't you think... perhaps...

Just maybe, mind you, a church that was more open and honest about dealing with -- and correcting -- its own flaws, might not be in such a steep decline?

Just spitballing here, but don't you think maybe a rigid insistence on pretending the church is great when it's obviously not, that maybe this actually *makes you look worse* ?

"We heckle this Bride at our eternal peril."

ETERNAL PERIL
That still sounds like a joke to me.
And that's the end of the essay.

I wrote most of this in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep, and woke up with a thought about why the evangelical church is losing the next generations.

I think church leaders recognized, in the 1960s, that the world around them was changing in a dramatic way — new technology, new social norms, and advancing civil rights for traditionally marginalized groups were all unfolding rapidly. The church decided to modernize.

Evangelicals didn't do anything as formal as Vatican II, but they started modernizing in similar ways -- and resisting modernization in similar ways.

It's really telling, when your church decides they're going to upend hundreds of years of tradition, do the Mass in English, etc., but women still can't be priests.

It reveals your priorities.

I mean, I don't know what their *intent* was, but both the Catholic church and the white evangelical church *ended up* revealing that they considered patriarchy to be the MOST important Christian sacrament --

Because it was something they weren't willing to budge on even as they made all these other changes.

"We're so modern, we have a rock band and you can wear jeans to church! But of course, only men are holy enough to truly embody the divine spirit!"

Evangelicals didn't JUST modernize in some ways but not others -- starting in the 1960s they totally remodeled their faith, a complete teardown.

It's very striking how RECENT a lot of key evangelical doctrines and practices are.

I’m always going back to this essay from Fred "Slacktivist" Clark, where he calls out the evangelical anti-abortion cause as “younger than the Happy Meal”
patheos.com/blogs/slacktiv…

I know you guys SAY Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but your TEACHINGS haven't even remained the same for a single human lifetime.

The great book Jesus and John Wayne starts out in the southern California evangelical movement of the 1960s, explaining how anti-communist America-first white nationalism and 1950s-style nuclear family patriarchy got together to breed the evangelical church as we know it today.

A lot of the key movements that harmed us — Christian patriarchy, purity culture, oppressive home schooling, anti-intellectualism, “child as viper” justification for discipline-as-torture — so many of those were BRAND NEW in the 1980s and 1990s.

Evan an old “classic” of Christian patriarchy, Fascinating Womanhood, was published in 1963.

Those of us raised in the church from the 1970s onward — Gen X and younger — were raised to be “culture warriors” to “take back America” for the holy cause.

We were raised to be political conservatives, to “stand athwart history yelling STOP.”

We were raised to be a stealthy fifth column ready to infiltrate the halls of politics, law, journalism, maybe even the arts, and insinuate the evangelical point of view.

And what was that evangelical point of view?

Basically, to make sure marginalized groups stayed marginalized, powerful groups stayed powerful.

Our purpose was to make sure the old hierarchies of gender, race, and religion remain in place, to make sure the US is never allowed to become too secular in its public spaces, to make sure racial equality and justice are never achieved.

Our holy cause was to prevent gender equality and justice, to protect capitalism, and, above all, to ensure that the wealth and influence of the church is never diminished.

This was the glorious kingdom we were promised to inherit, if we laid down our lives to fight for it: a world where everyone was guaranteed to be in their proper place and behaving properly, at gunpoint if need be.

We were promised a special place in the Republic of Gilead.

Some young Christians were obviously inspired by that vision.

Marjorie Taylor Greene strikes me as exactly the sort of culture warrior all that propaganda was intended to produce: single-minded, aggressive, self-righteous, completely unhinged, useless for all ordinary purposes --

Deeply unpleasant to be around, and fiercely dedicated to her vision of an unequal and unjust world.

Others were less inspired.

We realized, at some point, that we didn't WANT to fight for the glorious Republic of Gilead, we wanted to bring it down.

Now, I can't reset the simulation and re-run the last 50 years with the church taking a different path, where they focused more on "eternal verities" and Jesus and spirituality -- I don't know where the church would be now.

But I DO know that the "let us remake ourselves into bold culture warriors" approach led us here -- where the church is more *politically* powerful than ever, but it's hollowing out, people are leaving, there's no "ministry" outside the political cause.

Also, part of the restructuring of the church into a "culture warriors" factory was to make it more cultlike -- more totalistic, more authoritarian, more fanatical, with more intense propaganda and brainwashing -- which is where a lot of the harm comes from.

Which brings me back to my "Jesus is chocolate ice cream" theory, the idea that a lot of evangelical practice was based on the assumption that Jesus was a special treat that could be used to get us to participate in this grand plan, this holy war.

https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1387074631366955010

Based on the way they were presented, I think evangelicals always knew many aspects of this new "culture-warriors" style of faith would be a hard sell. Sexual purity and female submission, for example, were sold as "tough, but so worth it if you want to please Jesus"

And I think a lot of us who left the church, went through the first part of our lives just kind of taking it for granted that we DID want to please Jesus, but struggling with the things we were expected to do in order to please him.

Essays like this one tend to assume the things we struggled with were *all* related to sex, which ties into evangelical stereotypes of innocence vs. corruption -- anything sex-related is seen as inherently corrupt, and inherently adult, even if you're talking about kids.

So, a child raised in the church since infancy, fully subjected to every bit of propaganda and indoctrination, trained, shaped and molded exactly according to the dictates of the church "experts" --

All of a sudden that child becomes an adult with full agency as soon as they have religious doubts.

Revisit this part of the essay -- "Tragically, high profile figures who have for years publicly broadcast their “deconstruction” stories, now often have unraveling lives.[..] does practicing bad habits and making bad decisions leave one more susceptible to losing one’s faith?"

Remember, they're often talking about people raised in the church from infancy, raised exactly according to the dictates of the church.

Don't you think, if people like that are struggling as adults, the church might be to blame?

Maybe they're "deconstructing" and their lives are unraveling for the same reason: the church damages people.

But it doesn't matter WHAT part(s) of the church you struggled with -- hypocrisy, theological inconsistency, patriarchy, racism, sexual purity expectations, anti-intellectualism, Republican politics, etc. --

The point is that your struggles were all assumed to be redeemed by your love of Jesus. These were sacrifices you were expected to make for the sake of your love of Jesus.

But that love was just assumed to be there, without anything behind it.

Since this essay uses the "Bride of Christ" metaphor, I'll use it too.

I was married off to Jesus by my parents, when I was still a child. I was told he was a great guy, and I guess I believed it, since I didn't know any better. But I never actually saw Jesus, only heard stories about him from his staff.

"Your new master is absolutely the best, and you'll meet him someday. But right now, he wants you to do [x]. If you love him, you'll do [x]."

And over the years these things that you're expected to do for the sake of Jesus, because you love him so much, even though you've never met, these things get increasingly weird and morally questionable.

"If you love Jesus, you'll read this book"

Fine, okay, I like books.

"If you love Jesus, you'll tell those scientists to go away and you won't listen to them."
Really? Are you sure?

"If you love Jesus, you'll vote for Donald Trump"
NOW HOLD ON JUST A DARNED MINUTE

And then, one day, it hits you. All of a sudden.
You wonder, "Wait... DO I love Jesus? I've been told I love him. I've been told he's a great guy. But I've never even met him!"

"I didn't choose to marry him! It was my parents who chose that."

"I hate this house. I think it used to be a shopping mall."

"All these other people in the house telling me what Jesus wants me to do? They're weird and unpleasant and I don't like them."

"And those things they tell me Jesus wants me to do... I'm starting to think that, if Jesus really does want me to do them, maybe he's not a person I could love anyway."

"I'm also starting to wonder if any of THEM have met Jesus. He never comes around. They've been saying the whole time that he's going to come for a visit someday soon, but it's been years and he's still not here."

"You know what? I'm not sure Jesus even exists. I think maybe he's just somebody these weirdos made up to try to get me to do all these other things they want me to do."

"Either way, I don't care anymore. I'm getting a divorce. I'm moving out."

Wow, I think I just wrote the plot of a pretty kickass Gothic novel.

And I guess that's the end of the thread.

Enjoy your Saturday!