30 yrs ago, I knew a librarian at a prominent evangelical seminary whose sole job was going thru personal papers of ministers donated after they died. Her responsibility? Removing all the porn from such collections BEFORE they reached the cataloger.
In the 80s, there was a very famous, anonymous article in Leadership magazine (a CT publication) on porn and sexual addiction among evangelical clergy & leaders. It was rampant. That article was secretly passed among male evangelical seminary students & clergy like a banned book.
I'm hearing anecdotally that a number of progressive mainline churches are seeing a post-pandemic steady influx of ex-evangelicals looking for new spiritual homes.
This doesn't mean that all ex-evangelicals are making this shift, but it suggests that at least some are.
In the 1990s and early aughts, the progressive mainline attracted mostly disaffected Catholics - a trend that strengthened congregations & attendance.
That the next disaffiliation wave might come from disgruntled & deconstructing evangelicals isn't surprising.
Mainline types: Don't expect this is a trend where folks will knock down your doors. You're going to have to prove yourselves trustworthy, open, loving - and you'll need to overcome years of stereotypes these folks learned in evangelicalism - you'll need to earn their respect.
OK. I just told a guy in my local Starbucks/Safeway to f**k off.
And I can promise you in the next hour everybody in Alexandria will know.
I didn't know him. He was with a casual friend of mine, a rather nice woman whom I know from an Episcopal church in town.
She asked me what I was working on.
I told her that I was doing a new book on the spirituality of public space -- and how we can reclaim the empty places where statues have been taken down with different sorts of stories and figures to move us toward a better America.