Survey after survey has shown that Millennials are leaving religion in record numbers and by some accounts those who are religiously unaffiliated range between a third and 40% of that demographic. The same surveys also have revealed that the most significant factor in the decision to walk away from religion was fundamentalist and evangelical Christians' anti-gay hatred and bigotry - followed by their hypocrisy and nastiness in general. Indeed, the latest PRRI survey cited in a recent post shows that every Christian denomination is losing membership, including evangelical ones and the Southern Baptists. Among evangelicals, only 1 in 10 is under 30 years of age. Driving away the young and the educated (who tend to be Episcopalians, Evangelical Lutherans and some Catholics, if they remain Christian at all) is a sure form of long term suicide. Playing numbers games like the Catholic Church which keeps one on the membership roster until one affirmatively demands to be removed can mask the attrition from supposed membership strength, but the PRRI report shows the reality of what is happening. The irony is that a sexually obsessed and repressed minority within Christianity are killing the entire brand. The self-composed Christofascist myth that those who have walked away will return as the get older and/or have children simply is not happening. My own grandchildren, for example, are growing up as thoughtful, moral, compassionate individuals with religion playing no role in the lives. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the Christofascists road to suicide. Here are highlights:
At the end of last month, a group of Evangelical theologians, pastors, and leaders put out what they called the Nashville Statement on sexual morality. The first thing to note is that 50 years ago, it would have been regarded as self-evident to most Christians. Money quote: “We affirm that God’s revealed will for all people is chastity outside of marriage and fidelity within marriage. We deny that any affections, desires, or commitments ever justify sexual intercourse before or outside marriage; nor do they justify any form of sexual immorality.” So far, so conventional, especially for Evangelicals.But you immediately wonder if the statement is going to condemn divorce or contraception or multiple successive marriages or pornography or masturbation or countless other questions of sexual morality that heterosexuals grapple with. And you can search the document for any thoughts on these questions. In fact, it has almost nothing to say to 97 percent of humanity on sexual matters.
What it does instead is condemn the 3 percent. In fact, it does more than condemn the sexual behaviors of gay and transgender people. It erases our self-understanding entirely. Money quote: “We deny that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.” It is not just what we do that these Evangelical leaders object to; it is who we are. Our very “self-conception” is a defiance of God’s will. We sure aren’t part of nature, even though scientists have observed variations on the sexual norm in countless other species. We are merely heterosexuals who have chosen to act out our desires in sexually immoral ways. The words gay and homosexual and transgender describe nothing but sin. . . . . At best, we are beset with “psychological conditions” that lead us into sin and Hell.
What Evangelicals cannot seem to accept is the possibility that for the vast majority of humankind, male and female self-conception does indeed come completely naturally, that it is clearly integral to humanity’s reproduction and rearing of the next generation, that the sexes are indeed complementary rather than interchangeable … but that this is not the entire story. A small minority does not quite fit this rubric. . . . . it does mean that God’s creation isn’t just Adam and Eve period.
The reason so many minds have changed on this question is because we know more about our nature than we ever have before. You don’t have to junk all of Christianity to acknowledge that. Gay people, for example, will be the first to insist that male and female exist: It’s just that we are attracted to our own sex and not the other.
For a few generations now, gays and lesbians and transgender people, by coming out, have been telling our stories, and those with open minds and big hearts have heard us. It is one of the great tragedies of many Evangelical and orthodox Christians that they are not interested in listening.
And so in the Nashville Statement, there is no advice to gay or transgender Christians, except to be heterosexual, dammit. They don’t even air the possibility of chaste spiritual friendship as a way for such people to lead lives not beset with loneliness, or sexual repression of a kind no human is truly capable of without profound psychological distortion. There is no mention of love at all . . . All this constant rhetoric of loving us is therefore phony. You can’t love people without respecting them. You can’t welcome people you are simultaneously dehumanizing and writing out of creation.
[T]heir intransigence on this question is killing them. It’s particularly damning when so many of these leaders just endorsed, voted for, and threw their weight behind a man who has married several times, claimed that avoiding STDs was his own version of Vietnam, has humiliated successive wives, has bragged about sexual assault, who talks of his own daughter as a sexual object, and touted the size of his dick in a presidential debate. On all of this, most of these same Evangelicals looked the other way. But gay and transgender Christians? We are living rebukes to God’s natural order.
I believe that for an entire generation, this question is a litmus test for whether Christianity really is about love, and whether the Gospels (which have nothing to say about homosexuality) should even get a hearing. I can date my own niece’s and nephew’s rejection of Christianity to the day the priest urged them to oppose equal rights for their uncle. That’s why Evangelicalism is dying so quickly among the young. The latest PRRI survey shows that only one in ten Evangelicals are now under 30. It is no accident . . . . This is what the signers of the Nashville Statement do not quite grasp. They just signed one of the longest suicide notes in history. Because what they’re saying is not merely callous. It is manifestly untrue.
Some readers - most comment anonymously, of course - take me to task for lumping all Christians together when I say that Christianity needs to be a dead religion. Sadly, rather than continually, loudly and publicly condemn the hate merchants within Christianity and the toxicity of evangelical Christianity in particular, its easier for these individuals to attack those who point out what they prefer to close their eyes to and ignore. When Christianity dies, it will be because of critics like me, but rather those who could have opposed the hate merchants chose not to do so.
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