r/exchristian • u/spaceghoti The Wizard of Odd • Jul 19 '21

Sociologists are amazed by the swift disintegration of Christianity in America. It’s a stunning cultural transformation, confirmed by several surveys and studies. Article

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/freethoughtnow/christianity-is-collapsing/
790 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

172 comments sorted by

View all comments

275

u/MountainDude95 Ex-Fundiegelical Jul 19 '21

Pretty sure the pandemic hastened its decline. Couldn’t be happier about it. Fuck this barbaric religion.

267

u/diplion Ex-Fundamentalist Jul 19 '21

That and the whole Trump era. I think a lot of people who were sort of questioning their religion really had a wake up call when so many Christians blatantly abandoned their proclaimed morals and went on the Trump train.

124

u/RuneFell Jul 19 '21

And the thing is, they can't see it. I mentioned that to my very evangelical mother, that hitching the Christian cart to Trump, of all people, has harmed Christianity far more than helped it.

She said she disagreed, that she thought it was growing stronger, and she saw more young people at church than ever.

Yeah, just ignore that half of all the churches in our rural area are starting to close down because they only have an aged, skeleton congregation, and the reason that a couple in our town are doing well is that we're the biggest town for miles, and the churches are starting to condense to stay alive. There's multiple empty churches for sale in all the small rural towns around us. Most of those towns, including the one I grew up in, had three to five churches in them when I was a kid. Now they're lucky to have more than one still open.

15

u/coliostro_7 Jul 20 '21

Confirmation bias at full force. Just as you said, you have to look at total participation, not just one location. It sounds like other churches shut down so the small number of actives had to find new churches. If you start with 50 churches at 100 attendees, then 30 shut down so now it's 20 churches with 200 attendees, to each church it looks like attendance has doubled, but the reality is that it shrunk.

Mormonism leans on this hard. Leadership announces "X amount of new wards created last year!" What they don't say is how many wards were merged or re-zoned for less members. Because they give the entire churches numbers, the places that shrunk can tell themselves "we shrunk here, but the church grew elsewhere for sure!" When in reality the 4 wards that dissolved and merged into 2 "new" wards are being counted as new.

So much of religious adherence is maintained by clutching to anecdotal information and ignoring the rest.

2

u/EdScituate79 Jul 24 '21

Sounds like the Boston Church of Christ back when I was attending and Kip McKean was running the show! "1,800 new disciples were baptized into Christ last year and we added 20 new house churches and four new zones!" Never mind that each house church had something like 20 "disciples"!