They didn’t leave the church, the church left them | Opinion
According to a recent survey by the Pew Charitable Trust, 3 in 10 adults in the United States identify themselves as having no religious affiliation. Long-term trends continue, perhaps accelerated by the global pandemic. Now even the most complacent ordained and lay church leaders across regional and denominational lines worry about a future of declining involvement, and not just for selfish reasons.
The hard reality is this: Although it represents a minority of U.S. Christians, the Christian right has suited up for one last crack at the culture wars, and they intend to drag all of us into it. What’s worse, some of the movement’s leaders and followers will resort to just about any tactic to serve that end. Those tactics include gross distortion of the Bible, and demonization of immigrants, people of color and sexual minorities.
All of this in spite of the Bible’s repeated instructions to the people of God to regard the immigrant in the same way as widows and orphans, the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew from the eastern Mediterranean, and that sexuality seems to figure much less prominently in the Old or New Testaments than a whole range of social and economic behaviors that the religio-political right commonly ignores.
Should those of us who think the church has left them become secular people? For me, the answer is no. When I became a Christian, I began following Jesus Christ, not the policies or practices of his other followers. As the second-century martyr Polycarp said: “I have served him 86 years, and he has done me no wrong. So how can I speak against my king, who saved me?” I will not reach his age for several decades, but the sentiment makes sense of my experience.
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