Conservative Evangelicals are paying a financial price for the intrusion of Trump extremism into their churches.

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/12/significant-decreases-in-funds.html

It's been a little over nine years since Trump came down the escalator in his New York office building and announced he would be a candidate for President of the United States in 2016. That same period of time happens to coincide with a staggering decline in the membership and attendance within the churches of the nation's largest Evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Is there a correlation? Of course there is. And similar drops in membership and attendance are occurring in other segments of the broader spectrum of conservative Evangelicalism that are overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly influenced by right wing political extremism.

Southern Baptist leadership has, until recently, been very tight lipped about the decline of their membership. Membership plateaued at 16.2 million around 2000, and remained there, with tiny annual increases until 2008, when a drop of about 38,000 members was recorded. The decline continued at about the same rate, just under 50,000 annually, until 2016, when a loss of just over 200,000 was reported. The membership dropped by 240,000 in 2017, and 280,000 in 2018 before a sharp drop of 435,000 happened in 2019. Then, from 2019 to 2022, the annual losses exceeded 450,000 until the decline slowed in 2023, with a reported loss of 241,000 brought the total down to under 13 million for the first time since the 1960's.

Altogether, since 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention has lost 3,324,156 members, Average weekly attendance has dropped, over the same period of time, by more than 2.2 million. That is a loss of 38% of its total average weekly attendance, and over 20% of its total membership, most of that occurring in the last decade, and the steepest declines occurring since 2016. Only someone blind to reality would insist that the intrusion of the very worldly, immoral, corrupt style of right wing extremism into the churches of this denomination, in which over 75% of its members are self-identified Trump voters, didn't have anything to do with the decline.

Of course it did.

[kimbutgar]

1. They give Christianity a bad name

And I would be embarrassed to call myself a Christian.

I am a follower of Jesus’s teachings not the old testament evangelical idiots.

[mountain grammy]

2. Couldn't happen to a better group

Hope their numbers continue to drop. Much better for all.

[House of Roberts]

3. Keep in mind,

US population in the 1960s was almost 200 million, with the membership under 13 million.
US population in 2023 is approaching 335 million and their membership is down below 13 million again.
Southern Baptists are a much smaller slice of the country now than they were in the 60s.

[lees1975]

4. And if you look closely at their report, the membership is much greater than the actual church attendance.

At 12.8 million members, the actual weekly average church attendance is 3.8 million. So the actual numerical strength of Southern Baptists is probably not much more than 4 million. And while white Evangelicals voting for Trump slipped up to about 84% in 2024, the overall number of self-identified white Evangelicals who voted was almost 4 million less than it was in 2020.

[Girard442]

5. I joined a Southern Baptist church at age 13. I'm probably still being counted as a member 60 years later.

I'm an atheist. Was then, too.

[lees1975]

6. If you joined, and never did anything about un-joining, chances are good you're still on the roll.

Sometimes death isn't enough to remove your name. One of my college buddies went to be pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Missouri several years ago, about 50 people in church every week but over 300 members. They went through their roll and took off more than 100 names of people whose date of birth made them 100 years old or older.

[dalton99a]

7. Stay the course

[Aristus]

8. The one good thing about the Trump Presidency: It turned Mrs. Aristus from a conservative evangelical into a liberal

atheist.

She had been a lifelong member of the conservative Foursquare Church. I always thought she was too good-hearted, too kind, too loving, and too intelligent to be a conservative Christian, and I was right. (How many conservative Christians do you know who are ardent LGBTQ allies?)

Well, in November, 2016, when she found out 81% of evangelical Christians voted for Trump, she left the church. After a painful crisis of conscience that lasted a month or two, she came out the other end a liberal Democrat, and an atheist. I couldn't be happier with the transformation in her life, and neither could she.

Now she finds herself wondering if she is going to make through another four years of Trump...

[slightlv]

9. I wish I could get my head and intuition to stop telling me

it's gonna be much longer than 4 years we're going to have to suffer under this regime. I'm thinking of what it was like at the start of the Revolutionary War... maybe it's about time a bunch of us band together and ask another country(s) for help in administering regime change in THIS country... once again.

[lees1975]

10. There was a huge disconnection in this denomination already in existence between people in the pew and

its educational institutions. I became a political liberal growing up in a union household with working class parents. I became a social reform supporting theological liberal after four years and a B.A. from a Southern Baptist affiliated university, and then an M.A. from another one. The theology courses I had to take challenged the superstitions and folk religion that was preached and taught in the church where I grew up, and completely undermined the Christo-fascist politics and white supremacy and Christian nationalism streams that were present in many local churches.

While its theological seminaries, under the control of the national denomination, have purged liberal theologians and have been taken over by Falwell brand fundamentalists, most of the colleges and universities, under the control of what they call state conventions, have held on to historic Baptist theology, which includes radical, woke principles based on the Christian gospel, like loving one's neighbor, loving one's enemies, living according to values, and the freedoms that Baptists have always championed in the face of state church oppression, including soul freedom and individual accountability for a free conscience before God, independent, autonomous congregational churches, the complete separation of church and state, as well as protected religious liberty. There are informal groups of Baptist churches that have continued to carry out these historic principles in spite of the takeover of most Baptist denominations and churches by fundamentalists, who have introduced heretical apostasy into Baptist churches.