Trump's Brand of Christian Conservativism is Driving People Away from Churches
Southern Baptists lose almost 500,000 members in one year
Though it would be difficult to find anyone within the denomination to admit that the current sharp drop in attendance and membership in the Southern Baptist Convention has anything to do with the blending of the more extremist elements of far right wing politics with conservative, Evangelical Christianity in the United States, there are some stark facts about this unprecedented decline that directly correspond to the election of Trump and his first term in office that can't be denied. The Southern Baptist Convention, which is the nation's largest conservative, Evangelical denomination, has seen a drop of over 20% of its membership and attendance since 2016, the year Trump was elected to the Presidency.
What's happening in the Southern Baptist Convention is similar to what other conservative, Evangelical denominations are experiencing. Membership is falling, attendance is dropping, not just because of COVID restrictions, but the decline began well before COVID, and has continued unabated even after the recovery period ended limits and restrictions on church attendance. Across the board, declines in membership among denominations identified with various branches of conservative, Evangelical Christianity in America have seen a decline of more than 20% in membership and attendance since 2016.
Much of Conservative, Evangelical Christianity in America Has Been Subverted and Had its Mission and Purpose Redefined and Redirected by Trump, and the Far Right Wing Extremism of Trump Politics
Francis Wilkinson, an opinion writer for Bloomberg, said in an April 7 editorial, "Donald Trump, a 77 year old Bible salesman from Palm Beach, Florida, has emerged as the nation's most prominent Christian leader. Trump is running for President as the divinely chosen champion of white Christians, promising to sanctify their grievances, destroy their perceived enemies, bolster their social status, and grant them power to impose an anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, white-centric Christian nationalism from coast to coast."
That's a pretty good description of the extremist views of the far right, which now encompasses most of the Republican party. The reason this is causing conflict, and an exodus of members from conservative, Christian churches is that it is completely inconsistent with the Christian gospel, even the gospel that has been produced by the literalist interpretations of the Bible that are standard doctrine for Evangelical churches.
Don't get me wrong, here. Evangelical Christians do have definitions of behavior considered to be sinful, requiring conviction and repentance leading to forgiveness and redemption and restoration to God, but their saving faith is based on grace, not a literal, legalistic set of government-imposed values and virtues which do not transform human conscience. And there are many white, Evangelicals who are able to separate their secular politics from their church life, and do not appreciate this "intrusion of licentiousness" into the sermons and Bible study groups and Sunday school classes of their church. They do not accept the shift from dependence on spiritual power to bring about conviction of sin, and the spiritual formation of redemption to the need for political power to spread the influence of the church under the control of the government.
"That Trump doesn't [and never has] attended church, and has obviously never read the book he hawks for $59.99, seems of interest exclusively to his political opponents," said Wilkinson.
"In a single decade," according to Wilkinson, " from 2013 to 2023, the percentage of Americans saying that religion is the most important thing, or among the most important things in their life plummeted from 72% to 53%," he noted.
Wlkinson cites Dr. Michael Emerson, a sociologist at Rice University, who says, "The now intimate tie between religion and a host of social and political positions, for many people, either drives them away from religion altogether, or leads them to distance themselves."
According to Wilkinson, the increased infusion of secular politics into conservative, Evangelical doctrine and practice led to an increase in the number of people leaving their churches. What started as a slow trickle in the 1980's and 90's has turned into a flood of people, mostly those who see Christian faith as a grace-based lifestyle based on a set of values taught by Jesus, as opposed to what Kristin Kobes Du Mez described as "the culmination of their half-century long pursuit of a militant Christian masculinity that disdains pluralism and valorizes masculine aggression."
Numbers Don't Lie
There is little acknowledgement of the fact that the intrusion of secular politics into the doctrine and theology of the Southern Baptist Convention coincides directly with the steep decline in attendance and membership they've experienced since 2015. Membership and attendance peaked in 2006, as the total number of church members reached 16.2 million. It slowly started to drop back, but a much more precipitous decline set in starting in 2015. Since then, membership has declined by 3.5 million, down to 12.7 million currently, more than 20%, and attendance, which was also affected by COVID in 2019 and 2020, even after a recovery, is down 25%.
That this decline is due directly to the more extreme, militant brand of far right wing politics intruding into pulpits and classsrooms of churches via right wing politics is evident in the way people are leaving the church. Prior to 2015, death was the top reason for church membership decline. In churches where the median age of the congregations has been past 60 years of age since the early 2000's, there are more of those than births, or conversions.
But since then, the numbers have grown so significantly, that the biggest cause of decline in membership and attendance is 1] people leaving churches in which the doctrine and theology has become to infested with right wing politics and 2] entire congregations, disillusioned by a denomination full of infighting and unable to resolve problems due to the elevation of right wing politics to the forefront. Some of those liberal, mainline denominations and congregations have been beneficiaries of this exodus, as their recent membership records have reflected much less of a decline than they did over the past three decades. And while I don't have any research to cite specifically, I'm aware of a couple of newer congregations made up of groups from several conservative megachurches where the pastors have gone openly MAGA.
Many of them, having had the only faith they've ever known, so easily corrupted by political elements from outside of the church, have just quit going.
The Loss of Evangelistic Outreach
One fact which confirms that much of the membership loss now being experienced among conservative Evangelicals is directly related to Trumpism's intrusion into the church is the staggering drop-off in evangelistic activity, or the winning of new converts. Among Southern Baptists, this is measured by the number of individuals who are baptized, which gives them membership in the local church.
Baptism numbers in the Southern Baptist Convention have been tanking for a long time, falling from somewhere around 400,000 in a year, down to the low 100,000's. And on top of that, 90% of those who are baptized as a symbol of a conversion experience, into church membership, are children under 12 years of age. Church membership growth in this denomination has always depended on the number of new converts made each year, because the focus of the church's outreach ministry was to "reach the lost."
So when the focus shifted to "elect conservative Republicans as President," the baptism numbers started to slide. The steepest declines in the number of baptisms in any specific year has occurred since 2016. And while those numbers have recovered to pre-COVID levels since the pandemic, those numbers are the lowest recorded since the mid-1940's.
Christianity Was Never Intended as a Theocracy or as a Political Movement
The Christian gospel preached and taught by Jesus and his apostles, recorded in the New Testament, is a conversion experience leading to a life transformation that becomes a lifestyle. It's not a legalistic set of rules, laws and edicts, with success being achieved by counting how many of them one successfully obeys. It does not win converts by first gaining the favor and endorsement of the secular government. It is a lifestyle motivated through spiritual formation, not by coercion applied through the use of political power.
From the time of Constantine, Christianity endured centuries of subversion, perversion, the intrusion of licentiousness and the corruption of its precepts that lead to a spiritual conversion experience, as it grew fully dependent on political power to preserve churches as institutions, rather than as gathered groups of Christians for worship. When conversion was nothing more than a ritual requirement of the law, the kind of Christian experience of his gospel that Jesus preached and taught was in danger of disappearing from the face of the earth.
When James Madison observed Baptists being persecuted in Virginia by the state-controlled Anglican Church, he determined to put religious liberty, in the form of freedom of conscience, into the Constitution. Jefferson agreed with him. It set the church free, and led to two centuries of a thriving influence and the evangelization of an entire country. In other places where there is religious freedom, the same thing has happened. And America has been spared the war and bloodshed caused by centuries of politically motivated religious strife that Europe experienced. At least, it has been spared such since the Constitution became the law of the land.
So it should come as no surprise that the intrusion of secular, far right wing politics, into the conservative, Evangelical branch of American Christianity is responsible for its decline.
We can either learn from history, or be doomed to repeat it.
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