Why No One Wants To Become a Christian
According to a recent article by David Gushee in his new book, A Letter to my Anxious Christian Friends, the number of Christians is on the decline. And this decline is affecting religious life, culture and politics.
As evidence of this, in this recent election, social issues were rarely addressed. Abortion, birth control and a variety of other religious concerns rarely came up.
Gushee offers many reasons for this: lack of interest by the youth, excessive rigidity of conservative religion, and the inability of conservatives, especially conservative religious folks to engage in critical thinking.
I was reminded of this last point yesterday when I heard an interview on NPR with Dallas Pastor, Robert Jeffress. Jeffress supported Donald Trump and encouraged his sheep like flock to do so also. When the interviewer asked him about Trump’s behavior, he said that we are all sinners.
In other words, Jeffress blew off that question by implying that a lie, which we all have been guilty of, was just as bad as practicing serial adultery or Trump cheating his contractors by not paying them, or trump’s on-going lying or Trump’s stealing from innocent college students at Trump University. Or especially by Trump’s alleged 1994 raping of a thirteen year-old girl and afterward Trumps alleged threatening her if she told anyone about it. If this allegation is true , this young lady was one year older than twelve. An innocent child.
When I heard this interview I understood why membership in Christian communities is on the decline. Who wants to be around a bunch of old farts who say that because we are all sinners, a lie is just as bad a raping a thirteen-year old?
When 80-90 percent of evangelical Christians support a serial adulterer and a pedophile because they think that using the wrong email server is worse than being a liar, a deadbeat who doesn’t pay his contractors or a fascist with a narcissistic personality disorder, one can understand why Christianity is declining.
Their own Leader, Jesus says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but within are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanliness.
If you are an evangelical reading this, know that most of the real world scorns you. Because of your support of Trump, you are a hypocrite, and a racist full of dusty and rotting bones hiding in a beautiful white sepulcher. You look good on the outside but we know the darkness that hides in you. That darkness is now being exposed to light.
Ron
thought provoking article