I didn’t leave evangelicalism because of hatred (or even really just the garden-variety hypocrisy that was more prevalent back then), but if I had more tolerance for their teachings nearly always being wrong about how to make sense of lived experience, and had slogged on for another couple of decades, I might have ended up writing this essay. Man they have REALLY screwed the pooch in ways I could not have imagined 30 years ago.
Far too many people, though, will not make the connection that if this is how badly things can go wrong, maybe the basis for the teachings needs questioning. They will lament that the church has “lost its way” when IMO, it never found it to begin with …
IMHO, give them someone or something to blame and hate appealing enough, and with a fabricated mythology enough and with a leader enthusiastic enough, and religion may have genuinely met its demise.
Or in the words of Hoffer: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.”