The Collapse Of The Bible Belt

Debate Room
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This is a video I did not expect to see appearing on YouTube, but, I present to you …

The fracture lines identified in that video are listed as:

[1] Sexual abuse scandals, in particular the knowledge that churches covered up for, and protected, predators instead of victims;

[2] Politics, in particular the embrace of Trump by evangelical leaders;

[3] The information revolution, in particular the manner in which Internet access allows young people to access proper education about science, history and politics;

[4] LGBTQ acceptance, in particular rejection of being told to condemn family members and other loved ones for failing to conform to outdated shibboleths;

[5] Economic shifts, in particular the growth of modern, urban employment outstripping rural and agricultural employment, attracting ingress of new workers with progressive attitudes;

[6] The Covid pandemic breaking attendance habits;

[7] The abandonment of institution and authority, in favour of personal spiritual concepts among those continuing to believe in a god;

[8] Aggressive attempts to use regressive legislation to enforce conformity, such as anti-LGBTQ legislation and the Row vs Wade reversal, repelling ever greater numbers of voters;

But there’s a dark side. The fracture lines are leading to increased family division, an increase in mental health issues arising therefrom, and the dangerously increasing authoritarianism of the conservatives that are left. What will replace the disappearing bonds of traditional community? The worrying answer is, we don’t know.

Will a new, more fluid and more inclusive strand of faith emerge and replace the old dogmas? Or are we seeing the move from culture war to civil war?

A lot of food for thought here.

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It sounds like a great example of natural selection…evolve or face extinction.

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The thing that bothers me most about this is that I anticipate violence, and I anticipate greater efforts to mandate religion in public schools.

Florida has signed off on a document called the the Pheonix Declaration, which was crafted by the Heritage Foudation, and is being applied to the school curricula.

Basically, it whitewashes everything negative about American history, such as slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans.

It requires the United States to be presented as “the ultimate source of goodness in the world” as the font of Judeo-Christian values.

There will be no discussion of the glass ceiling, climate change, or sexism

And so forth.

All of this shit seems very Orwellian to me, and it makes me ill.

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We seem to be on a knife-edge as to whether the regime will endure in some form long enough to cement this kind of thing or not. It does seem like the regime’s sheer incompetence and overreach may be its undoing at least temporarily. I think they have bitten off more than they can chew because people like Vought and Miller are convinced they either have a mandate from heaven or are personally infallibly right, respectively, and are trying to create their imagined ideal world where everything plays by their rules and “values” and therefore is right, good, and efficient. They don’t take into account unintended consequences, as those can’t exist for them. And those unintended consequences are catching up to them. Political abreaction / public support falling apart, economic realities, etc.

But it’s a chaotic situation, that can play out in a lot of ways. Some at least short term very good, some possibly long term very bad.

Just looking at Operation Southern Spear alone – the hope there is to topple the Venezuelan regime with one friendly to the US and its interests (particularly in oil) but if that fails they’ve set up a situation where to save face they will have to do SOMETHING (like, start a war they can’t win) and if that draws in other players or causes someone to attack us while we’re distracted, it could quickly devolve into war, up to and including WW3, up to and including nukes. The odds are against that, but far from nonzero, too. And that’s just ONE of the puzzle pieces.

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They deliberately put politics to the forefront without realizing how much of their congregation they’d alienate. Unfortunately the one’s that remain are largely the fanatics.

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As a former evangelical (Chicago area, not really central Bible Belt, but close enough to relate to all this), I have come to see evangelical Christianity in America as a structure erected to perpetuate patriarchy, white supremacy, and bigotry in general.

For the fortunate insiders (those who conform to the dogma and expectations and “fit in”), yes it provided structure and belonging and protection from the scary / hated “other”, and losing that is putting a lot of people with tons of learned helplessness and zero skills and experience at reasoning and navigating moral questions at loose ends, and that’s doubtless causing anguish, family divisions, etc.

In many ways the churches maintained grown men and women in a childlike state of dependence for guidance and direction, so the fault for all this mayhem is with the churches and how they have ill served their members.

Like any authoritarian structure, it wasn’t sustainable and is now collapsing, for all the reasons listed in the OP’s excellent summary.

Large parts of this structure have abreacted by embracing authoritarian politics in a last ditch attempt to impose their ideals on the larger society by force. This too, cannot endure.

I can see a number of ways this could end, some of them very, very bad. I don’t pretend to know how all the complex factors will play out and how many false starts and stops there will be. But to my mind, the best argument I’ve heard is that the US never dealt honestly with its own moral failings, which were largely absolved / excused by Christianity – particularly but not exclusively evangelicalism – and therefore didn’t learn anything from them and are doomed to repeat them until that changes. Slavery just became Jim Crow and then became the incarcerative state, for example. The notion that God blesses the righteous with things like good health and prosperity led away from health care and other basic necessities as a human rights and toward health care and other forms of security and ease as earned privileges and even then, mostly for able-bodied members of the white overclass. The notion that God controls the weather and has given the earth in all its fulness to humanity to exploit at will with his blessing has led to the climate crisis and to unbridled exploitive capitalism and the progressive exploitation and debasement of workers and consumers. Etc.

The best case scenario is that we start to dimly make these connections and steadily move away from these dysfunctional framings of reality and gradually reverse all these trends. The young seem to be leading the way here, and I hope it’s not too little, too late – but I fear that it is.

The worst case scenario is large scale social and societal collapse and lots of general mayhem.

The median scenario is unsteadily lurching between the first two scenarios.

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It seems Orwellian because it is.

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I’ve been planning on leaving Las Vegas soon. Been looking for property in places where there are 4 seasons (a demand from my wife). I can’t believe how many churches I keep finding for sale.

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Yeah, there was one for sale near me. If I had the money I’d buy it and turn it into a strip club.

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There’s a published SciFi author on BlueTube (John Scalzi?) who purchased an abandoned church and uses it as his office and library.

I’ve read a number of stories in the past 2 or 3 years about churches turned into restaurants, bars and night clubs.

A hundred years ago a church in NY City built a skyscraper on their property, and retained the church within the first floor. The idea at the time was to finance the church with the rental proceeds of the rest of the property. But their timing was not very “divine” – they completed construction just as the Great Depression hit, and the hotel above them quickly became a house of ill repute with lots of prostitution, murder and other violence plus it became a popular suicide spot because of people jumping from the windows. Finally the church itself declared bankruptcy.

Today, the only churches that seem to be expanding are the relative handful of megachurches with media empires and I suspect even those have reached their practical limits.

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The acoustics make them pretty good night clubs and bars / music venues.

All part of god’s plan, no doubt. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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I would turn it into a brothel . . . with the sex workers dressed up like nuns.

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I have found a business partner…

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The only thing she is missing is a ruler.

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Yeah, go ahead…ruin the fantasy…

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Now that is a nod to Christianity, they only talk about a burning bush, you’re ready to give people a burning bush.

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I started listening to these videos as I was hoping to get some answers to a few questions that I had. After a while it became obvious he had an agenda and a formula.

The agenda? To convince churches to stop preaching politics.

The formula? Tell an anecdote followed by a bunch of statistics to make the point.

He seems to be pumping them out twice a day.

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I am an escapee of what used to be known as the Independent Fundamental [sic] Churches of America, which now just goes by IFCA International. If you have a “Bible Church” in your community, it is probably an IFCA church.

The stated reason for the name change is that they think evangelicals made a HUGE mistake getting involved in politics at all, so they wanted to distance themselves from Christian fundamentalism in general, not in terms of dogma but in terms of social policy and also to not soil themselves with the likes of Trump and his minions so that they preserve moral authority on issues like honesty, divorce, etc.

Since this ideation was what I was raised on, I give them props for integrity on this issue, even if I no longer agree with their dogma.

The reason for this position has always been their belief that “all the world needs is Jesus”, that politics represents the dreaded “social gospel”, which they define as the notion that anything BUT faith in Jesus is needed to make people’s lives better – things like food or health care or charity in general. They feel that advocating for or promoting these things are a statement of non-faith, basically. Of course that’s ridiculous; people need to be adequately nurtured physically as well as emotionally and to have belonging and refuge and stability and safety. An unforced reading of the NT leans pretty heavily into meeting people’s needs, deploying compassion and empathy and no strings attached as well.

Over against that, ever since Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority a couple of generations ago, most of fundamentalism has embraced political power in a sort of unholy alliance that is at odds with their moral playbook and they have deployed every conceivable rationalization in the service of that.

Meanwhile the liberal denominations have been mildly to heavily into liberal political causes.

So I think trying to get churches in general to stay out of politics is a fool’s errand, and I’m not sure I even agree with it as an ideal. While the fundamentalists are groping for raw political power because they sense their grip on society slipping and they want to impose their social agenda / standards by force if necessary, as a general principle I don’t really have a problem with churches having a voice / seat at the table like any other org. They won’t get very far appealing to magic or advocating regressive policies (patriarchy, anti-abortion, anti-divorce, “Christian principles”, etc) in a progressive secular society, but they’re welcome to try.

What I’d hope people like this would do is appeal to people concerning the importance of critical thinking. If you sell someone on that, religion takes care of itself as a force in their life. It disappears, as Hitchens had it, “in a puff of logic”.

You will never get religious orgs to sign off on that but you can peel away individuals one by one. It’s the long game but the only way IMO.

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In keeping with the nuns working in a brothel, see below: