Dear White Evangelical Church,
I have some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is you’re dying.
If you’re paying attention, you’ve probably noticed the symptoms.
Your buildings are slowly clearing, your pews gradually emptying, your congregations visibly aging away, your voice carrying less resonance than it used to.
The reasons for this are complicated and interconnected, but here are a few broad strokes:
You’re dying because of your hypocrisy.
People see the ever-widening chasm between who you say you are and what they regularly experience in your presence.
They see the great disparity between the expansive hospitality of Jesus and the narrow prejudice you are so often marked by.
They see Christ’s deep affection for the poor, hurting, and marginalized, and either your quiet indifference or your open hostility toward them.
They’ve listened to you preach incessantly about the immorality of the world, the dangers of greed, the corrupt nature of power, the poison of untruth, the evils of sexual perversion—and watched you willingly align with politicians embodying all of these.
They see that you are so often the very kind of malevolent ugliness that you forever warned was coming to assail the world.
You’re dying because of your willful ignorance.
People are tired of your war on Science.
They are sick of your arguing with Biology.
They are exhausted by your attacks on women.
They are disgusted by your justifications of racism.
They despise your narcissistic nationalism.
They know the Earth is round.
They know it is billions, not thousands of years old.
They know dinosaurs walked it.
They know that it is warming rapidly.
They know people here don’t choose their sexuality or deserve their poverty.
They know whoever and whatever God doesn’t appoint Presidents or hand out weapons or attack people with tornadoes.
You’re dying because of your devotion to cruelty.
People watch you dig in your heels against others because of their gender identity and their sexual orientation; the way you continually exact violence upon them, the way you try to blame God and the Bible for your mindless bigotry.
They’ve seen your intolerance to other religious traditions: how you vilify anyone who finds spirituality and meaning outside of your precise expression of Christianity, how you so easily disregard the faith stories of those who don’t mirror your own.
They’ve watched you so revel in being the bully to those you were originally called to protect.
You’re dying because of your complicity in violence.
Good people have seen you so often be a haven for misogynists, domestic abusers, sexual predators, and white supremacists, who more often receive protections than condemnation.
They’ve heard your explicit silence in the face of a brutal and rising flood of open racism, of hostility toward immigrants, of anti-Semitism, of attacks on Asian people and Muslims.
They see your pastors and leaders misuse their positions and leverage their influence to victimize the most vulnerable and make them scapegoats for discrimination.
They’ve watched you be the last, hateful holdout in matters of gender equality, racial diversity, sexuality, and theological difference; lagging behind almost everyone in the world in the kind of goodness you say you aspire to.
It’s easy to be fooled into believing you’re well because you have the political power of a presidency behind you, because you can temporarily impose your will on this nation. But this frantic flurry of cruelty is actually the death rattle of a doomed and dying thing. The empty bombast and blinding lights of your megachurches are a hollow rally that may momentarily anesthetize you, but they cannot stave off what is coming.
Yes, Evangelical Church, the bad news is that you’re slowly but surely expiring as you are now.
The good news is that in your passing, something else is being born.
Rising in these days is a sprawling movement of disparate people, not bound by denomination or tradition or nation, who want to create something redemptive and life-giving here, who don’t care what it’s called, who gets the credit, or what building it happens in.
Its makers are conscientious objectors in your unending holy wars, choosing to step away from you in order to create loving spiritual communities, grow deeper in personal faith, escape tribal partisan politics, craft a healthier planet, reflect the character of Jesus, and hold onto their souls.
These newly emancipated sojourners are creating something of compassion and generosity and hospitality; a radically inclusive faith that opens the table, a spirituality that welcomes the world, a religion that does no harm: a working theology of love. These open-hearted human beings are unearthing the beauty buried beneath heavy layers of rigid dogma, ornamental religion, and institutionalized discrimination.
The soul is leaving a body that no longer serves it, and you are that body.
The bad news for you, White Evangelical Church, is that you are certainly dying.
And it’s very good news for the rest of us and for a Jesus you have long abandoned.