Probably totally irrelevant- A few years ago (I think I’ve posted about this before) I did street preaching for Cthulhu. I didn’t break character to explain that I was doing a very nerdy humor act. People thought I was a genuine lunatic and avoided me. I began to feel guilty too. Yeah, I don’t actually believe in Cthulhu but isn’t yelling all day (and singing and doing various shtick) about another religion kind of wrong?
I was wondering this when something happened. A man in a Jews 4 Jesus shirt occupied a nearby corner and also started preaching. So, I stood 6 feet away from him and acted in a such a way that people thought we were part of the same organization. At first, he seemed to think I would grow tired of yelling and leave- it was at this point I knew he knew NOTHING about Jews. I kept up my act until he left for another street corner over an hour later. Then, satisfied that the Lord was pleased with me I engaged in the ancient ritual of getting Chinese food.
Your avatar reminds me of that day. It’s a proud day for me. Though in retrospect, I should have done street preaching for Sauron. Everybody would have gotten the reference.
Half of Americans have changed their religious denomination at least once in their lives – many several times – and 28 percent have switched faiths altogether (for example, from Christianity to Judaism).
Like if switching from Christianity to Judaism is a “big” move, it seems that those people would have be included in the larger group that “only” changed denominations. But I agree that it is ambiguously phrased. It depends on whether you consider Catholicism and Protestantism to be different “denominations” of the same religion, or actually different “faiths”. I think most people would say the former, but certainly some would disagree.
I’ve mentioned before on this board that this is me. I was conservative by default growing up. I understood conservatism to mean sticking with Biblical principles. I think the first wakeup call was when I learned about how many conservatives loved Ayn Rand and objectivism, and I learned she was against altruism.
Hold up. Christianity is all about altruism. So how could these conservatives think it was a bad thing? So I looked deeper, and I realized that it was basically the liberals (and later learned the progressives even moreso) who were pushing those morals. And I realized just how selfish conservatism tends to be.
Later, I figured out that abortion is not even mentioned in the Bible, so anyone making a big deal out of that was just ignoring Scripture. So there was one lone holdout: the LGBT issue. But I was already sympathetic to the idea that it was incongruent that God would say all this stuff about love and then condemn people for the way they were born. Judging actions made sense, but inborn traits?
I’d already realized that Romans 1 did not actually forbid homosexuality. I realized that the Old Testament stuff was said in the same place as other restrictions that had been rescinded. The only problem were a couple words in Greek. And then I learned that those words made more sense to be references to pederasty, pedophilia.
It seemed odd that a God who said that anyone who harms a child would be better off thrown in the sea with a weight around their neck never mentioned anything about pedophilia. I was already using the same logic of abortion: that was rampant at the time, and no one mentioned it? So it made sense that this is what he was talking about.
At that point, there was just nothing left to cling to conservatism. And I’m glad I left when I did, because it started to morph into what it is today, being wiling to worship at the feet of an anti-Christ. There’s no pretense that it isn’t about hate.
Oh, and I must mention how liberalism had the principle that bigotry was wrong, something from my favorite Bible verse:
Galatians 3:28
There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
It’s not like bigotry is a hard concept to understand. Sure, maybe you don’t notice something is bigoted at first, but, when it’s pointed out, it’s pretty obvious based on just what the term means.
When encountering this, conservatism tries to redefine the term to make it not bigotry. Liberals try to change themselves. And progressivism discovers the discrepancy in the first place.
I would feel a lot more uncomfortable in an atheist version of liberalism. It would be ignoring religious freedom.
Does switching from one form of Protestant to another (Anglican to Methodist, for example) count as changing one’s religion? What about from one flavor of Lutheran to another?
What if they find out they have Jewish heritage that they didn’t know about? My ancestors are from Germany. Many Jews there and elsewhere intermarried and abandoned the Jewish culture. The surname on my mother’s side is typically associated with German Jews, and it has turned out there is some heritage there.
I’m an American who transplanted to Europe a few years ago.
Political culture here is much more secular than in the United States (and just plain culture in general, but leave that aside for a moment). Political leaders and candidates don’t talk about moral imperatives in terms of religious abstractions (for the most part), they talk about benefits and harms to real people in the real world. But, at the same time, most of them do, in fact, still attend church services and profess to hold religious beliefs, albeit quietly, with circumspection. Governance is basically secular, but that doesn’t mean Europe is filling its governments with atheists.
At the same time, though, even the faithful politicians look across the Atlantic in horror. The specific flavor of evangelical-Christian politicking on display in the U.S. (and I will emphatically reinforce the general message of the thread that the OP’s conflation of the particular variety of activist evangelical authoritarianism practiced in the U.S. with Christianity generally is deeply misguided) is viewed as a monstrous aberration, and an abject example of how not to run a government, or a country.
Yes, the Christian concern with the poor, the unfortunate, the “least of these,” in general aligns more closely with liberalism than conservativism.
But it seems fair to point out that not all conservatives are admirers of Rand; some conservatives are quite generous; and some liberals are quite selfish (or, they’re only generous with other people’s money).
Several points here.
One, I suspect that more Catholics simply die off than leave the church. Like other mainstream religions it is getting older all the time.
Two, one reason there are so many ex-Catholics is the vast number of Catholics. It is by far the largest denomination of Christianity (all the Protestant denominations put together do not equal it).
Three, being an “ex-Catholic” is a category that doesn’t exist in the same way in Protestantism. Not sure why exactly. People don’t say they are ex-Lutherans.
Four, many people leave Protestant churches for doctrinal reasons also.
In my experience, doctrinal reasons are often not the central reason for leaving, but may be just the last straw. Most people leave churches because they stopped feeling part of the community, and that can be for all sorts of reasons, from a change of pastor to not needing the Sunday School any more.
I’m not sure what this means. I don’t exactly feel comfortable in the Christian version of liberalism, yet that appears to be the dominant strain in politics. Does that also ignore religious freedom?
Very sorta, since it was pretty much a failing subcult of Judaism before Paul started preaching to the gentiles. I suspect there might have been maybe 1000 “Christians” , which were then a type of Messianic Jews, before Paul moved it on to the Gentiles- Greeks and Romans, then Africans.
Islam stayed within those peoples for some centuries and many 100’s of thousands.
Tangentially related. The 2020 Census of American Religion by PRRI shows that Mainline Protestants (who tend to be more liberal) outnumber Evangelicals for the first time in a number of years:
I think there are many logical fallacies in the OP, but the main one seems to be “Many atheists are liberals/Democrats, therefore many liberals/Democrats are atheists.” Just curious if there’s a cool Latin name or something for that.
Unaffiliated does not necessarily mean “atheist”. While atheists are unaffiliated, so are a number of believers. They just don’t belong to any particular religion.
On the other hand, there are atheists who are also affiliated. For reasons unrelated to believing in god, they belong to some congregation.