For the first time since people started looking at demographics, more young women are leaving churches than young men. Naturally, the people most responsible for this trend have no idea what to make of it.

Kristi Burke is doing an excellent series of videos on Christian deconstruction. Here's her latest, posted yesterday.

Few people have an easy time escaping Christianity, because it's ubiquitous in Western society. But it can be done.

...pay attention to Leonard Leo. He is the judicial kingmaker responsible for the list from which Trump selected Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Leo has shaped this Court and acted effectively to keep its Republican justices from abandoning his – and their – sectarian-right vision of America.

Communicating trauma through art is fine, as long as you don't remind the Christian fundies that their beliefs and practices are a prime source of religious trauma for lots of people.

It's mostly good news all around. Evangelicals are the only ones who are managing to hold their ground, so that's bad. But "Unaffiliated" which includes atheists, agnostics, and "Nones" are up from 21% in 2013 to 26% in 2023. We continue to be the fastest-growing demographic in the US. Furthermore, an increasing number of Americans simply find religion irrelevant or otherwise unimportant, and those numbers are growing as well.

There is hope for the future, should we survive so long.

Captain Cassidy examines yet another Christian expressing pity for non-believers who must be somehow deficient to explain non-belief.

It's always a weird day, Easter was when my family found out I had fully left the church. I remember I just said I wasn't going that day and my mother had a meltdown, saying there was no point in celebrating if I didn't go to church. She cancelled the family dinner and all the activities for the whole family because she found out I didn't go.

20 years later we're better but I still remember that, I'm willing to admit that her cancelling a holiday because of me was traumatic for me, Easter used to fill me with dread.

Now I eyeroll at every big public he is risen post and continue on with my day. Today coffee, a good pastry shop, then enjoying a nice spring day.

...it's time to consider the strong possibility that Trump's disdain towards the practice and theological beliefs of Christianity is not a surprise to his followers. It's likely a selling point that Trump's version of "Christianity" is void of faith and morality. His pitch to his followers has a certain appeal: They can have the identity "Christian," and all the power that goes with it, minus the parts they don't like. No boring church services or Bible study. No tedious talk about "compassion" and "grace," which only gets in the way of the gay-bashing and racism. And definitely no need to worry about that Jesus guy, with all his notions about "loving thy neighbor" and "welcoming the stranger."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/13633704

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10259127

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10212589

Who needs theology when you have Trump?

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10212463

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10140175

Courthouse News reports: Arizona’s House Education Committee advanced a bill Tuesday that would allow public school teachers and administrators to post and discuss the Ten Commandments in the classroom. State Senator Anthony Kern [photo], the bill’s sponsor, says the Ten Commandments shaped the country’s heritage. “Our history is the Ten Commandments,” the Republican from Glendale …

"I would actually suggest that conservative folks are less concerned about sex and more concerned about the performance of gender," Gibson told me. "Sex just happens to be the vehicle" they are currently using, he explained, to push a rigid gender ideology where "men are expected to be the leaders" and "women are supposed to be submissive." He pointed out that much "tradwife" content may be sexually provocative, for instance, but it still pushes the notion that "women aren't sexual people" because "the purpose of a heterosexual relationship is for a woman to please a man."

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10081186

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10075272

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10067687

A grim murder story illustrates why it's so incredibly easy for predators to fool evangelicals into thinking they're good Christians.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10044851

In some of those images, Fautz allegedly used yearbook photos of two female students whose faces were then "transposed by means of Photoshop or morphing technology onto a different nude female’s body," according to a criminal complaint.

cross-posted from: https://midwest.social/post/10026298