Christianity: Not Just for Haters Anymore













Wish I could meet far more people like the Shores, such extreme stances of ant-gay bigotry are among the things that push people away from the church. No one with a healthy view of themselves can take (or should take) the amount of venomous rhetoric some people in church leadership positions spew for very long.

We are fighting back. The Big Jesus puppet has been at three Prides so far this year and is the creation of Liberty Church Blackpool. He expresses the fact that we are all loved by Jesus exactly as we are. Check him out on twitter: @libertychurchbp, Facebook: Liberty Church Blackpool or our website:

This is a cheap ploy to get tither's back in the pews. People are leaving christian churches because the churches ideals are finally being seen for what they truly are: antiquated, outmoded and hypocritical. No matter the denomination homosexuality has always been condemned (although secretly practiced - altar boys anyone?) and chastised throughout the christian community. Homosexuals have been judged, repressed, punished, beaten, bloodied and killed by self-righteous christians for almost two thousand years! They are the ones to BLAME for all the torture homosexuals have gone through and now they want us to be part of their team? All because they're losing attendance (read as cash). Oh please. I'm a gay man who's 35. I let go of the need to be accepted by bigoted people after years of introspection and self understanding. I learned how to guide my own moral compass without any of the bull that comes with organized christian religion and I didn't have to part with any of my hard earned cash to do it. If anything this "new stance" does bring me joy because I can laugh knowing the christian religion is no different than a corporation worried about their stock price plummeting. General Motors required a bailout. Seems like the christians are looking for theirs too. And this time from the very group they've been so outspokenly and acted so violently against for almost 20 generations. Well Joseph and Mary, you won't get it from me. It's time for you to drag your old, programmed minds out into an open field and die. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust - to borrow a phrase. This is the dawn of a new age and there's no room for you anymore.

I’m always happy to see anything positive about Christianity in the Prospect, and I’m elated to hear from this article and other sources that Christians are growing more tolerant and accepting of LGBT rights. That said, I have to take issue with some of the statistical assumptions here. It isn’t quite true that 59% of millennials have left their churches due to disagreements on gay issues; while millennials are less affiliated with churches than previous generations, a large majority still are, as confirmed by this survey. It might be more accurate to say that 59% of millennials *who left their church* cited intolerance of gays as a reason. (A good source of information about religion and the millenials can be found at this address: )

Furthermore, while the number of self-confirmed “nones” is larger and the number of Christians is smaller than in the past, Christians still constitute a substantial majority of the population–76%, according to this very article. American Christianity is (not for the first time) seeing a downward trend in membership that is worrisome; it is not seeing an existential crisis, any more than it did in the late 18th Century or the early 20th Century, two previous times when church membership decreased.

Liberals tend to fixate hopefully on any statistical evidence that “religiosity” is declining, but I think that they miss the big picture, which is that Christianity has endured ups and downs in membership without ever disappearing, or ceasing to be an influence in American culture. It reminds me of the way that conservatives look at population shifts away from cities and toward suburbs and exurbs and say that it’s proof of the failure of urban liberalism; never mind that lots of people (a majority in some metro areas) still live in those big liberal cities, which often still dwarf the suburban counties in population even with losses, and never mind that the last census showed many liberal cities starting to grow again (a caution against assuming that the current trend will continue forever).

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