this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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When I was a preacher I did a sermon around that episode. It's got a legitimately great message at the end about the perils of trying to make spirituality hip.
I'm sure they received the message well! XD
They really, legitimately did. I had many people tell me it was their favorite sermon ever.
It was one of my better ones, because it focused on what the church was doing well and what it was doing wrong, both from a social and a spiritual standpoint.
It's easy for a church to turn into a Chistian Club, where it's more about seeing your friends every week than anything else. And that's not all bad. With the decline of the Church we are losing some of the social glue of communities. It's a place where a bank executive and a bagger from Walmart can be legitimate friends without barriers between each other.
But the flip side of the Christian Club is they can become isolated and focus so much on the internal community and friendships they've built that they stop reaching out into the community at large. And while a lot of people here appreciate the lack of religious folks on every corner, it can prevent the members of the Church from benefitting the community at large.
In much of the country, the church had the fastest boots on the ground in an emergency for centuries. When now, programs like the United Methodist Committee on Relief can deploy huge resources all over the country with zero paperwork.
I once saw them buy 20 acres of land to build a evacuation/mid-term housing camp for fire refugees for cash money within hours of a disaster declaration. When the national guard arrived they set up their command station at a site the Methodists had prepped for them - it was incredible to see.
And they stayed working in that community for the better part of a decade until everyone had a home again.
But with the move to make Christiandom more hip, cool, and marketable it's become more inwardly-focused and has been enriching the Osteens of the world while abandoning the call to aid others and playing into the hands of the political right.
Religion isn't for everybody. But the church is capable of doing so much good in the world, and an important part of making it great again is to stop trying to market it like a business that's competing for the attention of the TV station and book deals, but to simply practice the kindness and compassion that we preach.
Even billionaires pick on a charade of "charity" after exploiting and benefitting off of atrocities they caused after they're on the top.
It's really easy to call yourself a force of good, when you pretend to fix the problems you created to get to the top.
Like the crusades? Hoarding wealth for the rich? diddling children? forced conversions? missionaries bringing diseases to native people?
No blooody thanks mate, religion going extinct would be a net positive for the world. There are genuine non-profits who don't use the fear of god and hell to help people without a need for a sky daddy. They can take your place and your sermons will not be missed.
Where do you go every Sunday morning and Wednesday night plus the occasional breakfast and weekend event to meet with a hundred people from all walks of life in the community and plan events to support the town?
If you don't think that a small local church can be a profound force of real, tangible good in a community then you're incredibly ignorant. The church has been the primary social safety net in small towns in this country for centuries, and right now that net is crumbling because religion is dying and nobody is stepping in to fill that social void with something else.
Put up or shut up.
But the good there isnt the church part; its the community anf social ties; being a third space. You could do this about nearly anything else. Hell, for the sake of argument; get a 3d printer and hold a fucking pirate wh40k league, with a book club for the novels and figurine painting workshops, and the audience might be different, but I bet the results would shake out pretty close. Diversify it a little (hold d&d on Monday nights, board games and tacos on Tuesdays) and the results will be even better.
The church has been the safety net because religion gets special treatment, and all the other safety nets get aggressively violently cut to shit (see: 'the black panther party for self defense' for a prime well documented example, or how 'food not bombs' get arrested for terrorism fucking routinely. Watch the biography 'Judas and the black messiah' for how that happens.). This is the exact same reason Iran(and a lot of the middle east) is the way it is; when they killed all the socialists and anarchists, the only organized radicals left to fight a government the people could not abide were the islamofascists, because religion got special status.
Youre not better than the rest of the athletes; you're just cutting corners in the foot race. Possibly on an e-bike. If you're not willing to tear down the institutions that make this so fucking hard, then you're not really aiming for systemic good; youre aiming to keep your monopoly on conscience, with state enforcers floating you wherever youre going on an easy convenient river of blood. Fuck, this even happens in your holy book doesn't it? It's like a whole thing the one time religion doesn't get special treatment?
I know you probably don't mean to do this, but then; what, may I ask, is the symbol of your faith?
You can have all the good sides of religion without the bad sides if only you try. You don't need a god to have a community. But you'd rather focus on helping one of the worst organizations in the world survive than build a better one. As for your question: soup kitchens. Book clubs. Swingers clubs. Sports clubs. Etc. There's literally hundreds of places where that's true.
PS. Loved the little typo/Freudian slip where you said that only someone incredibly ignorant could think that a small church could be a profound place for real, tangible good in the community.
Soup Kitchens and local homeless shelters are awesome. Know what kind of group operates 95% them? Churches. If all these non-religious groups are able to pick up where the church left off, the they need to fucking do it. Because they aren't.
As churches close their doors these local programs are dying. Combine that with the rising cost of living and we're experiencing an epidemic in homelessness and poverty that's untreated in smaller towns. As their shelters and food pantries disappear, they're literally buying people bus tickets to send the poor people to major cities. With the collapse of the Church programs the smaller cities don't have the resources to handle poverty.
I ask again, what organization do you, individually,. actively work with multiple times a week where hundreds of people gather and work to improve the local community? By calling for an end to the church you're calling for an end to everything they do, and I bet you aren't aware of 10% of what they're even up to.
What causes more harm in a small town? Having a church presence even though you don't share their beliefs or shutting down the homeless shelter, food bank, home hospice, free clinic, after-school programs, daycare, and more?
Put up or shut up.
Sigh... You're completely missing the point. Nevermind, have a nice day.