Trump's conservative Evangelical allies have a big problem. Their denominations and churches are losing members rapidly

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2025/05/theres-direct-connection-between-steep.html

Still calling itself the "Nation's Largest Evangelical Denomination," the Southern Baptist Convention posted an eighteenth straight year of declining membership, with just under 260,000 church members leaving the rolls of the church to which they once belonged, one way or another.

The nation's largest Evangelical denomonation reached is peak membership in 2006, at 16.3 million. Since then, membership has declined, with the sharpest and steepest declines occurring after 2016, when there were years when nearly half a million members disappeared from the rolls. The decline has slowed, somewhat, over the past three years, but even with annual losses falling below the 300,000 mark, over three quarters of a million members have been subtracted over the past four years. While weekly worship attendance has slowly crept back over the 4 million mark, since dropping during COVID, membership continues to drop sharply.

The attendance figure, averaging 4.3 million this past year, is still a much lower figure than the 6.2 million who sat in the pews prior to 2006. What's actually causing the "bounce" right now is the returning of those who didn't attend during the COVID pandemic. That's about over, as the increase over the past year was fairly insignificant. And the same study that shows this membership decline also points to the fact that 69% of the church membership is 50 years of age or older. Only 10% of Southern Baptists are under 30.

What that indicates is that a high percentage of those individuals who grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and likely participated in its children's ministry and youth group, have left, deciding that raising their family in the same church offers little in the way of value to them and their life. That's a big decision. It's interesting that the decline corresponds directly with the increased intrusion of right wing politics that started with Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and their baiting by the GOP back just prior to the 1980 Presidential election.

The correlation between Southern Baptists' rapid membership decline, and the increased involvement of mostly Caucasian, conservative, Evangelical Christians in far right extremism, a political perspective that is anti-Christian in both its means and ends, is pretty easy to see. There's no other demographic study that shows anything else coming along in the early part of this century that would find a big enough presence in the church to cause membership to drop so subtstantially, especially the rise of a worldly, morally bankrupt, failed businessman, Donald Trump, whose public behavior is completely antithetical to the values of Christianity. With many of the denomination's pastors preaching a form of white, Christian nationalism in place of the biblical Christian gospel message Jesus revealed, and the intrusion of Trump's licentious lifestyle, many faithful church members have said, "no thank you," and have left.

[msongs]

1. one suspects non denomination mega churches are taking over...with prosperity gospel and greed nt

[lees1975]

2. They're losing members too, and money.

That's the motivation behind their Christian nationalism. The government will bail them out by giving them tax dollars, and forcing people to attend church.

[Blue Owl]

3. Dump and the "Christian Right" is such a giant load of hypocritical BULLSHIT

It’s fucking sickening.

[Aristus]

4. With seemingly every conservative church's youth pastor

turning out to be a perverted, child pornography-possessing monster, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that young people are steering clear of the churches.