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If it wasn’t resulting in endless abuse and cruelty against innocent people worldwide, there’d be something comical about where Christians find themselves nowadays thanks to their ceaseless demonization and harassment of LGBTQ people. I’m sure they thought this was one culture war guaranteed to shock Americans back into churches nationwide; the people responsible for the hatred probably had no idea in the world that anything could go wrong with a smear campaign against that group. The whole thing probably felt like a total slam-dunk. And now it’s all gone hideously pear-shaped.

You can probably imagine that Christians aren’t terribly happy about Shannon Low’s deconversion. Today we’ll look at what his onetime tribe is making of his defection, because most ex-Christians have encountered much the same treatment–and if you’re a newly-deconverted person and haven’t yet, hang in there because you probably will at some point.

Thousands of people every day join the ranks of the ones who know. That number comes from Christian leaders themselves, who might have reason to misrepresent and inflate it–but I see no reason to think it’s not accurate.

Well, our ranks just expanded recently with the deconversion of the leader of a Christian rock band. I want to show you how his story fits in with the experiences of other people who’ve left Christianity (including me!), because next time we’ll be talking about why the tribe reacts to poorly to deconversions.

One of the greatest gifts we can get is constructive feedback from our peers and loved ones. That kind of feedback–offered in affection with hopes of improvement–shows us that they care enough to say something and that they believe that we can do better than we are now. That give-and-take is part of how we learn and grow and can be an important part of how we reach our various goals in life. Because feedback is so important, though, it’s really easy to turn into a weapon. Either the feedback isn’t offered in a constructive way because it’s being used to control or hurt us, or else we’re so scared of being controlled or hurt that we have a lot of trouble accepting it.

Christians these days sure do sound angry. The more right-wing the Christian, the angrier they sound–and the more vengeful, controlling, belligerent, and aggressive. Some of their worst blustering to date has occurred around their current culture war against transgender people. They’re fighting as hard as they can against what are essentially human rights for people who, if these same Christians really cared about what Jesus told them to do, would be the first people they’d nurture, protect, and love. That anger comes from a place of fear more than anything else.

Lately we’ve been talking about North Carolina’s House Bill 2, which demands that people use the public bathrooms corresponding to the sex marked on their birth certificates. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about this bill and what it means for both toxic Christians and LGBTQ folks. Today I want to look at some new developments in the bill’s future–and explain why it’s important to understand fundagelicals’ sudden obsession with transgender people.

Sometimes right-wing Christians can behave in ways that confuse outsiders to their culture. The National Day of Prayer (NDP) and its associated grandstanding may seem like yet another example of that confusing behavior, but it really isn’t. It fits in perfectly with their motivations and goals. Understanding the NDP can help us understand Christians themselves better–and better understand where their religion is going and why.

I mentioned being very very helpful the other day, and today I want to demonstrate that helpfulness by giving the duly-appointed (and self-appointed) representatives of the Religious Right some new slogans they can use to market their simple, universal human message of terror, misogyny, brutality, tribalism, abuse, and violence.

Losing one’s faith can feel a lot like mourning the passing of a loved one. There’s so much emotion bound up in a deconversion that it can be hard to unpack exactly what’s happening. I’ve been thinking about the topic lately because we’ve been touching on the topic in comments here and there. Strangely, it was an old song that really crystallized and solidified some of my thoughts.

When we look at the balance of news coming out about Christianity, one fact seems absolutely inescapable: the religion in general is starting to lose its privileged position in American culture. But for some reason, many Christians still act like they’re totally astonished and blindsided when they are confronted with this fact. Today I want to examine this tendency–because it shows us something important about what’s going on in right-wing Christian culture.