Grab your 20-siders. We're going in.

They ache for the legitimacy of having a good reason to believe–all while having no way whatsoever to achieve it or to establish that they have one.

The scandal around Josh Duggar has had a few days to ferment. News sites that previously hadn’t even breathed a word about the scandal are now tiptoeing into the waters with super-carefully-worded pieces about what he did, now that it’s painfully obvious that Christians as a group are talking about it. Mainly, unfortunately, they’re largely defending it.

Only one site featured the story of Josh Duggar’s pedophilia. I was surprised at which one! Maybe all the other sites’ writers are in church right now or busy praying so they didn’t get the news? For, uh, two days? Or were they all busy circling their wagons?

By now you’ve likely heard about the scandal rocking the right-wing conservative Christ-o-sphere: Josh Duggar, one of the older sons of the fundagelical reality-TV Duggar family, has confessed publicly to being a child molester. Worst of all, it seems clear that at least some of his victims were his own young sisters. The story gets more and more shocking with every single new detail that emerges about it. Just when I think it’s gotten as bad as it can get, I see something else. So tonight we’re going to talk about it.

Anything that takes effort to build and create can fall apart if it doesn’t get the resources it needs. Online spaces, too, can die; so can religions. The reason it’s so hard to recover from fading glory is because at that point, two things are working against the place, game, or group in question.

But what this study did do was to shine a line on two particular, self-servingly deluded claims made by the worst elements of Christianity: just how many members they have, and exactly how they view membership numbers. Here is how these two factors are working against Christianity in general when it comes to comprehending just how much trouble they’re in.

Some computer error messages, like “imminent hard drive failure,” are really quick, simple to interpret, and definitive as to resolution. Life doesn’t often hand us something so easy! But with the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, life has done exactly that for Christians.

Some computer error messages, like “imminent hard drive failure,” are really quick, simple to interpret, and definitive as to resolution. Life doesn’t often hand us something so easy! But with the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, life has done exactly that for Christians.

Tony Waller’s story illustrates an overarching trend and a deeper problem in the religion: Christianity is failing its young people. To understand how someone like this could end up in a church ministry involving children, we have to dig deep into what evangelical churches think about youth ministry–and how someone unqualified could end up with a church’s most precious and finite treasure in his hands.