Once again, right-wing Christian leaders are spinning bad news straw into gold, and as always it’s gloriously daffy. With churches emptying and scandals piling up, let’s unpack the bad news they can’t face—and how they’re lying to their flocks about winning the culture wars
(This post first went live on Patreon on 4/11/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! PS: After our last SBC post, I caught yet another Cooperative Program rah-rah piece over at Baptist Press. Once you notice the hamfisted money grabs, you can’t ever un-notice them. FROM INTRODUCTION: Lucia’s Garden; the fairy figurines; the Magick Cauldron; that time I accidentally attended a pagan orgy.)
(NB: I talk about evangelism in terms of recruitment. That’s because that is what it is. The goal of evangelism is not to spark faith in targets, but to get them to join a particular group of Christians. Faith is a goal only because without it, most people won’t join the group.)
SITUATION REPORT: Christian leaders fretting about new bad news about their religion’s decline
Last week, I caught an interesting book review. Recently, Christian Smith published Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Over at Religion News, Jana Riess reviewed it and interviewed him.
The book concerns exactly what you’d imagine: Christian Smith thinks that “traditional religion,” a term that neither he nor Riess explains at any point in the piece, has already become culturally obsolete in America. I’m guessing the term means forms of Christianity like Catholicism—to which Smith converted over a decade ago from Presbyterianism. (Yes, another one!) Smith says Christianity’s obsolete but—plot twist!—it’s fine because Americans love crystals. Seriously.
As well, last time we met up we talked about a new “State of the Church” report from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in conjunction with Barna Group. This report’s headline cheers because apparently churches are trending male these days—while somewhat burying the lede to admit that it’s only happening because women are ditching church way faster (dropping from 47% weekly attendance in 2000 to 27% in 2024) than men (38% in 2000 to 30% in 2024).
Both of these stories were on my mind when I ran across this February 2025 Barna Group article, “What Non-Christians Believe About God.”
In short, right-wing Christian leaders have been hit with a lot of bad news recently. But instead of dealing with it in a proactive, mature manner, they’re trying to spin-doctor the bad news into great news. They’re doing this for their flocks, who desperately need to believe that they belong to the winning team.
Today, we’ll check out this spin-doctoring—and talk about why right-wing Christians have this need in the first place.
Obsolete: For Christians, the bad news is that obsolescence has already happened
In his book Why Religion Went Obsolete, Christian Smith argues that “traditional organized religion” has already gone obsolete. As I said, this phrase appears to refer to Christianity, so I’m going to proceed on that basis.
So when we talk about Christianity’s decline, we’re talking about Christianity’s metrics responding to that obsolescence. As more and more Christians discover that their religious devotions don’t add to their lives, they drift away or leave. As the Religion News piece puts it:
His book, however, chronicles something bigger and harder to pin down. It’s about all the cultural changes that precipitated those declines and made organized religion so much less relevant in people’s lives. [. . .]
[T]he social changes that have made religion obsolete were “long-term, highly complex and unintended,” Smith said. Delayed marriage, reduced childbirth and voluntary childlessness have all chipped away at the cultural power of religion, but eroding religion was never the aim of those social changes.
Of course, Smith himself reminds us that “culturally obsolete things can still be quite useful for some people. He has DVDs and CDs in his house that he’s not planning to get rid of.” (My own DVD collection has achieved “BY THE POWER OF GRAYSKULL” numbers.) In almost every case of obsolescence, wherever it is found, there are still people who value whatever it is and pursue it. Heck, I’ve got a couple of glass and fountain pens myself for letter-writing:
Smith appears to view secularism and “traditional organized religion” as opposing forces. Personally, I don’t. In America in particular, most Christians have an extremely secular outlook—including and particularly the hardline right-wing extremists. Generally speaking, almost all Christians turn to real-world solutions for their problems whenever they can.
(See also: Leaving the ring, about evangelical women seeking husbands outside of their group.)
That said, Smith thinks that nontraditional religion may make some kind of comeback in America. He thinks this because his research has turned up a lot of Americans who’ve left “traditional organized religion” but find themselves “attracted to this re-enchanted culture.” The forms of re-enchantment he cites are “neopaganism” and “healing crystals.” I can’t even.
‘State of the Church’ reveals more very bad news for Christians
Last time we met up, I talked about a new “State of the Church” report from Barna Group. Barna makes these reports every so often. In its latest report, which is based on 2024 numbers, Barna shares some new very bad news for Christian leaders. From there, I found a story on their main site called “What Non-Christians Believe About God.”
Before we start on the numbers, know that Barna Group is a right-wing evangelical marketing machine. They sell cope to desperate pastors. And oh boy, do they have a buffet of cope to peddle with these two reports.
The big story in “The State of the Church” involves church attendance. Weekly church attendance is tanking—women fell from 47% to 27% since 2000, men from 38% to 30%. Both sets of figures represent terrible news for Christian leaders, who tend to pander to men but depend on women’s unpaid labor to keep churches going.
But the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) chose instead to headline and celebrate men’s greater attendance percentage. Barna made that conclusion an easy tee-ball hit.
‘Be encouraged,’ but it’s all bad news
If you thought that “State of the Church” report was a doozy of cope, just wait till you hear about the second piece. The Barna post about non-Christians’ beliefs (relink) presents us with even more cope:
Barna’s Spiritually Open research, done in partnership with Come Near, shows that spiritually open non-Christians tend to be more receptive to core Christian beliefs compared to those who aren’t spiritually open. This presents meaningful opportunities for dialogue, particularly as people seek authentic connection and understanding across ideological divides.
Yes. They seriously are telling worried pastors that they can still hope to recruit non-Christians because a large percentage of them totally already hold supernatural beliefs. They appear to have defined recruit-able non-Christians after the fact as non-Christians who somehow hold extremely Christian-adjacent beliefs.
I’ve said many times that Christian evangelism requires its targets to embrace certain undergirding beliefs. This undergirding needs to be set in place while the targets are extremely young—before most of them can rationally engage with what they’re told about the supernatural. And these beliefs don’t need to be specifically Christian. They just need to play nicely with Christian recruiting pitches. Without that shared basic undergirding of belief, however, recruiters have a much tougher time bagging their targets.
In the above graph, 36% of “spiritually open” non-Christians agree with the idea that “God is the all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect creator of the universe who rules the world today.”
Barna insists that this is all great news for Christian recruiters! In fact, they want their customers to “be confident and encouraged that many are open and ready to have spiritual conversations.” As Barna’s writers put it:
Christian leaders would be wise to approach these [recruitment] conversations with curiosity, empathy and a willingness to search for areas of alignment.
So recruiters shouldn’t assume their targets lack that necessary shared undergirding of belief. Once they find “areas of alignment,” they can start right at the phase of recruitment about their version of this god being the correct one. They can skip all the preceding steps like establishing the existence of the supernatural and some kind of afterlife for humans.
Alas, that strategy won’t reverse Christianity’s decline
Unfortunately for Barna Group, their conclusion is just spin. Non-Christian Americans who said they “believed in God” have always been around. When Christianity’s decline began in earnest around 2006, Gallup reported that only 12% of Americans weren’t affiliated with any religion. And yet Christianity declined from then on.
Around that same year, somewhere around 73-86% of Americans claimed to “believe in God” in some way. In 2024, Pew Research reported that 69% of “nones” (people who say they are “none of the above” regarding religion) believe in some kind of higher power or “spiritual force in the universe.” Those should be banger numbers for Christian recruiters, but there’s been no successful turnaround.
None of these figures helped Christian leaders avoid a decline then. Accordingly, I don’t think any number of people with Christian-adjacent beliefs will help them reverse it now.
Segue: Christian research gets done to sell stuff to worried Christian leaders
Christian researchers and leaders—particularly the more conservative, control-hungry sorts—cannot handle bad news. No matter how dire the numbers may be, they must find a way to spin moldy straw into shiny gold. When we encounter any Christian group that is peddling research or analyses, it is wise to compare whatever they’re claiming with outside, unbiased numbers.
So when Barna Group tells its followers repeatedly that young adults are totes way more religious and will totes reverse the decline, we must compare their claims to numbers from, say, Pew Research. When we do, we discover the dead opposite:
Pew Research thinks Christianity’s decline may have leveled off for now. However, they predict the likelihood of “further declines. . . in future years” because barely half of today’s young adults even identify as Christian at all.
I feel sorry for any Barna Group customer who bets the farm on their products. But what else can they do? They need to be on the winning team. Their ideal recruitment candidates will feel the same way.
They can’t possibly imagine themselves on the losing side. There must always exist a way to recover from decline and defeat. If there isn’t, then Barna Group’s sales will collapse—and so too would Christianity itself, finally.
Right-Wing Christianity 101: Bad news cannot stand
For many years—even before I joined an SBC church in my teens in the mid-1980s—evangelicals have defined correct Jesusing as a required condition for church growth. More than that, they’ve defined church decline as an outcome of Jesusing incorrectly.
Ah, but don’t ask them about megachurches that hold differing beliefs about Jesusing but grow like gangbusters anyway. This is a tightly compartmentalized belief, like most stuff evangelicals believe. At most, you’ll get some mealy-mouthed insistence that those suspiciously un-Jesusy groups grow because of demons or attendees’ love of spectacle.
So if a pastor Jesuses correctly and teaches his (not her, natch) church to do the same, there is no way Jesus would allow that church to fail. If it fails, it was because the pastor Jesused incorrectly. Even the pastors of these failed churches buy into this false belief, blaming themselves for their church’s failure. Christian Smith, in his interview with Religion News, mentions this self-blame as well.
And here, I remember my second Pentecostal pastor, Gene, and his little church plant in a wealthy, growing suburb of Houston. He and his wife were just sweethearts. They tried so hard to make that tiny little strip-mall church grow, but it died on the vine. Of course, Gene blamed himself for that failure. Its failure destroyed him emotionally—and may have hastened his death. Hauntingly, even the internet has forgotten that little church ever existed.
So yeah, this false belief bugs me. I’m glad Smith is calling it out. The pastors of failed churches sure won’t hear this reassurance from their peers and tribemates. Their inability to say that is a big part of why their religion is in decline and irrelevant to growing numbers of people.
Also Right-Wing Christianity 101: Their product never becomes irrelevant or obsolete, ever
We stand at the threshold of something truly wondrous to behold: the fading of a formerly-dominant world religion in the West. And we’ve seen it coming for damned near 20 years.
(See also: The predictions of iMonk.)
Christianity sparked and is now fading, just as many other big religions have sparked and faded over the millennia. I wonder if the last of the ancient Mithraic mystery-religion priests stood at the entrance of his underground shrine, watched his flock ditch for Jesus, and thought, “Well, I guess we’re boned!”
(We may exist in the Clown World timeline, but hot damn, it is interesting at least—like a dream going completely off the rails right before we wake up.)
I cannot pretend to know how Mithraic priests responded to the death of their religion, any more than I can pretend to know how the priests and followers of Ebla’s patron god reacted as their own died thousands of years ago. But I suspect they all responded in similar ways.
People don’t give their own personal money and time to projects that are doomed to fail now, and I doubt they did in earlier centuries either.
That said, the sunk-cost fallacy may keep those remaining believers insisting that their religion is completely, totally relevant long after everyone else has cringed and looked away from the spectacle they create.
Who are they gonna believe? The bringers of bad news, or their false beliefs?
So of course right-wing Christians are going to insist that their product is more relevant now than it’s ever been. To support that point, here’s one of the commenters from the Religion News interview:
It’s very odd to see someone who is a convert to Roman Catholicism say that religion has become “obsolete” in America–or anywhere else. Anyone who truly believes in the doctrines of the Catholic Church cannot believe that.
What one can believe is that religion–or, as the article also says, “traditional religion”, “organized religion”, and “traditional organized religion”–has increasingly been perceived by American society as irrelevant and obsolete. [. . .]
There is nothing in America–in the whole world–which is more relevant and nothing further from obsolescence than Christ.
See? Easy-peasy. This guy’s flavor of Christianity can’t possibly be obsolescent because it is “Christ” himself, and he thinks “Christ” remains utterly relevant to everyone. He can’t accept that “Christ” cannot exist outside of Christianity, which is increasingly irrelevant to most people’s lives today. What’s worse, he’s got all these people insisting everything’s gonna be all right:
- Christian Smith: Don’t worry! Crystal woo will save us!
- SBC report: More women are leaving churches than men—hooray to the bros!
- Barna Group: It’s gonna be so incredibly easy to recruit non-Christians! Look how similar they are to us!
I mean goodness, how do we expect Christians like this guy to respond? Will they side with their desperate need to be on the winning team and an untold number of hucksters promising them recovery, or with the people bringing them bad news based on reality?
NEXT UP: Mike Bickle is a name we haven’t heard lately around these parts. But recently, he’s appeared in Christ-o-sphere news for the worst reasons possible. See you soon! <3
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Of course, one could easily argue that Christianity itself has always been irrelevant. Here’s Hector Avalos, an archaeologist, explaining why that is:
[L]et me tell you what scholars know: modern biblical scholarship has demonstrated that the Bible is the product of cultures whose values and beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of our world are no longer held to be relevant even by most Christians and Jews themselves.
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