Go woke, go broke?

When I was an Evangelical, the church I attended was super wealthy. They had a staff of several pastors, who all had the nicest cars and clothes money could buy, and really nice housing on the church property so they didn't have to pay rent or a mortgage. They had a state of the art sound system, and a sanctuary that was big enough and well-designed enough for professional musicians like Michael W. Smith to hold concerts there. They had a full orchestra performing every Sunday, and a number of the people in the orchestra were professional musicians being paid for their time. They had over a thousand people attending every week, many of them doctors and lawyers and almost all of them Republican. The guy who invented MRI was a member. The guy who owned half the McDonald's franchises in the county was a member. LOTS of money and power concentrated in that building each week. And all of it concentrated on selling the idea that abortion was evil and LGBTQ rights were evil because Jesus, so we should "vote our conscience" (read "vote red no matter who").


For many years after leaving Evangelicalism, I attended an Episcopal church that had much less money but much more progressive values - which meant they were actually trying to be a moral community. The church did things like hiring women and Latinos as priests, placing openly LGBTQ people in positions of leadership, making the mass bilingual to be welcoming to Spanish speakers, feeding homeless people and allowing them to camp on our lawn (as long as they weren't doing anything actively dangerous or illegal). And every one of those steps led to losing more and more congregants. In 20 years we went from a couple hundred people to a dozen people. Part of that is just overall demographics in a super liberal city, but each step towards actually loving our neighbors as ourselves led to an exodus of congregants. 


In other words: The one business in which "Go woke, go broke" is actually TRUE is the religion business. It's not surprising that the majority of pastors have taken note of this, and have been running ever deeper into the arms of far-right politics - that's the only place left where they can make money selling their product. 

Because those dumbfucks on the far right will buy ANYTHING.

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