Churches here more or less conform to our state ideology too lol. If a church starts doing radical anti-government preaching the feds are gonna be interested. And let’s not get started on mosques!
I’m not sure by your post if you’re for or against church membership or being a believer, but I will say there’s a lot of good in believing in a greater power for a lot of people. However organized religion, with each having their own doctrine that creates fear if the doctrine isn’t followed, has no place in many people’s lives.
What gets me is how worked up athiests get with Christians or other religions. Believe what you want to believe, but there is no reason to denigrate people for what they believe.
No Christianity is declining at an alarming rate. Just go to a Trump rally and you'll know what I'm talking about.
I'm not in a big cult, either. I knew a guy who swam across Lake Santa Fe to escape one of your retreats.
When I was there we didn’t know how to handle hysteria, so we just let them swim. Aside: shortly before I came on a family kidnapped a Crossroads member for the purpose of deprogramming her. She escaped her family and returned to her “family.”
I lived & worked in Vietnam. There are beautiful Christian churches including a big one outside Hanoi that was being built. I was at the temple of literature the weekend before national exams. It was packed with students rubbing the turtle heads & praying. The gov take is you can worship as you pleas as long you are not hostile to other religions.
Never mind Vietnam, if the Jesus of the Gospels were to come to the US, he’d probably be arrested his first day on the ground.
Not to conflate church attendance with actually being religious, but I suspect that people who do go to church regularly are more likely to describe themselves as being religious. In that sense, the US went to through a revival in the 1950s, as it seemed to be a national mission to distinguish ourselves from the godless communists. That's when the National Day of Prayer was set nationally. 'In God We Trust' became our official motto. 'Under God' was added to the pledge of allegiance. Church attendance skyrocketed. And we became a religious nation.
As I recall, “being religious” in America reached its peak around 1980, at which time church attendance rate was four times higher than it was at the end of the Revolutionary War.
To associate liberal bed-wetting over Trump with soldiers fighting from a foxhole is an insult to all soldiers and Marines who have actually done so. You should be ashamed of yourself.
