Dear Pastor Locke,
As a well-known pastor in the white evangelical community, you have surely seen the polls about the percentage of religious “nones” in this country rising every year. You have likely also heard that for the first time in a long time, less than half of Americans claim to attend church on a regular basis. I’m sure you have already formulated theories as to why this may be. “Those godless liberals! Those Marxist colleges! Those filthy gays and feminists pushing their agenda on kids!”
Well, as an outsider, I am here to tell you that those are not the primary reason for Christianity’s impending downfall. Sure, they may play a bit of a role, but they’re not the main reason by any means. No, do you want to know why younger generations are dropping out of church?
Here it is: YOU ARE THE REASON! Specifically, your repulsive brand of evangelical Christianity that has infected our country for decades.
The rest of us have seen your arrogant, bigoted, my-shit-don’t-stink attitude. We see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy, and we want less than nothing to do with it.
For eight years, we watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for nearly 30 years; a loving father and husband who never showed any signs of infidelity.
We watched you deny his personal faith convictions, dispute his birthplace and citizenship, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence. We saw you weaponize the Bible in order to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him.
And through it all, white evangelicals such as yourself never once suggested that God placed him where he was. You never publicly offered prayers for him and his family. You never welcomed him to your Christian Universities. You never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance. You never offered him anything close to forgiveness or mercy. Evangelists like yourself never publicly thanked God for his leadership, nor did you take to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him. You never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any meaningful sense.
You viciously opposed him at every single turn, while never once offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You put Jesus in the back seat as you freely spewed vitriol and malice on said President.
And yet you gave unending praise and support to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth that Jesus himself would vomit at the very sight of him.
And the change in you is unmistakable. Your evangelical predecessors demonized Bill Clinton for his affair, claiming that the President should uphold morality. Well, Trump is far worse than Clinton ever was, yet with him, evangelicals like you find your King Cyrus (or John the Baptist, or whatever else you people have been calling him).
With him, you suddenly find religion. With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution. With him, all is forgiven, despite his claims of never feeling the need to repent. With him you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart. With him, sin has become unimportant, compassion no longer a requirement. With him, you see only Providence. And Pastor Locke, the rest of us hear you loud and clear, and the image we receive is not pretty.
We recognize the toxic source of your inconsistency. We see that you do not worship Jesus so much as you worship a political party. We see that emulating the words of Jesus come last in favor of promoting policies that dehumanize your enemies. We see that you aren’t burdened to love “the least of these”, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Hispanic, gay, liberal, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.
We see that all you’re really interested in doing is remaking God into your own bigoted image (anyone who has kept a close eye on you would see that you are extremely guilty of this, Greg) and demanding that the rest of us continue to bow down and grant you undeserved privilege. We recognize that Christianity is more of a political movement than anything else, and that you love the white, Republican Jesus a lot more than you ever even pretended to love the poor, dark-skinned, non-English speaking Jesus of Nazareth.
Make no mistake: the moral rot within Christianity has always been there, and one only needs to look at the kind of people evangelicals have been electing for decades to see this. However, the fact that you were so swift to lash yourself to one of the most unChristlike men on the planet is what severed the final string holding up your mask of righteousness.
You may not believe me when I say this but people like you have done far more damage to Christianity’s witness than atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens ever have. Your willingness to align yourself with a man like Trump is a textbook example of a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, maybe you did gain a few Supreme Court seats, as well as four years of the leader of the free world being your bitch, but was it really worth the cost?
You’ve lost any and all credibility with millennials and Gen Z, who are repulsed by the malignant bile you preach from the pulpit. You’ve lost any and all moral high ground or spiritual authority for generations to come. You’ve lost even the pretense of Christlikeness. Trump’s judicial choices ensure that while you may be able to win certain political court cases, it’s game over for you in the court of public opinion. “By their fruits ye shall know them”, yet we look at you and your ilk, and what we see could make a pigsty look like a rose garden by comparison. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
On a final note, in the off-chance you ever read FSTDT and happen upon this comment, I’m sure you will write it off as a “shibboleth of the damned”. After all, what does a high-and-mighty angel of God like yourself need with the words of a hellbound reprobate like me? Well, as someone whom you are ostensibly trying to convert, I felt I should give you this wake-up call. Is that not what Jesus would have done?
I would invite you to reacquaint yourself with what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount (assuming, of course, that his name still means anything to you, or if it ever even did in the first place). Your religion is a sinking ship, and I’m offering you the last lifeboat. Take it or leave it.
Sincerely,
A concerned citizen