Love the Bride of Christ, or else

That’s a great title: Heckle Christ’s bride at your eternal peril! I knew I had to read it to find out how to heckle Christ’s bride, so it was successful clickbait (Christ’s bride, by the way, is the whole dang Christian church, so now you know…lots of target out there.) And then the article starts with such good news!

For the first time since the Gallup organization started to track the data, fewer than 50 percent of Americans now belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. Behind these numbers are, among other factors, the trendiness of not only leaving church, but announcing it on social media with a bit of shaming and blaming thrown in for good measure.

Many are not only leaving a particular house of worship but joining a growing demographic known as the “nones,” rejecting all religious affiliation. The Christian version of those who grew up in the Church but have become “nones” often go by another label: “exvangelicals.”

As you might guess, the article is all about agonizing over why people are abandoning the faith. It sets up a dichotomy: are they leaving the church because it fails to live up to their moral standards, or are they leaving because they’re already depraved sinners who don’t like a church that has high moral standards?

Go ahead, guess. Which answer do they think is the true one?

You knew it. It was the latter. They’re losing faith because they are bad people. They have evidence for this! And at the same time, their evidence exposes the real reason many are leaving the church.

Years ago, Pastor Tim Keller was widely criticized for reporting that whenever a student returned from college claiming no longer to be a Christian, he’d ask them who they were sleeping with. I’ve worked with enough students over the past two decades to know, it’s a good question to ask. And not just to college-aged students.

You know, for this to actually be a good explanation, he should also go around to all the people who are staying with the church and ask them judgmental questions to imply that they’re all sluts and whoremongers, since I suspect a lot of good Christian men and women return from college having had intimate relationships and even having fallen in love. He’s asking selectively, though, trying to find a post hoc reason to condemn the sinners leaving the flock.

But there you go, the real reason people don’t like the Bride of Christ: it’s because she is a censorious, hypocritical, gold-plated bitch.