I woke up with a thought about this topic -- why the evangelical church is dying & why everybody who sticks with it is wrong about WHY it's dying -- and it's a theory I'm going to call "Jesus is chocolate ice cream" https://twitter.com/mcjulie/status/1386040855664861185

The actions of the adult believers who sent the evangelical church down the road to its own demise -- politicized it with the religious right, invented Christian patriarchy, orchestrated the Satanic Panic, eventually fell down at the feet of Donald Trump --

A lot of those actions, in retrospect, seem like they were trying to use Jesus as *leverage* for right wing/regressive social change.

As if they were saying "you want Jesus, huh? well, in order to GET Jesus you need to support all these other things too!"

As if Jesus was so wonderful, so inherently desirable, that you could demand that we pay a steep price for Jesus. That, if we went too long without Jesus, we'd really MISS having Jesus & want to go out & get some Jesus.

As if Jesus was chocolate ice cream.

They believed their own sales hype.

The evangelical church sells Jesus as basically the GREATEST PRODUCT EVER, and it's a HARD sell, like a 1950s door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman who just won't take no for an answer.

And I think, maybe, part of what's going on here is that an adult who sticks with the church is somebody for whom that's true -- somebody whose personal experience of Jesus really IS "wow, this is better than chocolate ice cream"

So, there is some leverage there -- they get something out of Jesus that's powerful enough to get them to stick with a deeply flawed church (like my parents back in the 80s & 90s) and they assume that experience is the default.

But my experience wasn't that.
My experience was being told "this is better than chocolate ice cream!" & thinking "are you sure because it tastes like carob-flavored mayonnaise to me"

I TRIED to enjoy it like it was chocolate ice cream. I really did try.

Evangelicals, even those with enough integrity to recognize that the church is in trouble, are still out there trying to sell Jesus like chocolate ice cream.

"I know we started making it out of gross ingredients & the factory got infested with bugs & mold, but I swear to you, we can clean UP the factory and get back to basics and the chocolate ice cream will be just as good as ever!"