Beware MAGA Christians

It’s no secret that organized Christianity is bleeding members at a significant rate, and it’s turning out that the Republican Party is emerging as a leading reason why.

Another largely overlooked reason, and it may be connected, is that many departing Christians simply do not understand what they are rejecting.

The Republican hypothesis, which is strong and gaining strength among social scientists, is that people are increasingly identifying Christianity as MAGA Christianity, and MAGA Christianity with the Republican Party.  That brings MAGA Christianity into politics, and politics is disagreement, conflict, argument and castigation of one’s opponents.  That’s a far cry from Christianity’s basic teaching of love thy neighbor, and a growing number of people want nothing to do with a church like that.  They are voting with their feet.

It’s a dangerous movement.  In a recent article written for ProgressiveChristianity.org, pastor/writer/activist John Pavlovitz explains the danger of it this way:  “The ungodly marriage of Christianity and MAGA Republicans could ultimately destroy the Christianity that was founded by a brown-skinned, Middle  Eastern Jew.  His messages of love and inclusion (particularly for those on the margins of society) were everything that MAGA Christians are not. His willingness to stand up to the heavy-handed Empire of his day flies in the face of the way MAGA Christianity desires to adopt itself into the U.S. political system in order to create its own version of the Empire.”

Pavlovitz is obviously right.  Jesus tells us to help the poor while MAGA Republicans oppose safety nets.  Jesus taught peace while Republicans worship at the altar of guns. Jesus taught us to render unto Caeser that which is Caeser’s where MAGA Republicans oppose taxes.

Maga Christians and MAGA Republicans are not the only reasons Christian churches are losing membership, of course.  Several reasons have been advanced.  But one major reason flying under the radar and not getting nearly enough thought is that many Christians who reject  Christianity simply do not know what they are rejecting.  They think MAGA Christianity is Christianity.  Or they know little or nothing abut Christianity.

The first time I realized that came quite suddenly and wholly unexpectedly one August day in 1989.  I was religion editor and columnist for Charleston’s News and Courier and The Evening Post then, and for a column I planned to write I spent one Saturday in shopping centers around Charleston asking people who self-identified as Christians three questions, questions that at first I feared were so easy that anyone who self-identified as a Christian could answer them.  I expected a high rate of correct answers.

But I was wrong.  Oh, boy, was I wrong.  The questions were:

• Who preached the Sermon on the Mount?
• Name a book in the Bible that tells of Jesus’ life.
• What is the basic difference between the Old and New testaments?

The result:

First Question: Who preached the Sermon on the Mount? Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount.  It is not literally a sermon, but a    compellation of everything Jesus ever taught.  It is the very bedrock of Christianity.   And only 29 percent of persons who self-identified as Christians knew that.

The answers I heard most often were Abraham and Moses, both of whom lived thousands of years before Jesus was born.  I also heard the names of two local pastors.  One man said he knew the name and it was on the tip of his tongue but he just could not think of it.

Second question: Name a book in the Bible that tells of Jesus’ life.  The only answers are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.   Only 39 percent answered correctly, but when I asked them a follow-up question – can you name them all? – at least a quarter of them  could not.

Among the answers that got more than one mention were Genesis and Exodus, which are the first two books of the Old Testament, and they were written at least 1,000 years before Jesus was born.  Other mentions included Peter, James, Proverbs, David and John the Baptist.  David and John the Baptist are not even books in the Bible.

Third question: What is the basic difference between the Old and New testaments?  The correct answer is that the Old Testament is the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament is a collection of distinctly Christian writings.

Here are some of the answers I received, and trust me, they are typical:

• “The Old Testament tells of when Jesus lived.  The New Testament tells of when he died.”
• “The New Testament tells of what will happen in the future.  The Old tells about what happened in the past.”
• “The Old Testament is for olden times. The New is for today.”
• “The New Testament has some stuff the Old Testament does not.”
• “One has more information in it.”
• “In the New Testament, the words are clearer.”
• “They’re both the same.” (Five mentions)

Oh, sigh.  And that was in Charleston, a city in the Bible Belt

That problem – not knowing the basics of  Christianity — has been hitting home to me in a new way recently, but just as strongly.  Quora Digest is a social Q-and-A website that answers questions on a whole slew of topics, and because I have a background in religion writing Quora asked me (among others) to answer questions dealing with religion.  Here’s a sample of questions I’ve been asked.

• “Is it better to say your daily prayers in the morning or at night?”
• “What if I forgot to end my prayer?”
• “Can people make things happen by decreeing them in prayer before they even happen?”
• “Can you smoke while you pray?”
• “What are the shortest everyday prayers of gratitude?”
• “Can you pray in your pajamas?”

Oh sigh again.  It should be simple to understand that Jesus’ only two commandments about how to live a joyous life are to love God — that is, love the creative spirit of love —  and love one another.  Do those two things, Jesus promises,  and you will experience a joy beyond human understanding. Christianity is as simple as that.

But would it really matter to society as a whole if true Christianity in the United States were to die?

The answer, according to years of research by the Gallup organization, is a resounding yes.  It would matter deeply, even to atheists.  A recent Gallup report put it this way:

“The evidence is clear that more religious people have higher levels of wellbeing and happiness.  And religion has a number of other positive functions in society, including its influence on morality and pro-social behavior, its influence on charity and giving back to the community, and its contribution to social cohesion and solidarity.  A continuing decrease in overall religiosity in American society, like the continuing decrease in faith in other American institutions, can have significant consequences for the health and viability of the country going forward.”

Oh, sigh