Experts project an estimated 100,000 churches in the US will close or be repurposed over the next decade.
Many churches will be unable to escape this “tsunami” of closings — a grim trajectory one pastor described as, “Every year the pews are getting emptier and the collection plates getting lighter.”
The church putting its weight behind Trump has turbocharged its own demise. Good fucking riddance.
The churches that put their weight behind trump are doing perfectly fine. The churches that are dying are the moderate churches that focus on traditional church stuff, helping neighbors, that type of thing. Megachurches that preach killing gays are doing great.
They’re consolidating as the church-going public shrinks. Every church that closes due to low attendance leaves some people who still want to go to church, and they’ll either find another regular church or the megachurch that some of their friends and coworkers may already go to. Eventually everyone bleeds out to the megachurches, which keep getting more mega as church culture slowly kills itself with its own meanness. Eventually the megachurches will be all that’s left and they’ll start to shrink, too.
90% agree
I don’t think the church, or organized religion as a concept, will ever die out. Megachurches may well begin to crash and burn, but local churches will start popping up again in the wreckage. I see it more along the lines of modern day US “capitalism”, where a handful of massive corporations have tacitly agreed to not compete against each other and focus their power against the workers and small business owners. Now we’re starting to see them struggle. Most evident in gaming, where Microsoft is desperately trying to find new ways to monetize games, even though they haven’t released a decent game worth playing in a decade. Ubisoft is probably too far gone to save, at this point.
We will see that start to spread to other sectors of the economy as time goes on.
Trump is only about as unpopular as Bush was in the last couple of years of his presidency. The church also put their weight behind Bush and they seem to have survived.