Reorganized Religion

That program, which remains in effect, has led the United States to spend more than $90 billion to fight the AIDS epidemic. The program was credited with saving the lives of millions around the globe during the worst days of the AIDS epidemic.

That’s reorganized American religion in a nutshell. It’s not that one thing is changing after another. It’s that everything is changing “all at once, all the time.”

Among older Christians, for example, white believers outnumber believers of color by more than five to one. Among younger Americans, those two groups are essentially equal—forcing congregations and denominations to deal with issues of racial justice they had long avoided.

“The best way to reach that group is not to show them a house that’s already built but to get in there and help them build something for themselves.”

Stroop, coeditor of Empty the Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church, is one of the most vocal activists in what’s known as the exvangelical movement, people who grew up in the white evangelical subculture and left it behind.

In 1966, there were more than 3.4 million Episcopalians. By 2019, that number dropped to 1.7 million, even though the population of the United States nearly doubled from 1960 (when the population was 180 million) to 2020 (when the population was about 330 million).

“faith unbundled.”

That’s the lowest rate of congregational membership since the 1930s, when Gallup first began collecting data.

“When did the theological architects of American slavery develop the moral character to tell the church how it should discuss and discern racism?” he wrote in an essay announcing his church’s departure from the Southern Baptist Convention. “As for me and the Progressive Baptist Church, I keep hearing the words of Harriet Tubman: ‘We out.’”9