And I would be embarrassed to call myself a Christian.

I am a follower of Jesus’s teachings not the old testament evangelical idiots.

Hope their numbers continue to drop. Much better for all.

US population in the 1960s was almost 200 million, with the membership under 13 million.
US population in 2023 is approaching 335 million and their membership is down below 13 million again.
Southern Baptists are a much smaller slice of the country now than they were in the 60s.

At 12.8 million members, the actual weekly average church attendance is 3.8 million. So the actual numerical strength of Southern Baptists is probably not much more than 4 million. And while white Evangelicals voting for Trump slipped up to about 84% in 2024, the overall number of self-identified white Evangelicals who voted was almost 4 million less than it was in 2020.

I'm an atheist. Was then, too.

Sometimes death isn't enough to remove your name. One of my college buddies went to be pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Missouri several years ago, about 50 people in church every week but over 300 members. They went through their roll and took off more than 100 names of people whose date of birth made them 100 years old or older.

atheist.

She had been a lifelong member of the conservative Foursquare Church. I always thought she was too good-hearted, too kind, too loving, and too intelligent to be a conservative Christian, and I was right. (How many conservative Christians do you know who are ardent LGBTQ allies?)

Well, in November, 2016, when she found out 81% of evangelical Christians voted for Trump, she left the church. After a painful crisis of conscience that lasted a month or two, she came out the other end a liberal Democrat, and an atheist. I couldn't be happier with the transformation in her life, and neither could she.

Now she finds herself wondering if she is going to make through another four years of Trump...

it's gonna be much longer than 4 years we're going to have to suffer under this regime. I'm thinking of what it was like at the start of the Revolutionary War... maybe it's about time a bunch of us band together and ask another country(s) for help in administering regime change in THIS country... once again.

its educational institutions. I became a political liberal growing up in a union household with working class parents. I became a social reform supporting theological liberal after four years and a B.A. from a Southern Baptist affiliated university, and then an M.A. from another one. The theology courses I had to take challenged the superstitions and folk religion that was preached and taught in the church where I grew up, and completely undermined the Christo-fascist politics and white supremacy and Christian nationalism streams that were present in many local churches.

While its theological seminaries, under the control of the national denomination, have purged liberal theologians and have been taken over by Falwell brand fundamentalists, most of the colleges and universities, under the control of what they call state conventions, have held on to historic Baptist theology, which includes radical, woke principles based on the Christian gospel, like loving one's neighbor, loving one's enemies, living according to values, and the freedoms that Baptists have always championed in the face of state church oppression, including soul freedom and individual accountability for a free conscience before God, independent, autonomous congregational churches, the complete separation of church and state, as well as protected religious liberty. There are informal groups of Baptist churches that have continued to carry out these historic principles in spite of the takeover of most Baptist denominations and churches by fundamentalists, who have introduced heretical apostasy into Baptist churches.