It's been a little over nine years since Trump came down the escalator in his New York office building and announced he would be a candidate for President of the United States in 2016. That same period of time happens to coincide with a staggering decline in the membership and attendance within the churches of the nation's largest Evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Is there a correlation? Of course there is. And similar drops in membership and attendance are occurring in other segments of the broader spectrum of conservative Evangelicalism that are overwhelmingly white, and overwhelmingly influenced by right wing political extremism.

Southern Baptist leadership has, until recently, been very tight lipped about the decline of their membership. Membership plateaued at 16.2 million around 2000, and remained there, with tiny annual increases until 2008, when a drop of about 38,000 members was recorded. The decline continued at about the same rate, just under 50,000 annually, until 2016, when a loss of just over 200,000 was reported. The membership dropped by 240,000 in 2017, and 280,000 in 2018 before a sharp drop of 435,000 happened in 2019. Then, from 2019 to 2022, the annual losses exceeded 450,000 until the decline slowed in 2023, with a reported loss of 241,000 brought the total down to under 13 million for the first time since the 1960's.

Altogether, since 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention has lost 3,324,156 members, Average weekly attendance has dropped, over the same period of time, by more than 2.2 million. That is a loss of 38% of its total average weekly attendance, and over 20% of its total membership, most of that occurring in the last decade, and the steepest declines occurring since 2016. Only someone blind to reality would insist that the intrusion of the very worldly, immoral, corrupt style of right wing extremism into the churches of this denomination, in which over 75% of its members are self-identified Trump voters, didn't have anything to do with the decline.

Of course it did.