Summary
Churches across the U.S. are grappling with dwindling attendance and financial instability, forcing many to close or sell properties.
The Diocese of Buffalo has shut down 100 parishes since the 2000s and plans to close 70 more. Nationwide, church membership has dropped from 80% in the 1940s to 45% today.
Some churches repurpose their land to survive, like Atlanta’s First United Methodist Church, which is building affordable housing.
Others, like Calcium Church in New York, make cutbacks to stay open. Leaders warn of the long-term risks of declining community and support for churches.
I don’t think the people you meet on Roblox or Wikipedia can be community the way a church can. Even if you want to force the definition of community to include ephemeral, non-physical, and paid places then you have to accept that a church fills a far different kind of communal void than the internet. People at your church can come to your house and help you do stuff. That’s huge! You’d struggle to get any kind of real, tangible help from an internet place. Maybe some money, but that’s it.
That just doesn’t feel like community to me.
Real community is when people are in a cult whose authority figures systematically molest children. Got it.
Any other words of wisdom, oh one so ignorant of what a third place is?
Real community is when people can go to each other’s houses and help with difficult chores, or can cook food for each other and eat together, or can take care of one another when they are sick, or hide from government agents who come to kill their neighbors.
Death to Christianity. I am not making any defense of the church. In fact, I literally said we need to replace it. 🙄
Religion in general fosters these sorts of toxic power structures because it’s based on fucking nonsense.
The church kept me from being homeless as a kid and helped our family eat when we didn’t have food.
When the church is gone, some kids who were in the situation I was in will have nothing.
Letting private organizations fill roles that the government should be doing is one of the main reasons we have problems like homeless children that need to be solved in the first place. The church has tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars that could otherwise be going toward programs which reduce childhood poverty (and this of course isn’t taxed). Moreover, churches prime people to believe and act on complete bullshit, which is exactly the kind of environment that fosters right-wing beliefs that are steeped in disinformation and rooted in a deficiency in critical thinking. Right-wing beliefs directly lead to poverty. Alleviating the symptoms of poverty via a cult instead of treating it at the source isn’t the right way to do it.
We need communal spaces. Please stop arguing with me as if I am advocating for church, because I’m really not.
I’m arguing we need community. It takes a village to raise children, government or not, and that means communal organizations. Parents shouldn’t be forced to raise children all on their own. Church used to fill that role! Now that church is dying we need something to replace it. Please stop trying to convince me that church is bad, it’s irrelevant to my point.