7 ms·

America’s Epidemic of Empty Churches

53 points by mitchtbaum 8y ago

mitchtbaum 8y ago
> Many of our nation’s churches can no longer afford to maintain their structures—6,000 to 10,000 churches die each year in America—and that number will likely grow... Closure and adaptive reuse often seems like the simplest and most responsible path. Many houses of worship sit on prime real estate, often in the center of towns or cities, where inventory is low... A church building is more than just walls and windows; it is also a sacred vessel that stores generations of religious memories... “We wanted to transform the church into a place that would draw people who might not otherwise come, and in Asheville, we’ve seen it break down stereotypes of what the church is,” Duggins said... This relatively small organization can only do so much to turn the tide of congregational death in America. Missional Wisdom has shifted its focus from one-off projects to publishing books, conducting seminars, and consulting with struggling churches.
pnathan 8y ago
The church I attend these days is doing this sort of "invite the community in during the week" approach, and being fairly successful at it, from what I can tell. There are a lot of dynamics going on there; I don't think it'd work everywhere. But definitely there's something to the idea, and worth bringing up in your congregational context if collapse is in the offing.
- chrisweekly 8y ago
  There's something poignant about the notion that a church, faced with "death", may find new life by welcoming the local community... which seems to me to be the raison d'etre for a church in the first place.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    As an atheist I’m sympathetic but that’s not the raison d’être for a Church and never has been. It’s about bringing people to God.
    - mschaef 8y ago
      > It’s about bringing people to God. True enough, but the community ('fellowship') aspect of the faith is essential. Maybe I'm missing it, but it also seems to be something that's missing in more secular world views.
      - rjplatte 8y ago
        Christianity emphasizes community heavily, and church is one of the last common social events that continues to exist in American society.
        mschaef 8y ago
        I live fairly close to several churches that have been converted to (high end) condos. From an economic point of view I get the appeal. In terms of the modern cynicism about religion, I also get the appeal. But on a personal note, It's hard to get excited about a place that was once home to community events getting turned into a half-dozen or so retreats where people of means can go be alone. (Particularly considering all the other options for housing around here, and the fact I don't exactly see community centers, etc. springing up to fill the gaps left by the churches.)
        kazinator 8y ago
        Bathrooms of adjacent apartments tend to be clustered together. Maybe a little window can be installed with a sliding shutter; the residents can then confess their sins to each other while sitting on the toilet.
        rjplatte 8y ago
        There are no replacements, which is the worst part. A healthy community has a gathering place, and without a church, where is it?
      - bonesss 8y ago
        Book clubs, talk therapy 'support' groups, athletics, travel associations, charities, small crop coops... The secular "world view" is replete with fellowship, collective action, and community. Heck, "community centers"... Though, lacking a unifying shared habit of proscribed worship at a single place those things tend to be interest, activity, or goal based.
ghettoimp 8y ago
At the risk of getting downvoted... good riddance.
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  In the UK they get turned into pubs.
  - ssmmww 8y ago
    Incidentally, more than 25% of UK pubs have closed since 2001: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/26/uk-pub-closures-financial-crisis-birmingham-ons-figures https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/26/uk-pub-clos...
    - quickthrower2 8y ago
      Not surprised. There are a LOT of pubs. You can live in the middle of nowhere and have a local pub nearby. And the big chain pubs offer cheap food/drinks and nice refurbished areas so it is going to be hard to compete I am sure.
- stouset 8y ago
  Better: “Thoughts and prayers”.
- xvedejas 8y ago
  I agree, but want to try and add a more substantive comment. I suspect that many of the people who don't attend church anymore in the US are doing so because they never wanted to be there, but society is nowadays more accepting of their absence. If you're a Christian, I hope you don't despair; there are indeed people you will never be able to reach. Better they feel comfortable leaving the church than attending for societal (rather than religious) reasons.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Ha, I suppose you’re expecting to get downvoted by HN’s Christian contingent? Somehow I think you’ll be okay.
elliekelly 8y ago
I lived in a church converted to condos in South Boston for a few years. The Catholic Church sold the property to developers to pay for an $85 million sex abuse settlement. When Boston had that one winter where we got 2 feet of snow every other day for a month and a half the ice dams were so bad it basically rained inside every unit for the entire month of February. We all lost everything. It turns out a 100+ year old building with a steeply pitched slate roof is almost impossible to repair in the dead of winter on short notice. Buildings like this seem interesting and like they have character but I would never live in a converted church again.
partiallypro 8y ago
I think there are two things going on: a) People are becoming less religious b) People are leaving smaller churches for much larger churches that are non-denominational. Smaller churches are more conservative and more political, people seem to be burned out on politics and don't really want it as something in their face on Sunday. You couple that with natural shifts in demographics and that essentially explains a lot of what is happening. I suspect once the millennial generation has more kids, church going will tick back up.
- JshWright 8y ago
  Ironically, this is exactly the opposite path my family (my wife and three kids) have taken. We left a large evangelical church for a small progressive (UCC) church.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    I think you're an outlier. Obviously I don't have a dataset, just my observation, but I've seen the "my father went to this church, so I'm going to go there too" die off. Now people will go to a larger church, especially younger people, because they can meet people their age. If you go to a small community church, you'll quickly find there might be one person your age, if at all, if you're in your 20s-30s. Now bigger churches do singles groups, etc. Zapping youth away from smaller churches effectively makes them unable to grow in the future, and their demographic target begins to die off or drop out. Church is very social, so the less people that go to the church that you know, the less likely you are to stick to it. It's very easy for a larger church to begin killing off smaller ones. It takes time, I believe this non-denominational /big church trend started 10 or so years ago...and is probably just now having a very noticeable statistical impact. Obviously, this could be regional as well, and we can't dismiss that people have become less religious in the traditional sense.
    - xamuel 8y ago
      If a church is too large and non-denominational, it ends up being a YMCA with sermons. In other words, there's no more church there, just vague platitutes and networking. Jesus himself said: "Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." Big amphitheatre churches will flourish in the short run but they don't produce real roots, and in the long run they'll have about as much staying power as Javascript frameworks.
aswanson 8y ago
What happens to a society when it loses communal organizations and faith, and becomes increasingly atomized? Is this good or bad?
- krapp 8y ago
  We don't need faith in God to have a community, only faith in one another. The premise that community cannot exist without a religious basis is a false one.
  - 706f6f70 8y ago
    I would argue that this would be a new event in human history. I can't think of a single major civilization that was not religious in some capacity.
    - krapp 8y ago
      I liken this event to the Enlightenment, when societies began to view religion as something which could be separated from science, scholarship and law, as the concept of "secularity" emerged. Religion still exists in some capacity, obviously the US is very much a "christian nation," but generally people are moving away from an explicitly orthodox, rigidly dogmatic, supernaturalist interpretation of religion. A literate society no longer needs someone standing at a pulpit telling them what the Bible says, nor should an educated society believe that humans were literally molded out of clay in the Garden of Eden. As societies change, religion must also change because religion is an expression of society.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    There was a pretty good podcast[0] (Hidden Brain) a while back that explores one possibility for why religions sprang up all over the world. The idea was that once communities grew too large for folks to know everyone, there needed to be something which two complete strangers in a community could relate to, with sufficient punishment for committing moral, ethical, etc crimes, for those communities to function. They also discuss how modern communities have less of a need for this. It's definitely an interesting topic, and my description didn't really do it justice. 0. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/16/628792048/creating-god https://www.npr.org/2018/07/16/628792048/creating-god
sparrish 8y ago
It appears the large denominational churches are closing while nondenominational churches are growing quickly. You can't put new wine in old wine-skins. https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/september/how-many-churches-in-america-us-nones-nondenominational.html https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/september/how-ma...
- sudosteph 8y ago
  I'm not sure the trend will hold. This is all anecdotal, but new non-denominational churches in my area seem to start more frequently and then die more frequently than mainline establishments, it seems that since many of them rent instead of own their churches, and leadership isn't necessarily restricted to those with training and education in running a ministry, they're more likely to flounder long-term. Considering that the numbers are for total number congregations, I don't think that the discrepancy between worshippers is actually as harsh as its made out to be, and if it is, I think we'll actually see a trend back towards more community-oriented mainline or even catholicism as worshippers get disillusioned by the drama / lack of structure that a larger portion of non-denoms undeniably struggle with. But this is based on just infrequent personal experiences with like 4 different non-denoms in the suburban South, ranging from "conference room at 2 star airport hotel" to "megachurch stadium so full we watched the service in an overflow room in the same venue". In all cases the people who invited me did not stay very long as attendees. I may be dramatically underestimating their popularity/longevity in more rural spots though.
intopieces 8y ago
It's important to note that Americans are far more religious than adults in other wealthy nations [0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-are-far-more-religious-than-adults-in-other-wealthy-nations/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-ar.... Even with this decline, the US remains a Christian nation. The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive, so I have little doubt that the faith itself will endure.
- rb666 8y ago
  With adaptive, are you referring to being able to pretend to care about unborn children but not actually caring about them after birth?
  - virmundi 8y ago
    When you look at care for the poor, a great many Christians give to charities. The driving force behind many of the social programs was Christians. There are two issues, at least, today. First, there are many people who call themselves Christians that aren't. This isn't surprising. Jesus called it when he said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." They probably won't actually due the will of the Father. Second, for many actual Christians, Caesar is a poor provider for the poor.
- 13of40 8y ago
  > The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive In fact, a great part of it runs counter to the actual teachings of Christ.
  - indigochill 8y ago
    It probably says something about the state of things that from this statement I genuinely can't tell which school of thought you're coming from, since each one says this about the others.
- robbrown451 8y ago
jmahyoung 8y ago
Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“ has been empirically shown to be false.” Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world’s population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now. University of London professor Eric Kaufmann, in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, speaks of “the crisis of secularism” and argues that the shrinkage of secularism and liberal religion is inevitable.
- git_rancher 8y ago
  This probably mirrors the concentration of power that’s happening.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  That seems at odds to the decline of religion across Europe. UK is now majority atheist, and Ireland once devoutly catholic is far more secular than it was. A majority voted to end the ban on abortion in Ireland only this year. So I am baffled at what "crisis of secularism" Kaufman is imagining.
  - 706f6f70 8y ago
    I think that the factor for Europe is immigration. A majority of new Europeans are Muslims and that is by far the fastest growing religion.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      Yes, fundamentalist Judaism and Islam do a great job at driving reproduction. And keeping women subjugated is a huge part of it.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
claydavisss 8y ago
Twitter has proven we would much rather spend Sundays brigading
r0m4n0 8y ago
One of my favorite roller skating spots is in a converted church. https://youtu.be/uWSTlDXDNXk https://youtu.be/uWSTlDXDNXk
joe_the_user 8y ago
Aside from the religion issue, This seems like a logical result of increasing land values and the advance of capitalist relations. Owning a building that is used one a day a week and empty otherwise is overall quite wasteful. A more efficient use of capital is to rent a hall for the times one actually uses the space - this is what I see modern "megachurches" doing.
- sudosteph 8y ago
  If a church is only used 1 day a week, someone is doing something wrong. The mid-sized church I attended growing up had - AA meetings hosted daily - choir & music groups meeting on weekdays - after school youth groups - book clubs - A small library for free use - counseling - volunteer events - would bus homeless people in once a week and feed and shelter them The community charity aspect is honestly the only reason to even let churches exist tax free. Those megachurches renting theaters and collecting mad cash really shouldn't meet the criteria to be tax exempt.
rjplatte 8y ago
I forget where I read the study, but it was along the lines of our brains being hardwired to believe in a higher power, be it reason or god. I doubt this will change, especially in a country as genetically Christian as the US.
torgian 8y ago
I’ve had nothing great to say about churches and services for a long time now. Part of it is due to my upbringing. Ever since I escaped the stranglehold that is religion and Christianity, I see church as a place where cults hang out.
onyva 8y ago
Here’s an idea: turn churches, mosques and synagogues into cooperative worship centers and kill two birds. “God” only knows there’s a lot of work that needs to done to repair the bad rap organized religion is getting lately: from children abuse in the Catholic Church, megachurch scams, subversive terror organizations and states repurposing Islam, Christian white nationalism, Israel’s expanding theocracy ... )
zachguo 8y ago
Silicon Valley Season 5 Episode 4

53 points by mitchtbaum 8y ago

> Many of our nation’s churches can no longer afford to maintain their structures—6,000 to 10,000 churches die each year in America—and that number will likely grow... Closure and adaptive reuse often seems like the simplest and most responsible path. Many houses of worship sit on prime real estate, often in the center of towns or cities, where inventory is low... A church building is more than just walls and windows; it is also a sacred vessel that stores generations of religious memories... “We wanted to transform the church into a place that would draw people who might not otherwise come, and in Asheville, we’ve seen it break down stereotypes of what the church is,” Duggins said... This relatively small organization can only do so much to turn the tide of congregational death in America. Missional Wisdom has shifted its focus from one-off projects to publishing books, conducting seminars, and consulting with struggling churches.

pnathan 8y ago

The church I attend these days is doing this sort of "invite the community in during the week" approach, and being fairly successful at it, from what I can tell. There are a lot of dynamics going on there; I don't think it'd work everywhere. But definitely there's something to the idea, and worth bringing up in your congregational context if collapse is in the offing.

chrisweekly 8y ago
There's something poignant about the notion that a church, faced with "death", may find new life by welcoming the local community... which seems to me to be the raison d'etre for a church in the first place.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  As an atheist I’m sympathetic but that’s not the raison d’être for a Church and never has been. It’s about bringing people to God.
  - mschaef 8y ago
    > It’s about bringing people to God. True enough, but the community ('fellowship') aspect of the faith is essential. Maybe I'm missing it, but it also seems to be something that's missing in more secular world views.
    - rjplatte 8y ago
      Christianity emphasizes community heavily, and church is one of the last common social events that continues to exist in American society.
      - mschaef 8y ago
        I live fairly close to several churches that have been converted to (high end) condos. From an economic point of view I get the appeal. In terms of the modern cynicism about religion, I also get the appeal. But on a personal note, It's hard to get excited about a place that was once home to community events getting turned into a half-dozen or so retreats where people of means can go be alone. (Particularly considering all the other options for housing around here, and the fact I don't exactly see community centers, etc. springing up to fill the gaps left by the churches.)
        kazinator 8y ago
        Bathrooms of adjacent apartments tend to be clustered together. Maybe a little window can be installed with a sliding shutter; the residents can then confess their sins to each other while sitting on the toilet.
        rjplatte 8y ago
        There are no replacements, which is the worst part. A healthy community has a gathering place, and without a church, where is it?
    - bonesss 8y ago
      Book clubs, talk therapy 'support' groups, athletics, travel associations, charities, small crop coops... The secular "world view" is replete with fellowship, collective action, and community. Heck, "community centers"... Though, lacking a unifying shared habit of proscribed worship at a single place those things tend to be interest, activity, or goal based.

ghettoimp 8y ago

At the risk of getting downvoted... good riddance.

quickthrower2 8y ago
In the UK they get turned into pubs.
- ssmmww 8y ago
  Incidentally, more than 25% of UK pubs have closed since 2001: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/26/uk-pub-closures-financial-crisis-birmingham-ons-figures https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/nov/26/uk-pub-clos...
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    Not surprised. There are a LOT of pubs. You can live in the middle of nowhere and have a local pub nearby. And the big chain pubs offer cheap food/drinks and nice refurbished areas so it is going to be hard to compete I am sure.
stouset 8y ago
Better: “Thoughts and prayers”.
xvedejas 8y ago
I agree, but want to try and add a more substantive comment. I suspect that many of the people who don't attend church anymore in the US are doing so because they never wanted to be there, but society is nowadays more accepting of their absence. If you're a Christian, I hope you don't despair; there are indeed people you will never be able to reach. Better they feel comfortable leaving the church than attending for societal (rather than religious) reasons.
draw_down 8y ago
Ha, I suppose you’re expecting to get downvoted by HN’s Christian contingent? Somehow I think you’ll be okay.

elliekelly 8y ago

I lived in a church converted to condos in South Boston for a few years. The Catholic Church sold the property to developers to pay for an $85 million sex abuse settlement. When Boston had that one winter where we got 2 feet of snow every other day for a month and a half the ice dams were so bad it basically rained inside every unit for the entire month of February. We all lost everything. It turns out a 100+ year old building with a steeply pitched slate roof is almost impossible to repair in the dead of winter on short notice. Buildings like this seem interesting and like they have character but I would never live in a converted church again.

partiallypro 8y ago

I think there are two things going on: a) People are becoming less religious b) People are leaving smaller churches for much larger churches that are non-denominational. Smaller churches are more conservative and more political, people seem to be burned out on politics and don't really want it as something in their face on Sunday. You couple that with natural shifts in demographics and that essentially explains a lot of what is happening. I suspect once the millennial generation has more kids, church going will tick back up.

JshWright 8y ago
Ironically, this is exactly the opposite path my family (my wife and three kids) have taken. We left a large evangelical church for a small progressive (UCC) church.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  I think you're an outlier. Obviously I don't have a dataset, just my observation, but I've seen the "my father went to this church, so I'm going to go there too" die off. Now people will go to a larger church, especially younger people, because they can meet people their age. If you go to a small community church, you'll quickly find there might be one person your age, if at all, if you're in your 20s-30s. Now bigger churches do singles groups, etc. Zapping youth away from smaller churches effectively makes them unable to grow in the future, and their demographic target begins to die off or drop out. Church is very social, so the less people that go to the church that you know, the less likely you are to stick to it. It's very easy for a larger church to begin killing off smaller ones. It takes time, I believe this non-denominational /big church trend started 10 or so years ago...and is probably just now having a very noticeable statistical impact. Obviously, this could be regional as well, and we can't dismiss that people have become less religious in the traditional sense.
  - xamuel 8y ago
    If a church is too large and non-denominational, it ends up being a YMCA with sermons. In other words, there's no more church there, just vague platitutes and networking. Jesus himself said: "Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law." Big amphitheatre churches will flourish in the short run but they don't produce real roots, and in the long run they'll have about as much staying power as Javascript frameworks.

aswanson 8y ago

What happens to a society when it loses communal organizations and faith, and becomes increasingly atomized? Is this good or bad?

krapp 8y ago
We don't need faith in God to have a community, only faith in one another. The premise that community cannot exist without a religious basis is a false one.
- 706f6f70 8y ago
  I would argue that this would be a new event in human history. I can't think of a single major civilization that was not religious in some capacity.
  - krapp 8y ago
    I liken this event to the Enlightenment, when societies began to view religion as something which could be separated from science, scholarship and law, as the concept of "secularity" emerged. Religion still exists in some capacity, obviously the US is very much a "christian nation," but generally people are moving away from an explicitly orthodox, rigidly dogmatic, supernaturalist interpretation of religion. A literate society no longer needs someone standing at a pulpit telling them what the Bible says, nor should an educated society believe that humans were literally molded out of clay in the Garden of Eden. As societies change, religion must also change because religion is an expression of society.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  There was a pretty good podcast[0] (Hidden Brain) a while back that explores one possibility for why religions sprang up all over the world. The idea was that once communities grew too large for folks to know everyone, there needed to be something which two complete strangers in a community could relate to, with sufficient punishment for committing moral, ethical, etc crimes, for those communities to function. They also discuss how modern communities have less of a need for this. It's definitely an interesting topic, and my description didn't really do it justice. 0. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/16/628792048/creating-god https://www.npr.org/2018/07/16/628792048/creating-god

sparrish 8y ago

It appears the large denominational churches are closing while nondenominational churches are growing quickly. You can't put new wine in old wine-skins. https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/september/how-many-churches-in-america-us-nones-nondenominational.html https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/september/how-ma...

sudosteph 8y ago
I'm not sure the trend will hold. This is all anecdotal, but new non-denominational churches in my area seem to start more frequently and then die more frequently than mainline establishments, it seems that since many of them rent instead of own their churches, and leadership isn't necessarily restricted to those with training and education in running a ministry, they're more likely to flounder long-term. Considering that the numbers are for total number congregations, I don't think that the discrepancy between worshippers is actually as harsh as its made out to be, and if it is, I think we'll actually see a trend back towards more community-oriented mainline or even catholicism as worshippers get disillusioned by the drama / lack of structure that a larger portion of non-denoms undeniably struggle with. But this is based on just infrequent personal experiences with like 4 different non-denoms in the suburban South, ranging from "conference room at 2 star airport hotel" to "megachurch stadium so full we watched the service in an overflow room in the same venue". In all cases the people who invited me did not stay very long as attendees. I may be dramatically underestimating their popularity/longevity in more rural spots though.

intopieces 8y ago

It's important to note that Americans are far more religious than adults in other wealthy nations [0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-are-far-more-religious-than-adults-in-other-wealthy-nations/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-ar.... Even with this decline, the US remains a Christian nation. The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive, so I have little doubt that the faith itself will endure.

rb666 8y ago
With adaptive, are you referring to being able to pretend to care about unborn children but not actually caring about them after birth?
- virmundi 8y ago
  When you look at care for the poor, a great many Christians give to charities. The driving force behind many of the social programs was Christians. There are two issues, at least, today. First, there are many people who call themselves Christians that aren't. This isn't surprising. Jesus called it when he said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." They probably won't actually due the will of the Father. Second, for many actual Christians, Caesar is a poor provider for the poor.
13of40 8y ago
> The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive In fact, a great part of it runs counter to the actual teachings of Christ.
- indigochill 8y ago
  It probably says something about the state of things that from this statement I genuinely can't tell which school of thought you're coming from, since each one says this about the others.
robbrown451 8y ago

jmahyoung 8y ago

Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“ has been empirically shown to be false.” Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world’s population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now. University of London professor Eric Kaufmann, in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, speaks of “the crisis of secularism” and argues that the shrinkage of secularism and liberal religion is inevitable.

git_rancher 8y ago
This probably mirrors the concentration of power that’s happening.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
That seems at odds to the decline of religion across Europe. UK is now majority atheist, and Ireland once devoutly catholic is far more secular than it was. A majority voted to end the ban on abortion in Ireland only this year. So I am baffled at what "crisis of secularism" Kaufman is imagining.
- 706f6f70 8y ago
  I think that the factor for Europe is immigration. A majority of new Europeans are Muslims and that is by far the fastest growing religion.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    Yes, fundamentalist Judaism and Islam do a great job at driving reproduction. And keeping women subjugated is a huge part of it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

claydavisss 8y ago

Twitter has proven we would much rather spend Sundays brigading

r0m4n0 8y ago

One of my favorite roller skating spots is in a converted church. https://youtu.be/uWSTlDXDNXk https://youtu.be/uWSTlDXDNXk

joe_the_user 8y ago

Aside from the religion issue, This seems like a logical result of increasing land values and the advance of capitalist relations. Owning a building that is used one a day a week and empty otherwise is overall quite wasteful. A more efficient use of capital is to rent a hall for the times one actually uses the space - this is what I see modern "megachurches" doing.

sudosteph 8y ago
If a church is only used 1 day a week, someone is doing something wrong. The mid-sized church I attended growing up had - AA meetings hosted daily - choir & music groups meeting on weekdays - after school youth groups - book clubs - A small library for free use - counseling - volunteer events - would bus homeless people in once a week and feed and shelter them The community charity aspect is honestly the only reason to even let churches exist tax free. Those megachurches renting theaters and collecting mad cash really shouldn't meet the criteria to be tax exempt.

rjplatte 8y ago

I forget where I read the study, but it was along the lines of our brains being hardwired to believe in a higher power, be it reason or god. I doubt this will change, especially in a country as genetically Christian as the US.

torgian 8y ago

I’ve had nothing great to say about churches and services for a long time now. Part of it is due to my upbringing. Ever since I escaped the stranglehold that is religion and Christianity, I see church as a place where cults hang out.

onyva 8y ago

Here’s an idea: turn churches, mosques and synagogues into cooperative worship centers and kill two birds. “God” only knows there’s a lot of work that needs to done to repair the bad rap organized religion is getting lately: from children abuse in the Catholic Church, megachurch scams, subversive terror organizations and states repurposing Islam, Christian white nationalism, Israel’s expanding theocracy ... )

zachguo 8y ago

Silicon Valley Season 5 Episode 4