It won't be the churches that most need to close. The quiet little church that feeds the local homeless people will close while the Trumpist evangelical megachurches with the hate-spreading, abusive, grifter pastors will be fine.

Absolutely. There is no reason for these predators to be tax exempt.

Thomas Cromwell got there way earlier.

They'll become less and less mainstream hopefully. Get the assholes out of schools.

The ones that are thriving are your batshit insane Baptist, Evangelical, Pentecostal types.

and there in lies the rub, broad support from their communities for their bat shittery.

This is exactly what I see in my area

The ongoing schism in the Episcopal church is also a tragedy.

Storefront type Baptists are doing just okay, and Catholics have drifted to majority hispanic by now.

Steel-barn / Christian Rock megachurches are expanding

I love your idea. Please make room for a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Around my area megachurches are just in industrial buildings. Its not tough to imagine a small manufacturing shop replacing any one of them.

IIRC, it's mostly that mega-churches are taking over.

It's the smaller (ostensibly) community focused ones that are dying.

A lot of older folks, too. A lot of people used to go to church for the social aspects, but today, everything is about grifting more and more money, and people get tired of constantly being tapped for money.

Also, a lot of people don't like their church ordering them to vote for evil pedophile traitors, or they'll go to Hell. The first time my pastor told me that I had to vote for Trump, would have been the last time he ever saw me.

But that didn't happen to me, because I know better than to welcome Zombie Cannibal Death Cults into my life.

Let’s start with billionaires. Then work our way down.

No kidding. Where I live in the Midwest that isn't particularly religious, most churches have like an insane amount of labs they're not using. Tax them to the ground.

Good point. The maker's spaces that take these places over should join some tax advantaged organization before going in and fixing them up.

It'll probably increase attendance at (and payments to) the megachurches as the smaller community churches close and people who can't face life without a church look for a new place to go.

Yea this was my first thought.

Anecdotally, in my area (rural, 25ish miles from a mid city) many of the old-school but liberal-ish protestant denominations seem to be withering.... Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist etc.

The storefront Baptists are doing just okay, and the metal-shed-building mega or wannabe mega are booming. New Life etc

This is not a particularly great trend imo.

The ongoing schism in the Episcopal church, also not great.

I mean, churches already can do this.

Instead of being the boring place you have to go on Sunday, they'd do what you're talking about.

Who wants fellowship in the most uncomfortable setting there is?

Cool it with all the pious bullshit, unpucker ye olde asshole and maybe some people might drop in. I cannot think of a more obsolete entity than the current church. Boring, stodgy, judgy, unpleasant. Big fucking surprise nobody is interested.

From the article: "There are recent signs that the gradual decline in church attendance has leveled off. For the first time in 25 years, the number of people attending in-person worship in the US has increased."

The article also says that about 100 million people (30%) attend a weekly service in the US nowadays. They talk about the heyday of the mid 20th century where 50% of Americans attended a weekly service. The population of the US in 1950 was 150 million. So that's 25 million more people attending church today.

So why are all the smaller churches closing? The article (and possibly the PBS doc) fails to place some of the blame on the congregation capture of mega churches and how politics has driven people into these behemoths. I know that is what's happening where I live in the South. They have a large sanctuary and expand that with an enormous online presence. How else can we have more Church goers and less churches?

The churches that put their weight behind trump are doing perfectly fine. The churches that are dying are the moderate churches that focus on traditional church stuff, helping neighbors, that type of thing. Megachurches that preach killing gays are doing great.

Trump is only about as unpopular as Bush was in the last couple of years of his presidency. The church also put their weight behind Bush and they seem to have survived.

The churches that do the most good are the ones that primarily serve and strengthen their surrounding community.

the harmful ones are the evangelical ones, and the televangencial churches. the small denominations usually are not part of that mainstream.

The problem is america doesn't have nice churches

is it a nice leather club?

I don't think The Church was a church before, but maybe you're talking about a different one?

Yeah, it'd be awesome if these could be community centers. Local worshipers could still even request the space on occasion!

Replacing them with smoke shops and carwashes and cash advances or a Subway isn't the net positive we'd hope for. =\

I've heard this referred to as a "third space", a place not home nor work where people can hang out and not be hassled for not buying anything. Like parks and libraries.

They're quickly disappearing. :(

If only I was confident enough in America to believe it was the Christian Nationalists tending towards closing down.

Probably not

This is one of those things that churches have figured out. You need to have in real life community. For churches it's part of their culture. A lot of secular groups haven't put this together yet. Humanists are one group that have.

This why some people have trouble leaving religion. There's no meatspace community for them. This is why we need people in these secular groups to start building community centers. It means starting out small, but there is a human need for meatspace interaction and social support.

100%. I miss the communal gatherings more than the brimstone.

Exactly same. Plus I moved around a lot. I am trying to create a social net around my family, but it’s really not the same thing as a community. That sense of entering the church and being welcomed even if you didn’t know the people there… I really miss it

Start a group that’s not a church!

Ya know, a group of actual good and nice people

I think this says as much about the Americans willing to start going to a new church as it does anything else. What's growing are suburban prosperity gospel nonsense churches with varying degrees of Christian Nationalist subtexts: strip mall churches on the one end, repurposed sports arena hyperchurches on the other. These tell white people in largely white areas that the lifestyle they already live, right down to the fact that they feel most comfortable driving to a pre-fab concrete box, is holy. They get to feel they are safely members of a strong community, and donating to their pastor and the GOP will keep the heathens who would take that from them at bay. The churches understand that people don't inherently want to throw money into a hole, so they offer a combination of services (including simple socializing with "friends") and threats, but they meticulously avoid anything boring or asking people to consider open-ended questions without simple answers. As committed evangelicals, they are also always selling this package.

What's dying are the mainline Protestant churches who made the mistake of taking separation of church and state seriously and trying to earnestly engage with their faith. You'll find many of them, even if they're quite socially conservative, are much less sure that they know what their god intends for LGBTQIA+ and nonbelievers, and even if parishioners personally are sure, they will say that kindness and setting a Christ-like example is the best policy because that is the tack their church takes. On the one hand, people of goodwill take from this that they don't need organized religion in their lives even if they're still Christian in some meaningful way, and they'll just show up on Easter or when they have personal spiritual crises. On the other hand, the aggressive culture warriors find it all to be unsatisfying because they want to be told not just what to believe, but that what they already believe is correct and should invoke a literally divine level of privilege.