“The Christians who need to clean up their act the most have the least interest in doing so. They’d rather be toxic to the very end than be slightly nicer and maybe help their Dear Leaders hold onto just a few more sheep… There’s simply not a way for any Christian leader to curb the behavior of even the most toxic members of the group. If anybody even tries too hard to do that, their sheep will get furious and leave.”

The goal is to help Christian preachers hold onto just a few more sheep? Ouch.

Certainly, it’s true that Christian churches can be very unfriendly places, but is referring to church members as herd animals likely to help with that?

There was a time when people didn’t blink an eye when hearing the metaphor inherent in the title of church “pastor”. A pastor is a pastoralist, a person who specializes in guiding animals, making sure they go where they need to go and do what they need to do. A pastor is someone who directs the lives of others for their own good, because only the pastor is intelligent enough to know what’s best for them.

The followers of church pastors are, in this metaphor, too stupid to take care of themselves. They’re like sheep who need to be herded. And so, if the church pastor fleeces them every now and then, to keep his pastoral scheme running, well, that’s all for the greater good, isn’t it?

Of course, it isn’t for the greater good.

When even a Christian reformer like Captain Cassidy doesn’t see the problem inherent in the toxic metaphor of Christian pastoralism, you know that the problems of Toxic Christianity run deep.

It’s a strange thing, that Christians on the one hand claim to have the best story ever, given by an all-powerful god who knows everything and has given them the most foolproof formula for good living… and on the other hand, they keep on shrinking in numbers because try to manage people as if they’re herd animals.

Now, just two weeks before the Iowa caucuses of 2024, a podcast is investigating the people on Donald Trump’s list of religious leaders. The podcast is a project of IowaFaithLeaderCoalition.com, and is named simply On the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

The list is not what it at first appears to be, the podcast reports.

The following is from the first episode of the podcast, out today, Empty Chairs in the Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.

“Back in the day when Twitter was still Twitter, and Twitter still mattered, Donald Trump claimed to have a huge number of Twitter followers. An investigation discovered, however, that at least half of Donald Trump’s supposed followers on Twitter were nothing more than fake accounts that had been purchased from scammers who make money by helping pretenders to make a social media footprint look bigger than it actually is. With so many untraceable names on Donald Trump’s list of supposed faith leaders, it looks as if Trump may be pulling the same dishonest scheme with his Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.”

We’ll name it here: Church

The Associated Press VoteCast survey interviewed over 110,000 people about various aspects of their lives, and about how they voted in the 2020 presidential election. The survey found a strong correlation between church attendance and support for the dangerous, radical agenda of Donald Trump.

Only 35% of voters who never attend a Christian church chose to vote for Trump. By contrast, 61% of voters who attend church at least once a week voted for Trump. The relationship was clear and progressive: The more often a voter attends church, the more likely they are to support the abuses, lawbreaking, bigotry, violence, animosity to science, and crude behavior of Donald Trump.

There are two plausible causal interpretations of this data. First, it’s possible that churches are especially attractive to people who enjoy crude behavior, racism and sexism, xenophobia, proud ignorance, disdain for the law, cruelty, and conspicuous corruption. If this is the case, Christian worship services aren’t the cause of dangerous radicalization, but are places that nasty bigots like to go.

A second possibility is that churches actively radicalize Americans, leading people who might otherwise be nice neighbors to become crude, rude, violent extremists.

It’s likely that both interpretations are correct to some extent. Christian churches have become stages upon which performances of defiant rejection of social norms take place, as preachers scream loud condemnations and passionate opinions that are disconnected from empirical evidence, in displays of raw emotional fury. These performances both attract misanthropes who seek the company of other hateful people, and normalize hateful attitudes and behaviors among other churchgoers.

Christian ideology also consistently teaches churchgoers that there is no need to have a factual basis for one’s opinions, even advising that dependence upon evidence and careful, rational thinking are sinful. Churches thus have become radicalizing training grounds for voters who are willing, and even eager, to believe whatever Christian politicians tell them to believe, without regard to the factual accuracy of any proclamation.

So it is that, even though the facts of Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in 2020 are rationally undeniable, Donald Trump’s Christian supporters are quite willing to accept Trump’s absurd assertions that he is the victor. A new verse of the old Sunday school tune for children could easily be sung:

Trump’s the winner, this I know, for my leaders tell me so…

Churches remain centers of political power in America, and have in recent years abandoned previous restrictions on explicit campaigning for political candidates, commonly hosting pro-Trump rallies and fundraising events.

The good news is that church membership is on the decline, along with Christian identity. In most Christian churches, the vast majority of congregants have grey hair and wrinkled skin, as young families with children are frightened away by the right wing radicalization of church culture. Younger generations of Americans are turning their back on church life and Christianity, constructing their political identities around critical reasoning skills and a more compassionate, secular vision of citizenship.