The Nashville Statement is receiving more attention, this time from Andrew Sullivan in NYMag, who suggests it’s a suicide note:
And so in the Nashville Statement, there is no advice to gay or transgender Christians, except to be heterosexual, dammit. They don’t even air the possibility of chaste spiritual friendship as a way for such people to lead lives not beset with loneliness, or sexual repression of a kind no human is truly capable of without profound psychological distortion. There is no mention of love at all — as if human attraction is not bound up with that deepest Christian imperative. Instead, we are told that gay and transgender people are deceiving themselves or are incapable of loving each other. All this constant rhetoric of loving us is therefore phony. You can’t love people without respecting them. You can’t welcome people you are simultaneously dehumanizing and writing out of creation. …
I believe that for an entire generation, this question is a litmus test for whether Christianity really is about love, and whether the Gospels (which have nothing to say about homosexuality) should even get a hearing. I can date my own niece’s and nephew’s rejection of Christianity to the day the priest urged them to oppose equal rights for their uncle. That’s why Evangelicalism is dying so quickly among the young. The latest PRRI survey shows that only one in ten Evangelicals are now under 30. It is no accident that the generation that has come to know gay and transgender people as people also finds it hard to dehumanize us in the way the Nashville Statement does, and see a church leadership that still treats us in this fashion as inimical to their own, yes, Christian values. And they are right to. This is what the signers of the Nashville Statement do not quite grasp. They just signed one of the longest suicide notes in history. Because what they’re saying is not merely callous. It is manifestly untrue.
When you place your movement’s entire existence on a wobbly pillar, the power that comes from being a strong proponent of that pillar will begin dissolving when that pillar effectively falls. French, and those others who have signed the Nashville Statement, have found it more important to affirm an arbitrary statement from an arbitrary authority than improve their movement, because they’re their entire ideology proceeds from flawed assumptions.
But Andrew merely made an assertion concerning the decline of the Evangelical movement. Kevin Drum has some solid numbers:
The chart below shows their problem. After years of gaining followers, evangelical strength began to decline during the Bush years and then fell off a cliff in the Obama years, dropping from 21 percent of the population to only 17 percent:
This decline is heavily age dependent—and not because of abortion. Young people feel about the same way toward abortion as older people. The real fault line is gay marriage. As the old evangelicals became ever more strident about it, they lost the loyalty of young people who just weren’t willing to buy the anti-gay hatred. Among 18-29 year-olds, only about 8 percent currently identify as evangelicals.
For those folks who consider themselves anti-Evangelicals, this is heaven sent news, obviously – the older the demographic age of a movement, the closer it is to decline and extinction – not that this will ever happen to the Evangelicals. But the Evangelicals need to sit down and really consider what’s going on and correct their thinking on homosexuals. This is not in the least unprecedented, as such subjects as slavery and witches are no longer interpreted as they had been. As the anti-homosexual streak has a weaker Biblical basis than some[1], as I understand it, the Evangelicals may manage to accomplish this sooner than some might expect.
Or they can go into deep decline until the anti-homosexual champions have passed away and the movement can renew itself. I, personally, don’t care to see such a renewal, as it tends to descend into irrationality, even denial, on a regular basis, a tendency irritated by right-wing radio and the Internet. But the renewal will happen, as many by temperament will eventually flock to the banner-carriers of the movement.
And I’m looking forward to seeing this same chart again in two years. How will Evangelicals, who helped carry Trump over the electoral finish line, react to his abysmal Presidential performance? Will more current Evangelicals lose faith in the movement for selecting such a horrid President, currently on course to be the worst ever? Or will they merely leave the GOP as hopelessly corrupt?
