Leave Loud, Blaming Churches Podcast by John Stonestreet Maria Baer for Break Point
Given the global pandemic, this seems like a particularly bad time to run a survey on church membership. Nevertheless, Gallup recently released a poll suggesting that the number of Americans who belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque has fallen below 50 percent for the first time since 1937, when the organization began tracking those numbers.
In fact, more than half the respondents to this poll didn’t merely give up their church membership. They gave up their religion, and now identify as “none,” as in “no religious preference.” Or, as my colleague Shane Morris put it in a recent podcast conversation with writer Samuel James, these folks haven’t just left the room of denominational preference, they’ve left the house of collective faith.
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A number of separate but related cultural trends are at work. For example, an organization called The Witness, an online community of African-American Christians, recently launched the hashtag “#LeaveLoud.” Through podcast episodes and online articles, The Witness encourages black Christians to not only leave “predominantly white or multiethnic” churches if they’ve been dishonored, but to be vocal about it, inside and especially outside the church.
Of course, there are such things as abuse or crooked doctrine which warrant leaving a congregation. Specifically, plenty of our African-American brothers and sisters have been neglected or hurt by fellow Christians, either directly or indirectly. And, depending on the context, church leaders should be made aware of things that justify a departure.
