Very good piece, Dan and sparked a lot of memories and thoughts about where we are in 2024.
People, like churches, are complicated - and many are stuck with 4-grade understandings. I had made a simple "I'm voting for Harris" post on my FB feed and got a private message from someone I would have called "friend" 20 or more years ago, but really is an acquaintance. "I used to think you were a Christian - was I wrong?"
I responded in kind, while adding "I do not understand the support for a man who stands directly in opposition to everything we learned in church"
Cheap groceries.
Cheap gas.
Won't allow the murder of innocent babies.
Sigh.
I think churches are the same. They had a worldview that worked at one time, and there is enough inertia, nostalgia, judgement, and folks too invested in the status quo to even consider the idea of change.
I'll bet that in many/most of the cases, the folks who originally started these churches were considered rebelous by those who came before. If we could look past the faded b&w photos in the fellowship hall of nameless church members long dead, the stories would astound us. It is tough to see them as anything other than strictly conservative, humorless, pillars of society and bedrocks of faith. They laughed, they cried, they had affairs, they doubted, but most of all they took a chance on planting a new church in an area that was underserved and under-represented. They saw and built a future based on the realities of today (1875) rather than what their grandparents believed and how they worshipped.
Ironically enough, we are probably more like our mistaken impressions of those folks long gone - rather than the realities they represented. They had a fearlessness about their faith that is either missing, or co-opted by a right wing political movement. I think they would weep if they could see what their children have done to their church and faith by not continuing to progress.