I always thought The Righteous Gemstones was a great show but purposefully overly ridiculous. I guess they were right on the nose.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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For-profit hospitals.
For-profit schools.
For-profit prisons.
For-profit churches.
When will Americans realise there's something wrong?
When it stops being profitable to pretend that there isn't.
It's not just mega churches.
My dad was going to a small little church for years. At some point in a conversation about their church, I asked him what the church does in terms of community service or giving to the less fortunate. His response was "nothing".
To me, that should be a pretty high priority for organized religion, otherwise it's just Sunday social hour and free entertainment ... at best.
Social hour is actually very necessary, not happening, our third spaces are dying and churches are one of them. Not that I'm not glad to a degree, but we need replacements because people come to the church for human connection, and then pick up the bullshit over time.
Hell I'm in the South and I have queer friends that still go to southern baptist churches "because there's food once a week" and "I get to be around people."
Back in the 70s/80s/90s, we had The Mall. If you didn't have anything else to do, you'd just go to The Mall, and see who was around. If nothing else, you could hang around in the book and record stores, or the food court. Or play games in the arcade. Or just sit on a bench and watch girls.
Now kids just sit home and play video games.
Watching Knives Out 3 triggered me. As a former Catholic, I was hit pretty hard by how the big bad was treating the church.
And thinking about it, yeah, that's exactly what they are. There are those who run a church like a little kingdom and create cults of personality.
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Everything is business, everything is entertainment, everything is about money.
There is still real Christianity in the US, but this isn't it. I recently read about someone asking for help from various churches, mosques and temples, and everybody offered help, except the churches. The churches that did help were predominantly black.
If this is how most Christians behave, then I'm sorry to inform you this is real Christianity.
Then what would you call the people who actually follow the teachings of Christ? What would you call the Christians in other countries? Why would appropriators of a word get to own it?
Also Christian. Even calling this appropriation is distancing them from the guy with the golden throne.
Also "we don't like traditional Church buildings with beautiful architecture, we want to save money"
"before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it"
I feel like half of American churches could be wiped out if people just had some other live entertainment they could afford on the weekends.
If you learn about what went on during the Great Awakening, you can see that there was a lot of competition between different churches and no government regulation. For the entrepreneuial pastor, they could slightly change the gospel and church services to target a congregation of their choosing.
Oh but you have to pay to attend this kind of show and it's super expensive, like easily 200$. It is a matter of preference for them, not affordability.
Where I live, there are tiny churches EVERYWHERE. There's a street next to Walmart that has 13 churches in residential houses along that single street.
Churches take money in, and provide literally nothing of substance in return. They are nothing more than tax evasion/ money-laundering operations, and at least 90% of them should be closed down. ALL of them should be taxed heavily.
self-proclaimed Christians
As someone raised Catholic my first visit to a Christian church looked wild.
Padded pews I can hang with. Drums? Electric guitars? Blasphemy I tell ya
Individual Christians are okay, but I don't approve of their immoral lifestyles.