I can see why you hate Christianity but I don’t see anything about why many people hate Christianity. I grew up in a more evangelical protestant church in New York State and never attended any radical boot camp, but I did attend a few Christian colleges. What drove me away from church was the constant focus on Jesus saving people from Hell. I get why people focus on it, but when you’ve heard your 1000th altar call, accompanied with sappy music, you start to get annoyed. The obsession with being saved trumped everything else. It was as if nothing else mattered and I didn’t learn anything about the faith beyond the initial ‘know that you know that you know’ that you are saved.

But the older I get the less I hate anyone of any creed, belief, or ideology. People, myself included, seem to have difficulty strictly following any belief system, let alone simple concrete things like diets. A lot of people just don’t know what they’re doing or why they are doing it. It can be hard to go deeper and overcome superficiality. I was definitely a hypocritical Christian, and lukewarm. In truth, I didn’t know exactly how to act, and my teachers in the faith didn’t help me mature into a better man. Thankfully, I never went through any sort of abuse like you speak of, and I’m sorry that was your experience, it is not excusable for Christians to turn into a literal cult or militia.

I did find the free Yale courses on the old and new testaments to be helpful. Michael Hudson’s recent book on debt forgiveness showed me something about Jesus’s call to forgive us our debts as something literal and real, not spiritual/metaphorical at all, just like how the daily bread was about literal food. My point is there is a lot of information for one to dig into and think for one’s self. I hadn’t done very much thinking about Christianity because I was bored in church and school, now, as an adult, it makes sense for me to think it through before judging.

As much as many people dislike the memory of the man, Jerry Falwell was right when he said, “If it’s Christian, it should be better.” I think, if the world hates Christianity, it is because Christians have failed to live up to the expectation. I do believe, as I’ve read from Dale Martin’s “Pedagogy of the Bible” that we should begin by tackling how future pastors and church leadership is educated and trained. There is overwhelming focus on the historical-critical method of biblical scholarship, which is a recent innovation, and it doesn’t appear to be making the faith a better option for people. Christianity is a religion of pastors and priests, and so better leadership should be a focus (as your camp demonstrates, poor leadership begets rotten fruit), but no one has decided what that looks like. I, for one, at least think we need to move away from the model of telling people they are forgiven their sins through Jesus. That model may help many people overcome their fear of death and damnation, but there it usually stops, and life in the present may not improve. I dunno, something is off, because it’s not just America that is seeing the losses. Just some of my thoughts.