American religion is on the decline, and it does not appear as if it will rebound anytime soon. Decades of hellfire preaching, gender stereotypes, “conversion therapy”, witch hunting, and wild accusations have finally pushed over half of the nations out of the pews. But the most prevalent factor you see in the modern church that is turning people off to organized worship is the rise of Christian fundamentalism. American Christian fundamentalism in particular is perhaps the nastiest, meanest and most unforgiving ideology to ever reach America’s shores. The fundamentalists Christians have turned American churches, once fairly harmless community organizations that specialized in charitable events, into political battlegrounds for the sanctity of mankind. Many American preachers stand on street corners shouting vile insults at passersby, threatening them with eternal hellfire for being gay or for masturbating or for wearing short clothes or for using demon technology (preacher talk for anything invented after the 1950s) or for getting vaccinated, and on and on the seemingly never ending list of demonic infractions goes. You cannot be yourself at church. You can only be what the preacher wants you to be, a numb, mindless sycophant. There was a time in America where you could still hold onto your identity and attend church, a time where you did not have to be perfect. Now the preachers demand perfection from their congregants. But there are no perfect people and so the churches are emptying like never before. And the preachers arrogantly huff and puff and say, “good, go; I don’t want any people around who are not in full submission to Christ.” Well, the people have gone; they have obeyed the commands of their preachers. “Americans' membership in houses of worship continued to decline last year, dropping below 50% for the first time in Gallup's eight-decade trend. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999.” (Gallup, 2021) Did the church really think it would survive after telling women what to wear? Did the church believe it would get away with stripping women of their right to choose? Did the preachers really think that they could continue to brush the rampant sexual molestation of juvenile congregants under the rug for years to come? Did the preachers believe that demanding cash payments or “tithes” from their congregants would be in fashion during a recession, which was then followed by a depression? Did the holier than thou folk really think that people would give up their birth control, their explicit lyrics, their miniskirts, their cannabis, their vaccines, their college degrees, all so that they could be good little children and maybe go to heave some day? Why would the church think that? Does the church not realize that religion can be done at home, that spirituality can be an individual practice, that some people do not even require spirituality? I do not know the holy folks were thinking when they got involved in politics, when they broke the sacred doctrine of separation of church and state, when they decided to legislate their beliefs instead of practicing them. It is true that the fundamentalists have the courts, that they have the Congress, that they, temporarily anyway, are in control of the national narrative. But as the churches empty, so will the church coffers. The wealthy church donors of the day may keep the church afloat for a time, but their children will grow up and spend their money elsewhere. "The decline in church membership is primarily a function of the increasing number of Americans who express no religious preference. Over the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who do not identify with any religion has grown from 8% in 1998-2000 to 13% in 2008-2010 and 21% over the past three years." (Gallup)