Christianity isn't the only religion abused by flawed people to do bad things. Its more of a reflection of the people involved and not the religion. It's sad.
(for context, I worked in evangelical christian ministry for multiple years when I was younger)
2015 was a sort of tipping point, IMO, that has caused a sort of paradigm shift in Christianity. (sorry, a little vague, but I'm still trying to understand all the changes.) My hope is that all Christianity will go back to basic tenets of faith, biblically taught.
And there’s the key. If only people would read the Bible. If they would read even just Philippians 3:12 or Hebrews 10:26 or any of a number of other passages, they would see at once what heresy “once saved, always saved” is.
But no, Christianity is too often just a club. Most people have no actual interest in the Bible. God has ever worked with minorities and remnants. Christianity strongly Bible-based will always be small by comparison.
I rather like the way Dickens framed it in A Christmas Carol:
> “There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
But the people who wanted to keep the definition of the american church a "small c" lost pretty thoroughly to the political action clubs.
The SBC boycotts/cancelation of Disney in 1997 and the memetic cancelation of General Mills cereal was all outworkings from Jerry Falwells take over of american christian expression using Francis Schaeffers films to provide emotional impact and introduce new political reasoning and adopt what was previously "the roman catholic" issue of abortion as a primary political, religious and social wedge issue. That was the core "ratchet" issue.
With Lamar Alexander, Alan Keyes and a few others politicians campaigning with extremely heavy religious strategies in republican primaries in 96 you see a turning point and culmination of the political work of Falwell and others through the 80s. It showed that there was effectively no pushback left among evangelicals to messaging that conflated Republican & Christian, the assimilation was sufficiently complete.
Idk, there's almost an infinite amount of causes and drivers but there were a lot of bad turning points along the way.
In what feels like a past life I actually went to a influential seminary in the early 00s, the few older professors we're academic and rigorous, the rest of the younger professors and the students themselves we're... bad, just really awful people with odd pathological relationships and furtive self serving behaviors, the amount of extremely insular "christian celebrity" worship was shocking to me at that age.
And in this context I think confronting the mindset is a valuable thing to do even if you are speaking with an atheist. Essentially, questions like:
* If everyone adopted your mindset, what kind of world would we live in?
* Do you think your friends and family would be proud of you if they knew you were acting this way?
* Would you feel good if you knew all your friends and family were acting like you?
* Are you acting in a way you might regret later in life?
Going to “basic tenets” and doubling down on sola scriptura is just fundamentalism and is why evangelicals and the like are the way that they are. And they’re (relatively) modern inventions!