Summary
Churches across the U.S. are grappling with dwindling attendance and financial instability, forcing many to close or sell properties.
The Diocese of Buffalo has shut down 100 parishes since the 2000s and plans to close 70 more. Nationwide, church membership has dropped from 80% in the 1940s to 45% today.
Some churches repurpose their land to survive, like Atlanta’s First United Methodist Church, which is building affordable housing.
Others, like Calcium Church in New York, make cutbacks to stay open. Leaders warn of the long-term risks of declining community and support for churches.
Churches aren’t community centres and they are highly exclusionary. Libraries are vastly undersold to the public but they do still offer TONNES of services and hold all kinds of community events. I’ve personally seen them as part community centre, part summer camp, or part theatre, among other things. They offer programs to help the homeless, they let you use the internet for free, and they are places of learning that aren’t spewing nonsense. They do so much for the community and they don’t even require you to do or believe anything in return.
Churches only have as much of a community as anything else that gathers weekly. My weekly social dances have the same thing, someone else might have a big game night at a board/cardgame shop, and others may go to the pub. One place near me has a giant folk music jam you can just roll up to to play or watch. Churches aren’t only not the only place to go for community but they’re also not even that good at it.
This fact (and I see this in the Denver area, too - the libraries here have always just blown me away in their excellence, although maybe some areas have even better ones) is why I think the libraries are under assault by the right. They seem to just fundamentally hate the idea of building healthy community as an alternative to the only public interaction that seems to compute for them, and that is commerce.
The first murmurings I heard of this was right after 9/11 - there seemed to be this concern about terrorists using the Internet w/o monitoring or something. Also, they were worried about “porn”. And “freeloaders” reading books/watching movies without paying Amazon! In any case, it seemed rather piecemeal, but you could tell that the qons probably never really loved libraries (just like their hatred of the USPS) but were trying to formulate something to put an end to it.
Then, in more recent years, they seemed to have arrived at the trans thing and this narrative of librarians being “groomers” and they have really cranked up the assault on librarians and libraries…
It’s simple, they can’t fathom the idea that they wouldn’t get something in direct return for doing a job and that’s the corr philosophy of libraries. They will, of course, underpay any and all staff and claim “that’s market rate and you should be happy” so we aren’t allowed to be mad when we don’t get paid.
Libraries are a thing that genuinely exist for the love the game. Every conservative so broken by the system that they genuinely believe that the only way to enjoy work is by being lazy, because any passion has been stripped from them, cannot understand this. They cannot understand doing something and allowing that betterment to come around later to help fund the library.
Conservatives are wildy unimaginative and full of a hatred they’re too emotionally stunted to control. They turn that hatred on the weak and vulnerable instead of their bosses who kick them in the teeth every morning and in the ass when they leave work later. Libraries are happy places, and they left true joy behind a long time ago.
Churches aren’t good enough, but the are certainly community centers.
We don’t have any of that shit, and a pub is not a communal space. You have to pay for it.
We have a church. A shrinking church that will die when all the boomers die. That’s it.
Ok, so it sounds like the church is a bad community investment but if the building is repurposed into a community centre run by the municipality then that’s the best option, no? It can even hold religious services for multiple religions now that it’s just a building.
Also you could totally have dances in a church! The social dances where I’m from are held in the basement of a church on Fridays. Before it moved to a community centre the organization where I live now held them in a church that had been converted like I mentioned above.
Your issue is a lack of imagination, not a lack of church.