As a Nicaraguan-born girl growing up in Miami, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez remembers going to church five times a week. Her father was a pastor, and their fundamentalist evangelical faith taught that a woman’s role was to serve her husband.
At the same time, Mojica Rodríguez saw how essential women were in keeping the pews filled and the church running. Ultimately, dismayed by the subservient role of women and the church’s harsh restrictions on girls, she would leave her faith – and her husband – in her late 20s.
“Women are less inclined to be involved with churches that don’t want us speaking up, that don’t want us to be smart,” said Mojica Rodríguez, who went on to earn a master’s degree in divinity. “We’re like the mules of the church – that’s what it feels like.”
Though the Nashville-based author and activist is now 39, her experience reflects a growing and, for churches, a potentially worrisome trend of young women eschewing religion. Their pace of departure has overtaken men, recent studies show, reversing patterns of previous generations.
Having religion in politics has ruined both. It makes politicians uncompromising since they believe they have God on their side and thus people they disagree with as the devil. This forces those within a church to decide on their values and their church. This drives people out of the church until only the craziest remain. This was inevitable and they both deserve it
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
- Barry Goldwater
Never agreed with Barry Goldwater before. But it’s the truth
That’s how you know just how awful evangelicals are that even he doesn’t like them.
He had a couple of “broken clock” moments.
Not many, but they did happen.
Yep, divine mandate existed before, gotta get rid of it again and again.
Hate to break it to you pal, but religion has been in politics since before cities existed. Not really ruination if it’s been that way almost forever.
Baron d’Holbach was writing about it in the… 1600s? And it had been going on for a while at that point, too.
It goes back to before cities existed, man.