Experts project an estimated 100,000 churches in the US will close or be repurposed over the next decade.
Many churches will be unable to escape this “tsunami” of closings — a grim trajectory one pastor described as, “Every year the pews are getting emptier and the collection plates getting lighter.”
Maybe someone can clarify this, but it seems like the biggest arguments for why Church closings are bad thing is that outreach programs and charities “die with the church”. Food pantries and shelters can (and do) exist outside of the church or religious setting. You don’t need a clergy to form outreach programs or shelters, so why would church closings be detrimental to this?
Americans don’t want public services because white racists don’t want any of their tax money possibly benefiting black people, so private charity haphazardly does things like food banks and homeless support. They also use to force you to attend sermons
Sure, it’s notionally possible, but churches provide structure and organization for it. For every one secular food pantry there are ten plus run by a church. And if you shut the churches down, it’s not like there are suddenly going to pop up dozens of secular food pantries in their place.
Church attendance and giving dwarf any other form of charitable donations, and is therefore a hard thing to replace. Most people I know who go to Church regularly are giving 10+% of their income to the church. Of my friends who don’t go to church, I don’t think I know a single one who’s charitable donations for the year top $5k, and for most it’s sub $1k. And I live in a pretty high income area.
It turns out that having mandated charitable giving leads to higher rates of charitable giving, and this gives these institutions the bankroll necessary to do things like run soup kitchens and shelters.
The only other source of money for this is the state, which notoriously underfunds and mismanages this type of work, so churches are filling that gap. So the best case scenario, if all the churches close, would be if the state raised everyone’s taxes to get extra funds to offset the loss of that charity. But it turns out that that’s not a politically savvy move. People hate raised taxes, and most hate the poor. And poor people in general don’t vote in numbers big enough to help you win, so you’re not even buying political good will there. So if the churches go away, it’s not like there’s a real backstop that can come fill the gap.