What people identifying as Christian do and act doesn’t represent Christianity as a whole.

I mean, religions are what people define them as, use them as. If two million people use the Christian Bible to prop up child abuse, slavery, and sexual, then that is part of the tradition of that faith. Perhaps you didn’t ascribe to faith that seeks to sever people from God via thoughtcrimes. Perhaps the church you attend works to alleviate those injustices, and that seeks conservation of the planet we were gifted. But I know when I asked about racism at church, when I asked about what we as a congregation were doing about it, I was told that was a heart issue that we just had to pray people would resolve on their own. Women, again, could not hold positions of authority because that was against God’s will, gay people were sent away, but racists, what can you do? Again, my experience isn’t unique. There was never any talk of care taking the planet. Fair bit of talk about the dude who buried his Talent vs the one who invested it, though.

I think you identify a lot of real evils in this world, and people really do create a lot of problems. I fundamentally don’t believe we are overwhelmingly evil, and I think teaching people they are evil is more likely to create people who grow up to be evil. People live up to what those around them believe them to be. When people believe to their core that they are truly evil and cannot trust themselves, that they instead must trust the human layers between themselves and God., that’s gonna come up as trauma and/or abuse somewhere down the line.

And while any environment can become abusive, churches preach truth and morality; tied in with that is a strong sense of community and family. Trying to call out abuse from an elder or a pastor often results in the pastor getting moved and ‘prayed for’ and the victim pressured to forgive before is appropriate. They’re bullied to say they forgive when they are not actually ok. And the abuser gets to move on and find new victims. We’ve all seen the scandals about the Catholic Church over the last couple decades. The Southern Baptist Convention had a list of 700 abusers they covered for. But still don’t be a loud lady, that’s against God. The SBC is one of the biggest evangelical denominations in the United States. I don’t think they’re what Christianity is supposed to be. But they are Christians and this is how they express their faith, so this is how I understand Christianity.

Bad theology hurts people. And to pretend there isn’t bad is to be unable to fix.