Name: Reasons to Leave Christianity* RIGHT NOW
Uploaded: 2025-07-04T19:40:49.000Z
Duration: 18 min 26 s
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You read the title, let's get into some inconvenient facts.

Some of you are going to want to click away instead of learning this stuff, but I can assure you, you're going to want to hear my final point, especially if you are a Christian.

In fact, the end of this video might even make some atheists think twice.

Fact one, U.S. Christians are still colonizing and killing Africans in the name of Christendom.

Christians have existed in Africa almost since the beginning of Christianity, but remained a small minority in most regions until European colonization.

European powers brutally conquered most of Africa with guns and whips in one hand and a Bible in the other. They used violence to control African bodies and forced their own version of Christianity on Africans to control their minds.

This was about extracting resources to enrich European leaders, not about saving souls.

I mean, colonizers went after historically Christian parts of Africa just as they went after everywhere else.

Although colonial powers nominally left Africa in the mid 20th century, colonialism never truly ended. There are a thousand ways colonialism has continued, but here I'll just focus on one way American Christians specifically have continued it.

In 2005, the Bush administration launched a supposed AIDS relief program worldwide.

Conservative Christians massively influenced this program as it put 1.4 billion dollars, two-thirds of its funding, into abstinence and fidelity campaigns.

A study conducted across 22 countries later found no evidence that these programs did anything to combat AIDS.

In fact, this so-called relief program actually made things worse.

It funded ultra-conservative Christians, such as Martin Sempa in Uganda, who promoted anti-LGBT sentiments.

Researchers have also found that arrests and convictions under anti-gay laws have significantly reduced the use of HIV prevention and care services by gay men in Africa, undercutting the progress against the HIV and AIDS epidemic that PEPFAR sought.

Yes, conservative Christians in the Bush administration,

I'm not exaggerating, funded the eat da poopoo guy.

It's funny until you realize what incredibly fucked up things resulted from that.

Since then, U.S. Christian right groups have put over $280 million into promoting extreme anti-LGBT laws and dismantling women's reproductive rights around the world, with over $50 million of that money targeting Africa.

The largest spender in Africa is the Fellowship Foundation, a shadowy Christian organization with ties to the family, a coalition of anti-democracy

Christian extremists who are all high up in the U.S. government and started the National Prayer

Breakfast. They spent $20 million targeting Uganda, where their associate David Behati wrote a bill that puts LGBTQ people to death. It also imprisons anyone who knows a queer person and does not report them to the authorities for execution.

The bill passed in Uganda in 2023. It's the law now. And how could it not be, with millions of Christian extremist dollars behind it? This is just one of many Christian organizations funding the brutalization of Africans today, and if you want to read more about it, I'll link all my sources down in the description.

People, and by people I mean Western conservative Christians and their handful of token ex-Muslims and atheists, like to point to Islam as being the source of violence against queer people around the world. In Nigeria, for instance, you can only get the death penalty for being gay in the northern states, under their version of Sharia.

But clearly, Christians are doing violence too. They're just doing it covertly through dark money groups because they have a lot of money, and that gives them all the power they need to create the large-scale violence they want to see.

Fact two, the abortion issue was invented to cover for racism.

We all know that abortion is a major issue for a lot of Christians in the United States.

They strongly oppose it because they believe something like, the soul of a human being comes into existence and achieves personhood at conception.

More commonly put, life begins at conception.

So, ending a pregnancy, to them, is the same as ending any other human life, which is wrong.

The Catholic Church has preached against abortion at some stage of fetal development for many centuries at least. But Protestants? They only latched onto this idea in large numbers about 45 years ago. Yes, this is the same issue that some Christians have committed actual terrorism and political assassinations over.

They've firebombed clinics with people in them, among other things, forcing Congress to pass laws explicitly protecting reproductive clinics of all kinds.

Recently, a Christian nationalist man assassinated pro-choice Minnesota state representative Melissa Hartman and her husband. He also shot pro-choice state senator John Hoffman and his wife, though they fortunately survived.

He apparently had a long list of other intended targets, composed of Democratic politicians as well as abortion providers.

Who he targeted tells us a lot about this guy's motivations, so I'm not surprised that over 70 sources have reported on this.

Sources on the left explain that the shooter's list of targets were pro-choice people, and explicitly connects the shooter's actions to his political affiliation with Trump, while sources on the right focus on the fact that the list includes large numbers of people and includes language such as manifesto, which suggests a broader conspiracy.

Y'all already know I was able to compare this coverage at a glance with Ground News, an independent app and website I actually use every day and have gladly partnered with for years now. Check them out at ground.news slash skeptic.

This shooter came from a Christian movement where folks often believe that abortion is child sacrifice to literal demons, so I think that discussing his list of targets is pretty relevant.

Apparently folks on the left tend to agree with that more than folks on the right, because coverage of this story was lopsided enough to make it into Ground News' blindspot feed, a feature that shows you important stories that one side of the political spectrum or another is ignoring. The right-leaning users of Ground News at least stood a better chance of seeing this coverage, with the feature right there in their pocket and in their email inbox.

I promise I'm not making this up for the ad, a regular viewer of mine once told me that they actually gifted Ground News to their right-leaning parents and said it helped them have more rational conversations about the news. So, go to ground.news slash skeptic or scan the QR code on your screen for 40% off. There you can get the same vantage plan I use every day for just $5 a month.

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Conservative Protestants 50 years ago didn't oppose abortion. The Southern Baptist Convention openly called for it to be legalized throughout the 1970s. When Roe v. Wade was decided, the president of the SBC said,

I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person. And it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.

In the late 70s, Billy Graham refused to participate in anti-abortion campaigns.

Even James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged in 1973 that the Bible was silent on the matter, and therefore it was plausible for an evangelical to believe that a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being.

Throughout the 70s, white evangelicals were mobilizing against the progress of the Civil

Rights Movement, specifically desegregation. The IRS no longer allowed tax-exempt status for whites-only Christian academies like Bob Jones University. Jerry Falwell, who called this progress the Civil Wrongs Movement, also had his segregation academies affected.

After the Republican Party nominated Reagan as its candidate for president in 1980,

Reagan spoke against this effect of desegregation, but said nothing about abortion.

This resonated with their base, but didn't help win new people to their side.

They had to find a way to promote white Christian segregationist interests without putting people off.

Enter Paul Michael Weyrich, also known as the Architect of the Religious Right.

During the midterm elections of 1978, Roman Catholic anti-abortion activists helped flip four Senate seats for Republicans, and Weyrich saw an opportunity. He alerted

Falwell and other white evangelicals that they could use opposition to abortion—a more respectable issue—to energize and grow their following.

In preparation for the presidential election of 1980, these guys started churning out anti-abortion propaganda, saying that in just one generation—the one generation that did the

Civil Rights Movement—our society has degenerated into holding a low view of human life.

But also it now puts man at the center of all things instead of God.

Humanism, secularized society, and liberal theology are all eroding Western civilization.

We must return to Judeo-Christian values, where all human life is actually valued.

This worked to galvanize evangelicals into a united political force for religious Republicans, framing the rejection of the Civil Rights Movement as

Racist Ronald Reagan went on to win the presidency, the Religious Right became an obscenely powerful force in American politics, and American Protestants still largely oppose abortion. The force behind all of this was not love for God or adherence to sincerely held theological beliefs, no. Protestant theology and politics took this shape because some of them, 45 years ago, deeply hated black people.

Fact three, the dominant American Christian view of politics was created by oil companies.

God made men to work. God didn't make men to vote for other men to tax men who do work so they don't have to work. God made men to work.

I'm sure you've heard all this before. The state shouldn't redistribute wealth.

That's theft at best and atheistic communism at worst. We believe in freedom under God.

We vote conservative and support free enterprise because anything else is out of alignment with true Christian values.

That popular Christian idea only took hold about 80 years ago, though. Its creators?

The National U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, the president of Sun Oil, and their employee, the wealthy pastor James W. Fifield.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Christian idea of the social gospel was popular.

Christians should seek to meet the earthly needs of every person, not just save their soul.

We must work together to rid the world of social injustice, economic inequality, corporate greed, and worker exploitation.

This was the basis of FDR's New Deal policies following the Great Depression.

It raised taxes on the ultra-wealthy, ended child labor, protected workers, and created social security. Most people, Christians included, liked this.

Wealthy corporate giants did not. So they developed a plan to take advantage of the trust that Americans placed in Christian ministers.

In the 1940s, these wealthy guys created Spiritual Mobilization, an organization which would try to convince Christian ministers everywhere that these social policies were literally evil and non-Christian.

Pastor Fifield acted as their mouthpiece.

He says of pagan statism, and instead what we need is a return to, again, this kind of unfettered free enterprise. He links Christianity and capitalism.

He sees that they're deeply intertwined. In his view, both are systems that stress individualism above all else. So as he tells it, Christianity is a system in which if you're good, you go to heaven. If you're bad, you go to hell.

Capitalism is the same way, he says. If you're good, you make a profit.

If you're bad, you go to the poorhouse. And any system that interferes with that divinely prescribed order of things, he says, is a form of pagan statism, and is itself evil. With literally hundreds of big companies, especially oil companies, funding Spiritual Mobilization, it took off.

By the 1950s, it had trained tens of thousands of Christian ministers to preach that libertarian capitalism was a part of Christianity itself.

This strongly influenced the message of Billy Graham. It became an integral part of American anti-communism, and even inspired the Eisenhower administration to put

Under God into the Pledge of Allegiance, In God We Trust onto Our Money, and make In God We Trust the official motto of the United States.

Christianity has always had a strong presence in the United States, but that presence used to look pretty different. The economically conservative, anti-communist majority we see today didn't even exist until it was manufactured by the ultra-wealthy so that they could pay less in taxes and exploit more workers.

American Christian theology on politics and economics today was not shaped by

Christ-like charity and grace, but by truly psychopathic levels of manipulation and greed.

If you're interested, I have a full video on this which goes into greater detail.

All of this is based on the work of historian Kevin M. Cruz and his book

How Corporate America Created Christian America.

Okay, at this point, plenty of Christians watching are probably thinking, everything you discussed here were just the actions of flawed human beings.

Christians being sinful doesn't mean Christianity itself is bad.

In fact, Christianity can't motivate sinful or harmful behaviors because true Christianity is, by definition, only good.

This very attitude, however, helps make the abuse and corruption I described possible.

There's a well-studied psychological phenomenon called moral licensing.

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