Exodus International announced today via its Facebook page:
Dear friends, please pray for us at Exodus. We have experienced an unexpectedly low giving season this summer coupled with much higher expenses (insurance, utilities, etc). Sadly, we have had to let several staff go. Your prayers are appreciated. For those who are also having to endure this unfriendly economy, our prayers are with you! Alan Manning Chambers
Perhaps Exodus wouldn’t be in quite this position if it had not spent the past decade supporting the borrow-and-spend economic policies and laissez-faire lending policies of the corporatist U.S. Christian Right. As a result of that economic program, the United States faces a prolonged recession, with no federal surplus to devote to economic reconstruction, no consumer savings to spend, near-record unemployment and homelessness, record levels of household debt, and no reasonable hope of a significant recovery until late in the decade. Had the Christian Right focused on real issues of national concern, instead of waging social warfare against fellow Americans, the ongoing fiscal catastrophe might have been avoided.
The financial prospects for Exodus are not encouraging. In a fatuous and inexcusably incompetent move, Exodus leaders bought an overpriced headquarters building in central Florida just as the real estate bubble was bursting. Florida was hit especially hard by the crash. Exodus also expanded its staff on “faith” that God had anointed them to unite antigay churches in political warfare against LGBT Americans, their families, and equality-affirming churches. Such self-adulation has come back to haunt Exodus before through sexual and political scandal; this time, self-adulation has sent Exodus crashing into a financial brick wall. Exodus must face the reality that its god — mammon — has fallen on hard times.
Exodus is holding clearance sales to get rid of its quack-therapy books. Its pseudo-Jewish ally JONAH is begging for donations of old clothing. Neither organization’s donor churches are quite so willing, for the time being, to pamper the superficial blatherings of leaders such as Randy Thomas when the churches’ own members — evicted from their homes — are living in their cars [update: and officially sanctioned homeless camps are forming in many major cities].
It will be interesting to see which programs Exodus sacrifices in order to preserve its delusion of service to God.
