It’s no secret that Christians are having a rough go of it these days. Real Christians, mind you, not those “love and acceptance and helping the poor” Christians. They’re doing just fine, but they don’t count.

No, things aren’t going too well for Grade-A, all-beef, Jesus-wearing-an-American-flag Christians, who only seem to be doing well when they get to Christian all over everyone else — in the doctor’s office, in the classroom, at your wedding and so on.

Things are going especially poorly for Rush Limbaugh, who isn’t getting to Christian all over as many people now since he keeps getting dropped from more and more radio stations across the country.

So for Rush, along with God-fearing, straight-caking, wife-doing Christians across the country, Monday’s Pew survey showing that America is way less Christian now than it was in 2007 — only 70 percent! — must have felt like a particularly strong punch in the dick.

Don’t worry, though, Rush knows exactly why Christians are the 21st Century’s great (white) persecuted majority: Barack Hussein Obama turned his gay activists loose and made everyone pretend to be atheists!

Listen to Rush Christsplain the Pew survey, via Media Matters:

[iframe src=”http://mediamatters.org/embed/203622″]

You heard him, folks: “Under the Obama years we have this dramatic drop,” in self-identified Christians.

If you don’t think about it at all, you can clearly see that he’s right. The Christian share of the American public wasn’t declining at all before Obama took office in 2007. But as soon as he did take office — in 2007 — everything started going downhill.

But don’t worry, maybe Christians aren’t leaving the faith. They could just be going into hiding:

Even after this dramatic drop of 8 percent Christians still comprise 70 percent of the population…Let’s round it up — 10 percent drop in people who identify as Christians. That’s key. They may still be; they’re just not admitting it. Even at that — 70 percent of the country identifies as Christian — less than 1 percent of the country identifies as Muslim.

Phew, OK. So it’s bad, but it could be worse. Christians might be leaving the faith, but they could just as easily have become secret Christians because haven’t you noticed how hard it is to be a Christian these days? Either way, at least they aren’t becoming, you know, the other guys.

After getting this initial concern out of the way, Limbaugh turned his attention to diagnosing the real problem: If forced conversion to Islam wasn’t snuck into Obamacare at the last minute, then what did happen to all of these Christians?

Obviously, Obama’s gays scared them off:

The last eight years have not been static. They have been dynamic. There have been a lot of things happening in various denominations around the country that might explain this drop. The Methodists, the Lutherans, the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians (the American equivalent of the Church of England) have had dramatic changes in their structure and their organization. Many of these churches within these denominations now perform homosexual marriage. They ordain gay pastors and ministers, and in some cases female and lesbian pastors and ministers, which you might think would cause some people to leave those churches if they disagreed with the decisions made… …If you look at the evangelical churches, they haven’t lost anything. Their membership is holding pretty steady. Where the message has remained, where the mission has remained the same, where the members of the church don’t think any corruption is taking place. They’re still hanging in there. Some might say, the churches that haven’t fallen pray to the dark side. All of this silly social evolution.

There you have it. All of Obama’s “silly social evolution” has caused eight percent of the country to leave their super gay churches. And those Christians with deeply held religious beliefs that gays are icky didn’t go out and find good, honest pure churches that haven’t been turned to the dark side yet; they simply gave up on calling themselves Christians altogether.

Probably because if they did out themselves for the passively anti-gay Episcopalians that they were, Obama’s gaystapo would find them and send them mean tweets and give them bad Yelp reviews, or something:

How is it possible that less than one million gay activist are able to bully and steamroll an entire country on the subject of marriage? By the same token, how is it that 70 percent of the population can be bullied and silenced and coerced into accepting societal evolution with which they disagree because of their religious beliefs?

That’s quite a pickle if, again, you don’t think about it at all. 70 percent of the country is Christian and yet 60 percent of Americans support marriage equality. Rush may not know much, but he does know this: Vegetables are for communists, rehab is for quitters and those numbers add up to more than 100.

Unless maybe, perhaps, possibly, just spitballing here, some of those self-professed Christians have, through some form of voodoo Jesus witchcraft, found a way to both believe in redemption through Christ and think that it isn’t a big deal if two men or two women can get married. Furthermore, maybe — and it’s a big maybe if you haven’t read anything that Pew has published on religion in the last very long time — Christians of all stripes were paying attention when the Religious Right insisted for decades that you can’t share their religious values if you don’t also share their political values. And maybe an increasing number of them heard that message and decided that it wasn’t for them.

As Limbaugh said, “I’m not tolerating or intolerating anything. I’m just telling you — I’m guessing — why the numbers are the way they are.”

Keep guessing, Rush.