Which ones?
No not that kind of Christian:
A growing number of prominent Christian leaders are sounding alarms about threats to democracy posed by ReAwaken America rallies where Donald Trump loyalists Michael Flynn and Roger Stone and rightwing pastors have spread misinformation about the 2020 elections and Covid-19 vaccines, and distorted Christian teachings.
But of course “Christian teachings” is a very large, and mixed, category. Many Christian teachings fit right in with people like Flynn and Stone and even Trump.
Several well-known Christian leaders, including the president of the Christian social justice group Sojourners and the executive director of a major Baptist group, have called on American churches to speak out against the messages promoted at ReAwaken America rallies that have been held in Oklahoma, Arizona, Texas, California, South Carolina and other states.
…
“This ReAwaken tour is peddling dangerous lies about both the election and the pandemic,” Adam Russell Taylor, the president of Sojourners, told the Guardian. “Jesus taught us that the truth will set us free, and these lies hold people captive to these dangerous falsehoods. They also exacerbate the toxic polarization we’re seeing in both the church and the wider society.”
Jesus is quoted as saying a lot of things, some of which are brutal. People who are not Jesus have said things about truth that are better than anything Jesus is quoted as saying. “Jesus said” is just a brand name, and not a very reliable one.
Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, which has organized Christians against Christian nationalism, said: “Christian nationalism is a threat to the church because those peddling it wrap this ideology in biblical language and imagery. Christian nationalism is wrong as a matter of Christian ethics. The Bible is not confined to a nation much less a party or list of policy positions.”
Yes it is. The Bible is jam-packed with nationalist rhetoric and exhortations. There are parts that seek to rise above that but more parts that wallow in it.
Ophelia, didn’t you know most Christians have magic Bibles that put the parts they don’t want to see in invisible ink? Because God is so powerful, the bible can say anything a Christian wants it to say!
I know, because I’ve had conversations with both left-wing and right-wing Christians who denied something was in the bible even after I showed them chapter and verse. Their magic bible doesn’t show them that part; when they read the parts they don’t like, the stye in their eye couples with the magic bible so they don’t have to see or remember it.
One of my favorite Bible verses is Luke 19:27 — Jesus says “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me”.
Now as for “the truth will set you free”, Jesus does say that in John 8:32, but in context it actually means much the same thing. Follow me to the letter, or die a slave to sin. Not very inclooosive of Him (or should I say, “Them”).
The stupid part about Christian nationalism and a significant part of why religious liberty is a thing: once they kill/enslave the rest of us they’ll turn their guns on each other over minute doctrinal disputes as they have in the past. When the Church is dominant it can’t tolerate heresy.
BKiSA #3
And of course purges, showtrials, and the hunt for scapegoats, heretics, traitors, saboteurs etc. are permanent features of Utopian ideologies in general: If the system is perfect, and infallible, and the final solution to every problem, then what do you do once you have introduced your perfect system and have to explain away the fact that there is still suffering in the world? It can’t be because it wasn’t quite that simple and perhaps the system wasn’t entirely perfect after all, so the only permissible explanation is that evil conspirators (heretics, counter-revolutionaries etc.) have infiltrated every level of society and are actively sabotaging the establishment of Paradise on Earth.
Religion by its nature is authoritarian and exclusive, no matter how much you want to nice it up with the image of a lamb.
The trick in Christianity is to find the one that reflects your biases and justifies your hatreds as being the same one as God’s hatreds. And there are well over 30,000 versions of Christianity, each on telling you that you practice the wrong one and if you don’t shape up you’re going to the bad place.
Religion is useful in enforcing moral authority, because the laws and punishments apply not only here, but in eternity. And if God endorses the government, well, where you gonna run to, SInner man?
I have just read John Bunyan’s ’Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners’. I admire Bunyan in many ways, for he writes beautiful prose and is a wonderful storyteller (I loved – and still love, in a critical sort of way – ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, which I found in my father’s library when I was, I think, 8 – I skipped the theological parts, which I couldn’t understand and which bored me, and enjoyed the story). He was also personally very brave. But the autobiographical ‘Grace Abounding’, though very well-written, was harrowing to read: the man is in constant terror of the punishing God, and of the devil’s whisperings. Christianity is an appallingly manipulative religion – that was what drove from it in my teens, as someone merely brought up in the Anglican Church; it mucks you up psychologically, as it clearly has done in the case of what Christian acquaintances I have – though they are Catholics rather than Calvinists, as Bunyan was. (The Catholic view of predestination does not appear to differ much from the Calvinist one, judging from the Catholic Encyclopaedia, though at the last moment the Catholics throw up their hands and declare it is a ‘mystery’, unwilling to go ahead and draw the obvious conclusions that Calvin had the honesty to draw.)
Another wonderful work, which also describes the Calvinist mind, is one of the unknown, or very little-known, great novels in the English Language – ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’, by James Hogg, the Scottish writer who was a friend of Wordsworth & Coleridge. I highly recommend it.
Is it wrong to hope they do this sooner rather than later (while skipping the killing/enslaving the rest of us bit)?
Is there a badge or membership card for this? I want to get one now to beat the rush.