Most evangelicals don’t have the ability to thoughtfully do something they think is evil for the greater good. They think that stealing to save someone’s life is a really tough problem. They just actually view him as the good guy.
Just for some context here. In the US, Christianity is everyday, more an identity than a religion. The “evangelicals” that support Trump overwhelmingly don’t attend services, don’t read the Bible, and don’t pray unless they’re in trouble. The evangelical movement has been cooped by the Republican party so thoroughly, that there isn’t much difference between conservative politics and Christian belief in the average worshiper’s mind. Christianity is the justification for having power, not the ethic of how to wield it.
I’m not playing “true Scotsman”, or trying to define what a Christian ought to be. I’m just posting this for the people who are mystified at the disconnect between the teachings of Jesus and the support for regressive and hateful politics.
It’s ironic that apotheoses of the individual, so central to modern conservative thought is antithetical to patriotism, faith, and family values.
I would argue that Christianity has moved much further toward reactionary politics than the other way round. Evangelicals in the 70s were pro-choice for example. I’d also point out that reactionary politics is at a high water mark while Christianity is in decline.
There’s a trap in being a critic of religion that one tends to overestimate the power of faith.
No, its true. Evangelicals have been massively radicalized by the right ever since the 80s. This Politico article goes over the history of the rise of the radical right, and they discuss how abortion was only used because it was more convenient than their actual goal. Some choice quotes (emphasis mine):
The history of that movement, however, is more complicated. White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue. They organized instead to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions, including Bob Jones University.
The historical record is clear. In 1968, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, organized a conference with the Christian Medical Society to discuss the morality of abortion. The gathering attracted 26 heavyweight theologians from throughout the evangelical world, who debated the matter over several days and then issued a statement acknowledging the ambiguities surrounding the issue, which, they said, allowed for many different approaches.
“Whether the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed,” the statement read, “but about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.”
Two successive editors of Christianity Today took equivocal stands on abortion. Carl F. H. Henry, the magazine’s founder, affirmed that “a woman’s body is not the domain and property of others,” and his successor, Harold Lindsell, allowed that, “if there are compelling psychiatric reasons from a Christian point of view, mercy and prudence may favor a therapeutic abortion.”
Meeting in St. Louis in 1971, the messengers (delegates) to the Southern Baptist Convention, hardly a redoubt of liberalism, passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, a position they reaffirmed in 1974 — a year after Roe — and again in 1976.
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and sometime president of the Southern Baptist Convention, issued a statement praising the ruling. “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,” Criswell declared, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
Hell, as noted later in the article, Falwell didn’t even start bitching about abortion until like 5 years after Roe.
I’m not playing “true Scotsman”, or trying to define what a Christian ought to be. I’m just posting this for the people who are mystified at the disconnect between the teachings of Jesus and the support for regressive and hateful politics.
I literally got called a communist by family members for actually acting the way they raised me, because apparently its communist to want to care about less well off people than yourself (and we weren’t even doing that well to start with…)
Don’t do that, they are Christians. These people are the ugly side to Christianity, own it and fix it, don’t push them off as “not real Christians” cause they very much are
Those red hats do seem to have a "mark of the beast" flair to them. They aren't the permanent mark indicated in Revelation 13:16, but I think if you wear it every day it may as well be.
I'm not a Christian, but his followers certainly are. I wonder how they don't see it?
I think they don't see it because the people who support Trump and see him as a harbinger of prosperity are the same people who take the Bible at face value and are already of the belief that should the Rapture come tomorrow, they certainly won't be left below.
They believe in the wrathful God of the Old Testament, they are fundamentalists and they are a far cry from what good Christians can be. Should Jesus come tomorrow, these people would have him lynched as a pinko liberal, labeling him the antichrist.
They're not Christian because they have read the Bible and learned to love thy neighbor and become a righteous person, they are Christian because they have been told a lake of hellfire awaits those who don't accept Jesus and they were indoctrinated into the religion of Revelations. They've been fed the cherry-picked apples of knowledge by pastors with agendas and never challenged the version of God they were given.
Trumps persecution by the state and mainstream politics fuels this fire. Surely if he were the antichrist he would not have been challenged by the DOJ and "anti-christian" liberals. In their minds, his path to the white house, as a leader of men, parallels Jesus.
My mother calls him ‘a man for such a time as this’. She references god using a donkey to minister to Paul and says ‘god can use anyone’. She acknowledges he’s not a Christian but still believes he’s the anointed one to lead the country and has prophecies about him, including one about him being assassinated IIRC.
The book of Revelations is purely about the Romans and more specifically about Nero. His name was coded as the number of the beast. The evangelistic types have twisted the story to be about the end of times or some future anti-christ but it was all just code talk about the time they were living in. They defined what an anti-christ would be like because the Roman Emperors were the real deal.
The Bible also says the mark is required to do business, like buying food at the store. The similarities are interesting, but it’s not like you can’t apply many of them to other terrible leaders throughout history. And since Revelation is actually referring to Rome and Nero, it makes sense why the author is able to encapsulate the concept of “terrifying leader” so well.
But to your point, they don’t see it, because like everything in religion, you can pick and choose what you like. That’s why there’s so many sects of Christianity, and why at least one scholar calls Trump’s version “American Fundamentalism.” Trump is the messiah they’ve been waiting for.
Omg totally. It’s like a brand. But not that kind, that it also is. Oh, snap. That’s the etymology of the modern use of the word… Huh… TIL as I type this…
But yeah, that describes how I viscerally respond to seeing it. They needn’t have the rest of their face if it were a 666 on the forehead, it’d be all you see. Same w the hats now. Face is irrelevant. Hat says enough.
Satan gave humans knowledge, while God punished all of humanity for attaining it. Satan wants you to love yourself and do the things that make you happy. God wants you to become an ascetic and live in subjugation to his desires.
Sounds more like the epitome of Yahweh than Satan.
Well I'm not religious and to me all of it is nonsense, so there's no actual god or satan or jesus. But to me, Satan would be the one who keeps you FROM knowledge and understanding, and the one who fills the world with misinformation.
Any god worth being called a "god" would want you to love yourself and do the things that make you happy. And that is not trump or his followers. They DO want you to live in subjugation to their desires. Call it by whatever name, it is inhumane and to me, it's insane to want trump back in public office.
The post above you was taking about the biblical Satan (for as much as there is any biblical consensus). Lucifer literally means light bringer, he brought enlightenment to humans and they were eternally punished for it.
Such a sad and disgusting concept, that humans should ever be punished for having gained enlightenment. Another reason I could never accept such horrifying ideas, what sort of god would allow that to be the case. That's terrible.
Idolatry - trump has christians idolizing him and praying to him directly
Persecution of believers - he’s telling christians he’s tricked into following him that real medicine is bad and taking medication that gives them heart attacks and injecting bleach will save them
Pride - the Trump towers, how he talks about himself
Greed - he won’t pay the contractors who did work for him just to save a couple dollars
Wrath - inciting violence, full page advertisements advocating the death penalty, says he loved to fight, any kind of fight, including physical.
Envy - obsessed with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote , wants to be a dictator like the leaders of China and North Korea,
Lust - Trump is a rapist, and committed constant sexual harassment in the White House often.
Gluttony - obviously eats too much McDonald’s and drinks too much soda, bottomless appetite
Sloth - avoided presidential duties to watch TV for hours, live tweets the TV he’s watching for hours, is never prepared for meetings, delegates work and then takes credit for it.
Sloth - avoided presidential duties to watch TV for hours, live tweets the TV he’s watching for hours, is never prepared for meetings, delegates work and then takes credit for it.
Thanks for adding some detail to support my post. I thought about doing it but felt it might become overwhelming. Since you’ve done so already, I will add one more thing for Sloth. It’s a weird one too. Trump believes that we are born with only so much energy and if you exercise you use it up and will die quicker.
After college, after Trump mostly gave up his personal athletic interests, he came to view time spent playing sports as time wasted. Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted. So he didn’t work out. When he learned that John O’Donnell, one of his top casino executives, was training for an Ironman triathlon, he admonished him, “You are going to die young because of this.”
What's the passage on that one? Could it mean trumpWorshippers persecuting people who actually believe in the kindness and support tenets of Christianity but who aren't [MAGAts || Christians]?
And if you have read the books, you’d probably appreciate it more than I do, but it’s the most in-depth takedown of a book, let alone a series of books, that I have ever read. Like paragraph by paragraph sometimes.
Oh geez I’ve been wondering about this for twenty years! I caught the first post or two as they came out, right as I was still in the thick of cultural Christianity but not really serious about it—later, as I began shuddering at what I had been, I idly wondered to myself about this series and whether it had continued, but never enough to actually go looking for it. Thank you for bringing it back to my attention!
I never was very religious before being an atheist but the books were entertaining popcorn between Sword of Truth and Wheel of Time releases. It also helped my mom was reading them so I didn’t have to spend my money on the books. A lot of what I read at the time was because my mom read it.
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