Politics is Destroying Christianity

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AhsUmF ... Matter2525

Pretty obvious really even without watching the clip.

Take Christianity out of politics the churches collapse and close because unlike other cou tries, the governing principles of laws and rules were based upon Christan principles. Undermine this and the backlash will be that the new laws abd rules will be set up to directly attack and pull down the church.
Where I live, it is now hard to find any traditional anglical churches that have not been closed or turned into flats and some of these churches foundations are over 1000 years old or more. Yet in just a decade they are shut because todays politics is against the church as they bring in laws that the church has to abide by which are directly against Gods word. So churches close and the believers set up meetings in their own homes instead where they can't be controlled by the state. It is pretty obviousthis was going to happen. Means now marriages and the like don't get registered with the state like they once did.

Last edited by Mountain Goat on 09 Dec 2023, 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Know what's ironic? It is ruining the neopagan movement too. For example now nobody is allowed to believe in or honor anyone else's gods and goddesses without being accused of "cultural appropriation".

Talk about a double-edged sword.

The clip is about American churches. Christian idolization of Trump is something unique to America.

The Anglican Church is, well, the official Church of England, so there has always been a confluence of church and state.

When the United States was founded, they decided to separate church from government, partly to rub it into King George's face, and partly with a realization that recent European history involved people slaughtering each other over which brand of Christianity was correct.

Now, most Europeans have stopped going to church, while, in the USA, about 1/4 to 1/2 of the population is evangelical Christian (in the Bible Belt, it is almost everybody).

Back in the Baby Boom years, typically, the father worked, the mother stayed home with the children, and the family dressed up and went to church on Sunday, and enjoyed a roast beef dinner afterwards.

Now, relatively few families are arranged this way. Women work, and both men and women are too frazzled to want to go to church.

The people who still go to church are very committed, and most of them love Trump.

I agree 100%, clinging to the Orange Antichrist is probably what ruined American churches for a lot of people.

No, you have it backwards.

Christianity is destroying politics.

They are trying to run the country and subjugate the USA under their discriminatory dogma.

They will lose their holy war!

Or maybe they're destroying each other?

That was part of the genius of the Founding Fathers. Separation of church and state. The result was better politics and better religion.

Now that the two are getting mixed ...both religion and politics are going down hill.

Meh. I go to church because my wife is a pastor. I sit there, smile, nod my head, and try to be nice to the other people there.

Yes, I believe in the Christian God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

Yes, I try to follow the Proverbs, the Psalms, and the Sermon on the Mount (but I sometimes fall short).

As for Donald J. Trump, I hope he spends the remainder of his years in solitary confinement, cut off from social media, his fans and followers, and whoever believes him to be God's "Chosen One". He has pandered to the white nationalists by appealing to their corrupted "Christian" values, thus providing them even more incentive to use the Bible as a political tool to restore all white people to the same privileged social class that hasn't been seen since the Confederacy was formed.

I agree. This is why I fully support seperation of Church and State (but not necessarily the absolute destruction of religion like some people today seem to be advocating for).

Religion should neither be forced on others nor should people have their religious beliefs stripped from them.

American politics is destroying everything.

It seems the French idea is that a purely secular government protects the religious freedoms of Christians, Jews, and Muslims:

"The idea of "secularism" was put into a French law of 1905, after years of struggle between the state and the Roman Catholic Church. It enshrined freedom of belief, but ended state involvement in the Church and removed all signs of religion from public buildings.
The law has since come to be regarded as a cornerstone of modern France, ensuring strict neutrality between Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and guaranteeing that citizens are seen as individuals-in-a-state and not as members-in-a-community."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-67657837

Given that Jewish voices didn't like Macron lighting that Jewish candle, it would seem that it's not just the secular sector that thinks so.

I've long favoured secular government, and felt that the nearest thing to harm that it does to any religious group, Christian or otherwise, is that it won't give them special privileges or discriminate against non-believers, which isn't really harm at all.

As for the OP's video, I've listened to 14 minutes of it so far, and the only thing I don't like about it is that he implies it's a good idea to try to "win people over," by which I guess he means persuading people to become or to remain Christians. I tend to feel that if a thing is good enough, people won't need persuading to identify with it.

After that, he may have stated the obvious a lot, but he sometimes did it in ways that I'd not heard before, and I think he did it well. He seems well aware of the hypocrisy of the loudest voices in American Christianity, and of the irrationality of a lot of their messages, e.g. that silly "if you don't stand for something you'll fall for anything" meme. Personally I didn't need him to tell me not to swallow that, as it was child's play for me to fail to believe it, but I concur that many out there do swallow it. I like the way he rationally unpicks some of the unsupported assertions that get past the goalie. So far, he's impressed me as a critical thinker. I don't quite know why he's a Christian yet, or what kind of Christian he is, but I'm surprised he's not secular, as I can't see how faith can survive in a good critical thinker's mind. But I might find out if I get to hear the rest of the video.

https://baptistnews.com/article/state-s ... udy-shows/

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Interesting. By what mechanism would government support for a religion have a negative impact on its popularity? I would have thought the general tendency would be for people to accept a thing more if their leaders approved of it, if it made any difference at all. Personally I tend to go the other way, but then I'm rather anti-authoritarian, uncommonly so, I've always thought. And given that religions are usually steeped in authoritarianism and in reverence for supposedly great deities, saints, and religious leaders, it seems even stranger.

The latter might be true in the short run, but not in the long run.

If a religion is sponsored by the government, then a lot of people will join it for reasons having nothing to do with any real belief in the religion, and a lot of people will join the clergy for opportunistic reasons, as a means to gain temporal power. This has the longterm effect of weakening the religion, as more and more people notice all the hypocrisy.

On the other hand, if a religion is NOT endorsed by the government, then its adherents are more likely to be sincere believers, with relatively few ulterior motives. Sincerity makes the religion more attractive, especially if the believers manage to create a strong grassroots sense of community.

Outright persecution can strengthen a religion even more, by guaranteeing that all its adherents are hardcore, and sometimes (e.g. in the case of the ancient Roman Christians) by inspiring popular admiration of the adherents' bravery. As they said in the early days of Christianity, "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church."

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 10 Dec 2023, 5:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It just amazes me how all these so-called Christians are all for Trump, when he is about the most unchristian person ever. Such hypocrisy.