Preachers to Stand Up to Christian Nationalists.
The "Preach and Pray to Confront Christian Nationalism" initiative is the latest event sponsored by Faithful America, an online community of progressive Christians that aim to combat the use of their faith being "hijacked" by the political right. The group recently protested a high-profile conservative speaker event in Miami, Florida, and has taken a public stand against several Republican politicians, including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously defended Christian nationalism, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Faithful America's newest initiative is aimed at taking a stand within the church building next, calling on pastors to "warn against effort to conflate Christian and American identities" while leading service on June 11.
"Toxic Christian nationalism is the single biggest threat to both democracy and the church, and we pastors have a moral obligation to loudly oppose it as a dangerous hijacking of our faith," Empsall told the outlet. "Unless we as Christians challenge this dangerous political ideology, its leaders will continue to twist our faith as they try to justify an agenda that is in actuality the antithesis of what Jesus taught: To love our neighbor and to care for the least among us."
Read the Full Article Here
_________________
Also worth reading,
Annals of Religion April 3, 2023 Issue
How Christian Is Christian Nationalism?
Many Americans who advocate it have little interest in religion and an aversion to American culture as it currently exists. What really defines the movement?
By Kelefa Sanneh
March 27, 2023
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023 ... ationalism
There is no canonical manifesto of Christian nationalism, and no single definition of it. In search of rigor, a pair of sociologists, Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, examined data from various surveys and tracked the replies to six propositions:
The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation.
The federal government should advocate Christian values.
The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.
The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces.
The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.
The federal government should allow prayer in public schools.
Respondents who answered more often in the affirmative (or, in the case of the third proposition, the negative) were judged to be more supportive of Christian nationalism, and the scholars conducted interviews with fifty subjects, to get a better sense of who believed what.
_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011
Also a useful reference,
https://www.christiansagainstchristiann ... /statement
As Christians, our faith teaches us everyone is created in God’s image and commands us to love one another. As Americans, we value our system of government and the good that can be accomplished in our constitutional democracy. Today, we are concerned about a persistent threat to both our religious communities and our democracy — Christian nationalism.
Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.
As Christians, we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. We believe that:
People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square.
Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.
One’s religious affiliation, or lack thereof, should be irrelevant to one’s standing in the civic community.
Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.
Religious instruction is best left to our houses of worship, other religious institutions and families.
America’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions.
Conflating religious authority with political authority is idolatrous and often leads to oppression of minority and other marginalized groups as well as the spiritual impoverishment of religion.
We must stand up to and speak out against Christian nationalism, especially when it inspires acts of violence and intimidation—including vandalism, bomb threats, arson, hate crimes, and attacks on houses of worship—against religious communities at home and abroad.
Whether we worship at a church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, America has no second-class faiths. All are equal under the U.S. Constitution. As Christians, we must speak in one voice condemning Christian nationalism as a distortion of the gospel of Jesus and a threat to American democracy.
_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011
One last reference, and they do not mince words,
https://www.ambs.edu/learn-now/what-is- ... tionalism/
With such a broad question, one place to start is by forming a working definition.
Christian nationalism, in short, is a worldview where one’s theological imagination is coopted by state power. It exchanges the church’s loyalty to the Lord of Peace for a false god fashioned by the myth of American exceptionalism.
In fact, Christian nationalism is a form of political idolatry that distorts our knowledge of God and neighbor through a xenophobic, racialized and militarized gospel that is at odds with the life and teachings of Jesus.
_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011
As for the technical step by step process I don't know, but the Bible's theology very much describes what allows it to be done, humanity's sin nature and the resultant pride, arrogance, and selfishness.
One sample,
https://biblehub.com/parallel/jeremiah/17-9.htm
_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011
As for the technical step by step process I don't know, but the Bible's theology very much describes what allows it to be done, humanity's sin nature and the resultant pride, arrogance, and selfishness.
One sample,
https://biblehub.com/parallel/jeremiah/17-9.htm
My understanding is that there still white christians who legit believe that black people are not human, For example in the christian bible school in South Africa it was taught (and I suspect still being taught) that when Noah collected two of every species on the Ark he also bought two black people (I kid you not).
In America white christians believed (right up to the late 1960s) that sons of Ham were condemned by god and cursed. You will find this still being preached by the Mormons (go check their bible) who believe a black person can't enter the kingdom of heaven.
So even when white Americans have separate burial plots (segregation from cradle to grave) there is no place in the after-life (god's heaven) either for black folk (and I suspect undesirable PoC).
The "Preach and Pray to Confront Christian Nationalism" initiative is the latest event sponsored by Faithful America, an online community of progressive Christians that aim to combat the use of their faith being "hijacked" by the political right. The group recently protested a high-profile conservative speaker event in Miami, Florida, and has taken a public stand against several Republican politicians, including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who previously defended Christian nationalism, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Faithful America's newest initiative is aimed at taking a stand within the church building next, calling on pastors to "warn against effort to conflate Christian and American identities" while leading service on June 11.
"Toxic Christian nationalism is the single biggest threat to both democracy and the church, and we pastors have a moral obligation to loudly oppose it as a dangerous hijacking of our faith," Empsall told the outlet. "Unless we as Christians challenge this dangerous political ideology, its leaders will continue to twist our faith as they try to justify an agenda that is in actuality the antithesis of what Jesus taught: To love our neighbor and to care for the least among us."
Read the Full Article Here
Halleluiah!
I stay away from extremists of both sides but am aware of the black people thing.
The Noah's ark claim I have not previously heard that I remember.
That I am aware of, and how anyone derived that Ham was black from a text which makes zero mention of the race of Noah's family is a mystery, except for that deceitful mind bit above.
This from the New Your Times way back in 2003 alludes to the time-honored practice of pretzel-twisting scripture to support what your sinful self is going to do anyway,
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/arts ... onale.html
_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011
During the apartheid era the German and Dutch speaking colonists in South Africa and Namibia were taught they were the chosen people to settle Africa and they were the direct descendants of Adam and Noah.
I was watching a documentary on the Dutch reformed church in South Africa and parishioners interviewed still believe this nonsense which helped treat African people like fauna. In AUstralia christians also believed nonsense like this which is why in Australia aboriginal people were classified under flora and fauna until they were given the right to vote in 1967
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/01/arts ... onale.html
Not satisfied with dominating blacks on earth, whites even depicted a heaven where blacks had second-class status. Masters and white ministers typically assigned blacks a subordinate place in heaven and warned them that their earthly obedience and work ethic would play a significant role in where they spent eternity. They either stated or implied that blacks would be inferior to whites in the afterlife because the concept of racial equality contradicted their contention that God sanctioned slavery. Instead, Southern whites usually portrayed a segregated heaven where blacks continued to serve whites. Sermons sometimes described blacks’ role in heaven as “working in God’s kitchen.” One white minister told slaves that heaven had a wall with holes in it that would separate them from their masters but permit blacks to see whites as they walked by.
https://www.faithandfreedom.com/race-se ... nd-heaven/
I suspect 99% of white christians think heaven will resemble their all white neighborhoods that they currently are beneficiaries of the old US Federal Housing Act
This white boy just got done working in his own kitchen after a 9pm grocery shopping trip.
$118 USD ain't buying what it used to.
High today was forecast to be around 92F, 33.3C, and this defective body no longer handles heat as well as in the California desert and the southeast swampland like I grew up in.
Naptime is approaching fast.
But yeah, mankind's inhumanity to other groups of mankind is legendary.
Especially in Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, where I grew up, where a lot of it was white mankind to other mankind, red and black specifically.
And that people supported it while claiming to be followers of Christ has to be the absolute award winning poster child for cognitive disconnect or whatever the phrase is; they definitely documentably had that deceitful mind mentioned earlier.
"Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world."
How so very very odd that adults who profess to love Jesus (mis)use (and abuse) Jesus to justify doing exactly the opposite of that.
Okay this defective body is about out of both physical and mental energy.
Y'all have a good night/morning/afternoon as per time zone.
_________________
"There are a thousand things that can happen when you go light a rocket engine, and only one of them is good."
Tom Mueller of SpaceX, in Air and Space, Jan. 2011
This white boy just got done working in his own kitchen after a 9pm grocery shopping trip.
$118 USD ain't buying what it used to.
High today was forecast to be around 92F, 33.3C, and this defective body no longer handles heat as well as in the California desert and the southeast swampland like I grew up in.
Naptime is approaching fast.
But yeah, mankind's inhumanity to other groups of mankind is legendary.
Especially in Georgia, Virginia, South Carolina, where I grew up, where a lot of it was white mankind to other mankind, red and black specifically.
And that people supported it while claiming to be followers of Christ has to be the absolute award winning poster child for cognitive disconnect or whatever the phrase is; they definitely documentably had that deceitful mind mentioned earlier.
"Red and yellow black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world."
How so very very odd that adults who profess to love Jesus (mis)use (and abuse) Jesus to justify doing exactly the opposite of that.
Okay this defective body is about out of both physical and mental energy.
Y'all have a good night/morning/afternoon as per time zone.
Have a good night
"most white Americans?" I think that's a bit of a stretch, even for you. I can't speak for South Africans, but attaching "most" to a statement like that is just blatant assumption.
Do I think some whites still think that way? I know they do. And when they make remarks at a table that are racist, 4 out of the 6 people sitting with them will be looking at them with disgust. So NO, not most. Some, yes. They aren't finding the welcoming committees they once did, though.
_________________
Disagreeing with you doesn't mean I hate you, it just means we disagree.
Neurocognitive exam in May 2019, diagnosed with ASD, Asperger's type in June 2019.
"most white Americans?" I think that's a bit of a stretch, even for you. I can't speak for South Africans, but attaching "most" to a statement like that is just blatant assumption.
Do I think some whites still think that way? I know they do. And when they make remarks at a table that are racist, 4 out of the 6 people sitting with them will be looking at them with disgust. So NO, not most. Some, yes. They aren't finding the welcoming committees they once did, though.
And then there is the awful truth
As of 2001, as many as 87% of Christian churches in the United States were completely made up of only white or African-American parishioners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_se ... ted_States
Kraichgauer
Veteran
Joined: 12 Apr 2010
Gender: Male
Posts: 47,781
Location: Spokane area, Washington state.
"most white Americans?" I think that's a bit of a stretch, even for you. I can't speak for South Africans, but attaching "most" to a statement like that is just blatant assumption.
Do I think some whites still think that way? I know they do. And when they make remarks at a table that are racist, 4 out of the 6 people sitting with them will be looking at them with disgust. So NO, not most. Some, yes. They aren't finding the welcoming committees they once did, though.
And then there is the awful truth
As of 2001, as many as 87% of Christian churches in the United States were completely made up of only white or African-American parishioners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_se ... ted_States
In all fairness, that's more due to historic church membership than to racism. For instance, African American Baptists will stick with their own doctrinal background, as will Irish Catholics, or German Lutherans. People go to the churches their parents and grandparents went to, which may be a legacy of prejudice, though it shouldn't be taken as an indication of current racism. To be sure, there are certain denominations of a political and theological right wing bent that still cling to bigotry, though I don't believe that includes all churches.
_________________
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
Similar Topics | |
---|---|
Christian Propaganda at Hwy 80 Rescue Mission |
13 Apr 2024, 4:14 pm |
Delusions of Grandeur - Religious/Christian
in Bipolar, Tourettes, Schizophrenia, and other Psychological Conditions |
29 Mar 2024, 8:25 pm |
A Deer Hunter's Tree Stand Is Taken Over By Barn Owls |
06 Apr 2024, 6:51 am |