Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged Christians

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Could the Christian Eucharist have begun as a psychedelic ritual? - Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...psychedelic-christianity

christianity psychedelics ritual history

shared by Javier E on 25 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The main thesis of Muraresku's exceptional investigative work: the modern Eucharist is a placebo variation of a psychedelic brew that originally represented the body and blood of Christ, as was likely practiced during the secret Eleusinian Mysteries.
  • This power play—one that, Muraresku writes, potentially demonized psychedelics and ousted them from spiritual rituals, as well as the keepers of ancient ritualistic secrets, women—has forced us to attribute the foundations of Western civilization to Christianity.
  • The real lineage belongs to Greece. Muraresku, who holds a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, spent 12 years investigating this book due to his longstanding love of the Classics, which he believes to be the West's actual inspiration.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Paul's letters, which comprise 21 of 27 books in the New Testament, were addressed to "Greek speakers in Greek places." While the roots of Christianity are in Galilee and Jerusalem, the seeds were planted in Corin, Ephesus, and Rome. And if the Greek language underlies early Christian thought, then so do the philosophy and rituals.
  • "Would you study the Torah with somebody who didn't know Hebrew? Would you study the Quran with somebody who didn't know Arabic? It's really hard to make a left turn into Christianity and divorce everything that came before, which is not what happened, obviously."
  • Muraresku was drawn into this research due to the mystical concept of dying before dying, as expressed during the Mysteries of Eleusis. He uncovered parallel narratives while conducting research with God's librarian in the Vatican Secret Archives
  • "This is something preserved in St. Paul's monastery, for example: if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. That's the key. It's not psychedelics; it's not drugs. It's this concept of navigating the liminal space between what you and I are doing right now, and dreaming, and death. In that state, the mystics tell us, is the potential to grasp a very different view of reality."
  • Muraresku, who has never taken a psychedelic drug, read about terminally-ill patients having a similar revelation after ingesting psilocybin. "Dying before dying" succinctly describes what they felt; the overwhelming sensations prepared them to actually die with confidence and grace. Could this be the same experience discovered by initiates at Eleusis and, later, early Christians?
  • The key to immortality might be dying before dying, and psychedelics appear to be one method for unlocking this mystery.
  • Muraresku spends the bulk of 400 pages chasing down archaeological and scriptural evidence for spiked wine. The wine and wafer of today is a far cry from the kukeon of the ancient Greeks, drunk by pilgrims, who were given the title epoptes, "the one who has seen it all." That's a heavy ask for a grape.
  • the Greek language is descriptively rich and extensive, yet these philosophers somehow never invented a word for "alcohol." Their chalices weren't for wine alone.
  • But if you were to mix that grape with blue water lily (with its psychoactive compounds, apomorphine and nuciferin), henbane, lizards—ancestral food choices that put Brooklyn hipsters to shame—or ergot, the fungal disease that gives LSD its kick, you might just "see it all."
  • While he calls psychedelics "just one, perhaps very tiny piece" of early Christian rituals, it could be an essential one. Sadly, archaeochemistry isn't the most funded discipline,
  • "It's no mistake that the Eucharist is described as the 'drug of immortality' by the early Church fathers because there was this sense of really sophisticated botanical understanding that goes all the way back to Homer. Obviously, it goes back a lot further
  • part of the reason I wrote the book is to show people that within Western civilization—at its roots, in fact—is this very pharmacopoeia. This tradition was certainly there, and it begs the question of how prevalent and widespread it really was."
  • While in the Archives, Muraresku found evidence of at least 45,000 so-called witches being executed, with "countless more" tortured or imprisoned. The patriarchy initiated a pattern:"[The leadership] wasn't just trying to rid Christianity of folk healers. It was trying to erase a system of knowledge that had survived for centuries in the shadows."
  • The knowledge was the pharmacological expertise these women had amassed over untold generations. The two banes of the Church—mind-altering substances that afford the initiate a mindset comparable (or, perhaps exactly akin) to prophets and sages and women, the holders of the Secrets—were swept up in one millennia-long cover-up
  • Interestingly, this 12-year-long odyssey only deepened Muraresku's Catholicism, which is rooted in the Jesuit tradition. As he says, Christianity—a religion that was a cult for over 300 years before being catapulted onto the global stage—has always evolved. Could the Church possibly change again and offer the psychedelic sacrament that might lie at the heart of the religion?
  • As Muraresku concludes during our talk, each attempt to get back to the roots, beginning with Martin Luther and continuing right through to Pope Francis, is an analysis of the origins of the faith. To know your history is to understand where you're heading.
  • "When I look and see Hellenic Christianity that was very much at the roots of the Catholic Church, and the more I found that Greek influence underneath the Vatican—in some cases, literally, in the catacombs—the more I began to really love and appreciate what this was all about.
Javier E

It's Time to Stop Rationalizing and Enabling Evangelical Vaccine Rejection - by David F... - 0 views

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...o-stop-rationalizing-christian

vaccine rejection moral foundation Christian morality framework liberty libertinism rights

shared by Javier E on 29 Aug 21 - No Cached
  • As we approach nine months of vaccine availability and nine months of flood-the-zone coverage of vaccine safety and efficacy, it is clear that much (though certainly not all) of our remaining refusal problem is not one of information but one of moral formation itself. The very moral framework of millions of our fellow citizens—the way in which they understand the balance between liberty and responsibility—is gravely skewed. 
  • To understand the skew, it’s first necessary to understand the proper balance, and while we have vaccine endorsements from Christian leaders from across the Catholic/Protestant spectrum, we also have guidance from church fathers—individuals who no one can claim have caved to some “establishment” or are motivated by supposed invites to mythical beltway “cocktail parties.” For example, read these famous words from Martin Luther, written during a plague in his own time:
  • Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Christian vaccine refusal not only rejects self-care, it enhances risks to innocent and vulnerable neighbors. Even vaccinated people can catch relatively rare breakthrough cases. And every person—regardless of vaccination status—is vulnerable to the strains placed on a region’s hospitals when COVID runs rampant. 
  • As a person created in the image of God, taking care of yourself is an independent good. Taking care of yourself so that you can care for others is an even nobler good. 
  • The balance is clear. It is incumbent on the Christian to take care of themselves, including by taking medicine “in order not to become contaminated” (a nice definition of a vaccine before vaccines were invented). To the extent that he or she takes risks, those risks should be on behalf of others
  • In addition, my liberty doesn’t extend to materially impairing your ability to pursue happiness.
  • The idea that liberty has limits is inherent in the American social compact
  • Through more than two centuries of controversy and progress, our classical liberal legal system is learning to harmonize these three unalienable rights.
  • I have liberty, yes, but my liberty does not extend to taking or endangering your life
  • I also fear that the relentless right-wing political focus on religious liberty has obscured two realities—that our liberties have limits when they collide with the rights of others, and that the exercise of our liberty carries with it profound moral responsibility. 
  • In March I wrote to warn that Christian vaccine hesitancy was a looming national problem. That which we have feared has come to pass. Indeed, as both the geographic concentrations of unvaxxed Americans and the survey data demonstrate, Christian vaccine refusal is helping sustain this pandemic:
  • Foremost among them are protections for life and health.
  • By contrast, what does the anti-vax Christian seek? The liberty to risk both the lives of others (through the physical danger of COVID and/or the danger of swamped medical facilities) and their pursuit of happiness (through the continued physical, economic, and social strains of a pandemic extended in part but the choices of anti-vax citizens). 
  • let’s be honest and clear. The majority of Christians seeking religious exemptions are using religion as a mere pretext for their real concern—be it fear of the shot or the simple desire to do what they want.
  • I’m quite concerned that long-standing, justified Christian concerns for religious liberty have inadvertently created a sense of religious entitlement that obscures the desperate need for religious responsibility.
  • For the Christian believer, the pursuit of freedom is inseparable from the pursuit of virtue. We do not seek liberty simply to satisfy our desires or to appease our fears. In fact, when we pursue the freedom to make our neighbors sick, we violate the social compact and undermine our moral standing in politics, law, and culture. Christian libertinism becomes a long-term threat to religious liberty itself. 
  • Our founders recognized the threat of libertinism to liberty. “Our Constitution,” John Adams wrote, “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” In fact, a sufficient degree of vice would, Adams argued, “break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”
  • it is increasingly clear that many of the remaining holdouts need their hearts to change before their minds will change. It’s their moral framework that’s broken, and when that framework is broken, reason and virtue have difficulty penetrating a hardened heart.
  • The proper framework is easy to articulate, yet hard to create. Take prudent measures to protect yourself. When you choose to take risks, take risks for others. And always recognize that liberty isn’t license. Believers should seek freedom to pursue virtue, not to indulge their desires or appease their fears. 
  • In more prosaic legal terms, the state is able to regulate even the strongest of liberties when it possesses a “compelling governmental interest” and places those regulations in proper limits
  • Now is the time to take a clear stand. Not in a way that mocks or condescends, but one can be firm while also being respectful. As the Apostle Paul told Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.” The power is not political power, but the power of God over the fears of man. The love is for God and for our neighbor. And sound judgment should help us separate lies from truth and tell us that no argument for liberty should trump our responsibility to spare our nation and our neighbors and finally take the vaccine. 
jlessner

Unaffiliated and Underrepresented - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ated-and-underrepresented.html

religion christianity US politics history culture

shared by jlessner on 18 May 15 - No Cached
  • President Obama is a Christian (despite the fact that most Republicans apparently still believe that his “deep down” beliefs are Muslim, according to one poll conducted last year.)
  • In fact, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, there have only been four “religiously unaffiliated heads of state in American history,” the last being Rutherford B. Hayes, who left office in 1881. This, however, does not mean that they did not believe in God.
  • Now it is almost unconscionable to think of a president who didn’t believe in God. In fact, a poll last year by the Pew Research Center found that not believing in God was the most negative trait a presidential candidate could have among a variety of options, even more negative than having an extramarital affair.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Furthermore, in the House and Senate at the beginning of this session of Congress, 92 percent of members were Christian, 5 percent were Jewish, 0.4 percent each were Buddhist and Muslim and just 0.2 percent were unaffiliated. For those doing the math, that leaves only one member unaffiliated: Representative Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona.
  • This begs the question: How much longer will this be thought of as a strictly Christian nation (if it ever really was one) with an overwhelming Christian government?
  • In March, Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton University, argued in The New York Times Sunday Review that “the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.” This, according to Kruse, began with anti-New Deal business leaders in the 1930s who linked capitalism to Christianity as a public relations move.
  • We already see a rising sentiment in America that Christianity is under attack and losing the culture wars. Some even try to link Christian persecution abroad to the plight of Christians in this country.
  • If the unaffiliated are to make their presence felt in terms of more representation, it will most likely come on the Democratic side. As PRRI points out, in 1980 unaffiliated support for Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan was by a margin in the single digits by percentage; in 2012, they supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 51 percentage points.
Javier E

A Tough Season for Believers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20douthat.html

Christianity history US

shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • our society reaps enormous benefits from religious engagement, while suffering from few of the potential downsides. Widespread churchgoing seems to make Americans more altruistic and more engaged with their communities, more likely to volunteer and more inclined to give to secular and religious charities. Yet at the same time, thanks to Americans’ ever-increasing tolerance, we’ve been spared the kind of sectarian conflict that often accompanies religious zeal.
  • In the last 50 years, the Christian churches have undergone what “American Grace” describes as a shock and two aftershocks. The initial earthquake was the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which undercut religious authority as it did all authority, while dealing a particular blow to Christian sexual ethics. The first aftershock was the rise of religious conservatism, and particularly evangelical faith, as a backlash against the cultural revolution’s excesses. But now we’re living through the second aftershock, a backlash to that backlash — a revolt against the association between Christian faith and conservative politics,
  • Having popularized the term “culture war” two decades ago, Hunter now argues that the “war” footing has led American Christians into a cul-de-sac. It has encouraged both conservative and liberal believers to frame their mission primarily in terms of conflict, and to express themselves almost exclusively in the “language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment and desire for conquest.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future.
  • the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life
  • believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation.
  • The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities,
  • Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.
Javier E

Evangelical Christians owe their fellow Americans something better - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...low-americans-something-better

christians evangelical trump election 2016

shared by Javier E on 16 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • According to exit polling, about 80 percent of evangelical Christians voted for President-elect Donald Trump, a man who personifies none of the values evangelical Christian leaders say they embrace. 
  • “To clarify, 80% of white people who voted and call themselves ‘evangelical’ or ‘born again’ voted for Trump,”
  • “This is a sociological category more than a theological one. Consider that just 56% of voters who said they attend religious services ‘weekly or more’ voted for Trump.'”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Conservative scholar and former adviser to President George W. Bush Peter Wehner argues that evangelical Christian voters now have a special burden. “Trump voters — the fully committed and the partially committed — made his presidency possible, so they have part ownership in it. We’ll see the level of competence and honor and toxicity that will characterize the next four years.”
  • “The point here is that our allegiances have to be to things beyond party and tribe and ideology; there needs to be an allegiance to truth, as best as we mere mortals can discern it – and in the case of Evangelical Christians, an allegiance to a Lord who asks of us to act justly and to love mercy.
  • “One of the things that really concerns me as a Christian is how in the political arena our faith has become weaponized, how our political loyalties disfigure our faith commitments rather than our faith commitments shaping our politics.
  • “The idea that Trump’s most vocal supporters will in the future weigh in on the importance of character in public leaders is risible,” Wehner says. “That argument is now gone, at least for a time. Many Evangelical Christians marched under the banner — some even helped raise the banner — for a man whose personality is characterized by vindictiveness, cruelty and coarseness.” He explains, “They rallied behind a man who in my estimation embodies a Nietzschean ethic rather than a Christian one, and there’s a price that will be paid for that. Trump supporters would say it was worth it in order to prevent a Clinton presidency.”
  • “In many ways empathy and sympathy – what Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments referred to as ‘fellow feeling’ — are lost, or at least de-valued, virtues.” Ultimately, however, Wehner, like Teetsel, comes down on the side of engagement, explaining that “politics, for all its mundane aspects and downsides, is still a means through which we pursue justice, protect human dignity and advance human flourishing, and those things are never unimportant.”
  • “In the last few decades – and especially in the last year — Christians have often done politics poorly,” Wehner observes. “So do most other groups in democracy. The answer is to do politics better. I think we can, and I hope we do. Because this nation is in a difficult place just now, in need of healing and reform and restoration.” People of different faiths or of no faith at all certainly can agree with that.
Javier E

Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ral-christianity-be-saved.html

religion liberalism decline

shared by Javier E on 16 Jul 12 - Cached
  • decline is the latest chapter in a story dating to the 1960s. The trends unleashed in that era — not only the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism — threw all of American Christianity into crisis, and ushered in decades of debate over how to keep the nation’s churches relevant and vital.
  • The most successful Christian bodies have often been politically conservative but theologically shallow, preaching a gospel of health and wealth rather than the full New Testament message.
  • The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life. No one should wish for its extinction, or for a world where Christianity becomes the exclusive property of the political right.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • liberal Christianity has simply collapsed. Practically every denomination — Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian — that has tried to adapt itself to contemporary liberal values has seen an Episcopal-style plunge in church attendance. Within the Catholic Church, too, the most progressive-minded religious orders have often failed to generate the vocations necessary to sustain themselves.
  • What should be wished for, instead, is that liberal Christianity recovers a religious reason for its own existence. As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”
  • Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism.
Javier E

A Christian Nation? Since When? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ristian-nation-since-when.html

history politics Christian New Deal libertarian capitalism corporate ideology eisenhower spiritual

shared by Javier E on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • For all our talk about separation of church and state, religious language has been written into our political culture in countless ways. It is inscribed in our pledge of patriotism, marked on our money, carved into the walls of our courts and our Capitol. Perhaps because it is everywhere, we assume it has been from the beginning.
  • the founding fathers didn’t create the ceremonies and slogans that come to mind when we consider whether this is a Christian nation. Our grandfathers did.
  • Back in the 1930s, business leaders found themselves on the defensive. Their public prestige had plummeted with the Great Crash; their private businesses were under attack by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal from above and labor from below. To regain the upper hand, corporate leaders fought back on all fronts. They waged a figurative war in statehouses and, occasionally, a literal one in the streets; their campaigns extended from courts of law to the court of public opinion.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • But nothing worked particularly well until they began an inspired public relations offensive that cast capitalism as the handmaiden of Christianity.The two had been described as soul mates before, but in this campaign they were wedded in pointed opposition to the “creeping socialism” of the New Deal
  • Accordingly, throughout the 1930s and ’40s, corporate leaders marketed a new ideology that combined elements of Christianity with an anti-federal libertarianism.
  • Powerful business lobbies like the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers led the way, promoting this ideology’s appeal in conferences and P.R. campaigns. Generous funding came from prominent businessmen
  • In a shrewd decision, these executives made clergymen their spokesmen.
  • businessmen worked to recruit clergy through private meetings and public appeals. Many answered the call
  • Uncoupling the language of “freedom under God” from its Christian libertarian roots, Eisenhower erected a bigger revival tent, welcoming Jews and Catholics alongside Protestants, and Democrats as well as Republicans. Rallying the country, he advanced a revolutionary array of new religious ceremonies and slogans.
  • In his initial ministry, in the early 1950s, Mr. Graham supported corporate interests so zealously that a London paper called him “the Big Business evangelist.” The Garden of Eden, he informed revival attendees, was a paradise with “no union dues, no labor leaders, no snakes, no disease.” In the same spirit, he denounced all “government restrictions” in economic affairs, which he invariably attacked as “socialism.”
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower fulfilled that prediction. With Mr. Graham offering Scripture for Ike’s speeches, the Republican nominee campaigned in what he called a “great crusade for freedom.
  • Elected in a landslide, Eisenhower told Mr. Graham that he had a mandate for a “spiritual renewal.”
  • Although Eisenhower relied on Christian libertarian groups in the campaign, he parted ways with their agenda once elected. The movement’s corporate sponsors had seen religious rhetoric as a way to dismantle the New Deal state.
  • But the newly elected president thought that a fool’s errand. “Should any political party attempt to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs,” he noted privately, “you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”
  • Unlike those who held public spirituality as a means to an end, Eisenhower embraced it as an end unto itself.
  • The most important clergyman for Christian libertarianism, though, was the Rev. Billy Graham.
  • The rest of Washington consecrated itself, too. The Pentagon, State Department and other executive agencies quickly instituted prayer services of their own. In 1954, Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. It placed a similar slogan, “In God We Trust,” on postage that year and voted the following year to add it to paper money; in 1956, it became the nation’s official motto.
  • During these years, Americans were told, time and time again, not just that the country should be a Christian nation, but that it always had been one. They soon came to think of the United States as “one nation under God.” They’ve believed it ever since.
Javier E

Opinion | One Reason the Trump Fever Won't Break - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alism-trump-renew-america.html

christian Christianist nationalism irrationality history crisis culture politics US GOP trump

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • most observers and critics are paying too much attention to the wrong group of Christian nationalists. We mainly think of Christian nationalism as a theology or at least as a philosophy
  • In reality, the Christian nationalist movement that actually matters is rooted in emotion and ostensibly divine revelation, and it’s that emotional and spiritual movement that so stubbornly clings to Donald Trump.
  • Arguments about the proper role of virtue in the public square, for example, or arguments over the proper balance between order and liberty, are helpless in the face of prophecies, like the declarations from Christian “apostles” that Donald Trump is God’s appointed leader, destined to save the nation from destruction.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Essays and books about philosophy and theology are important for determining the ultimate health of the church, but on the ground or in the pews? They’re much less important than emotion, prophecy and spiritualism.
  • Christians will claim that the Holy Spirit spoke to them directly. As one longtime friend told me, “David, I was with you on opposing Trump until the Holy Spirit told me that God had appointed him to lead.”
  • a key part of Trump’s appeal is the joy and fellowship that Trump supporters feel with each other. But there’s one last element that cements that bond with Trump: faith, including a burning sense of certainty that by supporting him, they are instruments of God’s divine plan.
  • It’s not a serious position to argue that this diverse, secularizing country will shed liberal democracy for Catholic or Protestant religious rule. But it’s exceedingly dangerous and destabilizing when millions of citizens believe that the fate of the church is bound up in the person they believe is the once and future president of the United States.
  • That’s why the Trump fever won’t break. That’s why even the most biblically based arguments against Trump fall on deaf ears. That’s why the very act of Christian opposition to Trump is often seen as a grave betrayal of Christ himself.
  • In 2024, this nation will wrestle with Christian nationalism once again, but it won’t be the nationalism of ideas. It will be a nationalism rooted more in emotion and mysticism than theology. The fever may not break until the “prophecies” change, and that is a factor that is entirely out of our control.
Javier E

Timothy Keller: Becoming Stewards of Hope-Part 1 - outreachmagazine.com - 0 views

outreachmagazine.com/...g-stewards-of-hope-part-1.html

hope christianity peace liberal conservative god anxiety

shared by Javier E on 19 May 23 - No Cached
  • Imagine if you were middle-aged in 1948. You’d have lived through a worldwide influenza pandemic, two world wars and an economic depression all within the space of about 40 years. Life seemed fragile. It felt like anything could happen. Nothing seemed secure.
  • I was born two years after Auden’s Pulitzer, in 1950. The feeling was that even if there were, say, an economic downturn, things would be better afterward than they had been before. We just assumed that our lives and society were going to get better and better. There was a long period in the second half of the 20th century, in which the anxiety that had defined the first half went away. For a couple generations we lived largely free of insecurity about the world in which we lived.
  • Christian distinctives push against culture. But then we go into the culture with our hope. We simply try to be Christians in the culture, living with integrity and compassion
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • That was a very new idea, this idea of progress. It is not the way most people in history have understood their times. Most ancient peoples either saw history as cyclical or as declining from a past golden age. Nobody thought that humanity’s best years were ahead. Nisbet said that this idea came originally out of Christianity, but then during the Enlightenment it had been secularized.
  • Instead of seeking to ground that optimism in the fact that God has the future in his hands, we collectively said, “No, we’ve got the future in our hands.” That particular story about the human race, which is a modern and Western story, started to lose altitude in the first part of the 20th century. Although there was a small uptick, it went on life support as decades passed. I would say it’s really dying now.
  • Mark Lilla has written a couple of interesting books, one on the conservative mind and one on the liberal mind
  • conservatives have a nostalgia for the past. They feel like things are getting worse. Liberals and progressives have the opposite perspective. They see the past as being horrible. They think our hope is in the future. Even Lilla, who is not a believer, noted that Christianity had a different story than either. He observed that Saint Augustine’s book The City of God rejected both conservative and liberal perspectives.
  • Augustine believed that “the city of man” is bad and “the city of God” is good, and that eventually the city of God is going to supplant the city of man. He said you cannot identify any particular political order or any particular city of man with the city of God, and that our true hope lies in the new heavens and earth of the future. That gets rid of the conservative idea that that everything in the past was better and there is no hope. However, it also gets rid of the liberal idea that if we all just pull ourselves together we can bring about the city of God on earth. It gives us a chastened hope for the future rather than a utopian one.
  • Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, observes that empirically we are living healthier and longer lives. Nevertheless, people feel more culturally and emotionally dislocated than ever. Younger generations are experiencing far more depression and anxiety than those that came before them. We can feel the cultural anxiety today. There’s a real pessimism about the future that I’ve not seen in my lifetime. We find ourselves in a new age of anxiety.
  • The gospel creates virtues in Christians. If Christians multiply in the culture, we can work for a more just society. And even if we do not immediately bring about a perfectly just society, we have the hope that eventually that’s going to be established on earth by God.
  • We do not have to become the darkness to bring this about. We do not have to say, “Well, we have to break eggs to make an omelet.” We do not have to trample on people because we think that is our only hope for a better world. It is not
  • We can remain faithful in our hope, even if it means that we ourselves do not necessarily see the immediate success we want. To be hopeful means to do what we are supposed to do because our eventual prospects are certain.
  • In English, hope can mean the opposite of the biblical sense—to be uncertain. If you say, “I know it’s going to happen,” that is certainty. If you say, “I hope it will happen,” that is uncertainty
  • My son Jonathan is an urban planner. In his mind, he has all these exciting ideas about what a great city would look like. Well, as a Christian, he realizes that in his entire life he may only get one “leaf” done of his beautiful vision. We all face that reality. Nevertheless, we live with the hope that there will be a tree. There will be a city. There is going to be a just society. Beauty will be here. Poverty and war will be gone. We are not the saviors. Instead, hope can set us free from both the despair of nihilism and the naivety of utopianism.
  • The word hope in English has declined in meaning. We use it as if it were a pleasant wish. What you are describing, like the Bible’s definition, is obviously richer.
  • We have a translation problem. Like the word shalom, which is usually translated into English as “peace.
  • There is a famous short story by J.R.R. Tolkien called “Leaf by Niggle.” Niggle is a painter who spends his entire life trying to paint a mural of a tree. By the end of his life, he has only gotten one leaf completed. Then he dies. But when he gets to heaven, he sees the tree that was always there in his mind. That is the way of the Christian
  • The Greek word elpis means assurance of the future—assured anticipation. You are sure of your hope. Quite the opposite of how we typically use the word in English.
  • Eventually everybody will get to the place where it matters personally whether the resurrection of Jesus Christ really happened. Because if it did, then there is hope for you, no matter what happens
  • I did not want to try to redo what N.T. Wright did. He wrote what is in my opinion the best book on the resurrection in the last 100 years, The Resurrection of the Son of God. He traces significant evidence that the resurrection accounts were not merely made up. They have all the marks of historic eyewitness testimony—including bizarre details no one would include in a fictional account.
  • Wright said there were only two ways that people had ever thought of resurrection before Jesus. The first was as resuscitation—like Lazarus. The person was dead, then something miraculous happens and he gets up out of the tomb, in which case you recognize him because he still looks the same, right? The second idea of resurrection is of the transformation of the person into an angelic or radiant being. But the idea that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead as recognizable, yet somehow different from the way he had looked before his death (so much so that even his closest friends didn’t at first recognize him) is so utterly counterintuitive. No one would have made that up.
  • Why does the resurrection matter? Well, as one reason among billions, because I have cancer. Because one of the things you do when you have cancer is ask how you are going to deal with it. That experience has required that I increase my hope, by reading the Word, especially on the resurrection of Jesus. Because if he were raised from the dead, then basically, it is going to be OK. If he were raised from the dead, then Christianity is basically right, and the hope it gives is an infallible hope.
  • as a mortal person facing his own death, the resurrection brings perspective to our theology. At this stage in my life, I am looking at the big things of which I can be sure
  • when it comes to the resurrection? If I am sure of that, then I am OK. I can handle anything that life—or death—throws at me.
Javier E

How Anti-Christian Is Fox News? « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...how-anti-christian-is-fox-news

Fox News Christianity

shared by Javier E on 15 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • It has been fascinating lately to watch Fox News go after the Pope for reiterating long-standing Catholic and Christian doctrine about the false god of materialism. By echoing Jesus’ insistence that you cannot know the kingdom of Heaven if you are bound up in wealth and possessions, the Pope drew charges of Marxism (which is anathema to Christians for the same reasons that unrestrained market capitalism is) and engaging in politics (from a channel that has long insisted that Christianity cannot and should not be relegated to the private sphere). Maybe it’s because they have not subjected their own views to anything passing as critical engagement for so long that they have forgotten that Christianity is deeply, profoundly opposed to any system of government that values human beings by the material wealth they create.
  • When you absorb the constant racial undertones on Fox, and its constant worship of the god of money, when you absorb their long list of fears about the “other”, whether immigrants or gays or the poor, when you recall their glee at the torture of human beings, or their passion for the death penalty, you can’t help but wonder if they are not one of the most powerful forces against Christianity in our culture.
Javier E

The Foolish, Historically Illiterate, Incredible Response to Obama's Prayer Breakfast S... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...385246

racism history obama Civil War religion justification deification infantilization

shared by Javier E on 08 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Inveighing against the barbarism of ISIS, the president pointed out that it would be foolish to blame Islam, at large, for its atrocities. To make this point he noted that using religion to brutalize other people is neither a Muslim invention nor, in America, a foreign one: Lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.
  • The "all too often" could just as well be "almost always." There were a fair number of pretexts given for slavery and Jim Crow, but Christianity provided the moral justification
  • Stephens went on to argue that the "Christianization of the barbarous tribes of Africa" could only be accomplished through enslavement. And enslavement was not made possible through Robert's Rules of Order, but through a 250-year reign of mass torture, industrialized murder, and normalized rape—tactics which ISIS would find familiar. Its moral justification was not "because I said so," it was "Providence," "the curse against Canaan," "the Creator," "and Christianization." In just five years, 750,000 Americans died because of this peculiar mission of "Christianization." Many more died before, and many more died after. In his "Segregation Now" speech, George Wallace invokes God 27 times and calls the federal government opposing him "a system that is the very opposite of Christ."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Christianity did not "cause" slavery, anymore than Christianity "caused" the civil-rights movement. The interest in power is almost always accompanied by the need to sanctify that power. That is what the Muslims terrorists in ISIS are seeking to do today, and that is what Christian enslavers and Christian terrorists did for the lion's share of American history.
  • That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, "the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” by a former Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics.
  • related to that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct.
Javier E

How a Rising Religious Movement Rationalizes the Christian Grasp for Power - The French... - 0 views

frenchpress.thedispatch.com/...eligious-movement-rationalizes

christian christianist dominionism politics crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 28 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • The origin of the Seven Mountain Mandate rests with an alleged divine revelation shared by Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With a Mission, and the theologian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer
  • They’re among the most influential Evangelicals of the modern age.
  • In its distilled essence, the Seven Mountain concept describes seven key cultural/religious institutions that should be influenced and transformed by Christian believers to create “Godly change” in America. The key to transforming the nation rests with reaching the family, the church, education, media, arts, the economy, and the government with the truth of the Gospel.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • To put it another way: If God asks mankind to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God,” He does not intend that those virtues be confined to church. The fruits of the spirit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control”—are not mere Sunday School values. They should pervade our interactions with the wider world.
  • Moreover, if and when those seven key institutions become instruments of injustice, Christians should respond. To take some obvious examples, if the “mountain” of government turns against its citizens, Christians have an obligation to stand with the oppressed. If the mountain of popular culture transforms the beauty of art into the perversion of porn, Christians must resist. And if the mountain of education teaches falsehoods, Christians have an obligation to tell the truth. 
  • But there is an immense and important difference between seeking justice and seeking power. In fact, the quest for power can sideline or derail the quest for justice. And that’s where we get to the real problem—the difference between a Seven Mountain concept and a Seven Mountain mandate or Seven Mountain dominionism.
  • In 2013, Bethel Church pastor Bill Johnson and author Lance Wallnau co-authored a short book called Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate. In that book, here’s how Wallnau described the stakes:
  • Each of these seven mountains represents an individual sphere of influence that shapes the way people think. These mountains are crowned with high places that modern-day kings occupy as ideological strongholds. These strongholds are, in reality, houses built out of thoughts. These thought structures are fortified with spiritual reinforcement that shapes the culture and establishes the spiritual climate of each nation. I sensed the Lord telling me, “He who can take these mountains can take the harvest of nations.” (Emphasis added.)
  • Wallnau went on to describe the importance of “mountain kings”—those individuals who have a “position in a high place” and who wield influence over “their own sphere directly and other spheres indirectly.” It is thus of urgent importance for Christians to reach, influence, or even become these “mountain kings.”
  • At its most extreme edges, Seven Mountain dominionism holds that Christ will not return unless and until the church successfully invades or “occupies” each of the seven key spheres of life.
  • Astute readers will by now have noticed two things. First, you’ll note the extent to which the heart of this strategy (or mandate) isn’t based on clear scriptural commands but rather on claimed special revelations from God. Second, you’ll note how much it emphasizes the importance of placing people in positions of power and control
  • The business of shifting culture or transforming nations does not require a majority of conversions.” What does it require? “We need more disciples in the right places, the high places.”
  • What is the alternative to the pursuit of power? I prefer the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr. “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”
  • Christians can never forget that they live in what my pastor once called an “upside-down kingdom.” The last shall be first. If you want to save your life, you’ll lose it, but if you lose your life for Christ, you’ll save it. And don’t forget, the Son of God himself spent his entire life on earth far from the mountaintop.
Javier E

Lexington - The mark of Cain | United States | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...the-mark-of-cain

christianity evangelical racism history politics culture

shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • FEW THINGS about Donald Trump’s rise are harder to explain than the fact that some of the most religious Americans were behind it.
  • In 2016, 81% of white evangelicals voted for him.
  • The popular explanation for this strange nexus is that white Christians overlooked the president’s failings because of his willingness to fight their corner, by nominating conservative judges and opposing abortion
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Mr Jones finds white evangelicals especially likely to express goodwill to African-Americans. But dig into their unconscious biases, he claims, and you see a different picture emerge. “In survey after survey” white Christians are much likelier than non-religious whites to express negative attitudes towards minorities and complacency about the rough treatment of African-Americans, among other indicators of racism.
  • Melding history, theology, statistical modelling and his own experience, as a Southern Baptist seminarian, Mr Jones suggests in “White Too Long” that white Christian traditions are so steeped in historic racism that “the norms of white supremacy have become deeply and broadly integrated into white Christian identity.”
  • Another explanation, argues a new book by Robert P. Jones, an authority on American religion and politics, and head of the Public Religion Research Institute, is that white Christians were especially receptive to Mr Trump’s race-baiting. Mr Jones also offers a grim theory for why this was the case.
  • Asked whether police killings of black men were isolated incidents, 71% of white evangelicals said they were, compared with 38% of non-religious whites.
  • white evangelicals are likely to be old, conservative and live in the South—characteristics that point to unreconstructed views on race independently of religion
  • two qualifiers are often added
  • Second, while people who simply identify as white evangelicals might hold such views, the most pious do not.
  • Mr Jones is unconvinced by either qualifier. He controls for age, partisanship and geography in his model—and finds the same pattern.
  • And he finds that practising evangelicals score the highest on his index of racism.
  • He concludes that white Christian identity is “independently predictive” of racist attitudes.
  • But, Mr Jones argues, the history of American Christianity makes this likelier than it might sound. The dominant southern strains of white evangelicalism were formed amid and sometimes in response to slavery.
  • Such claims are shocking.
  • The Southern Baptists, America’s biggest denomination, was launched to defend it biblically—which it did by representing black skin as the accursed “mark of Cain”. Many southern pastors were cheerleaders for the Confederacy, then shaped the culture of nostalgia and lament (the “religion of the lost cause”) that precluded a reckoning with Jim Crow’s legacy.
  • Post-war pessimism also led evangelicals to adopt a premillennialist theology, which viewed the world as irredeemable by man. Instead of wasting their time on social justice, it urged them to focus on their individual spirituality
  • The perverse effect, argues Mr Jones, was to imbue white evangelicals with “an unassailable sense of religious purity” that blinded them to their own behaviour.
  • As African-Americans fled north, mainstream protestants and Catholics increasingly adopted the mores of southern evangelicals.
  • The moral majority of the 1970s and 80s, fuelled by a Catholic aversion to abortion and common fears of the civil-rights movement, was the culmination of this fusion
  • Mr Jones’s model suggests the same racial attitudes are common to most white Christian traditions. Evangelicals are merely the most extreme case.
  • This troubling past was always the real mark of Cain, Mr Jones writes. And “today God’s anguished questions—‘Where is your brother?’ and ‘What have you done?’—still hang in the air like morning mist on the Mississippi River.
Javier E

Opinion | No, Eric Metaxas, Jesus wasn?t White - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-aff6-220dd3a14741_story.html

jesus white christianity slavery

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • The embrace of a Scandinavian Jesus is not just foolish but part of a broader historical amnesia. Jesus not only looked like a Middle Eastern Jew; this identity also made him part of an oppressed, dispossessed group. A sense of Jewish powerlessness was the social context for his ministry, and his teaching reflected it.
  • Jesus offered little advice to the privileged, except to humble themselves and give their wealth away. He had much to say about the inherent value of the poor, the meek and the mourning. This message was one reason he suffered a brutal, unjust, suffocating death at the hands of public authorities.
  • The Christian message has always been more easily and fully understood by those who lack social privilege — by those who see the face of a nonwhite Jesus.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Against Douglass’s expectation, Christian conversion tended to make slave-owners less humane. Because their version of faith justified and normalized slavery, their oppression and cruelty became more extreme.
  • “The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus,” Douglass wrote. “The man who robs me of my earnings at the end of each week meets me as a class-leader on Sunday morning.” Douglass understood that the relationship between apostasy and slavery was not only individual but also structural. “The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit,” he continued, “and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity.”
  • Even though Douglass often found “the Christianity of this land” depressing, he maintained great respect for “the Christianity of Christ,” which he regarded as a revolutionary doctrine of freedom and equality.
  • It is the great temptation of Christians in every time to shape their faith to fit their interests and predispositions rather than reshaping themselves to fit the gospel. This is what happened when Christians justified slavery, blessed the violent reimposition of white rule after the Civil War and sanctified segregation.
  • Now scandalous injustice has forced the examination of white supremacy in our lives and institutions. The Christianity of Christ has much to offer. Among White evangelicals, it needs better representatives than we have recently seen.
fischerry

Christians - Not the Enlightenment - Invented Modern Science - 0 views

www.cnsnews.com/...enment-invented-modern-science

christians history

shared by fischerry on 30 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • In Stark's words, "Christian theology was necessary for the rise of science." Science only happened in areas whose worldview was shaped by Christianity, that is, Europe. Many civilizations had alchemy; only Europe developed chemistry. Likewise, astrology was practiced everywhere, but only in Europe did it become astronomy.That's because Christianity depicted God as a "rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being" who created a universe with a "rational, lawful, stable" structure. These beliefs uniquely led to "faith in the possibility of science."So why the Columbus myth? Because, as Stark writes, "the claim of an inevitable and bitter warfare between religion and science has, for more than three centuries, been the primary polemical device used in the atheist attack of faith."
  • fischerry on 30 Oct 16
     
    This article makes an argument that Christianity was actually the cause of the scientific revolution. 
g-dragon

The Armenian Genocide - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/-armenian-genocide-1915-195758

Armenian Genocide WW2

shared by g-dragon on 02 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • From the fifteenth century on, ethnic Armenians made up a significant minority group within the Ottoman Empire. They were primarily Orthodox Christians, unlike the Ottoman Turkish rulers who were Sunni Muslims.  Armenian families were subject to the and to heavy taxation. As "people of the Book," however, the Armenians enjoyed freedom of religion and other protections under Ottoman rule.
  • To make matters worse, other Christian regions began to break away from the empire entirely, often with aid from the Christian great powers. Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia...  one by one, they broke away from Ottoman control in the last decades of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.
  • The Armenian population began to grow restless under increasingly harsh Ottoman rule in the 1870s.  Armenians started to look to Russia, the Orthodox Christian great power of the time, for protection.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • From the Turkish point of view, the Armenians were collaborating with the enemy.
  • Local massacres of Armenians became commonplace,
  • In the spring of the following year, a counter-coup made up of Islamist students and military officers broke out against the Young Turks. Because the Armenians were seen as pro-revolution, they were targeted by the counter-coup, which killed between 15,000 and 30,000 Armenians in the Adana Massacre.
  • the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War, and as a result, lost 85% of its land in Europe. At the same time, Italy seized coastal Libya from the empire. Muslim refugees from the lost territories, many of them victims of expulsion and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, flooded into Turkey proper to the discomfort of their fellow subjects. Up to 850,000 of the refugees, fresh from abuse by Balkan Christians, were sent to Armenian-dominated regions of Anatolia. Unsurprisingly, the new neighbors did not get along well.
  • Embattled Turks began to view the Anatolian heartland as their last refuge from a sustained Christian onslaught.  Unfortunately, an estimated 2 million Armenians called that heartland home, as well.
  • Enver Pasha ordered that all Armenian men in the Ottoman armed forces be reassigned from combat to labor battalions, and that their weapons be confiscated. Once they were disarmed, in many units the conscripts were executed en masse.
  • The Armenians quite rightly suspected a trap, and refused to send their men out to be slaughtered, so Jevdet Bey began a month-long siege of the city.  He vowed to kill every Christian in the city. 
  • this Russian intervention served as a pretext for further Turkish massacres against the Armenians all across the remaining Ottoman lands.
  • Abdul Hamid II intentionally provoked uprisings in Armenian areas
  • Red Sunday incident
  • Tehcir Law, also known as the Temporary Act of Deportation, authorizing the arrest and deportation of the country's entire ethnic Armenian population.
  • These acts set the stage for the genocide that followed.
  • Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly marched out into the Syrian Desert and left there without food or water to die. Countless others were crammed onto cattle cars and sent on a one-way trip on the Baghdad Railway, again without supplies. Along the Turkish borders with Syria and Iraq, a series of 25 concentration camps housed starving survivors of the marches.
  • In some areas, the authorities didn't bother with deporting the Armenians. Villages of up to 5,000 people were massacred
  • The people would be packed into a building which was then set on fire.
  • thrown overboard to drown.
  • In 1919, Sultan Mehmet VI initiated courts-martial against high military officers for involving the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
  • they were accused of planning the elimination of the empire's Armenian population.
  • The victorious Allies demanded in the Treaty of Sevres (1920) that the Ottoman Empire hand over those responsible for the massacres. Dozens of Ottoman politicians and army officers were surrendered to the Allied Powers
manhefnawi

Christian III | Scandinavian king | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Christian-III

Early Vasa Kings Denmark Schleswig Holstein

shared by manhefnawi on 10 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • (Council of the Realm) therefore rejected his bid for the throne when Frederick died in 1533, preferring Christian’s younger brother Hans.
  • restore the imprisoned former Danish king Christian II and provoked a civil war
  • Christian sponsored successful military campaigns in the provinces of Jutland, Fyn, and Zealand and, with the capitulation of Copenhagen (1536), he assumed control of the kingdom.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • In foreign affairs, Christian allied with the Protestant German rulers against the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who wanted to place the daughters of Christian II on the Scandinavian thrones.
Javier E

Steve Bannon's Coalition of Christian Traditionalists - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...519900

traditionalist populism christian history politics culture

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • even as Bannon and various religious leaders seek to pit the values of Christianity against those of Islam, there is also an internal competition to decide who gets to define Christian traditionalism.
  • Two of the main players in this competition, American Christian traditionalists—including conservative Catholics like Bannon as well as evangelicals like Franklin Graham—and Russian Orthodox, are united in their desire to save Christendom from the perceived threat of radical Islam. But buried underneath that superficial agreement is a complex disagreement as to what Christendom even means.
  • In Bannon’s telling, the greatest mistake the baby boomers made was to reject the traditional “Judeo-Christian” values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime, because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European fascism, and, subsequently, to create an “enlightened capitalism” that made America great for decades after World War II.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that “large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement.” Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the “New World Leader of Conservatism” whose traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.
  • Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.”
  • Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.
  • the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.
  • previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom.
  • Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West.
  • The possibility of a new global resistance to the values that have become stays of the mainstream progressive West raises the question of who will lead this resistance.
  • While there are obvious connections between Trump and Bannon, Bannon and Dugin, American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox, there is no clear social, political or ideological framework tying them all together. And the gap between conservative and extreme right seems to be rapidly widening.
  • In a void that prelates and preachers struggle to fill, Trump will continue to be the face of a new traditionalism.
Javier E

How America Went Haywire - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534231

reality truth irrationality crisis culture trump history politics post-factual post-truth

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
  • Why are we like this?The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned.
  • The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites.
  • ...92 more annotations...
  • Yet the institutions and forces that once kept us from indulging the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—have enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the past few decades.
  • Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts—cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and truthiness and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the past several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks, which Donald Trump slid down right into the White House.
  • Esalen is a mother church of a new American religion for people who think they don’t like churches or religions but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking
  • The great unbalancing and descent into full Fantasyland was the product of two momentous changes. The first was a profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the ’60s; since then, Americans have had a new rule written into their mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.
  • The second change was the onset of the new era of information. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of the ideological and religious and scientific kinds. Among the web’s 1 billion sites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists, with collages of facts and “facts” to support them
  • Today, each of us is freer than ever to custom-make reality, to believe whatever and pretend to be whoever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, personal, subjective. And we like this new ultra-freedom, insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrongheaded fellow Americans use it.
  • we are the global crucible and epicenter. We invented the fantasy-industrial complex; almost nowhere outside poor or otherwise miserable countries are flamboyant supernatural beliefs so central to the identities of so many people.
  • We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any other nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But our drift toward credulity, toward doing our own thing, toward denying facts and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality, has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less developed country.
  • For most of our history, the impulses existed in a rough balance, a dynamic equilibrium between fantasy and reality, mania and moderation, credulity and skepticism.
  • It was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for “science” containing next to no science. The idea was to be radically tolerant of therapeutic approaches and understandings of reality, especially if they came from Asian traditions or from American Indian or other shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous and unfalsifiable, the better.
  • These influential critiques helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact.”
  • The Greening of America may have been the mainstream’s single greatest act of pandering to the vanity and self-righteousness of the new youth. Its underlying theoretical scheme was simple and perfectly pitched to flatter young readers: There are three types of American “consciousness,” each of which “makes up an individual’s perception of reality … his ‘head,’ his way of life.” Consciousness I people were old-fashioned, self-reliant individualists rendered obsolete by the new “Corporate State”—essentially, your grandparents. Consciousness IIs were the fearful and conformist organization men and women whose rationalism was a tyrannizing trap laid by the Corporate State—your parents.
  • And then there was Consciousness III, which had “made its first appearance among the youth of America,” “spreading rapidly among wider and wider segments of youth, and by degrees to older people.” If you opposed the Vietnam War and dressed down and smoked pot, you were almost certainly a III. Simply by being young and casual and undisciplined, you were ushering in a new utopia.
  • Reich was half-right. An epochal change in American thinking was under way and “not, as far as anybody knows, reversible … There is no returning to an earlier consciousness.” His wishful error was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified. Instead, Consciousness III was just one early iteration of the anything-goes, post-reason, post-factual America enabled by the tsunami.
  • During the ’60s, large swaths of academia made a turn away from reason and rationalism as they’d been understood. Many of the pioneers were thoughtful, their work fine antidotes to postwar complacency. The problem was the nature and extent of their influence at that particular time, when all premises and paradigms seemed up for grabs. That is, they inspired half-baked and perverse followers in the academy, whose arguments filtered out into the world at large: All approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised to serve people’s needs or interests. Reality itself is a purely social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent.
  • The delusions of the insane, superstitions, and magical thinking? Any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because pretty much everything is equally true and false.
  • over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself
  • Over in anthropology, where the exotic magical beliefs of traditional cultures were a main subject, the new paradigm took over completely—don’t judge, don’t disbelieve, don’t point your professorial finger.
  • then isn’t everyone able—no, isn’t everyone obliged—to construct their own reality? The book was timed perfectly to become a foundational text in academia and beyond.
  • To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”
  • In the ’60s, anthropology decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected, but considered equivalent to reason and science. If all understandings of reality are socially constructed, those of Kalabari tribesmen in Nigeria are no more arbitrary or faith-based than those of college professors.
  • Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”
  • Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certaint
  • Conservatives are correct that the anything-goes relativism of college campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America it helped enable extreme Christianities and lunacies on the right—gun-rights hysteria, black-helicopter conspiracism, climate-change denial, and more.
  • Elaborate paranoia was an established tic of the Bircherite far right, but the left needed a little time to catch up. In 1964, a left-wing American writer published the first book about a JFK conspiracy, claiming that a Texas oilman had been the mastermind, and soon many books were arguing that the official government inquiry had ignored the hidden conspiracies.
  • Conspiracy became the high-end Hollywood dramatic premise—Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor came out in the same two-year period. Of course, real life made such stories plausible. The infiltration by the FBI and intelligence agencies of left-wing groups was then being revealed, and the Watergate break-in and its cover-up were an actual criminal conspiracy. Within a few decades, the belief that a web of villainous elites was covertly seeking to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.
  • t more and more people on both sides would come to believe that an extraordinarily powerful cabal—international organizations and think tanks and big businesses and politicians—secretly ran America.
  • Each camp, conspiracists on the right and on the left, was ostensibly the enemy of the other, but they began operating as de facto allies. Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists). Conspiracy theories were more of a modern right-wing habit before people on the left signed on. However, the belief that the federal government had secret plans to open detention camps for dissidents sprouted in the ’70s on the paranoid left before it became a fixture on the right.
  • Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside, but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional.
  • Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude, especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.
  • Starting in the ’80s, loving America and making money and having a family were no longer unfashionable.The sense of cultural and political upheaval and chaos dissipated—which lulled us into ignoring all the ways that everything had changed, that Fantasyland was now scaling and spreading and becoming the new normal. What had seemed strange and amazing in 1967 or 1972 became normal and ubiquitous.
  • For most of the 20th century, national news media had felt obliged to pursue and present some rough approximation of the truth rather than to promote a truth, let alone fictions. With the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, a new American laissez-faire had been officially declared. If lots more incorrect and preposterous assertions circulated in our mass media, that was a price of freedom. If splenetic commentators could now, as never before, keep believers perpetually riled up and feeling the excitement of being in a mob, so be it.
  • Relativism became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say
  • as he wrote in 1986, “the secret of theory”—this whole intellectual realm now called itself simply “theory”—“is that truth does not exist.”
  • After the ’60s, truth was relative, criticizing was equal to victimizing, individual liberty became absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts.
  • America didn’t seem as weird and crazy as it had around 1970. But that’s because Americans had stopped noticing the weirdness and craziness. We had defined every sort of deviancy down. And as the cultural critic Neil Postman put it in his 1985 jeremiad about how TV was replacing meaningful public discourse with entertainment, we were in the process of amusing ourselves to death.
  • In 1998, as soon as we learned that President Bill Clinton had been fellated by an intern in the West Wing, his popularity spiked. Which was baffling only to those who still thought of politics as an autonomous realm, existing apart from entertainment
  • Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared.
  • I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed. We wanted to believe in extraterrestrials, so we did.
  • Limbaugh’s virtuosic three hours of daily talk started bringing a sociopolitical alternate reality to a huge national audience. Instead of relying on an occasional magazine or newsletter to confirm your gnarly view of the world, now you had talk radio drilling it into your head for hours every day.
  • Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before.
  • Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.
  • there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: global alert for all: jesus is coming soon. Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown
  • After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.
  • Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers
  • Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the ’80s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, that had not been necessary to say
  • Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside of the internet seems at least as profound as the upside.
  • On the internet, the prominence granted to any factual assertion or belief or theory depends on the preferences of billions of individual searchers. Each click on a link is effectively a vote pushing that version of the truth toward the top of the pile of results.
  • Exciting falsehoods tend to do well in the perpetual referenda, and become self-validating. A search for almost any “alternative” theory or belief seems to generate more links to true believers’ pages and sites than to legitimate or skeptical ones, and those tend to dominate the first few pages of result
  • If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extreme and extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics?
  • an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas.
  • Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, “Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the best predictors of their “perception of purpose in life events”—their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”
  • Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an omniscient, omnipotent planner and interventionist manager. Since the ’60s, that exceptional religiosity has fed the tendency to believe in conspiracies.
  • Oliver and Wood found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-times prophecies.
  • People on the left are by no means all scrupulously reasonable. Many give themselves over to the appealingly dubious and the untrue. But fantastical politics have become highly asymmetrical. Starting in the 1990s, America’s unhinged right became much larger and more influential than its unhinged left. There is no real left-wing equivalent of Sean Hannity, let alone Alex Jones. Moreover, the far right now has unprecedented political power; it controls much of the U.S. government.
  • Why did the grown-ups and designated drivers on the political left manage to remain basically in charge of their followers, while the reality-based right lost out to fantasy-prone true believers?
  • One reason, I think, is religion. The GOP is now quite explicitly Christian
  • , as the Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun saw back in 2003 in A Culture of Conspiracy, “such subject-specific areas as crank science, conspiracist politics, and occultism are not isolated from one another,” but ratherthey are interconnected. Someone seeking information on UFOs, for example, can quickly find material on antigravity, free energy, Atlantis studies, alternative cancer cures, and conspiracy.
  • Religion aside, America simply has many more fervid conspiracists on the right, as research about belief in particular conspiracies confirms again and again. Only the American right has had a large and organized faction based on paranoid conspiracism for the past six decades.
  • The right has had three generations to steep in this, its taboo vapors wafting more and more into the main chambers of conservatism, becoming familiar, seeming less outlandish. Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of Republican voters, according to Public Policy Polling.
  • starting in the ’90s, the farthest-right quarter of Americans, let’s say, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment rhetoric.
  • Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism
  • Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish
  • For a while, Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their variously fantastical and extreme partisans
  • Karl Rove was stone-cold cynical, the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat shortly before he won a second term for George W. Bush, about how “judicious study of discernible reality [is] … not the way the world really works anymore.” These leaders were rational people who understood that a large fraction of citizens don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that a lot of voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and frightened won them elections.
  • But over the past few decades, a lot of the rabble they roused came to believe all the untruths. “The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,”
  • “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”
  • What had been the party’s fantastical fringe became its middle. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.
  • The Christian takeover happened gradually, but then quickly in the end, like a phase change from liquid to gas. In 2008, three-quarters of the major GOP presidential candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016, just one did
  • A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion,” according to Public Policy Polling.
  • Although constitutionally the U.S. can have no state religion, faith of some kind has always bordered on mandatory for politicians.
  • What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace of admixtures of reality and fiction and of fame for fame’s sake. His reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed
  • When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, the character he created was unprecedented—presidential candidate as insult comic with an artificial tan and ridiculous hair, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a pâtissier.
  • Republicans hated Trump’s ideological incoherence—they didn’t yet understand that his campaign logic was a new kind, blending exciting tales with a showmanship that transcends ideology.
  • Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.
  • Trump took a key piece of cynical wisdom about show business—the most important thing is sincerity, and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made—to a new level: His actual thuggish sincerity is the opposite of the old-fashioned, goody-goody sanctimony that people hate in politicians.
  • Trump’s genius was to exploit the skeptical disillusion with politics—there’s too much equivocating; democracy’s a charade—but also to pander to Americans’ magical thinking about national greatness. Extreme credulity is a fraternal twin of extreme skepticism.
  • Trump launched his political career by embracing a brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two American taproots—fear and loathing of foreigners and of nonwhites.
  • The fact-checking website PolitiFact looked at more than 400 of his statements as a candidate and as president and found that almost 50 percent were false and another 20 percent were mostly false.
  • He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s or ’90s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth really is just one option. After Trump won the election, he began referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as “fake news.”
  • indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction—he deeply believes them, so … there. When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked at a press conference about the millions of people who the president insists voted illegally, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump “has believed that for a while” and “does believe that” and it’s “been a long-standing belief that he’s maintained” and “it’s a belief that he has maintained for a while.”
  • Which is why nearly half of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump’s view, that overrides any requirement for facts.
  • he idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum, as if powered by a Newtonian law, was always a very American belief. However, it’s really an article of faith, the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending reconfigured during and after the Enlightenment as a set of modern secular fantasies
  • I really can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into irreversible decline, heading deeper into Fantasyland. I wonder whether it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this way. Or maybe we’re just early adopters, the canaries in the global mine
  • I do despair of our devolution into unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.
  • I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations
  • We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal
  • do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong and between wise and foolish.
  • How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities?
  • reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half.
  • Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.”
  • A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like us; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth.
zoegainer

How White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump Extremism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...used-with-trump-extremism.html

white christians captiol riot US trump Politics history Culture

shared by zoegainer on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Before self-proclaimed members of the far-right group the Proud Boys marched toward the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, they stopped to kneel in the street and prayed in the name of Jesus.
  • The presence of Christian rituals, symbols and language was unmistakable on Wednesday in Washington. There was a mock campaign banner, “Jesus 2020,” in blue and red; an “Armor of God” patch on a man’s fatigues; a white cross declaring “Trump won” in all capitals. All of this was interspersed with allusions to QAnon conspiracy theories, Confederate flags and anti-Semitic T-shirts.
  • that the most extreme corners of support for Mr. Trump have become inextricable from some parts of white evangelical power in America. Rather than completely separate strands of support, these groups have become increasingly blended together.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “We are fighting good versus evil, dark versus light,” she said, declaring that she was rising up like Queen Esther, the biblical heroine who saved her people from death.
  • Like many Republicans in Congress, some evangelical leaders who have been most supportive of Mr. Trump distanced themselves and their faith from the rioters. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas, called the violence “anarchy.” The siege on the Capitol “has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity,” he said. “Our support of President Trump was based on his policies.”
  • The riot on Wednesday, carried out by a largely white crowd, also illustrated the racial divide in American Christianity.
  • Hours before the attack on the Capitol, the Rev. Raphael Warnock of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta had been elected to the U.S. Senate after many conservative white Christians tried to paint him as a dangerous radical, even as his campaign was rooted in the traditional moral vision of the Black church. And for years many Black Christians have warned white believers that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on race was going to end badly.
  • In Kalamazoo, Mich., Laura Kloosterman, 34, attended mass on Wednesday and prayed that Congress would decline to certify Mr. Biden’s victory. She had read claims online about flawed voting machines undercounting votes for Mr. Trump — there is no evidence for these claims, which Mr. Trump and right-wing voices online have promoted.
  • These false beliefs have forged even stronger connections between white evangelicals and other conservative figures.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 588 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page