Top Trump administration officials will address a mass prayer meeting in the heart of Washington Sunday – an event organisers bill as reclaiming the country’s religious foundations, but critics say is a quasi-official rally for Christian nationalism.
You know, Christianity was used for the left during the New Deal among other times, in fact the New Deal was put together on a coalition that included a broad base of Christians who believed it was essentially Jesus’s work to do so.
Today the left has so much spiritual trauma we dump on religion and want it gone, but really we need to embrace it and have a strong faith based arm that can speak this language to people. If America is a Christian nation than some immediate changes need to happen - universal healthcare being top priority. Also homelessness, poverty, food insecurity, war, etc. Amen.
Despite some of it being in the Bible, socialism and humanitarianism isn’t on the agenda for the major Christian players. There are absolutely some churches that do great work in their communities, but that’s tarnished by the bigger groups who use the power of religion to control the masses and are not interested in considering the softer sides of messages from Jesus.
And the US was founded by a mix of believers, with the intention of being secular for the protection of all beliefs. They knew first hand from history and their current situation what mixing religion and politics does, and also what drawing a line for some beliefs and not others does. Fighting about religion was often between sects of Christianity, and a secular protection helped everyone. It was idealistic, never was 100% and drifted a lot away from that goal, and how far it is seems to correlate with the problems we have.
The point is though, Christianity has influenced and given credence to progressive viewpoints at several junctures throughout American history, so we can sit here and wish upon a star that Jefferson’s vision for a secular America truly emerged, or we can acknowledge that it’s never been quite that simple and that we too can use Christianity for our purposes now just as we have historically. Religion is a weapon and a tool the left has simply given up, and now we’re like “I can’t believe the other side is successfully using this to hurt us.” Find the progressive faith communities, empower them, let them go do spiritual battle for us, see if we make more progress in winning hearts and minds - I bet we do.
I wish the better sides of religion would take arms against the ones using it for their own gain. I think they have that responsibility. They aren’t.
I get what you’re saying, use the same tools but for a greater good. I’d just like us to do things because they’re the right thing to do, and not because some book said or implied it. Because in the end even if you take the broad idea of loving and helping each other from a book, that doesn’t get into how to do that, and often times people with similar goals end up fighting over the details and undoing any progress simply because they can’t agree on the HOW.
I admire the teachings of Jesus 100%, they are for the most part, common sense stuff for people who care about other people and the earth, unfortunately he’s being retconned out of the bible by a lot of people. I grew up going to a Catholic school and let me tell you the shock of the difference of what people said they believed and how they acted in the real world is still an issue for me honestly.
It doesn’t help that immediately after the gospels are Paul’s angry, regressive, and authoritarian letters to all the congregations he was trying to dominate, followed by the late-first century anti-Roman millenarian fever dream of Revelations.
It’s not though.
The left does not want religion gone. Some athiests do and another chunk would not mind if it did but that is not the entirety of athiests or the left. Now The large majority want freedom from religion which means it keeps its things with its followers at their private places and does not throw it into the public square (which ironically goes with some of jesus’s teaching and should be supported by christians) . That is about god exists believe X, Y, Z, and not about preferential ways of govenoring or how how society works… As you say working toward a society with robust social safety nets and common sense social welfare is just something non hypocrite christians should be doing.
I’d be fine with that, if some other form of homicidal, life-denying mass delusion didn’t replace it.
its doubtful that religion of some sort goes away completely. I would like it if humanity could stop making up reasons to be dicks though.
Ban organized religion and a lot of it goes away. Having personal beliefs or distributing your flavor of holy book is fine, but religion should be something practiced in private at home, not in large crowds and certainly not in public. Espousing religious beliefs in public should be treated the same way you’d treat someone taking a shit in public.
Thats kinda redic. Are you banning all group gatherings. Is it the clubhouses we ban or are we just banning it if it fits some definition of religion. I mean we all know banning alchohol caused the human race to stop doing that. Its well known christianity itself was banned at one point in rome and I believe various countries have banned various religions. Banning is not as a good a solution as people think it is because they someone think it will of course get 100% compliance and everyone will wake up and believe like the banee thinkgs they will. It never happens like that.
The problem is the churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques. Buildings that exist to be dedicated spaces for people to gather to share their religion with each other and that provide a position of authority for religious leaders. If a group of say Christians wants to meet at somebody’s house to talk about the bible that’s fine, but talking about your religion in public shouldn’t be acceptable. What people do in private is their business, so it’s not a ban in that sense, but by shutting down the churches you starve them of the vast majority of their power. Ironically doing so would align much closer with Jesus teachings than anything the modern churches engage in.
Those buildings are private. They are not public structures. Some of them are not xstian so the teachings of jc don’t matter to them and the majority of other xstians just pick and choose what they like anyway. My point is banning is one not so easy especially since you are basically saying if you social group meets a vague criteria we will go after you and two generally does not work at stopping the thing you want to stop. There is all sorts of things we could do that very much falls short of that. No special tax status, not allowing it in public places like public schools and city halls and libraries and such.
You’re missing the point of removing the dedicated structure. They are public spaces even if they’re private property because they’re open to the public. I could right now look up a local church and go visit it. By removing the public spaces it becomes much harder for the religious leadership to shape and control narratives.
A significant reason why religion in the US has become so problematic is that the religious structures are easy to find and easy for large groups to regularly attend at and therefore make very convenient locations to distribute propaganda from. By removing the central structure you force things into a distributed system that’s much harder to weaponize. You also eliminate nearly all of the power of the religious leaders as without the regular services their authority is diminished to almost nothing.
As for the criteria being vague, no it really isn’t. You just define it as religious and there is already ample legal precedent on exactly that topic. There have been laws, regulations, and rules about religion in the US pretty much since the founding of the country, mostly in an attempt to prevent exactly what’s been happening lately which is Christianity being written into US law.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, people will definitely find loopholes, it just needs to make it hard enough that most people won’t bother. Religion is already dying out, it just needs a little push. Remove the tax exempt status, remove the dedicated religious structures, and the rest will take care of itself. When people have to make an effort to attend religious gatherings, most won’t bother.