Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s recent First Things essay, “Our Christian Nation,” may warm the hearts of Christian nationalists and confound historians and theologians who worry about continuing threats to the separation of church and state.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s recent First Things essay, “Our Christian Nation,” may warm the hearts of Christian nationalists and confound historians and theologians who worry about continuing threats to the separation of church and state.
Not anymore. But that’s a product of the current generation divesting (or simply losing touch with) the religious communities of their elders. Go back 40 years and you could very credibly claim that America was a Christian Nation in every way that mattered. Billy Graham was a fixture in every White House. Religious fundamentalism was driving foreign and domestic policy. Individual elected delegates were de facto required to be members of large religious communities in order to take and hold office or mobilize large bodies of political activism.
The First Amendment has no teeth. Religious minorities in the US are routinely persecuted, by the state, both explicitly and implicitly for their membership and their beliefs. This hit the ceiling in the wake of 9/11, when any kind of Muslim religious affiliation was borderline criminal. Police wiretapping and surveillance and extrajudicial punishment of Muslim individuals and groups (very obvious breaches of the 4th and 5th and 8th amendments) was routine. People were deported entirely on the grounds of their religious affiliation. States passed laws outright banning the practice of Sharia custom and culture. And that’s just in the last few decades.
You can find all sorts of crazy prohibitions, sanctions, and outright persecution of religious minorities, from the hounding of Mormons across the American Midwest to the denial of legal asylum to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution.
Okay, sure, that’s a beautiful ideal. But it isn’t the reality on the ground. Certainly not in a country where clery post the names and addresses of abortion providers, encourage their congregants to kill them, and then suffer no meaningful legal culpability.
The separation between church and state, in practice, is a fig leaf that serves more to protect religious institution from taxation and regulation than to keep religious beliefs from affecting public policy or election results. If anything, it has created a kind of paradox in which religious leaders have more influence over politics than lay congregants.
The United States of America, the nation standing above all others as being most desperately in need of being put out of the collective misery of all the people of the Earth. I wish I had something positive to say about it however I have that odd compunction against lying.
Well fuck the United States, it is a shithole of a country (despite hoarding a good chunk of the worlds money and power).
Turtle Island though? That place is dope.
If you’ve never felt the need to lie, you’ve lived a blessed existence.
It’s a common theme. Why lie? Why live in denial blaming demons for urges when if you face reality you live a much happier existence.
Cause your parents will throw you out of the house if they know your true feelings toward people of the same gender or what’s in that vape pen.
Cause your teachers will fail you if you express your real political views or historical understanding on a term paper. Or your future prospective employer won’t hire you, if they know you’ve got union sympathies.
Cause the ER won’t treat you if they know you’re pregnant, in a state that has made it politically dangerous to care for someone having a miscarriage.
Cause your migrant status means always lying about your real nationality.
Cause you live in a Christian Nation and your financial, social, and physical well-being are predicated on people believing you aren’t some kind of baby-eating Satanist for holding heretical beliefs.
When the truth is an excuse to do violence against people, lies are a commonplace means of self-defense.
Your entire rebuttal is right wing fantasy. Not everyone has religious parents they live with, let alone have the need to lie to constantly. You may perceive this country as religious, but it is not, by law. Law and money run things in this country. Not sky Fairies.
I think you’ve lost the thread. They are explaining why you are privileged not to have to lie by giving examples of situations that would compel many people to lie.
Would you say that you’ve been in any of those situations?
The whole lying bit itself was a “lost the thread” moment because it was in response to someone saying that they couldn’t say something nice about USA without lying. Which has nothing to do with lying to protect yourself or your position. Turning an offhand “I don’t like lying” into a lecture about privilege isn’t going to win any allies.
Lost the thread to a theist on an atheist instance. Lol sure. Atheist are not as incredibly dumb as theists and have a bit more logical thought than that.
Now I think you’re a loser because you’ve lost the thread and misinterpreted what I said to mean you’re losing.
I am not a theist and I see that you’re just not paying attention to what you’re responding to. Almost like Christians to preach while closing your eyes and ears.
Not a right-wing fantasy. Its what happens when you live in a right-wing community.
When the law and the money believe in the sky fairies, they will enact the Sky Fairy Will in some truly brutal fashion.
This would require the sky fairy to be real. Your culture is on its way to the landfill. All you have are two bit con artist snake oil salesmen like Kenneth Copeland, filling their pockets. Morons. Scum. The death rattle of a bygone era, relegated to the dustbin of history. You should stop fighting progress, they’ll be the ones your children will grow to love.
Kill in the name of God and your victim will be just as dead as if you killed for secular reasons.
Thinkers have been making this claim since the first Enlightenment, back in 1685. But people are as prone to reading messages in their tea leaves now as they were a millennium ago. I don’t see any evidence to conclude that modern day Satanic Panics are less likely than they were under Reagan. And given the number of TV ghost hunters and TikTok psychics and QAnon Shamen I see popping up in my social media feeds, we’re no less likely to kick off another Salem style witch hunt than we were 300 years ago.
My guy, I need to see some progress before I worry about fighting it.
Brutal violence , like good Christian folk. Cowards can’t even have a conversation without trying to threaten people.
Edit: typical Conservative, threatening people to intimidate them, then erasing it. Cowards
Nope, felt the need to occasionally. I just don’t it frivolously.