Christian nationalism

[auburnatl1 4,939]

To be clear - I’m a Christian. But there is an evangelical fringe I do struggle with. Dont mean to open yet another religious debate thread (and also don’t go acasta crazy) - but on this one specific subject - thoughts?

 

[homersapien 11,381]

It's getting more and more resistance - particularly from actual evangelicals.

For example, Tim Alberta has been on the book lecture tour recently:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-kingdom-the-power-and-the-glory-tim-alberta?variant=41012408516642

https://www.bytimalberta.com/

[PUB78 1,358]

Good article. Too many conservative Christians have got wrapped up in the Trump Devotion mode , but most Liberals  are in the Trump Derrangement camp.

God is in control, we know how it all ends.

https://wng.org/opinions/mans-chief-end-is-not-political-obsession-1705963132?mkt_tok=NzEwLVFSUi0yMDkAAAGQ1Y8ocOG6km9j_DMKDer0GGsWVewHWe2GmulHuN00cvoXYUu1B8L0KiBMqUrdzoS0TLrd1A7EIA8-SG0lfS9YMr8ZmKaln8PTrUvxsZCNIvZR

[CoffeeTiger 5,111]

2 hours ago, PUB78 said:

Good article. Too many conservative Christians have got wrapped up in the Trump Devotion mode , but most Liberals  are in the Trump Derrangement camp.

God is in control, we know how it all ends.

https://wng.org/opinions/mans-chief-end-is-not-political-obsession-1705963132?mkt_tok=NzEwLVFSUi0yMDkAAAGQ1Y8ocOG6km9j_DMKDer0GGsWVewHWe2GmulHuN00cvoXYUu1B8L0KiBMqUrdzoS0TLrd1A7EIA8-SG0lfS9YMr8ZmKaln8PTrUvxsZCNIvZR

 

uhhh......liberals would stop talking about Trump if the Republicans would stop trying to make him President every election cycle. 

 

Like yeah.....Democrats are going to talk about Trump when he's continually the most influential and important person in the Republican party. 

[homersapien 11,381]

Serious question for all those so called "Christians" who support Trump and proclaim "God is in charge":

Have you ever considered that God is using Trump to test your faith?

Edited January 23 by homersapien

[I_M4_AU 7,850]

36 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

 

uhhh......liberals would stop talking about Trump if the Republicans would stop trying to make him President every election cycle. 

 

Like yeah.....Democrats are going to talk about Trump when he's continually the most influential and important person in the Republican party. 

Trump wouldn’t be a thing if Biden was doing a decent job. Biden’s approval rating is in the low 30’s.

[homersapien 11,381]

Theologian Russell Moore Has a Message for Christians Who Still Worship Donald Trump

The past few years have not been an easy time to be God’s lobbyist. A lot of folks claiming to represent the Almighty have been jostling for space in the corridors of Washington, with a lot of conflicting agendas. Their methods often seem mutually exclusive with the Christian tenet that one should love one’s neighbor. So perhaps it’s not surprising that shortly after the events of Jan. 6, the guy whose actual paid job it is to try to get those in power to think about a higher power got about as ticked off as a polite Southern gentleman of faith is allowed to get.

“If you can defend this, you can defend anything,” wrote Russell Moore, a theologian who is also the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), in an excoriating editorial to his fellow evangelicals about the breach of the Capitol. The intruders displayed Jesus Saves signs next to those calling for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence and, once in the building, thanked God for the opportunity “to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors” within the U.S. government. “If you can wave this away with ‘Well, what about …'” added Moore, “then where, at long last, is your limit?”

Many Christian leaders and thinkers decried the attack on the Capitol, but few went as far as Moore; he laid the blame squarely at the feet of a man many evangelicals believe to be their hero: President Trump. “This week we watched an insurrection of domestic terrorists,” Moore wrote, “incited and fomented by the President of the United States.” When asked about that statement during an interview from his book-lined Brentwood, Tenn., home office a week later, he doubles down. “He called them to the rally. He told them that the future of our country was at stake, that the election had been stolen from him and that weakness could not be an answer,” Moore says. “And after the attack took place with our Vice President under siege, with people calling for him to be executed, the President continued to attack the Vice President on Twitter. It’s indefensible.”

In criticizing President Trump, Moore has diverged from such influential evangelicals as Franklin Graham, who compared Republicans who voted for Trump’s second impeachment to Judas Iscariot; Jerry Falwell Jr., who said he’d give Trump a third honorary degree if he were still head of Liberty University; and author Eric Metaxas, who devoted almost his entire Twitter feed after the election to increasingly bizarre and implausible conspiracy theories on the method by which it was stolen. Moore’s position differs even from that of the guy tipped to be the next head of the SBC, the Rev. Albert Mohler, who voted for Trump in 2020 and said–even after the events at the Capitol–that he’d do it again.

“It’s–it’s been lonely,” says Moore of his stance. “But I think many people have experienced that sort of loneliness over the past four or five years. I don’t know a single family that’s not been divided over President Trump, and politics generally. I don’t know a single church that hasn’t been.” Moore’s opinions are not new. He has been a Never Trumper since at least 2015 and scoffs at the notion put forward by many evangelical leaders that Trump converted to Christianity just before being elected. “It is not a position that I find rational,” he says. “Especially when Mr. Trump has been very clear about his own spiritual journey, or lack thereof.”

The usually mild-mannered author’s stance has come at a cost. He says both he and his family have been the subject of threats and that people have tried to dig up information that would prove he is a liberal. (Heaven forfend!) In February 2020, the executive committee of the SBC formed a task force to look into whether the ERLC was fulfilling its “ministry assignment” after reports that churches were withholding their giving, citing Moore’s political positions.

Moore’s loneliness is of a particular sort, however, since unlike most of Trump’s most vocal critics, he is a dyed-in-the-wool social conservative, staunchly opposed to same-sex marriage, abortion and premarital sex, and he has worked to limit the spread of the first two. (He acknowledges he’s walking into a cold breeze on the third.) In a way, he is a weather vane for the cold front much of the evangelical church is now facing. What is the future for a group that preaches truth, peace and moral living, after it gambles all its chips on a man who embodies none of those but will play along–and loses?

The pushback against Moore is surprising. Born in Biloxi, Miss., and ordained at 23, he checks dozens of typical conservative boxes, from his gentle demeanor, to his five sons, two of whom are adopted from Russia, to the family photos he posts of the entire clan clad in khaki pants and navy sport coats. He publicly supported the right of a Colorado baker to decline to make a wedding cake for a gay couple. He would love to see Roe v. Wade overturned. He believes gay Christians should remain celibate. He has also championed protection for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, undocumented immigrants and refugees. He helps guide church thinking on living wills and end-of-life decisions, weighing in on the role of doctrine if people are in terrible pain.

In many ways, Moore’s job is to pull his fellow Baptists into the future. In others, it is to try to prevent the culture from abandoning convictions that are several millennia old, some of which–like celibacy outside marriage–no longer seem to make sense to most people. “I think the problem with evangelical Christianity in America is not that we are too strange but that we are not strange enough,” says Moore. “We should be countercultural in loving God and loving our neighbors in ways that ought not to make sense except for the grace of God.”

Often Moore has to tap-dance around the gap between his church’s beliefs and its behavior. He dismisses as a “manufactured controversy” the criticism of six SBC seminary presidents who in November released a public condemnation of critical race theory. “I don’t find any postmodern theory motivating those who are concerned for racial reconciliation and justice,” says Moore. “I find that what motivates such things is the Bible.” And while Moore has set himself apart from those who support the President, he declines to condemn those who opted to vote for Trump because they believed in the platform, not the man.

Moore thinks reports of the death of American Christianity are overblown. But as increasing numbers of Americans tell pollsters that they are not affiliated with any kind of religion, and in the wake of Trump, he wants the church to take a harder look at its priorities. “The biggest threat facing the American church right now is not secularism but cynicism. That’s why we have to recover the credibility of our witness,” he says. It’s one thing to dismiss the teachings of his faith as strange and unlikely, he notes, but “if people walk away from the church because they don’t believe that we really believe what we say, then that’s a crisis.” This is what he fears will be the legacy of an era in which people of faith put so much faith in a President. “There is an entire generation of people who are growing cynical that religion is just a means to some other end.”

https://time.com/5932014/donald-trump-christian-supporters/

Edited January 23 by homersapien

[CoffeeTiger 5,111]

12 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

Trump wouldn’t be a thing if Biden was doing a decent job. Biden’s approval rating is in the low 30’s.

That doesn't make any sense...M4. The only reason Biden is President is because Trump was so unpopular that he lost to a relatively unliked Biden in the last election.....so in turn Republicans decide the best person to get rid of Biden is the same person that sealed the Biden presidency in the first place? 

Are Republicans stupid or something? 

Edited January 23 by CoffeeTiger

[I_M4_AU 7,850]

3 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

That doesn't make any sense...M4. The only reason Biden is President is because Trump was so unpopular that he lost to a relatively unliked Biden in the last election.....so in turn Republicans decide the best person to get rid of Biden is the same person that sealed the Biden presidency in the first place? 

Are Republicans stupid or something? 

Typical answer from you.  If, just in one area, Biden didn’t reverse the border EOs and it worked out possitively Trump would not be a thing.  In reality, he reversed policies that was working and now the border is a mess.  The same can be said about Biden’s insane withdrawal from Afghanistan.  I know you are going to say Trump was going to do the same, but Joe is the one that absolutely embarrassed the American people by the way he did it.

[CoffeeTiger 5,111]

1 minute ago, I_M4_AU said:

Typical answer from you.  If, just in one area, Biden didn’t reverse the border EOs and it worked out possitively Trump would not be a thing.  In reality, he reversed policies that was working and now the border is a mess.  The same can be said about Biden’s insane withdrawal from Afghanistan.  I know you are going to say Trump was going to do the same, but Joe is the one that absolutely embarrassed the American people by the way he did it.

And typical dodging of the question from you. 

 

You're saying Trump is only popular because Biden is apparently the worst president in US history.

 

Yet Trump is the one who got his ass kicked by Biden in the last election......

So logically shouldn't Republicans have supported a 'Trump like' candidate that wasn't actually Trump, but would institute similar policies, instead of going back to support the one guy who already lost to Biden as their best chance to beat him?

 

Saying Republicans only love Trump because Biden is a bad president doesn't make any sense. 

 

[SaltyTiger 7,813]

35 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Serious question for all those so called "Christians" who support Trump and proclaim "God is in charge":

Have you ever considered that God is using Trump to test your faith?

I said something very similar in another thread and you facepalmed me. 

[I_M4_AU 7,850]

21 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

You're saying Trump is only popular because Biden is apparently the worst president in US history.

 

Yet Trump is the one who got his ass kicked by Biden in the last election......

 

Trump got his ass kicked by Biden because the American voter was betting Biden could unify the American people and *put the adults back in charge*.  He spent his campaign in the basement blaming Covid.  He ran on being a moderate.  He has proven he isn’t. What the American people got was a President that divided the American people more, (no unity) opened our borders by design and has a horrendous foreign policy that has several proxy wars going on at the same time.

With all of Biden’s policies defying what Trump had going or would have done and showing Biden’s complete lack of success in his policies the focus is on getting Trump back into the White House.

If Biden had been successful with his policies, Trump’s policies weren’t necessary to advance America.  That didn’t happen.  Another phenomenon is the *indictments* seemed to have lost steam and is looked upon as a political witch hunt (whether true or not).  

Right now Biden is counting on a guilty verdict before the election (and it seems that isn’t going to happen) and Jan 6th.  Nothing on his policies making America a better place.

[CoffeeTiger 5,111]

56 minutes ago, I_M4_AU said:

Trump got his ass kicked by Biden because the American voter was betting Biden could unify the American people and *put the adults back in charge*.  He spent his campaign in the basement blaming Covid.  He ran on being a moderate.  He has proven he isn’t. What the American people got was a President that divided the American people more, (no unity) opened our borders by design and has a horrendous foreign policy that has several proxy wars going on at the same time.

With all of Biden’s policies defying what Trump had going or would have done and showing Biden’s complete lack of success in his policies the focus is on getting Trump back into the White House.

If Biden had been successful with his policies, Trump’s policies weren’t necessary to advance America.  That didn’t happen.  Another phenomenon is the *indictments* seemed to have lost steam and is looked upon as a political witch hunt (whether true or not).  

Right now Biden is counting on a guilty verdict before the election (and it seems that isn’t going to happen) and Jan 6th.  Nothing on his policies making America a better place.

You're still not explaining why Republicans didn't choose to go with another, less controversial candidate that would institute many of Trumps policies without all the Trump baggage. 

They'd get a clean candidate who can institute Trumps popular policies without his problems...instead Republicans are dragging out the old, dirty, retread hoping things go better than they did 4 years ago. That's not Democrats fault....that's all on Republicans. 

 

And Its very possible Republicans are overplaying their hand with the whole idea that "Americans may hate Trump, but we think they'll hate Biden EVEN more and will vote for Trump who we think they'll hate less. 

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/23/trump-moderate-republicans-problem-00137112

Polling is starting to show moderates and never Trump Republicans may not be willing to vote for Trump just because they don't like Biden. 

A lot of moderates don't approve of Biden...but that doesn't necessarily mean they'd prefer another Trump presidency or think Trump would be 'better' than Biden. 

 

 

[autigeremt 6,636]

God will burn both sides to the ground. If you believe 

[auburnatl1 4,939]

I was out with a friend several months ago whose wife explained to me that Trump was sent by God and was related to Jesus. Her minister was preaching this.

Ive read similar posts here where trump is an imperfect but divine instrument of God.  Good luck arguing with that. 

[Gowebb11 9,328]

2 hours ago, auburnatl1 said:

Good luck arguing with that. 

Agreed. I don’t even try anymore. It’s a whole new level of brainwashed. 

[I_M4_AU 7,850]

4 hours ago, CoffeeTiger said:

You're still not explaining why Republicans didn't choose to go with another, less controversial candidate that would institute many of Trumps policies without all the Trump baggage. 

They'd get a clean candidate who can institute Trumps popular policies without his problems...instead Republicans are dragging out the old, dirty, retread hoping things go better than they did 4 years ago. That's not Democrats fault....that's all on Republicans. 

I just pointed out why Republicans think Trump can win.  I was hoping DeSantis would emerge as that person with no baggage and good ideas.  He was, in my opinion, the right person.  It is obvious most Republicans want to, as DeSantis put it, give Trump another shot at getting things right.

I didn’t say it was the Democrats fault Trump is running, I said if Biden was a more successful President we might see another Republican candidate in the lead.  Biden has proven Trump’s policies were working and Republicans want those policies back.  They believe Trump is the only one that can do this as he has done it before.  The field was down to 4 just before Iowa and now down to 2 in NH.

It really mirrors what the Dems were going through in 2020 after South Carolina.  It’s ashame we are left with these two candidates.

[AU9377 4,950]

7 hours ago, I_M4_AU said:

Trump wouldn’t be a thing if Biden was doing a decent job. Biden’s approval rating is in the low 30’s.

Really?  By the end of Trump's term, his approval rating was 34%.  Trump was going to run and continue his lies about the 2020 election regardless of whether Biden was running or not.

[AU9377 4,950]

3 hours ago, auburnatl1 said:

I was out with a friend several months ago whose wife explained to me that Trump was sent by God and was related to Jesus. Her minister was preaching this.

Ive read similar posts here where trump is an imperfect but divine instrument of God.  Good luck arguing with that. 

Unfortunately, you weren't at a comedy club?

[homersapien 11,381]

7 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

I said something very similar in another thread and you facepalmed me. 

Well, if it was that similar, I shouldn't have facepalmed you.

(Not that I actually think that "God" would even bother.   I am just trying to relate. )

Edited January 24 by homersapien

[auburnatl1 4,939]

21 minutes ago, AU9377 said:

Unfortunately, you weren't at a comedy club?

And this was in a metro area, not backwoods Idaho.  

[SaltyTiger 7,813]

34 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Not that I actually think that "God" would even bother.   I am just trying to relate. )

You need to read an article on “relate” skills. 

[homersapien 11,381]

10 minutes ago, SaltyTiger said:

You need to read an article on “relate” skills. 

Probably.  But I though talking in terms they could relate to was a decent start.

[I_M4_AU 7,850]

1 hour ago, AU9377 said:

Really?  By the end of Trump's term, his approval rating was 34%.  Trump was going to run and continue his lies about the 2020 election regardless of whether Biden was running or not.

Yes, if Biden had the border under control, not more than one proxy war and inflation under control Trump wouldn’t have anything to run on.  The Republicans would have seen Turmp’s way of doing thing were not better than what Biden has done and another Republican candidate could have made a push.

As it stands Biden wiped out all of Trump’s EOs and policies and is doing poorly, giving Trump the opening he wanted.  It still will come down to how Trump is perceived by independents.  Both Iowa and NH voters has said the border issue is the #1 issue the are concerned with and Biden is doing exactly what he wants at the border.

[SaltyTiger 7,813]

5 hours ago, auburnatl1 said:

Ive read similar posts here where trump is an imperfect but divine instrument of God.  Good luck arguing with that. 

If you read it here it should be easy to reproduce. I am guessing you mis understood the statement or did not follow the context or intent.

Sovereign God is my belief but your conversation with the friend at dinner is weirdo land. Of course the agnostic or anti God group eat up those stories as commonplace.