Thoughts and Prayers: The Religion Thread

Christians split over the teachings of the New Testament!
I work with a young woman who is pretty entrenched in her Methodist church, and she tells tales of it blowing up over this. Apparently they about had some throwdowns when their vote came up. The older folks were losing their minds. The younger ones didn't care.

 

goin' great!

House speaker’s Christian nationalist ties spark first amendment fears

 

oh ffs

Trump Is Connecting With a Different Type of Evangelical Voter

“Trump is our David and our Goliath,” Ms. Johnson said recently as she waited outside a hotel in eastern Iowa to hear the former president speak.

 

That answer says a lot about her understanding of that biblical story, but it is telling.

Trump is really their devil. The way so many supporters view it, they live a crooked world anyway, and if Trump's their crook in the fight, fine by them. His complete lack of virtue is a virtue - because they don't view anyone in politics as having any virtue. (And they also believe that no one else - but themselves - see them as having any virtue.)

This is how cults function.

How do you get people out of a cult?

By telling the people how awful they are, of course.

 

I figure the horns with blasphemy written on each one are being saved for the convention, or maybe debate season.

 

Which NT teaching are they split over?

 

In the old days, they'd have been abducted, taken to a motel, tied to chair and shouted at by a deprogammer until they came around.

What alternative do you propose?

 

Another historical alternative:

 

Matthew 5, 6, and 7.

 

The knots evangelicals have to tie themselves in to justify trump, to me, means it’s not about their religion or faith.

There’s no changing their minds, so it’s pointless to try. But they can spare me with their clearly fake piety. If they can’t accept the truth of the false god they worship, it’s on them.

 

Could you unpack that? The Methodists are split on what The Sermon on the Mount means?

 

Agreed. Or, I agree in the sense that you're right about that regardless of what they'd say about it. It's entirely possible they don't know what they actually believe, if that makes sense. Or what they think they believe.

Most of them have no piety and, frankly, they don't even fake it. Pietistic Christians hate Trump.

Now there are some - I know a few - who'd say "well, the left hated and made fun of Bush, and hated and made fun of Reagan, and they all seemed to love Clinton, so we're done putting plausibly decent human beings forward."

I think that's where your Mike Johnson types - or even Mike Pence types - come into play. They knew better. They know better. They're just mad.