Some info for DU folks who think all Christians are right-wing idiots.

[LAS14]

This is a story about a group, rooted in the Baptist denomination, fighting against "Christian nationalism."
https://time.com/6242260/christians-against-christian-nationalism-violence/

[Elessar Zappa]

1. I know many good Christians.

I used to go to an episcopal church and the vast majority of the congregation were good-hearted, tolerant, liberal people.

[Maggiemayhem]

2. Mainline churches are empty, though.

[wryter2000]

7. Not entirely

Problem is we don't have the money to buy politicians, so we have no political power and don't get any press. I sure wish Presiding Bishop Michael Curry was on TV all the time. He'd give a totally different impression of Christianity.

[Delarage]

11. My church is dwindling

Presbyterian. There was a split over LGBTQ pastors and a bunch of people left my church for a more RW version up the road (good riddance). But a mega-type church (called The Journey) that I can't figure out draws masses. I went with friends a couple times and couldn't get a feel for whether or not it was a RW cult or just a non-denominational organization. Not my bag, so I haven't been back.

[haele]

19. It's like Team Amway with the Mega-churches.

They all have MLM/tent revival vibe to them. It's like they're all on a team and participate from the tailgating parties; the Mega-church directors have all these great "participation party events" and the parishioners don't have to do any thinking other than showing up and do what they're told for prizes. Oh, and drop a little "entertainment cash" in the offering box or online to be able to participate.

Haele

[wryter2000]

44. LGBT hate is causing real problems in the Episcopal Church, too

Mostly in conservative areas of the country. In more loving areas, we’re hanging on. We are way lower in numbers from our stronger days, of course.

[shrike3]

23. Unfortunately, yes. Growth seems to be in the more right wing churches.

[intrepidity]

3. Not all; but certainly, too many. nt

[wryter2000]

6. This Christian totally agrees

Thing is, the RW "Christians" support stuff Jesus would hate.

[Genki Hikari]

27. The deity supported a bunch of hateful stuff

So why be surprised when some of his followers do, too?

[wryter2000]

43. I said Jesus

I realize Jesus and God are part of the trinity, but much of Jesus’s message was to replace what came before.

[Chainfire]

4. I don't think all Christians are bad, some of my best friends are Christians....;)

[wryter2000]

5. I'm Episcopalian

Our parish is very liberal, as is the national church. Well have LGBT families. I was on the lay committee for a trans woman who became a priest.

[brewens]

8. Nice to see that. We've needed for "good Christian" to be pushing back and denouncing the wackjobs

since the 50s. I hope it's not too late.

[old as dirt]

9. I'll add a little historical passage about my wife's (Catholic) culture, as well.

(pages 104 - 106)

snip-------

Slaves also sought freedom extra-legally, and flight was typical across the Pacific lowlands. Some escaped slaves traveled as far as the cities while others formed maroon communities, or palenques, along the margins of the mining region. The most important palenque that was formed within the jurisdiction of Popayán was located east of the Pacific mines, in the Patía River Valley. This palenque was significant because it evolved into a town that, as we shall see in later chapters, was central to the royalist defense of Popayán during the wars of independence. Runaways settled in a place called "El Castigo," taking advantage of the frontier area around the Patía River Valley north of Pasto and east of Barbacoas, which was not colonized by the Spanish until the 1720s. By then, when exploration of the area and land titling began to take place, the palenque was populated mostly by renegade whites and runaway slaves from the mines of Barbacoas and Iscuandé and from the haciendas in the Cauca River Valley. During this period Spanish colonial officials unsuccessfully attempted to conquer or destroy this palenque.

Yet, as occured in the neighboring palenques of Esmeraldes and Baudó, and in other runaway communities in colonial contexts, the inhabitants of El Castigo sought the presense of representatives of the church in their territory. Between 1731 and 1732, they sent three messengers to the city of Pasto to request that a Priest visit Nachao and Nalgua, two towns they had established, each of which had built a church within its boundries. This request exposed their strategy of aligning their community with the Catholic precepts that were central to social and political life in Popayán.

The Quito Audiencia tried to take advantage of the maroons' interest in the church, attempting to co-opt the palenque into establishing civil government in the area in exchange for a pardon from the state. The runaway community resisted the audencia's attempt to include them within its juristiction (reducción) but succeeded in securing a permanent priest for their settlement. Morover, the Popayán municipal council conceeded their right to name two people from the palenque to "administer justice in the name of His Magisty to all the individuals who currently are congregated in those towns," with the condition that they not admit any more runaways to the community, detaining the fugitives and informing the Popayán authorities to their presence. Thus, the maroons of Patía not only used religion for the purpose of community building; they also seem to have preferred to establish a relationship with the church rather than with the civil authorities.

In the Hispanic context, the crown promoted a corporate organization of society, and thus collective rights could be secured to a greater extent than individual rights. This constituted an incentive for enslaved and free blacks to link their legal strategies to the colonial corporate logic. Indeed, the politics of freedom and community building among free people of African descent pivoted around the struggle to gain recognition, aquire political rights, and overcome racist assumptions of the larger society. During the eighteenth century, those goals coincided with the crown's interest in integrating the maroons into society - to "reduce" the community of runaways to legitimate towns - by negociating and extending certain concessions in exchage for their professed loyalty. The integration of free blacks in to civil life reminds us that maroon communities were forged within the colonial would and not outside it.

In Popayán, free and enslaved blacks of Africal origin and descent upheld justice through their underlying pattern of engagement with imperial legal institutions. This was visible in instances when, as in Patía, maroons negociated their conditions of integration into colonial society. Yet legal freedom was not the only goal of the enslaved. As we will see next, in the Pacific mining region, garnering greater rights within the institution of slavery may have been their most realistic goal.

snip-------

Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825 (Cambridge Latin American Studies, Series Number 102)

by Marcela Echeverri

[https://www.amazon.com/Indian-Slave-Royalists-Age-Revolution/dp/1107084148

[Genki Hikari]

28. The problem here is that the reason these people

were enslaved in the first place is thanks to the Catholic church. In fact, it was the papal bulls of 1452 (Dum Diversas) and 1455 (Romanus Pontifex) under Nicholas V that launched the Atlantic slave trade.

Here's Brittanica on the subject:

In 1452 Pope Nicholas V issued a papal bull entitled Dum Diversas, which authorized Afonso V of Portugal to conquer “Saracens (Muslims) and pagans” in a disputed territory in Africa and consign them to “perpetual servitude.” It has been argued that this and the subsequent bull (Romanus Pontifex), issued by Nicholas in 1455, gave the Portuguese the rights to acquire slaves along the African coast by force or trade. The edicts are thus seen as having facilitated the Portuguese slave trade from West Africa and as having legitimized the European colonization of the African continent.

[old as dirt]

49. I'm quite aware that...

...there are other cultures out there that have historically disagreed.

Wars were fought over this stuff.

[yaesu]

10. Never believed all Christians were rw idiots but I do believe all rw idiots

Claim to be Christians

[Elessar Zappa]

13. Nah,

there’s plenty of wing nut atheists, Jews, etc. Of course rightwing Christians are the primary base but those other groups exist also.

[old as dirt]

22. As a lifelong atheist, ...

...I've also noticed the rise of a bizarre (and rather oxymoronic, to my mind) subculture of fundamentalist atheism in the 21st century that I never really encountered personally in the 20th century, that seems to reject science (especially social sciences like history or anthropology, etc), as they relate to religion and other aspects of culture.

I've taken to calling it antiintelectualknownothingism, due to its similarity to its religious counterparts.

It's always reminded me of an old King Crimson tune, written back in the 20th century.

[Sky Jewels]

12. This is a slightly separate issue, but I do think all Christianity is

"right wing" in that sense that it is all about preserving the patriarchy and propping up the power of men. The mythology is that the omnipotent creator of the universe is male. The Great and Powerful sky god and his "son" (who was somehow born 14 billion years after the universe was made ... go figure) are the two most important characters in the stories. The most important woman in the second book in the mythology is Mary, who got raped by the sky god in order to produce the "savior" of the world.

Therefore, in my opinion, Christianity is inherently sexist and misogynistic. It's been a cancer on the planet for centuries.

[LAS14]

15. That is SO uninformed. I think we probably have more female pastors than male now. nt

[Genki Hikari]

29. What's uninformed about it

Every single bit of it is from the book the religion follows.

The uninformed are those who want to pretend the book doesn't say the things it does.

You need to listen to nonbelievers about your book. A greater percentage of us have actually read it, unlike the believers. I doubt if even 10% of them have read more than the equivalent of 5-10 pages of it.

[Sky Jewels]

16. Are you seriously claiming that the entire structure of this religion isn't entirely male-oriented?

Why is the main deity said to be a male (a humanlike male to most believers, even though humans emerged only 200,000-ish years ago, on this one planet amongst trillions)? Why is it all "He" and "Father" and "His Son"? Women are pretty much excrement on the sandals of the characters in the Bible, a collection of Mesopotamian tales that is the foundation for this very obviously patriarchal belief system (which was coincidentally -- ha ha -- made up by a very patriarchal society). Do you seriously think that because some women have some power in some churches that that undoes the entire framework of this entire religion?

[quaker bill]

26. You seem fully convinced

But, my experience and reading however indicates that people have been stepping outside this construct for roughly 400 years. Occasionally they have been convicted as heretics for it and some were even hung in Boston for that, but they persisted.

[Sky Jewels]

33. Huh? You think most Christian Americans view God and Jesus as genderless?

Seriously?

[quaker bill]

36. I do not have an opinion on what most Americans think, nor does it matter.

The fact that there are people who hold and have held spirit to be genderless for hundreds of years, is reason enough to determine that a gendered understanding is not intrinsic. The gendered notion may indeed be common, but that is different than intrinsic and unavoidable. A great number of things are commonly held, and also incorrect.

[Sky Jewels]

40. The predominant U.S. view is that the two main mythological characters,

God and Jesus, are human-like males. A majority of Americans believe that these supernatural “men” actually exist. That convoluted story is obviously a crock of shit, but tens of millions of people in this country believe that it’s “true.” There is no way to calculate the harm this patriarchal framing and propaganda has done to the collective psyche, especially of women — the lessers.

[old as dirt]

20. "The mythology is that..."

When I first met my wife, one of the first stories that she told me about her religion (Roman Catholic) was about how her ancestors ran away some 500 years ago and established a palenque, El Palenque del Castigo in the Patía valley.

They were called "cimarrones", and were among the very first "illegals" here in América.

In the Patía valley they climbed a mountain, to the top of el cerro del Manzanillo, to see if they could see África. When they couldn't see África, they played their drums and cried.

Whenever their descendants were sad, like their ancestors before them, they would also climb to the top of el cerro del Manzanilla, and look out to see if they could see África, and when they could not, they would play their musical instruments and cry.

Over time all of those tears coalesced to form a lake.

El cerro del Manzanillo is a magical mythological and geographical place. (In fact, it is the center of the world, the Axis Mundi, where heaven meets earth and hell.)

As it happens, my wife was born very close to it, and when she was a child more than half a century ago, there was a rumor going around Patía that la Virgen María had appeared at the top of el cerro del Manzanillo, so her and her friend climbed to the top to see if they could see Her.

Here's the best video documentary available about my wife's religion. It's got some of the best views of el cerro del Manzanillo in the second half that are available on the web.

Bambuco Patiano - Bambuco Negro

[Genki Hikari]

30. People were enslaved because this particular religion declared

Muslims and pagans fair game for enslavement.

This church literally gave the green light to the Atlantic slave trade.

[old as dirt]

38. This particular religion is a palenque religion.

People were enslaved because this particular religion...

The post that I replied to made extremely broad-brushed claims about its mythology, so it seemed like a tiny bit of information on that mythology of this particular religion might be in order, so that the poster could adapt his or her claims in light of what is presumably new information.

I'm still awaiting a response.

Your claim that people were enslaved because of this particular religion is simply false, historically.

El Palenque de El Castigo was the land of freedom. (Think of it as the Wakanda of Cauca.)

They were allied with the slaves. Over the centuries, they accepted many enslaved people as refugees.

Let's not thoughtlessly slander Black religions and Black cultures.

[shrike3]

24. Ancient Greeks worshipped many goddesses

Yet women in Greece couldn't vote, own property or inherit. Women in, say, Plato's Dialogues are so unimportant the men might as well as birthed themselves.

Patriarchy predates Christianity.

[usonian]

14. It's just that the fascists speak up loudly and repeatedly.

When good people remain silent, all hell breaks loose.

I remember Daniel Berrigan and Dr. King.

There is power in the truth, if the truth be spoken!

[old as dirt]

48. From Phil Berrigan's autobiography

Fighting the Lamb's War: Skirmishes with the American Empire.

The Autobiography of Phillip Berrigan, with Fred A. Wilcox

(from page 219 of the 1996 edition.)

My critics say that I must "Love or Leave" America. I have never considered becoming an expatriate. This is my country. I was born and raised here. The United States has fostered and nourished me. And even though the government does not represent the people, this country belongs to us.

People talk about taking the country back from the usurpers, but what does this mean? In the name of liberty and justice, Pat Buchanan and friends want to establish an Old Testament Theocracy. In their ideal world the state will not only be God’s representative on earth; the state will be God. Persecuting the poor, abolishing Affirmative Action, building more prisons, executing more prisoners, expanding police powers, burning books, denying gay men and women jobs, fanning the fires of bigotry and hate, nourishing the addiction to war; all this will be an expression of God’s will.

How anyone can claim to be a Christian and believe these things is beyond comprehension. The God of the so-called Christian Right is a God of hate, not love; revenge, not forgiveness; death, not life. Such a God is bigoted and spiteful, a misogynist who inflicts pain and misery on the human family. The Christian Right’s vision stems neither from the Bible nor the Constitution, but from the dark and frightened recesses of the human psyche.

As for myself, I continue to resist because there is no alternative. I will not join the establishment. That would be deeply repugnant to me. I intend to stay here, witnessing against violence and madness, obsession with property and glorification of privilege.

Plowshare activists go to jail in order to resist the empire. We are innocent, but there is no other way to make our statement. We make it publicly, in court, before the press and anyone who cares to listen. We do not choose to go to prison. That is the government’s decision. We violate unjust laws, and take the consequences, whatever they may be. But our submission doesn’t mean that we respect the corrupt judicial system. We go to prison for our nonviolent beliefs, not because we accept the empire’s rules.

I remember one quotation from the Book of John, where Jesus says something like, “If they hate me, they will hate you also.” The implication; if they do not hate you, you are not living the life you profess to live. That is, following me.”

Two thousand years have passed, and Caesar reigns. The military occupies our country, a hierarchy of the rich and powerful controls the people’s lives, taxing the poor, beating, jailing, killing, those who resist imperial policies.

For over a period of two thousand years, the Bible has been largely ignored or defiled. The life of Christ is not preached by the established church, and it is not lived by many Christians; not to be wondered that so many “Christians” despise the poor and support the military.

[RANDYWILDMAN]

17. Hopefully nobody thinks that

Thank for sharing !

I know many good christians who care about the neediest in their communities and who are not political at all.

[multigraincracker]

18. Good and bad arise together.

Different sides of the same coin.

I like to say it is all gray.

[Dysfunctional]

21. Nobody in my area needs to go hungry or can't have their house problems fixed.

There is more food to give away than people who need it and most churches have groups that have carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who do not charge for their labor and the churches help to pay for the supplies. Churches here are part religion and part social groups. I love them neighborhood pig pickin'.

[shrike3]

25. The way it should be. Thanks for sharing.

[Genki Hikari]

31. And, oddly enough, much of the same is done without religion

All over the world.

In less than 100 years, SECULAR groups and government have fed and clothed and housed more people than religion ever has, in all of its brutal, bloody history.

SECULAR values have healed far more sick people, and created healthier communities than religion ever has. Or ever will.

SECULAR values actually work, and work for more people, without pushing any lies, divisiveness and threats or acts of violence on anyone.

I'll stick with the proven winner, thanks.

[Dysfunctional]

32. Sorry, but I don't see any secular groups doing anything in my rural area

and not the government without poor people having to jump through hoops. No one is ever asked what their income is when they show up at the food banks or asks for help fixing their plumbing problems.

[Sky Jewels]

34. Food stamps, welfare, SNAP, WIC, school lunch program, Medicare, etc. are secular.

No belief in supernatural nonsense is necessary to access these services. And they help millions of people.

[Dysfunctional]

41. They are secular, but most people are not eligible for government assistance.

Where are the programs that are run by non-religious groups, there aren't any around here. I don't know what your problem is with all religions, but here the churches are the places people go to socialize and to help other people. And what supernatural nonsense are you talking about?

[Red Mountain]

35. Just out of curiousity.....

and please don't be any more specific than you are comfortable sharing.....but where do you live?

Rural is a very fluid concept these days.

[Dysfunctional]

42. Eastern North Carolina, most land is farms and forests.

[Arazi]

45. Can you PM me your church?

I know many trans folks that would relocate there. They desperately need assistance, especially food and housing.

[Dysfunctional]

47. You might be surprised at how many places in the South even red states

welcome people of all colors, all religions or non-religious, and genders. I have a gay grandson and his husband that are not treated any differently than everyone else. I am happier here than in any other place I have lived and I have lived in many parts of the country.

[Silent3]

37. My formerly Trump-voting sister has gone this more positive direction

It took Trump's pandemic bullshit to finally break the spell, but she now recognizes and strongly opposes Christian nationalism. She's now very positive about LGBTQ rights as well, and I'm pretty sure (although I've never asked directly) that she has dropped the biblical literalism that she used to cling to.

[Initech]

39. I don't have a problem with Christianity in general.

It's the nationalists and conspiracy theorists that I have a problem with. And they just keep getting weirder and weirder.