When America becomes an idol, country replaces God (Hudson/al.com)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Guest Voices
on October 09, 2017 at 10:12 AM

By Blake Hudson, a professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center who grew up in Alabama and graduated from the University of Montevallo.

***
While I care deeply for my country, I was not in church to worship America that Sunday. But America worship has become a disturbing trend on the religious right--a trend that needs to stop if self-professing Christians truly care about our nation.

Many on the Christian right have turned America into their God, seemingly inserting "America" all throughout the biblical text. Doing so has contributed to the rise of populist figures like Donald Trump, who prey on whatever people are idolizing at the moment in order to obtain and maintain power.

In 2011 only 30 percent of white evangelical protestants said private immoral conduct did not prevent elected officials from adequately performing their public duties.

By 2016 that number had grown to 72 percent, the biggest jump of any self-identifying group in America. This demonstration of choosing political platform over religious conviction -- country over faith -- is stark.
***
more: http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/10/when_america_becomes_an_idol_c.html


Worth reading through to the end.

[Igel]

1. We all have gods.

Some are worshipped externally, some not. Some are obvious, some not.

We act like we need to think of an afterlife or all-knowing being. Animist religions have gods all over the place.


On the other hand, the OP is amusing. For decades RWer of a religious bent insisted that USSR-style communism was a de facto religion, only to be met with contempt and scorn from most of the American left. How could it be a religion without a divine being?

Some split hairs with Confucianism and Taoism. For them, a lot of animist religions would probably fail the religion test.


At the same time, I know evangelicals who don't see a meaningful difference between Trump and Reagan or Reagan and Clinton when it comes to morality. Caesar was hardly a role model, and yet the gospels say Jesus said to render to caesar what was caesars, and there's no indication that he opposed the occupation as such. The entire oppression of Palestine under a foreign occupier barely gets mentioned, it was just that important.

The requirement that the leaders be morally or ideologically pure has always struck me as a non-starter. I don't see how things like adultery keep a public official from enforcing the laws. It's when they stop enforcing the laws fairly, making exceptions for one group and being harsher than usual on a second group I get bothered. "Fair" to me means "unbiased," not "biased in the way I want them to be." In Constitutional terms, it means due process.

[Nitram]

2. Mormonism is a prime example. The religion's doctrine hold that the Founders were guided by God when

they wrote the Constitution, much like Moses being handed the Ten Commandments. The world view of American Evangelicals is bolstered by the belief that "of course God loves America" - no different than any other religion that believes they are the Chosen Ones. I suspect it goes back to the fact that many religions seeking a place where they could practice their faith without fear of violence, imprisonment, or death, came to believe that God must have chosen America as the home for his true believers.