Reply #19: Sadly, this has been going on for decades, lady. [View All]

[Philostopher]

The ministers at my church down in the boondocks near Cinci was preaching Reagan in veiled ways from the pulpit as soon as he got there in about 1982. I'll tell you who's responsible for this, too -- bible colleges like Cincinnati Christian Seminary, who encourage their ministers to worship neocon politics as if it were religious dogma. They're taught that radical right-wing Republicans are their allies in 'saving us all.'

For my part, I went through the opposite revolution others on this thread did -- my liberalism caused me to leave church. I got sick of the one-issue thing about abortion, which CCS ministers all, to a man, use to try to drive a wedge in their congregations or browbeat them into voting for Republicans.

My dad -- who also left the church because of this, and still wasn't a church member when he died of cancer in 1996 because of it -- believed a progressive attitude of being kind to those less fortunate and not letting oneself get all caught up in the details was the most Christlike behavior. The minister of the church he'd attended for about 30 years visited him once in the last four months of his life; the Methodist minister came by and saw him every week. I think my father still considered himself Christian when he died, but I don't believe he considered himself a member of any church.

My mother still attends that church, all her friends are there -- she's attended the same church since she was a child. She told me that this year, if she'd heard one peep of politicking out of the pulpit, she'd have gotten up and left -- but for some reason, the guy kept his mouth shut, this year. Perhaps he was worried about endangering the church's tax status -- he was egregious back in the Reagan era, and I think my dad may have threatened him with reporting the church to the IRS over it, when he had his final meltdown and bailed out.

It saddens me, in some ways, though I'm not sorry I stopped identifying with evangelical Christianity. For me, it was philosophically too narrow -- even when I still attended, I kind of felt like we all reach our own level with religion. Regrettably, it looks like many churches have made a bargain with a beautiful man that may not be the beautiful man they think he is. For some reason, they just can't smell the brimstone ...