I'm waiting for John Fugelsang's latest book, Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's Guide to Taking Back the Bible From Fundamentalists, Facists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds to arrive. It's backordered, if you click the link and want to get it from Bookshop.org. American Christianity has always been subject to the possibility of being hijacked by theological and cultural intruders who completely miss the point by making something out of the collection of ancient works the church collected, preserved and turned into "scripture" intent upon bestowing some kind of political power upon the church that Jesus never intended for it to have or use.
Why We'd Better Get Interested in This
The First Amendment is what makes this country America. There's a whole lot to the Constitution that is unique, powerful, and which contributes to this country being the world power that it is. Beyond that, there's a lot more that contributes to the freedom we enjoy, under which we prosper, and which contributes to our pursuit of happiness. The First Amendment is the core, the foundation, the thing that makes sacrifice for its protection worth it.
It wasn't perfectly formed when it was first written and ratified. Slavery was an acknowledged evil in the writing of some of those who were responsible for its drafting, and yet, the more powerful need to get the Constitution ratified, and the government established, caused dealing with it to be postponed for more than fifty years after it was ratified. And even then, it took a bloody civil war before the 13th amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery. And the struggle, and the racism, went on for at least another century.
The founding fathers, most particularly those involved with drafting the Constitution, and especially those who drafted the Bill of Rights, had a close up seat for the kind of violence, hatred and bigotry caused by state sponsored and controlled religion. Europe's history is one of hundreds--literally--hundreds of years of bloody violence and war over trying to protect the waning power of one religion over the growing changes brought about by the Renaissance and the Reformation which challenged, and eventually broke, that power.
Why would we ever want to go back to that? Why would the people in America, who came here at least in part to escape from that, want it to follow them here?
So we have the First Amendment, freedom of conscience that includes religious liberty and the complete separation of the state from control over, or by, any religious structure or organization or church.
But we've had our share of religious persecution and infighting among the various denominations and sects in the United States that have staked out their territory and attempted to use religious fervor and influence to try and gain a power advantage for a political agenda.
Here's the bottom line, at least, from my personal perspective. If a person is confident that the theology, doctrine and practice of their faith grants them forgiveness and salvation and the spiritual life they are seeking, then it is not necessary to put down, attack, vilify or otherwise disparage what other people believe. And if it's the Christian gospel, revealed to humanity by Jesus Christ, that one has chosen to follow, then practicing that faith, and evangelizing it to others, doesn't require the use of the political power of the state to grow or to be sustained.
In fact, to attempt to unite the church and the state, for evangelistic or control purposes, would be completely against the core principles of the Christian gospel as taught by Jesus himself. Within the Christian tradition, Jesus is believed to be the divinely human Son of God, and part of the trinitarian godhead, so if that is the case, his word supercedes all other words on the subject, including that of the other authors of the Bible. His teaching and the systematic theology he laid out is the filter by which all of the rest of the Bible is to be interpreted.
History Does Repeat Itself
So why should Americans be getting interested in this? Because there is an abberration of Christianity that has intruded upon the Christian church in America, and it is heading down a road toward the destriction of individual rights and the Constitution, specifically the separation of church and state and religious liberty. It is destroying the orthodoxy and sincerity of an entire branch of American Christianity. And if it continues, it will destroy our Constitutional Democracy.
The Apostle Jude, author of one of the shortest epistles that made the New Testament Canon, slipped in right in front of the book of Revelation, warned the early church that such intrusions of distorted and false doctrine were possible, and in fact, had already occurred. It's a prophetic warning of events that have repeatedly plagued Christianity virtually since the church itself was born. The Christian faith that Jesus revealed to humanity was a lifestyle, lived according to a set of virtues and values that are acquired because of our understanding of God and who he is, not by following a set of rules or laws under the enforcement of some religious authority.
The face of religious-based violence pops up every now and then. Most recently, we saw it in the faces of those who dressed themselves in Jesus t-shirts and then went off to violently attack the United States Capitol in the name of an anti-Christ. We are seeing it in the formation of organizations like Turning Point USA, a distorted form of pseudo-Christianity whose leader advocated the use of violence when necessary to advance what they see as their ideological "cause." So it wasn't all that surprising that he was assassinated by one of his own disciples.
And we saw it again in the face of the conservative Evangelical zealot who attacked a Mormon congregation in Grand Blanc, Michigan. The Mormons have a lot of endurance of persecution at the hands of people who think of themselves as good Christians in their past. In fact, had it not been for the targeted persecution of Mormons, specifically its original "Prophet," Joseph Smith, they would likely have scattered, dwindled and eventually died out instead of establishing the closest thing we now have to a Christian nationalist kingdom in the middle of the Utah desert.
Mormons and conservative Evangelicals share a lot of extremist right wing political perspectives, but there is very little else they have in common, including almost nothing at all when it comes to the doctrine and practice of their churches. Evangelicals are harsh critics of Mormonism, there's quite a market for anti-Mormon books and works which help churches teach their members about Mormon false doctrine and avoid being converted, and which lay down evidence that Mormons are not Christians by definition.
Nor are Mormons silent when it comes to these attacks. Mormons have their own nationalist theology, a core principle of their doctrine is that it is their destiny to take over the government of the United States in order to prepare the world for the advent of the universal Adam-God they believe will make a physical return to the earth. And of course, that is in direct conflict with white, Christian nationalism from the conservative Evangelical perspective.
We should not be surprised, then, that any kind of violence with the potential to disrupt American society would be religious in nature. And that's why it's vitally important that Americans, even those who think of themselves as being intellectually liberated from religion need to know the root causes of these extremist political cults and their activity. They are more dangerous than the Ku Klux Klan ever was.
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