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A "Westerville resident" said this? Just like a guy on the street?
"Hey, we're with this organization, do you have any thoughts on Westerville City Schools' policy that allows LifeWise to educate Christian children during school release time?"
"Oh, let me think about that for a moment. Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian..."
Clearly this was a public-relations type statement, it's incredibly disingenuous to attribute it to "random resident" as though this is just what some guy who lives in the community thinks.
But as an aside, I really don't know where the "Christian Nationalist" slur came from, particularly how it's been applied to just about anything Christian. I know there were some idiot influencers a few years ago talking about something like that, like requiring a religious test for public office or something, but c'mon people, this is not representative of the mainstream of Christianity in the US, even in the most Christian parts, which are Baptists who come from a long tradition of church-state separators. I guess the idea is something like, "These people are Christians, they're also nationalists, so huh! They're Christian nationalists!" But I don't understand the idea that mainstream Christians are fascists or something. They're not. It's your chill grandpa who reads bible stories to the grandkids, or your cousin who has a 'homestead'. Brownshirts these people are not.
I think it's a successor to dominionist, a stance held by an extremely small number of protestant theologians in ultra-fundamentalist churches that thought the law code spelled out in the bible, judicially, for ancient Israel was binding today, but in practice mostly used as a slur for anyone who didn't jump in whatever progressive bandwagon rolled out. The idea that 'American' is a thing with defining characteristics- any of them- pushes leftist berserk buttons like nothing else, the twitter democrats dominate their messaging, and so add it together.
Baptists don't like an establishment of religion because of the 'establishment' thing- it's too much of an institutional church. Requiring a religious test is a part of baptist history; in America before the supreme court banned them baptists often supported laws which required elected officials to be protestant. Today I suspect a 'Christian nationalist' law would ban Muslims/Hindus/atheists from office and require assent to the divinity of Jesus and maybe some Christian moral ideas.
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“Fundamentalism” was the term of choice for the 90s and 00s until W. was out of play. By the time Romney ran, it was a joke. For the new generation, who were at least familiar with the old, cringe atheists, a new term was required.
Well, it does have a history. White supremacists, blood ‘n soilers, people were happy to claim it. Which is, of course, why the oldest source on the Wikipedia page for “Christian nationalism” dates to 2016.
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I think he's a public education/special education careerist with a public outreach focus, though I've not been able to track it down much further than that (who names a company EDU_?).
I'm now even more confused. He graduated from Liberty with a History/Theology degree? I'd expect someone with that background to sound much more like me than like whatever it is he sounds like. Graduating from Liberty with a degree in Theology and then down the line saying that not every human should be a Christian? Harvard Divinity I could understand, but Liberty?
Perhaps we're just looking at another one of those Christian-moralist-to-progressive-moralist conversions, like the VeggieTales guy. I certainly know some goody-two-shoes Southern Baptists who probably sounded like me 15 years ago but nowadays sound like progressive twitter. Maybe he started to see the limitations of his Liberty degree and swung the other way to try and challenge the low prestige.
It's too bad, I guess.
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