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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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and when they’re born you can forget about them.

This is one of those leftover Redditisms that just refuses to die.

No, actually, the religious people advocating for the unborn actually do also do a TON of work for all sorts of people. The society of Saint Vincent De Paul, for instance, or Covenant House.

Because: these people are actually consistent in their beliefs. They care about people, including the unborn, and dedicate substantial parts of their life and work to caring for them. All that stuff they talk about at Mass every Sunday, they actually believe it. It’s not for show.

This is one of those leftover Redditisms that just refuses to die.

No, actually, the religious people advocating for the unborn actually do also do a TON of work for all sorts of people. The society of Saint Vincent De Paul, for instance, or Covenant House.

This is true. It is also true that there are a lot of people (according to both my casual observation, and traditional Protestant doctrine on this point, far more than the first group) of unsaved sinners who tick the "Christian" box on the census as a way of expressing their secular tribal identity, but do not accept Jesus Christ into their hearts as their Lord and Saviour. And that group are somewhat involved in anti-abortion activism, and not at all in any of the other stuff. In the American political context, this group of "Christian" hypocrites is particularly significant because they vote and thus a major political party exists to represent their interests.

So the correct Arminian interpretation of Barnhart's sermon is "If your Christianity is causing you to advocate on behalf of the unborn, but not any of the other disfavoured groups that Jesus mentions in the Bible, then you are doing Christianity wrong and need to do some repenting" and the correct Calvinist interpretation is "If you see a group of self-identified Christians advocating on behalf of the unborn, but not any of the other groups Jesus mentions in the Bible, then you are looking at a group of fake Christians."

I imagine it's meant to be an attack on the average anti-welfare GOP politician, not on (mostly) Catholic charities.