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Notes -
In East Germany the church was allowed to remain under only limited molestation, and to have it's own an associated political party, provided it proclaimed that actually Christians are perfectly loyal communists. I wonder how many people actually ended up believing this. It can even be supported biblically, but was clearly not the source of the East German Lutheran's professed values. No Christians had not been loyal communists, until the powers that be told them, and then they cited their faith to support it. The fact is the average evangelical Christian was perfectly fine with racial identity and segregation until power told them they were wrong. Evangelicals found a way to overlook the historic Christian opposition to abortion, and correspondingly the Southern States had the most liberal abortion laws until after Roe v. Wade. Belief in the morality of inter-racial marriage was at 4% when the laws banning it were struck down. It only reached 50% in the 1990s.
Christians, being a group of Humans, bend under pressure. Christianity has not yet broken. The Enlightenment's adherents began writing our obituaries three centuries ago. The Communists thought they were digging our grave a hundred years ago. Dawkins and Harris and the rest tried to write us off as irrelevant a decade ago, cheering on a social inflection that has now eaten their movement alive.
I like our chances, honestly.
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