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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29309 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Why do you believe that "murdering people is wrong" eviscerates Christianity?

I don't. I am saying that because Christianity has multiple different sects which in some cases believe the adherents of basically the same religion are variously blasphemers, followers of the anti-Christ and not true Christians, and this tendency does sometimes lead to violence and strife that Christianity taken as a whole is a fractured religion and therefore when talking about Christian Nationalism taking over in the US that which sect takes over is not going to be wholly supported by all Christians.

This has nothing to do with whether one of those branches is actually correct. Catholicism could be the one true way to God and it will still be true that creating a specifically Catholic Nationalism in the US is may well lead to strife within the Christian larger community.

I don't think that eviscerates Christianity though. I think the Sunni and Shia conflict within Islam shows this is not specifically a Christian problem. If we were discussing an Islamic Nationalist project it would likely be even worse.

For some reason this comment strikes me as much more reasonable than your earlier comment, even though as I read them both back-to-back I find they're perfectly compatible. Go figure -- chalk it up to some difference between us over some intonation or phrase.

I agree that "Christian Nationalism" is basically a non-starter as a political formula to govern the United States; although, granted the caveat about "Which Christianity?," I think it's at least worth respecting as a serious position.

Fair, communicating over text can lead to tonal or other types of miscommunication very easily.

I am an atheist from Northern Ireland, so obviously my set of my experiences with Christianity (particularly where both Protestantism and Catholicism are deeply embedded into 2 co-existing communities and has blended with a nationalist ethos in each). The US experience is different, but I think overlooking that a sectarian peace does hold perhaps because of the fact we don't have to decide which has supremacy in a more secular state might be a problem.

I think it is a serious position, though not one I would support. Having said that assuming you avoided the sectarian strife part, it wouldn't be the end of the world.

In practice, Catholics don’t have the numbers and Protestants don’t have the organization, so a Christian theocracy in the US of necessity has to be generic.

It might start out that way, but there is a deep underlying division that lies quiescent due to the idea that the state should not favour one church over another. The resurgence of true belief a Christian theocracy would require seems unlikely to come to the same point.

Possibly you could arrange some kind of power-sharing as per the current in Northern Ireland, where the legislative bodies and executive must be divided equally, but that is very shaky and requires in NI, the pressure form a higher legal power (Westminster) to enforce the rules and even then we went 2 years or more without it actually sitting.

The dominant branches of conservative Christianity in this country deny the existence of a visible one true church, are basically orthopraxic, and tend to rely on Catholics for staffing when they wield political power. That's not a recipe for theological splintering-driven conflict, that's a recipe for making a stratum of 50's larper cleruchoi who may or may not be good at running things but mostly identify as closer to each other than to the general public.

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