At the country’s founding, “there was a Christian political theory that was assumed as a consensus position, and the laws of nature and nature’s God don’t make sense without a common shared understanding of the divine and of created order,” Meadowcroft said, adding that the belief that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” as the Declaration of Independence states, “only makes sense within the long story of the Christian West.”
Biblical language has been used throughout American history, from the founding and Abraham Lincoln’s arguments to end slavery, to combating communism and advancing the civil rights movement.
“We’re saying we need to return that biblical language and an acknowledgment of our Christian heritage to the public sphere if our institutions and our assumptions about human nature and the law are going to make sense, and that the longer that we keep those out of the public sphere, the more unmoored we become from these core moral assumptions that undergird our whole constitutional system and the more lawless our future will be,” Meadowcroft explained. “So this is not a call to revolution, or civil war, or any such thing, it is rather a restoration, a re-founding, and an establishment of genuine constitutional order again.”
Cuttlefish1111@lemmy.world 8 months ago
White Supremacists have hijacked the Christian religion for their own self serving purposes. They do blend in well, but not quite. Christians are hateful and racist, but they aren’t drooling for power like the current group of fools.
PeepinGoodArgs@reddthat.com 8 months ago
Characterizing all Christians as hateful and racist is unfair. There are plenty of Christians that genuinely believe in Jesus and the Bible for more than the social power it provides. I was a staunch member of the New Atheist movement back when it was popular. Then I realized…Christians and even the Bible itself isn’t nearly as bad as they were making it out to be. It’s the same problem as say, communism or American Free Enterprise, or nationalism, or whatever: the human tendency of control others.
I’m of the opinion that almost everything is permissible as long it doesn’t interfere with the rights of others. They call this classical liberalism these days, but even the classical liberals made exceptions, permitting slavery, for example, or justifying the subjugation of Indians and Native Americans by considering them savages.
I, on the other hand, make no exceptions. If someone wants to devote their life to God, I’m 100% okay with that. If they want make me devote my life to god or to practice their version of Christianity by banning abortions, for example, then we’ve a problem.
Cuttlefish1111@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I can agree with most of what you’ve said. What we are facing is white supremacy dressed as a Christian and if Christians don’t want to lose their right to freely practice religion they need to get their house in order.