- “You can’t be a democrat and be a christian.” Heard that one since Reagan.
- Discussion, much less killing, over who’s magical being is better or stronger regarding an etherial afterlife is just plain snake oil stupid.
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Conservatives will never push liberals out of Christianity because Jesus died on that Cross to make sure we always had a place with Him. They are the Pharisees and we all know it.
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Ironically, tying Christianity to the conservative brand will hasten the religion’s demise. If people believe Jesus would have been a Republican, Jesus will become as popular as Republicans. Only the fearful, and not the hopeful, will cling to it.
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So this tub of lard believes that he has some sort of divine commission to say who and who is not a ‘Christian’. Were he honest, he would have prefaced his fatwa with something like ‘Obama is not my kind of Christian’, something with which I feel the president would enthusiastically agree.
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In this day and age, that is not going to happen. Repub Christians are not true Christians. Either that or they are truly mixed up about the Prince of Peace. They need to read the Sermon on the Mount. That is what it’s all about. RWNJ repub Christians do not get it when it comes to our country. They can expect the following: Love God, follow your religion and leave the rest of us alone. That’s it.
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Regarding the race car guy: Who could possibly give a fuck about the opinions of someone who spends their time driving around in circles?
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I’ll take what Erick Erickson has to say about Christianity seriously when he publicly declares that he’s giving everything he owns to the poor, as Christ commanded his followers to do.
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The comments by the conservatives, show clearly, just how ignorant they are.
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I don’t think Conservatives are pushing liberals out of Christianity. I do think Conservatives have convinced certain facile media types that they are. The Dominationists have pushed a lot of moderate/liberals out of some of the big evangelical sects such as the Southern Baptists, but they haven’t stopped being Christians. Of course, the media types don’t look too deep at anything so they think the liberal/moderate Baptists have just gone home. They haven’t, you can find them in church every Sunday morning, just not the Churches dominated by the old testament Christians.
By the way, my criticism is a criticism of the headline not the post. Ed is spot on as usual.
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We are talking about those people who think “Christian” is “conservative version” and this has been going on for years – 2004 was the year of the “values” voter. This was code; as Al Franken noted, liberals have lots of “values.” The “he’s lost support among many potential allies” doesn’t ring true to me. What allies did he really lose here? His inclusive ways involves including nonbelievers of God into his comments repeatedly; this alone probably balances off any such type of loss of support from inclusive comments the other way.
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Liberal Christians have let conservatives appropriate the term and meaning of Christianity. they also often tend not to believe in much of anything–Kurt Vonnegut once characterized Unitarians as agnostics with children. Kilgore seems to Blue Dog things a bit much here–yes Obama lacks cred with evangelicals and fundamentalists, but frankly, pandering to them won’t help either. Clinton and Bush I did that and it made things worse, blurring lines around church and state that never should have been touched. I was never so happy as when I left the South and no longer had to worry about being boxed into conversations about whether I was “saved”. Kilgore needs to deliver us from having to worry about that on a national stage.
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Disclaimer; I grew up in a fairly open minded Baptist home and church but now consider myself an atheist. I still go to church and take my kids to an open minded Baptist church. I’ve not told them I’m a non-believer as I figure I’ll let them decide for themselves.
Fights between Christian groups that believe differently, claim one group isn’t Christian because of their different beliefs and sometimes kill each other over these differences have been going on since Christ started his ministry. So this “recent” conservatives pushing liberals out of Christianity is nothing new, it’s just that some conservative groups lately have started speaking out more publicly as they see the numbers of people following them, and even the liberal Christians, going down.
I believe the tensions Ed Kilgore describes are real; I don’t quibble with that. But I do disagree with the title.
Christianity is not a fixed size object where one group can push out another. It just expands to accept all groups which claim they are Christian. Of course some groups are going to claim their territory is the real Christianity and the others are false teachings. I’ve actually seen online commentary where a Protestant will ask, in sincerity: are you Christian or Catholic? Many reject Mormonism from the Christian club because of their extensive extra-biblical teachings.
If we have gotten to this point with the huge diversity of Christian belief coexisting, I don’t see how the balloon of Christian membership doesn’t just stretch to accommodate everyone who wants to get inside it.
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Really? You sound a bit “all powerful, all righteous” yourself. You’re not one of those “overbearing asshole”, are you?
I tried one time but after about the 20th time they turned left I got bored.
Because nothing is better calculated to redress rigid religious intolerance than rigid intolerance of religion.
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Amen! I have found that over the last several years my faith has actually grown stronger because of these shameless attempts by conservative dominionists to hijack Christianity. And not just because of them but also because of hilariously ignorant liberals who don’t seem to understand that Pat Robertson doesn’t somehow represent all Christians anymore than Bibi represents all Jews or bin Laden represented all Muslims.
Also, you’re exactly right about the media. The media doesn’t talk to mainline Christians when they seek a Christian perspective. They seek out the most regressive, pieces of shit in the country and then treat them as if they’re somehow the final word on Christianity. They don’t even bother to ask them which Christian denomination they belong to, they just pretend that some random evangelical speaks for all of us.
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Oh, it exists. I’ve been there. It looks just like an August day in the middle of the parking lot for the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where low seniority employees and students are forced to park.
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Sure, but then you’d be out of step with the Republican Party, especially its base.
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The Dominionist fundies have permanently alienated a huge part of one generation from religion and are now in the process of alienating the next one. They have done more for the cause of atheism than Richard Dawkins or Madelyn Murray O’Hair could ever have dreamed of doing. There are tens of millions of kids who genuinely, and not irrationally, believe Christianity is what the Dominionist fundies say it is and nothing else and whose minds are thus permanently closed to even to a secularist agnostic reading of the actual teachings of Jesus.
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