At another point in the 19th century, Protestants became worried about a different group of immigrants flooding across the border – Mormons coming from Canada.
Uh…they weren’t coming from Canada, they were coming from New York via Illinois.
This was the case for a long time but it’s generally faded away now. Especially since Catholics (or rather the clergy) are largely on the evangelicals’ side politically.
Steven Waldman:
It’s a stance we’ve come to expect, but there’s an irony to this. At a moment when more and more Americans are unaffiliated with religion, immigration is providing a counterbalance.
Waldman is right about the irony and you’re right about the hypocrisy.
Verb. sap.
Well, if someone is planning to stop them, I hope they do it soon-ish.
One thing that I’ve learned from listening to ex-evangelicals is that calling them fake Christians can be counterproductive. The formulation cedes to Christians a moral high ground they do not deserve.
Another is distinction elided by the author between religious “freedom from” and “freedom to.” Previous battles for religious freedom focused on freedom from imposition of a dominant religion. Current battles focus on the demand by evangelicals that they have the freedom to discriminate against others based on their “deeply held beliefs.”
Evangelical’s accepting Catholics as Christians is actually a relatively new development and has to do with the decision to disguise racism as religion. That is the Moral Majority was formed to oppose Jimmy Carter because he ended all Government funding to any institution, especially “colleges and universities” that discriminated based on race. Realizing that racism alone would not produce the policies they wanted, led by the biggest racist of the 1950s Jerry Falwell Sr., the “Moral Majority” in addition to supporting racists and racism adopted anti-abortion planks so as to both put lipstick on a pig (hide the fact that racism was their real reason for existing) and expand their base to include Catholics who until then Evangelicals hated second only to Blacks. Remember many states north of the Mason Dixon line that had few Blacks and Jews like Maine had huge KKK membership because of the hatred of Catholics and that the biggest Evangelical victory in American history, Prohibition, was first and foremost supported because it was perceived to be anti-Catholic.
This distinction between the excuse of abortion and the reason Racism for values voters is why Evangelicals had no issue supporting the most pro abortion president in American history, Ronald Reagan, first Governor in American history to sign a bill legalizing abortion, a bill that to this day is the most permissive on the subject, appointed Supreme Court Justices that sided with the South on race but made sure abortion was stayed legal and followed policies that caused the number of abortions during Reagan’s term as president to greatly increase.
While I understand your desire not to be lumped with fraudulent right-wing pseudo-Christians, the reality is that as a national political force Christianity is overwhelmingly retrograde. With the exception of the AME and a few other black churches, there is no liberal or left Christian political influence at work in US politics. I think that this is intrinsic to the authoritarian mindset of rightwing Christians and the “cat herd” quality of the religious left. In any case, what it means is that for purposes of national political discussion, “Christian” now means and for the foreseeable future will mean bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. If genuine (Left) Christians want to live in a country where their identity means something different, they are going to have to confront and cast out the (immensely successful) fraudulent Christians that now define the term. It sucks but it is reality.
In the conservative Bible White Jesus add the disclaimer “Does not apply to brown folks”.
Real Christians are protestant, white, Republican, and gun carrying. Although oddly, very conservative Jews, Mormons, and RCs as well as atheists are honorary Christians.
I wonder what Mrs. Thing was doing in Ukraine…
Don’t kid yourself, the evangelicals are not crazy about Catholics, oh there are some evangelicals among them but for the most part they are hard line Protestants, remember Catholics were targets of the KKK along with the blacks and Jews.
Actually, it’s those at the top of the hierarchy (Bishops and up) who tend to identify with right-wing authoritarians. Parish clergy tend to have center-left views. There is a tinge of authoritarianism that remains, but I think that’s a consequence of a very top-down organization.
That’s like the right wing telling followers of Islam that if they don’t want to be associated with terrorism and want to be truly seen as a religion of peace, they should be denouncing terrorism in the name of Allah. Even though regularly, Muslims will come out saying those who commit atrocities in name of Islam are at best misguided or, at worst, traitors and impostors.
We all know the right wing totally ignores these voices. Let’s be better than that.
I was raised in evangelical Baptist culture, where people repeatedly said that Roman Catholics weren’t Christian. The pope was sometimes called The Whore of Babylon. The evangelicals I knew would not consider Latin American immigrants to be Christian
One way of reading the Gospels is as a critique of the Jewish religion as practiced at the time. The deep irony of Christianity is that every single critique Jesus makes applies to modern Christianity. This essay is just one of many examples, and not even the most striking. Jesus preached radical poverty and pacifism. He said, in the story, to respond to theft with generousity and to violence with submission. That is the opposite of everything the Republicans and the White Christians teach. He attacked the temples for selling sacraficial animals. He attacked the priests for praying on the street corner. He attacked the hypocrites for stoning the white they all used.
Christianity is absolute proof that myth fails. They are, literally, the complete opposite of what their myths say they should be. What a joke!
Rape cover-ups by Jehovah’s Witnesses as exposed on NBC Dateline:
Conservative Christians are all about judgement for the sake of feeling superior, and power for the sake of making others do what they want. Religion is one means to the end and criminalization of immigrants is another.
A friend from college was dragged to a fundamentalist church as a boy. He told me that the preacher would inveigh against “them idol worshippers in the city”. He said he was nearly an adult when he realized the “them idol worshippers” were Catholics. As a child he visualized some Hollywood Bible epic with people in loin cloths bowing before a statue of some farm animal.
Thanks. Nice little tutorial. I learned something. I had heard only bits and pieces of this before.