Hoodwinked & Hijacked
Sold Out. Souled Out. Hollowed Out. And Empty
“Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.” – Reinhold Niebuhr.
From my perspective, Evangelical Christianity has been sold out to power and politics, or maybe “souled out” is a better term. Hollowed out and empty also come to mind quite often.
What I see is a form of Christianity that has traded righteousness for power, character for politics, the hard, dirty work of compassion for the easy way, the essential issues at the core of Christianity for distraction issues that are nonessential, fringe, nonbiblical issues.
“How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.”
― Christopher Hitchens
“[Christianity] began as a revolutionary nonviolent movement promoting a new kind of aliveness on the margins of society. It claimed that everyone, not just an elite few, had God-given gifts to use for the common good. It exposed a system based on domination, privilege, and violence and proclaimed in its place a vision of mutual service, mutual responsibility, and peaceable neighborliness. It put people above profit, and made the audacious claim that the Earth belonged not to rich tycoons or powerful politicians, but to the Creator who loves every sparrow in the trees and every wildflower in the field. It was a peace movement, a love movement, a joy movement, a justice movement, an integrity movement, an aliveness movement.” [Brian McLaren]
Immigration, homosexuality, and abortion as political weapons
It is of great concern to me that these political issues seem to have emerged for political convenience and power which include mistranslations and misinterpretations of the Bible. Could it be that the Bible has secretly lost its authority, inspiration, and inerrancy in order for it to be so freely weaponized for political gain? Or has it never had the inspiration, authority, and inerrancy that humans proclaim? The absurdity of it is that it is the “Evangelical Christians” that are trying to hang on to their precious inspiration and inerrancy while at the same time weaponizing the sacred book for the sake of their precious politics. They are going to have to prioritize soon because the rest of us are catching on and they are losing their integrity and credibility in America and in this world. No one can serve two masters.
Of course, the Christians that read their bibles can see through the deception and discern the truth from the constant lies. They can look with discernment beneath the conformity to this world to the principalitites and powers that are manipulating the manipulable. Those that read the bible would not be so gullible as to be Hoodwinked & Hijacked or brainwashed in such a cult-like way.
See the continuation of this post here:
Immigration, Homosexuality, and Abortion: a biblical and historical perspective
Respectable Religion?
“Following Jesus is not a respectable religion, and I suspect it was never meant to be. It is a call to truth, justice and liberation for those oppressed, excluded and disempowered.”
Diarmuid O’Murchu
Source: Catching Up With Jesus
FOLLOWING THE EASY WAY
Originally, Christianity, according to Jesus, was never meant to be the easy way. Then it became seduced with power by becoming an arm of empire (beginning in 313 AD and continuing for most of its history). Currently, it has again been hoodwinked and hijacked by the power of the American empire. For any morality or system of belief to be so easily seduced brings into focus the viability and veracity of its claims. To what extent has it been seduced into conformity to this world???
It is so interesting how easy it has been to forsake the essentials of Christianity for the sake of politics, money, and power.
Essentials are those basic, central characteristics expressed in words and actions and reactions that prove a person is a Christian:
- Fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
- Loving God and Neighbor, which includes our enemy, the alien, the stranger, and all of those that are different from us… unconditionally.
- Do to others only what you would want done to you.
Apart from these things, there is no faith, there is no love, there is no Christianity.
“Faith without works is dead.” (James 2:14-26)
“Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:8)
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35)
“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.” (Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer)
“The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self – to encounter another human being
not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control,
but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith)
It is so much easier to focus on nonrelational, impersonal, political, nonessentials that were not emphasized by Jesus, the Bible, and 2000 years of Christianity. I see this as yet another prime example of worshiping the gods of comfort, security, and certainty or a compartmentalized religion that has no demands except possibly on Sundays, holidays, and voting day to do one’s duty.
Behold, a new American sanitized, sterilized, homogenized Jesus, the perfect American Jesus, emerges creating the easy way, a pipeline to heaven, where right belief expressed in fear and hate rather than right living is the fruit of the spirit. A nice imaginary Jesus has been created for our own convenience in America. Christians no longer have to “love their neighbor” or be a “friend of sinners” or care for the “least of these” because it is too hard and inconvenient and dirty. And who wants to get their hands dirty, anyway?
Behold a new story in the heads of well meaning Christians, as they sit in their easy chairs and padded pews. No wonder the gullible are gobbling it up.
These nonessential issues are safe and easy; issues where nothing needs to be done, no one can touch your heart, and you can’t touch others, allowing us to escape the hard work of compassion, avoid the pain of empathy, and not get one’s hands dirty; secure and safe in one’s bubble. All that needs to be done is use politicized, weaponized words to rail in judgement or hate against people on social media (our self-made echo chamber), sign petitions, and donate money; nothing personal, nothing face to face, no compassion needed, no relationships necessary. Those that are affected as victims by these issues are unavailable to one’s touch, words, and actions; arms length, safe and easy. No care, no compassion, no service except lip service from a distance.
Christianity in America has sectioned itself off and segregated itself from those that Jesus said he came for; the outcasts and despised, the poor and downtrodden, the week and the weary, the lowly and forgotten, the unseen and unheard; THE SICK NOT THE HEALTHY. A friend of mine told me a story that she was in an adult Sunday school class and they had started a new topic, studying what the Bible says about the poor in her large, well-known, well-established Evangelical Baptist Church in the affluent suburbs. When it was discussion time, they all turned to reach other and said, I don’t know anyone that is poor, do you? The answer was”no” all the way around the room. Following what Jesus said and did or what the Bible says to do no longer matters. Just vote from the safe, secure, comfortable bubble. Incidentally, I have noticed a very distinct growth of the War on the Poor and Advocates for the Rich over subsequent years. I think they ceased to study the “poor” in the bible. It is easier. Vote for nonessential, unbiblical issues like anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, xenophobia, and homophobia.
American Christians don’t even know what the bible says about their own issues. See the continuation of this post here: Immigration, Homosexuality, and Abortion: a biblical and historical perspective
Primarily, I see that we have gutted (hollowed out) the real work of Christianity for the non-issues or anti-issues of abortion, immigration, and LGBTQIA equality. Currently it seems that Christianity is defined more by what it stands against than what it stands for. Rather than pro-life, it is anti-abortion; excusing them from the hard work of pro-life compassion work. And may I suggest that those in power do not care about those issues? These issues are simply tools of manipulation to get a vote and maintain their base of support. Sometimes they end up being against the needs of the people unless there is multiple perspectives making those decisions. Here is an unfortunate example that is bad for both pro-life and pro-choice advocates.
Recently, a high court decision banned employers from being forced to provide birth control under the Affordable Care Act. Rather than being thought through, this seemed to be more of an anti-Obama move; and he isn’t even president anymore! But that made it a victory, albeit thoughtless and mindless. If this would have been thought through for the sake of politics, anyone could see that if women use less birth control, then they will have more unwanted pregnancies; which in turn will almost guarantee more abortions. So this action of the administration works counterproductive to the goal of no abortions. Not very wise.
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
― Audre Lorde
True Pro Life = Advocating for Life
The belief that all life matters and is sacred and deserves to be protected. One who is truly pro-life will oppose capital punishment, war, poverty, and all forms of physical or mental torture, domestic abuse, and police brutality. Such a person will see abortion as a tragedy for all involved, not a “reproductive right” to be celebrated – and will work to end abortion, not by force or intimidation, but by working to change the social and economic conditions that lead people to be so desperate as to have no choice but abortion.
It seems quite hypocritical that people might think that because a person identifies as pro-life, they would support such atrocities as capital punishment, pre-emptive war, racism, or violence against women.
The institution of Christianity was birthed in 313 AD in the womb of the power of empire and sustains itself in that same power as an arm of empire; progressively merging religion with the power and authority of politics as the power and authority of religion is trumped, stifled, and rendered meaningless. This struggle between revival and empire has continued for 2000 years. That’s why America was founded. The founders fled the tyranny of religion in England so that they could be free to worship or not worship, believe or not believe in America. Check out the latest statistics of those that are religious and those that are no longer religious (the nones) in America and throughout the world. https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/
Recently I was checking some statistics about American Christianity. In 2015, the country was 75% professing Christians. By 2019, it dropped to 65%. You may say, only 10% during Trump’s presidency? And I say, yes, over 30,000,000 people have left Christianity in America. Not just the church, but these are people that can decidedly no longer identify as Christian. I wonder why?
See the continuation of this post here:
Immigration, Homosexuality, and Abortion: a biblical and historical perspective
More Historical and Political Perspectives:
This video is a nice summary of what I’ve been trying to express in this post:
https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/videos/549035905672278/
"I helped start the Moral Majority. Trump is the opposite of what we wanted.
"The Real Origins of the Religious Right"
They’ll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record’s clear: It was pro-segregation. When that didn’t hold true then the right had to politicize Abortion and eventually Homosexuality; both of which are not biblically supported to take a stand against. As stated above, Homosexuality was not even in the bible until the mid 1900s. And abortion began at birth according to evangelicals up until about the same time that that these issues were politicized. So not only has Christianity been twisted from taking a stand for to standing against all of these issues that are not even the real issues of Christianity.
Also this:
"I’m Billy Graham’s granddaughter. Evangelical support for Donald Trump insults his legacy."
By supporting Donald Trump, evangelical leaders are failing us and failing the Gospel. Christian women must step up where our church leaders won’t.
Check out this story on usatoday.com: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2020/08/25/billy-graham-evangelicals-support-donald-trump-hypocrisy-column/5625617002/
Intriguing analysis. The author considers the likelihood that “white Christian tribalism and a very American sort of heresy, not a commitment to scripture and tradition, has kept evangelical churches thriving all these years.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/trump-evangelical-crisis.html
False God – Why the Christian right worships Donald Trump https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10221469946763775&id=1403961775
Why America’s Christian Foundation is a Myth
Based on:
- A new book by attorney Andrew Seidel, ‘The Founding Myth: Why Christian nationalism Is Un-American’, takes on the myth of America’s Christian founding.
- Christian nationalism is the belief that the United States was founded as a Christian nation on Christian principles, and that the nation has strayed from that original foundation.
- Judeo-Christian principles are fundamentally opposed to the principles on which America was built, argues Seidel.
- The name Judeo-Christian is an oxymoron. Jews are Jews because they reject Jesus as Christ and Christians are Christians because they reject the Jewish religion.
- America was not founded to be Christian. It was founded to have freedom of religion.
What Is Christian Nationalism?
The Privilege of Denial
Pandemic and Racism are revealing American Christianity’s true colors.
“But racism is similar to the pandemic in another primary way — both are spread, in large part, by willful ignorance. And it takes an extraordinary level of privilege (and effort) to stay ignorant of both realities.In either case, you can only deny the truth if you’ve never had to suffer from it.At the heart of both issues lies a common factor: a failure of empathy; and a refusal to witness a struggle we have never had to experience for ourselves. It indicates an ability to craft one’s own narrative in order to preserve the level of comfort to which we’ve become accustomed. In order to stop the spread of disease, we have to give up some personal freedoms.”
How a Plague Exposed the Christian Nation Myth
Unmasking America’s Counterfeit Christianity
“That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.” (David Remnick, A National Tragedy)
If you would like to read more on the topic, here’s a list:
- American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism by Matthew Sutton
- Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism by Molly Worthen
- Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics by Marie Griffith
- Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America by Randall Balmer
- NPR Throughline – the Evangelical Vote
- What is this Persecution Complex?: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unenlightenment/2020/11/the-war-on-christmas-and-the-persecution-complex/
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