Tuesday, February 21, 2017

White Evangelic Christians Are Killing Christianity


It is no secret that I hold evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in extremely low regard.  Between their embrace of ignorance and rejection of science and their hatred towards anyone different than themselves, I view them as a cancer on American society.  They bemoan the growing secularism as they call it of society and the growing flight of the younger generations from religion and Christianity in particular.  Nearly 1/3 of the under 30 generations have walked away and now the "Nones" are the largest religious group in the nation.  Yet these modern day Pharisees remain blind to what is driving the exodus: they themselves.  Hatred, bigotry, and support for political agendas that are the antithesis of the Gospel message now most define Christianity in the public's mind's eye.  When Christianity becomes a largely dead religion in America, it will be the evangelicals and their fundamentalist brethren that will have most contributed to its demise. A piece by John Pavlovitz sums up the situation well:
Jesus cautions against the wolves who would come  in goodness to gain proximity to the sheep, only to devour them. “ 

And the saddest part about Jesus’ warnings is that they have now come to pass; the predators are here and they didn’t come from somewhere outside. They weren’t the Muslims or the gays or the Atheists, as we’ve been told by the Church they would be. They didn’t come from Hollywood or North Korea or some ISIS offshoot as FoxNews or Breitbart forecast. These wolves weren’t watching from a distance and they didn’t have to travel far to infiltrate the flock.
This slaughter has been an inside job. It’s happened at campaign rallies and in voting booths and on partisan news networks. It’s come through the evangelists and the pastors and the politicians and from proclaimed Christians, all out of blood while wearing Jesus like a sheepskin.
For all their sanctimonious preaching about morality and family values, and for all their endless warnings to the “sinners” around them, white Christians elected the worst human being to ever reside in the White House; a man completely devoid of goodness and decency—and dared to call him Christian.   
[W]hite Evangelicals let the wolves in and they’re tearing the sheep to pieces.  
And the sad part about it all is that Jesus ends up with the blood on his hands that really belongs to them. 
For many people, Evangelical Christianity here hasn’t been about Jesus in a few decades.     . . . They think this is victory.     Not long from now, these same supposed men and women of God will lament why the Church has died. 

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