A message to conservative parents

yaxomoxay

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I was raised Catholic but stopped going to church on the regular over 20 years ago. I occasionally go with my parents a couple times a year. I’ve never seen politics be a big part of the mass. The closest it’s gotten is acknowledging we live in divisive times and we should focus on the best outcome for the most people, especially the poor, but it’s never been attacks on parties or specific politicians. The priests seem keenly aware that there is probably a diverse mix of political beliefs in their congregation.
As a pious, devout, heck a Saint Catholic, I observe the same. I go to mass up to 5 times a week and political speeches are very very rare and quite often indirect when they happen. Certainly, I have never seen a priest - even in different cities or states - endorsing or attacking a candidate. Granted, there are so many priests and parishes, so statistically some will inevitably get more political than they should and maybe get on the news but they’re more an oddity than normalcy. Probably the liturgical structure of the Mass doesn’t really allow for much politics.

My impression is that some Protestant churches are very political.
 
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lizkat

Watching March roll out real winter
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A great deal if not all of the religious news about Trump MAGA is support for Trump. Really I just want to know if their are hordes of Christian’s against the likes of Trump, MAGA, Deceit, Corruption, and the threat to our democracy, and I have no clue if there are. If we could find a statistic about the “Christian” community in the USA, how does this group break out for or against the Devil?


According to this article, single issue voters: pro-abortion. Yet they appear to be oh so ready to sell their souls in the bargain.

This article says Trump Christian support is based on pro-abortion and him declaring a truce on Christian churches, huh? I suppose this means the Trump con of turning the country into a Christian Theocracy.

Christian denominations hold a vast array of beliefs, and the range of a supposed "authoritative voice" is equally diverse, e.g. all the way from such as the RCs asserting doctrinal infallibility of the Pope, to a Baptist who may affirm "priesthood of the individual believer".

I hasten to say in both cases there are plenty believers and nonbelievers alike who misinterpret what either of those two positions on leadership in matters of faith actually mean.

But the Constitution does not prefer either, nor any in between, and so in fact there an be no single "authoritative voice" of the Christian community, not about matters of faith in practice, and certainly not about the effect on human beings of any secular leader, including Donald Trump.

The question in the USA is to what extent a country --with a Constitution that affirms there is no established religion-- can tolerate the intrusion of religious belief into the public square.

It's true there's a fairly loud "evangelical Christian" answer to that question. But even the evangelical community leadership is divided about some aspects of the effect of having elected a man like Donald Trump.

I'd point out here that the magazine Christianity Today, which was founded in 1956 by Billy Graham as a mainstream but conservative media outlet, has been ridiculed by Trump in recent years as "far left" in its outlook, solely for having taken exception to a few of Trump's morally questionable policies and behaviors.​
The magazine a few years ago noted that there are fewer protestant Christians nowadays willing to identify themselves as "evangelical" precisely because of the politicization of Christianity in the USA.​

I think we're seeing a last gasp of fundamentalist Christians as attempted drivers of "conservative" political policy in the USA, because of the continuing decline of formal religious affiliation in this country combined with a decline in political party affiliation. The now aging Boomers and the slightly older Silent Generation have far higher rates of asserted belief than do the Millennials.


Bottom line: We cannot afford to figure that professed Christians --evangelical or otherwise-- are somehow collectively obligated to rise up as one and declare Donald Trump morally unfit to lead (and to have led) either this nation or the band of diehard followers who've made the Republican Party into no more than the shell around a cult of personality.

There's no one voice of Christianity to lead either the GOP or the USA out of the confusion we now suffer by allowing politics, religion, social media, a public health crisis and a Congress indebted to private wealth to end up conflated as "American government." It's the Gen Z and the Millennials who are going to have to sort this mess out. Fortunately they're more educated and [arguably] somewhat more progressive than the boomers and silent gen. It's proving messy for the USA to get the baton away from the septuagenarians for keeps, but that's a self-solving problem if the planet can manage to stay in orbit for a few more years.
 
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