Ngl it's hard to overstate how much contemporary evangelicalism has broken the brains of American conservatives, an ideology that allows you be ontologically righteous with no actual demands on you so long as you are a considered "a good Christian"
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I attempted to mildly shame a Xian relative into a better opinion on immigrants by nothing that me, an atheist, more closely follows Matthew 25:31-46 and she waved it away with "everyone sins, that's why we need Jesus". Just no acknowledgment of a need to try to be moral.
It's astonishing on several dimensions. For one, in the cited verse Jesus literally says he will throw you into the eternal fire if you don't do these things. It's clearly not meant to be a suggestion, but it barely registers as an admonition much less command for my relative.
For another, it's amazing how the teachings of Paul have, in their minds, totally reduced the entirety of Jesus life and teachings to just his death. Like his whole life and teachings become pointless in the standard evangelical substitutionary atonement view of my relatives.
I think it's fair to say that my evangelical relatives are basically in open rebellion against the teachings of this guy Jesus who they claim to follow and just the blowback dissonance of being around them hurts my head.
Forgot one of my dimensions of astonishment: It's astonishing that she didn't try to refute my claim of following it more closely. There wasn't any hint of "no, actually, I'm following Jesus better". Not the slightest hint of that. It was straight to "morality doesn't matter at all".
I read The Pagan Christ by Thomas Harpur many years ago, and the one thing I really took away was the idea that Xians had lost the real potential to bring forth good in the world by taking the story literally, and thus giving themselves an out by worshipping...
I think it was Barbara ehrenreich who said she left an evangelical church service and was struck by the fact that the preacher only spoke about Christ as a corpse not his acts or his life.
"By faith alone you are saved" makes evangelical Christianity both uniquely appealing and uniquely dangerous. A blank check for salvation without any ethical requirements makes for an incredibly easy justification for indulging in one's basest, cruelest instincts.
Yup, and they are so sure they are right about Jesus it bleeds over into being certain they are right about everything in general. There is no place for humility or curiosity.
The truly soul crushingly, stupid aspect is that most of them wouldn’t know the central tenants of Christianity if you hit them in the face with it. There are golden calfs aplenty. And most of them are so cruel to people who are less fortunate.
Australian Christian and evangelical here. American evangelicalism is something totally different and a total bastardisation of evangelicalism. American evangelicalism is an unholy (in the most accurate sense) fusing of pro-gun, libertarian and rampant capitalism cultures. It's a cultural label.
Sorry to break it to you, but the incredibly vulgur attitudes of Australian conservatives online were hugely influential to the current generation of American fascists. I don't trust you.
I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm also not really online and I'd describe myself as a swinging voter. I'm just pointing out that these people do not believed the same things I believe. They worship capitalism and preach hate. They are badly misled.
Right, like Fox News wasn’t founded by an Australian. 9/10 cultural criticism of the US by Europeans and their descendants is just a pot calling the kettle black and trying to assuage guilt for their own sins
Were those conservatives actually evangelicals? I don't know Australian religious and/or civil politics myself, but I'm squinting here because the person you're responding to only said *evangelicals*, which is NOT synonymous with conservative (indeed it seemed like this was precisely their point).
I work with a lot of religious conservatives and despite their outward demeanor, there is something so deeply broken in them it is difficult to actually ponder for too long. Just staring at a black hole
Yup, broken.
These two books are real. “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” and “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”
This is why having one on one conversations with them pointing out the things Trump does and telling them this is what they empower and who you see them as causes them to have a complete fucking breakdown they think they’re good people, but they’re absolutely shitty. Fucking humans.
just gotta recite the "Sinner's Prayer", ideally as young as possible, though the ease of getting in if you come with a solid conversion story ("I had sex out of wedlock but now") draws a lot of abusive men who become untouchable in the community
Shades of the Southern Baptist Convention ahead of the Civil War. Absolutely fascinating to read the insults of abolitionist Christianity compared to pro-slavery doctrine
There was also a LOT of pushback on the Nazis coming from those Churches. One of the ironies of history is that no one stood up to the Nazis better than Churches, and no one collaborated with the Nazis more enthusiastically than Churches. Often the same organizations, just different individuals.
Fair point. I've seen the argument that, until Islamist theocratic movements took over as the biggest right-wing ideological threat to the world, it was Catholic Fascism in the form of Italian/Spanish/Latinx/Portuguese/French/German/Hungarian/Polish fascist and fascist-adjacent movements.
Now, of course, it seems like Evangelical Protestant Fascist movements from Trump's America to Museveni's Uganda are at least making a strong effort to replace the Ayatollahs and Mullahs of militant political Islam as the biggest such threat to the world and its people.
One of the hypotheses I’ve seen around the US vs Euro faiths is that by excluding creeds from state support, we applied an evolutionary pressure that ensured only the fittest & most virulent creeds have survived. Kinda seems the religious left here is enervated Euro-style, but the right is bred hard
It’s a religious pyramid scheme. You can live how you want , ignore the rules and all will be forgiven.
So long as you ensure as many people as possible are forced into living by those rules .
By deception. By hate. By fear.
Whatever it takes
The best depiction of modern evangelicalism is The Righteous Gemstones, but they’ll never see it. Demonstrations of the most selfish, self-serving acts, all while their churches are still full and their collection baskets are overflowing.
what's wild to me is that, while white evangelicals still clearly the lion's share of the base & humming in the background in this admin somewhere (most directly Hegseth, Johnson), they're *not* the vanguard.
Instead this weird kludge of fringe Catholics & technobroligarchs, + ...Trump.
Paul doesn’t give license to act this way. 1 Corinthians 13 is all about love. Salvation by faith alone is not instruction to do whatever you want. Romans 6 is a pretty clear repudiation of that idea.
Depends on your definition of "contemporary evangelicalism". Lots of them believe that (though they wouldn't put it that way), but it's a departure from historical evangelicalism, and Christianity per se. You cannot say "Jesus is my Savior" if you're not willing to follow him as Lord, his path.
My hot take is that the reason homosexuality is the one sin that matters is that it's the one sin that the majority feel no temptation to commit. Absolute peace of mind -- didn't suck a dick today, didn't even want to, so this desire I feel to hit my wife must be pure and righteous.
Part of the success of evangelicals and manosphere stuff is they promise paradise while demanding nothing—no demand for honor, or sacrifice, or chivalry. They're all but explicitly anti-social ideologies
Modern evangelicalism and toxic masculinity are the conservative's very twisted version of identity politics.
It's partly why they think advocacy for marginalized groups is "giving *those* people a pass." Because they use their identities as "real men" and "Christians" to ignore their own flaws.
This is far from the only reason the right punches down on minorities, but I think this is another manifestation of "every accusation is an admission" with conservatives.
They themselves attempt to exploit their identities as much as possible, and assume every other group is doing the same.
Bless you. I have been screaming this for years. Nothing is required of you at all! But you get to be righteous and better than everyone by saying the Sinner’s Prayer.
A religion that needs
the strong-arm of the state
to require its citizens
to conform to its beliefs,
Is a religion that
isn't worth a damn.
Freedom of conscience
is our Right.
Don't let the misguided
take it away.
the thing that gets me is, whereas the "heavenly reward" shit works because it's literally unfalsifiable, it SHOULD be immediately obvious that acting like an entitled douche makes men MORE untouchable, but it...doesn't.
I guess Musk is the exception that keeps the faith, but he's got billions so
It's really even worse, since evangelicals aren't just fundamentalist protestant, but fundamentalist Calvinist: they believe themselves among the elect, which creates a self-fulfilling assumption that anything they do is not only acceptable but unimpeachably correct
Having been in the evangelical movement in a way that afforded me a close look: not really Calvinist so much as a buffet hell-stew of useful ideologies warranted by half memories of some adjacent faith's theology
An evangelical conservative not only won't apologize for sins, they can't, because being God's elect, apologizing for their behavior would be like saying God was in the wrong
Also, a whole lot of them really explicitly want to create a country modeled after Calvin's Geneva, burning heretics at the stake and all. It was real fun listening to the Bible department at my Presbyterian undergrad declare my Anabaptist ancestors all nuts who deserved to get murdered.
I think it's literally true to think of MAGA as a religious movement, forged through the fusion of three prior faiths: evangelical predestination, Silicon Valley technocapitalism, and old-school charismatic fascism to tie it all together in a single figurehead
Particularly manosphere stuff is popular because you can be an asshole and do relatively little and then become hot, successful, and desired for it, "actually being an asshole makes you more fuckable"
I remember in the years of feeling like a leftist in the wilderness in the 2000s, people would use words like "Christianist" to describe this creed of toxic empty faith. Is that still a thing?
Christianism is a dangerous sub-culture. A radical ideology of violent cultural expansion by force—the elimination of difference and diversity. They are the evangelical equivalents of Zealots or Jihadists. They proudly embrace the genocidal mantle of "Crusaders"; adopting their iconography.
I think that part if tho is sort of “ the evidence of my eyes “ no? I see people who are evil jerks get rich and sleep fine and can make my life miserable (they are probably my boss). that makes the whole concept of “be decent” a harder sell, no?
ALL religions tell you that if you believe the message, you’re automatically a good person. The most you ever have to do is a token gesture of obedience, like the occasional ritual. Adherents consider some incantation to be a small price to pay for feeling good about yourself.
Can't quite agree. As ideologies both demand self-sacrifice and service. A major reason they are so destructive is that their praxis requires antisocial authoritarian entitlement. This hypocrisy resolves into a honour culture that valorises violence and glorifies abuse and submission to abuse.
Devout family member who practices their faith calls this kind of evangelism based on being saved as the only requirement for admission to heaven “fire insurance “ .
Omg the other title at the bottom I forgot about that one lol (Allie Beth is someone whose entire existence I mostly try to block out of my memory to preserve my mental health).
My theological Hot Take is that Sola Fide is the most enduringly destructive religious doctrine in human history. No other major religion promises eternal salvation without at least SOME kind of moral/ethical requirement from the follower. That's usually a feature of cults.
Christians who do not attend evangelical churches (or schools) rarely get how indoctrination works differently in severed communities.
When I visited evangelical churches they'd routinely hand out checklists on how to vote, how to approach "sin" and "fleshy" human pitfalls under the guise of piety.
Realizing this is the actual practical message of Evangelicalism was such a mindfuck as someone who grew up in it. "Wait, everyone else *isn't* full of guilt and sorrow over being fundamentally broken, and always trying to make up for it? They don't care at all?"
Yeah. There are some people who really do believe all the stuff about trying to be a good person according to what they think Jesus said and then there are people who... don't???? and as someone who was category 1 the cat 2 people still baffle me even now that I'm agnostic.
(And then of course there's the question of how self-deluded a person is. Humans can justify a whole lot of stuff by getting themselves to believe that the bad things are good things that god requires of them, or that their selfishness is the Holy Spirit)
This is not quite accurate: Most conservative evangelical churches place immense demands on lower-ranking members. It is only high-ranking members that are considered righteous regardless of behavior.
Just say you're a Christian and "I'm broken" and everything is all good. There's a professor at a previous workplace of mine who dropped that in a Facebook confession on how he had raped children, and people were liking it with hug emojis.
Comments
I attempted to mildly shame a Xian relative into a better opinion on immigrants by nothing that me, an atheist, more closely follows Matthew 25:31-46 and she waved it away with "everyone sins, that's why we need Jesus". Just no acknowledgment of a need to try to be moral.
These two books are real. “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” and “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”
.
Parasites.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/alina-habba-trump-lawyer-court-b2481296.html
So long as you ensure as many people as possible are forced into living by those rules .
By deception. By hate. By fear.
Whatever it takes
Instead this weird kludge of fringe Catholics & technobroligarchs, + ...Trump.
faith is evidence of things unseen, these people merely believe without being tested (yes I am grumpy about the state of affairs)
belief is so amorphous for we may think one thing and do another
auto erotic are the first two of the three below,
the third requires another person or the possibility of you seeing yourself as cringe after it’s over
It's partly why they think advocacy for marginalized groups is "giving *those* people a pass." Because they use their identities as "real men" and "Christians" to ignore their own flaws.
They themselves attempt to exploit their identities as much as possible, and assume every other group is doing the same.
the strong-arm of the state
to require its citizens
to conform to its beliefs,
Is a religion that
isn't worth a damn.
Freedom of conscience
is our Right.
Don't let the misguided
take it away.
I guess Musk is the exception that keeps the faith, but he's got billions so
like Musk, they're stuck in some Spaceman Spiff level of arrested development, just wanting to be cool.
but you have to get laid to be cool soooo
also: laundry.
god bothering for the Boomers, incel boards and dank memes for the boy kiddies
blech
And what was "conservatism" then is just "howling fascism" now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinomianism
https://pca.st/episode/bfec2601-0a3a-437d-ad56-19886ffcb21e
When I visited evangelical churches they'd routinely hand out checklists on how to vote, how to approach "sin" and "fleshy" human pitfalls under the guise of piety.
You already have Mormonism, so another form of Ziontology brings them closer to syncretization.
American Christianity, where white men are little gods.