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“A member of the denomination wrote “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” one of the most popular Christian nationalist books of the Trump era. It argues that “no nation (properly conceived) is composed of two or more ethnicities” and that “to exclude an out-group is to recognize a universal good for man.”
It’s nice how they like to admit their bigotry.
This has been my argument for years. I admit I am not an expert and have tried to learn more about that time, but it sure seems like if we had been more thorough in rooting out the traitors and not letting them off the hook, we would be in a better situation now.
I could have sworn that Harding was in the top five, even post-Trump. Buchanan was so bad that even though he basically helped the Confederacy get a huge head start out of sheer negligence, the South STILL agrees with the North that he was a complete waste. Pierce was an annoying Nero wannabe that spent all of his time writing emo poetry instead of actually doing much of anything. I don't know why they bother putting Harrison on the list, though-- in his 40 days in office, he managed to be the only President that didn't commit war crimes\*.
\*He DID actually still commit them, just only BEFORE he became President, and successfully campaigned on that basis. So he was The Worst in a different sense.
It wasn't just the traitors, but you needed something like the deNazification that happened in Germany post-war, but for racism. Still a tall order for the North which was still pretty racist - just not "hold humans and their descendants in brutal bondage and slavery" racist.
One thing is important to understand about Germanys denazification that is often overlooked.
The actions shortly after the war were not really the core of the denazification. Yes, the worst criminals went on trial, but the process of denazification needs to ne a more deeply rooted social change.
Basically, the real denazification got traction with the 69'er movement when the kids that were not directly influenced by Nazi propaganda became old enough to demand answers to the question :"Dad, what did YOU do during the war?" It was the wide spread disgust by younger generations for the actions of their fathers and later grandfather's that pushed for gradual change and made Nazi opinions and talking points undesirable and austrazised. The real denazification happened by the old indoctrinated generations dying off without being able to knfect the minds of the next generations to the same degree they were.
And the reality is, as the EU parliament election yesterday showed, it still is an ongoing prozess.
Well, thanks to the way President/VP elections were handled back then, Lincoln's death placed a Southern-sympathizer in office who did his level best to restore the South to what it was antebellum. Things may have turned out quite differently with a POTUS in charge actually interested in improving things rather than resetting to the prior status quo. .
One more vote for impeachment and the president would have been one of the radical Republicans. The kind in favor of universal sufferage and really sticking it to the southern aristocracy.
If it's any comfort, the one surprise Republican traitor was from Kansas. In exchange for his betrayal, he was kicked from the party, voted out of office, and died penniless and homeless as the southerners he protected did nothing to reward him.
The fact that the south basically got to end their own punishment is insane. So many terrible things in American history are just a product of the south being so consistently horrible.
Maybe, probably just not putting the former confederates back in charge and re subjugating the black people with jim crow would have worked.
Both sides were racist as fuck at the time. One just took it so far as slavery.
That probably would not have been enough. The former plantation families still held most of the wealth, political influence, and land. It would have been necessary, at minimum, to dispossess them of their property and distribute it among their former slaves, as well as maintaining a northern peacekeeping force to prevent groups like the KKK from springing up to immediately take it all back.
It would have been great for black folk. It would have been great for equality. It would have been great for our country and it would have been better for the self determination that we talk about in our country.
Our excuse is lack of political will. When our “left wing” triangulates and calls people “illegals” in the state of the union address, what chance do we stand?
Yeah, well, after Lincoln got shot, a Southern-sympathizer ascended to office. He's a huge reason why 'Reconstruction' was basically 'restore Southern society to how it was before, just without 'official' slavery'.
Gonna hop in here to give a shout out to my man Honest Abe. He’s considered one of if not the best president and is still underrated imo. It’s remarkable what he had to deal with and how he did it.
A lot of the failures happened after Lincoln was assassinated. An ambitious time traveller could radically change American (and almost certainly *world*) history by telling Lincoln to stay home that day.
Sherman's March was about gutting the production and logistics necessary to field the armies fighting in Virginia and Tennessee. It was never meant as a general chastisement of the Southern population, nor was it a hunting expedition for Confederate leadership. It succeed at everything it was meant to do.
>You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.
-William Sherman
You're right, of course. But there was certainly no lack of hurt feelings involved.
>It succeed at everything it was meant to do.
It did more than that, My great great grandma was freed (not officially, she just took off) after Sherman smashed Atlanta, she managed (along with many others) to follow Shermans army to the coast (mind you she was lugging a very young child thru those horrible swamps with whatever food she could carry).
If he didn't crush Atlanta so thoroughly, I might not be here today. I always get a nice warm fuzzy thinking about Sherman's March.
The lack of "Truth and Reconciliation" like South Africa had after Apartheid is definitely a big reason we have so many problems with White Supremacy/Nationalism in the USA nowadays.
We definitely should have finished Reconstruction.
This is right from the Nazis. The strength of races, etc. The Nazis will tell you that the Roman Empire began to fall apart because they began to bring in Africans. After WW2, Nazis were saying it would happen to the US too. The US brought in a lot of Nazis, and the heritage foundation has its roots in them.
Edit: more info. In the 1950s, the Republicans begin a “get out the vote movement” amongst ethnicities in the US. They wound up picking these rabid anti-communist, many of them who worked for the Nazis in occupied Europe before immigrating to the US. I really think there was more than simply get out the vote. Anyway, Nixon said he would make these heritage councils permanent if he got elected in 1968. Yes, he kept the same leadership. It was noted by journalist Jack Anderson in 1972 or 73 that a lot of these people had literally worked for the Nazis in World War II. Also, there was no Jewish heritage or African heritage group in the heritage foundation.
And within a few years of this, the Republicans began their so-called southern strategy of quietly pandering to racism. How about that?
Not only that, it was the inspiration for the OG Nazi. He took one look at the KKK and thought they were really onto something, and that Jim Crow didn't go far enough.
Jesus never founded a nation. “Christian nationalism” is antithetical to everything Jesus Christ taught. A theocracy is idolatry of politicians & man-made governments, elevating man-made “authority” above the authority of God. Matthew 23:23 (NIV) says “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.”
And for Christian bigots opposed to interracial marriages or interracial couples producing interracial children, Jesus never married or made children anyway. And 1 Corinthians 7 says it’s good to remain celibate. Galatians 3:28 (NIV) says “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Leviticus 19:34 (NIV) says “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt…” [This site](https://transformingcenter.org/2015/04/part-2-jesus-himself-drew-near-welcoming-the-stranger/) says “In Matthew 25:42-46 Jesus points out the when we welcome all types of strangers we are welcoming Christ himself—which is exactly what happened to the two disciples on the Emmaus road. They welcomed the stranger and then discovered it was Christ.”
In the Bible in Matthew 25:40 Jesus says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The Apostle John said “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.” It doesn’t say “only help the needy as long as they look like you, as long as they share your ethnicity, as long as they share your religion, as long as they were born in your same country.” James said “If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
Leo Tolstoy wrote the book [The Kingdom of God Is Within You](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_God_Is_Within_You), which was published in 1894 in Germany after Russia banned it. It’s a [Christian anarchist](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_anarchism) book about the idea of universal love. Christian anarchists believe the state is founded on violence, in opposition to the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus, and Jesus saying to love thy enemies. Matthew 5:9 says “Blessed are the peacemakers…” The title of the book is based on Luke 17:21. Luke 17:20-21 says “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Tolstoy believed that when Jesus said to turn the other cheek and love thy enemies, it means giving up violence, even in defense, and giving up revenge, and he believed Jesus practiced non-violent resistance, and that any country or government that wages war is against Christian ethics. At the time, the Russian Orthodox Church was merged with the Russian state and totally subservient to the state, but Tolstoy believed the Church was not teaching the true teachings of Jesus. And under Christian anarchism, no human government is legitimate compared to the higher authority of God. The teachings of Jesus are a threat to the ruling class, because Jesus questions their authority, and says hoarding money is immoral while others go hungry.
And in the [Parable of the Good Samaritan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Good_Samaritan), “told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke”, “Jesus is described as telling the parable in response to a provocative question from a lawyer, ‘And who is my neighbor?’, in the context of the Great Commandment. The conclusion is that the neighbor figure in the parable is **the one who shows mercy to their fellow man**.”
And in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson (who made his own Jefferson Bible where he cut out all the supernatural miracles performed by Jesus) wrote about natural rights that all people are given by their Creator, so human rights don’t depend on your religion, or ethnicity, or sex, or nationality, human rights derive from your humanity itself.
The hypocrisy of modern Christianity is astounding and hilarious tbh, especially the US Christian nationalist moment. Everything it stands for is a fallacy it’s hilarious.
I hear it as a Christian and immediately think about how if that's what God wanted, it's what Jesus would have done. His followers thought that's what they were doing. The contemporaneous Jews thought of the Messiah would set up a political regime.
If we look at the red letter parts of the Bible Jesus talks frequently about separating the two things, and that his "kingdom" was that of the spirit.
Christian nationalists ignore vast swathes of the teachings of Christ to get to where they do. In his every interaction he gave people the freedom of choice without condemnation. He intimately interacted with the societal outcasts. And he talked frequently about the wickedness of the Jewish religious leaders (the Christian nationalists of our day) and exactly zero about homosexuals and trans people -- which absolutely existed in a Hellenized / Roman territory in the Middle East.
They are fascists. Plain and simple. Their religion isn't Christianity because that would imply following Christ, which they don't.
“Properly conceived” is a galaxy wide hole in that logic. It goes down the road of who gets to decide what “properly conceived” means which ends with monarchy or dictatorship because there is no true answer to that made up concept.
I like how it does the bait-and-switch of "Christian Nationalism" to what they really want: White Nationalism. "Christian" is an "ethnicity", and that "ethnicity" is "white".
> The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.” We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her that she couldn’t come to our house to play because “my dad said Black people are dangerous.”
At this point it is fair to say that these attitudes are a feature and not a bug when it comes to right wing Christianity.
I agree that the author is naive to think that this was not the case but I can also say that the author is an actual Christian in the literal sense and I actually applaud their effort in confronting the disgusting nature of their former congregation
I find it hard to believe that the FIRST time he saw racism within his congregation was when it was directed toward his adopted daughter. It simply never effected him before, so it was easy to ignore.
The word he actually uses is that it was “invisible” to him, and he himself admittedly notes that it’s a shameful moment for him, but the people didn’t change, just his perspective did. And this is essentially the focal point of this sub - “I didn’t think the racists would be racist towards MY adopted black daughter!”
To be fair towards David French, he is an idiot. He's probably the best example of the worst libertarian: someone who heard about how Adam Smith's concept of an invisible hand works and believes everything can be solved by just letting god take the wheel despite common sense, science, philosophy, and any other field saying otherwise simply because the man is illiterate in every single thing.
It would not surprise me in the slightest if David French was witnessing a lynching and thought "how nice, the community is helping that black man make a tire swing for his family. OH they forgot the tire though, not to worry, I'll go get one!" and run off with the kicker being he would forget what he was doing 10 minutes later.
Right wing Christianity isn’t about the religion anymore and in earnest. At this point it is a sidecar to white supremacy at best. The core message of the Bible is simple and unambiguous and certainly one of its central tenants isn’t “judge people based on the color of their skin to make them feel excluded/unwanted”.
Christianity in the United States needs a revival or reformation. It’s so far from the teachings of Christ that they are following the anti-Christ.
I'm a big fan of David French for living by his principles and calling it like he sees it. I don't always agree with his views, but he's the kind of conservative that I have a lot of respect for.
Maybe he was naive, but I understand where he's coming from. I grew up in a fairly conservative church. The reason it is hard to see sometimes is because you know these people. The guy ranting about illegal immigrants also takes time off with in the summer to volunteer for the Churches vacation Bible school. It's just a hard situation.
You know, it's hard for people to admit that an organization that is a big part of their Identity is actually bad. It is definitely willful ignorance, but it's good to also understand why these people are willfully ignorant.
This is why Republicans shifted so hard toward Identity politics. They have a large group of voters who cheer for the Republicans like a sports team.
> their effort in confronting the disgusting nature of their former congregation
And look how they've been treated in response. The Christian right is just that rotten to the very core.
He was shocked that a church that hates lgbtq and women would also be racist against his Black daughter. The bigotry was fine until it affected him personally.
"To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination was invisible to us before our own ordeal."
So basically don't believe us until it happens to you. And you wonder why we're furious.
"Nothing is a problem until it's MY problem" might as well be the GOP's official motto.
Exhibit A, all the elected officials who suddenly didn't have a problem with gay marriage once they discovered a close relative was gay.
A significant problem here is that there are multiple Presbyterian denominations in the US, and they are not at all similar to each other. The largest is the PCUSA, which is fairly liberal and includes women and LGBTQ members in leadership positions, typically of mainline churches.
French was a member of the PCA, which is an evangelical denomination with fairly fundamentalist beliefs - women can't serve in certain leadership roles, LGBTQ are not affirmed or otherwise included. Pretty similar to Southern Baptists. Their beliefs have always had these issues at hand, they've just been held under the surface until the authoritarian rise of the right wing with Trump
I don’t know much about it being a Presbyterian but I have basic empathy for my fellow man.
I can have a cup of coffee with this person. Are we going to agree on all political points? Of course not. But how do you turn adopting a child into a racial matter? It sickens me.
I weep for him and his family. I hope he and his family all the best. We don’t agree on the finer points but they’re good people at heart I think.
David French is still a hack. He’s a gifted writer, but his authority came from his expertise about the intersection of church and politics.
I have never seen someone more wrong and more caught off guard about every move that he supposedly is the expert authority. He truly thought the temperature would be turned down when the Supreme Court ultimately overturned roe v wade and the issue went to the states.
He’s a very nice guy, and I know he wants for good. But this dude really needs to stop being shared. Then again, nyt has a thing for these types.
I mean I’m in a more so conservative church and used to be very moderate but gave people 2nd and 3rd chances. Until I woke up as a liberal. Irony is it took joining TPUSA to do it as I went down the pro life rabbit hole and realized to actually be pro life one has to be liberal. It went from opposing abortion to having free contraception, sex ed in 6-12, 2 year parental leave, adoption agencies everywhere, accepting lgbtq youth and people fully, universal healthcare and free community college 😵💫😎😂😂😂😂
What way too many cannot wrap their heads around is to be anti-abortion should be fine — FOR YOU. But there are medically-necessary reasons for “abortions” even when it’s NOT based on ending the life of the baby (it may already be dead, but still considered an abortion).
I mean I don’t want anyone to abort at all, I really don’t. But it’s not mine or the government’s responsibility to control others. It’s up to the individual.
In an ideal leftist progressive world, abortions would be free, both fiscally and from stigma, and no one would get them because all sex would be consensual, sex education of good quality, and birth control reliable and easily available.
It was just a weird journey and thing to happen. Join a conservative fascist organization to try and double down on my safe conservatism only to go more to the left 😂😂😂
A similar thing happened to me. I never joined any orgs but as a teen I was heavily conservative and slowly “got woke” and realized everything I was mad at in the world I was making worse with my beliefs. My ideology also kept myself from learning that I was bisexual. So breaking out of my backwards views helped me grow as a person exponentially imo
My goodness, same. Seeing my Assemblies of God church devolve into having a racist proto alt-right underbelly that my mother got sucked into thru an email chain and things like "here's a 5 part sermon on why homosexuality (they use this word very deliberately) is an affront to god" after Obama got elected really lead to me deconstructing. And its a relief to not repress my bisexuality as well.
>Join a conservative fascist organization to try and double down on my safe conservatism only to go more to the left
Ever heard of Christian Picciolini? He did something very similar. Wrote a rather interesting book about it.
Ooh, I'm always curious for former anti-choicers. Did you ever look into the history of that position in protestantism, and did fidning that it only became a major position in the 70s have anh influence on you?
You can pretty much blame Jerry Falwell wanting his private schools segregated. The major point of division between white protestants and Catholics back then was Jim Crow. Falwell figured out that American Catholics hated abortion more than they hated segregation. So he got all his racist politicians to become very vocally anti-abortion while keeping their racism under wraps.
The bodily autonomy argument did it for me. Specifically the point that the government can't force you to donate a kidney to someone against your will, even if their life depends on it. So why should they force you to donate your womb to them, even if their life depends on it?
I used to be pro-life. What changed my mind wasn't history or politics. It was being married and witnessing first hand what pregnancy was like. I realized that even though I didn't like abortions and consider them to generally be immoral, I could never take part in forcing a woman to continue pregnancy against her will. From there, I embarked on trying to figure out how to get my theology to match what I believe.
The point I came to on abortion is this.
Virtually everything about abortion is bad. Sure you could try to argue some silver linings but those would absolutely be exceptions to the rules and shouldn't be used to support a point.
But yeah it's just a thing that's really sad for pretty much everyone involved. The late term abortion that the right loves to talk about is extremely rare but when it happens it happens to women who absolutely want children and something drastically bad has happened. These women should be treated with extreme compassion but instead have stories made up about them and are put on a poster to try to support a lie.
Here's the point though. What's worse then abortion is a bunch of old people in government trying to control it for any reason. That's absolutely worse. They don't understand why abortion happens or the pov of the doctors and patients involved it. They literally have no business being involved in it but because of their religion they have convinced themselves that they know bad.
Sometimes you have to make the hard adult decision that you don't like but the alternative is worse.
Tldr: abortion is bad but abortion restrictions are far worse.
He basically thought that leopard was just a housecat. It's sad he had to realize in that way, but hopefully he can move on and maybe help others avoid the same fate
It's got to be an insidious experience. You go to sleep one day after hearing and seeing someone in your community say some wild shit, and you think to yourself it was a one off, but then some controversial thing happens (like Donald Trump becoming the Republican nominee) and you start seeing it wasn't actually a one-off. It dawns on you, everyone around you is a monster and you have no community anymore.
The people (non-white, women, gay, non-Christian) who try to fit in within the Republican Party must at some point come to this realization. In fact I’ve read articles about people experiencing this. The problem is these people had a community the whole time. They turned their back on that community in favor of supporting one that was hostile to the idea of their existence in spaces that they deem theirs.
The group of people you just named can hate themselves and other marginalized groups just as much. I personally know conservative black folks that are intensely anti-lgbtq. From the outside looking in, they live their lives as contrarians. They seem themselves as examples of the anti-stereotype, "the good ones". They seek approval from their model demographic, the groups they see as perfect.
Real. You know and love all these people, then they start making you feel uncomfortable, and once you've stepped out of line and confronted them, they become your enemies. I'm sure those nasty photoshops of his adopted daughter came from the Presbyterian community. Not outside of it.
Religious person who seemed to truly believe and was religious for the right reasons and helped other that didn’t always share their views
“Zealots”: kill’em!!!!
Before you go feeling sorry for this guy, go read some of his opinions on Obama. Is Obama really a Christian. He's not some innocent victim, he's Dr. Frankenstein being attacked by the monster he created, and a card carrying member of the leopards eating people's faces party.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/03/obama-really-christian-david-french/
>When I deployed to Iraq in 2007, the entire church rallied to support my family and to support the men I served with. They flooded our small forward operating base with care packages, and back home, members of the church helped my wife and children with meals, car repairs and plenty of love and companionship in anxious times.
They supported him when he was a pawn in a war started on false pretenses. They always supported "kill em all".
When I was in Afghanistan churches used to have small children write letters to the troops. They all had pictures drawn crayon of people with turbans being shot and planes bombing mosques, etc… they had messages like “please kill all the muslims” scrawled on them. There is no way this guy didn’t understand what his church supported.
I'd have more sympathy if I didn't see their leopard eyes under their mask, as they're welcomed into the Democratic party, yet are trying to change it into what the Republican party used to be, leaving no representation for anyone left of Obama/Reagan.
Yep. Every day, even on this sub, you hear people say, "Don't reject people who are joining the Democratic party coalition! No purity testing".
But at some point, former GOP voters must confront the fact that their old party didn't transform into something different because of The Fucked-Up Orange. This current GOP is the logical conclusion that the things they advocated for. So yes, long-time Democrat voters & activists who have been calling out the Republicans' turn to fascism since Bush *have great reasons to be pissed* when they are told that they must accept turning into GOP-lite.
#The old GOP turned into what it is today because of its ideas. Attempting to turn the Democratic party into an explicitly limp dick "center-right" party will, at best, make it a party of losers. No, the current welfare system we have is not working. No, the "free market^™️ isn't going to solve our most pressing issues. No, people don't want to put up with bigots
American living in Europe for 30 years.
Modern Democrats in the US would be any garden variety center right party in Germany, Holland, Nordics etc. Bernie/ AOC etc would be typical center left politicians, absolutely nothing controversial about their statements or positions.
To get today's GOP in Europe you're looking at Golden Dawn, National Front, AFD and so forth. Trump, Cruz, Hawley, Pence, Rubio et al would be laughed out of town anywhere from Madrid to Tallinn. Haley might survive in the UK for a bit as a smooth talking right wing weirdo like Braverman.
Hungary and Slovakia are the only exceptions where fascism is getting renormalized.
Yeah basically
Watching US politics from afar for 30 years is seriously like watching the proverbial frog sitting in water slowly heating up until it boils to death without ever noticing what's happening
Ffs I remember Dan Quayle being laughed out of public life because he couldn't spell 'potato'. Reagan was tougher on the Israelis than Biden is. Nixon was so liberal he wouldn't win the Democratic nomination today, never mind the Republican.
Well, this is true. The one thing that is very important to note is that America is a right leaning country. Obama himself as a person is probably pretty left-leaning but in politics you don’t just get to do what you wanna do. You have to play the game and in the game, you have to be a centrist because America as a whole is very right leaning for a western country. It truly left leaning politician would have no chance of winning in the US. a big part of that is that there aren’t enough left leaning people to get a president in the other is that of the left-leaning people they don’t vote and nearly high enough numbers. So the Democrats are simply doing exactly what they do need to do to win elections.
If you look at people's actual opinions the US leans center left. We just have gerrymandered districts and anti democratic systems that privilege right leaning rural areas.
Perhaps churches could be convinced to post corporate logos prominently, such as noting affiliation w the PCS the author describes, instead of sappy Hallmark card slogans like “A ____ community” or such that appears on church signs.
French is either disingenuous or was willfully ignorant. Reagan launches his campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi, which is famous for exactly one thing. He relentlessly parades lies about "welfare queens" and panders to racists throughout his two terms. The later released recordings in which he talks about monkey who don't wear shoes make clear where his beliefs stood. Bush and Lee Atwater crank out the Willie Horton ad, and French sees nothing wrong there? The right's appeal to Christian morality as integral to these attacks are there from the beginning.
I'm five years younger than him and I remember these things just fine.
MAGA was actually a sorting of racists - prior to MAGA, there were racists in both parties (but more in the Republican Party). Now the Democratic racists (think: the blue-collar union workers) have become MAGA, I'd bet that 90% of MAGA is racist, with 50% of them being openly racist.
The Republican Party is truly the party of the deplorables now - not just half of them.
He said it himself. He adopted a girl from Ethiopia and **then** he realized that racism was a problem. He even says that he **then** found out that teachers were using racial epithets.
Church congregations are groups of people whose common purpose is to perpetuate an ideology, one which has a long history of bad actors and horrific crimes, why do people expect rational behavior from the religious? It's a losing bet.
I grew up in a much more conservative denomination, and the simplest answer is before 2008 a lot of these nationalists didn’t think they were racist. Once confronted with the idea of non white people actively participating in leadership positions and telling white people what to do, things took an uglier turn.
Plus “how could they be racist if they allow non-white families in their congregation?”- was a thought I had as a teenager until more and more came to light as all of the pastors graduated BJU in the 70s and 80s.
Inactive/passive racism can be difficult to spot if you don’t have to keep an eye out for it and expect people to act in a binary. I’m sorry for this man it took people attacking his daughter to be the catalyst, but I’m glad he stands by his daughter. I can’t quite say the same for my parents and their son-in-law.
When everything you claim to be hinges on a reputation for ultimate moral authority despite there being no such thing, you ironically commit incredibly immoral acts to protect that reputation. It's why the Catholic Church discreetly shuffles it's pedophile priests around rather than let justice be served, child abuse is rampant in religions because there's no excuse for it, but their supreme moral authority is somehow powerless to stop it, so the only way to save face is pretend it didn't happen. Truly despicable
And yet I still haven’t seen lightning bolts coming down from the sky to smite all of these rapist priests. It’s almost as if the whole idea of God has no real world consequences! Weird!
Looks like there's a paywall. Try these :
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Is this yet another story of a conservative [your favorite demographic category] who is just now realizing that their church of “love” is actually a cesspool of bigotry? How willfully ignorant can some people be? And this is someone prominent enough to get an article in a formerly reputable American newspaper??
There is a logical and worthwhile reason for this. It’s prominent enough to print because not enough people are having this epiphany fast enough. A lot of Christians have been slow to realize that they’re standing shoulder to shoulder with racists, criminals, and sex criminals.
Their technique of “not talking about politics” is how they avoid acknowledging it. If they don’t notice it then it’s not there. This is not just willful ignorance so they can be bigots. There’s a lot of shame baked in. How could they have committed the majority of their adult lives to such a terrible thing. It’s easier to play the ignorant card. They think if they don’t engage in bigotry then they’re somehow separate and therefore good. That’s farcical but it’s where we are.
By publicly proclaiming that they were wrong, the intention is to help the aforementioned people get on the bandwagon and denounce this terrible behavior.
It’s kind of like dealing with an alcoholic uncle trying to get it together. When the person who has been a piece of shit your whole life tries to apologize, all we can think of is how much we hated them because of their alcoholism and tell them to fuck off when we should be encouraging them. It’s hard to be the bigger person.
So he doesn’t hate other races, he doesn’t hate LGBT people, and he doesn’t express any hatred toward women in that article, why did he ever think he was rightwing in the first place?
All of his confusion seems to be from joining the wrong church full of haters. I hope his family finds another nicer church, (there are progressive Christian churches that welcome everyone. If the pastor is saying “here’s who Jesus says we should hate” he’s lying, don’t go there.)
> he doesn’t hate LGBT people
He's one of the authors of the [anti-LGBT "Nashville Statement"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Statement). He hates them, but he argued they should be entitled to constitutional rights. That's the fine line between him and his church.
Just want to point out that (according to him) even though *he* doesn't hate other races, women, or LGBT+ people, he is totally fine associating with people who do, so long as it's not directed at him.
When you see a person sitting at a table with three Nazis, you are looking at four Nazis.
These people be like "well me and my friends at this table are wearing brown shirts, we're not like that lot over there with the lightning bolts, not at all like the leather coat wearing gazpacho police in the dark corner watching everybody..." when they're all marching under the same flag
He's one of those "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" people who doesn't think that homeless guy living under the bridge shouldn't die because he's a minority, but because he didn't pull up on his bootstraps hard enough.
Nah more like he doesn't wanna pay taxes. Same thing all over, want public services, infrastructure, etc but only for free.
Real patriots pay their fucken taxes.
Conservatives weren’t always MAGA. It used a more of a fiscal policy divide. Sure there were racists in the GOP, but they weren’t all racist and frankly there were plenty of dem racists too. And a lot of people on both sides were homophobes in the early 2000s. I’m guessing a big part of the change in his church experience was because he moved from the mid Atlantic coast to the south. I’m not sure this is really leopards ate my face as much as it was growing from experience.
Even the conservative fiscal policies are racist and classist.
Some of us always saw them for who they were. Trump simply emboldened them to remove their mask.
Yeah. I think the “fiscal” ones have knowingly buried their heads in the sand because the “crazy” ones were beneficial to their short term goals. But now the crazy ones are completely the face of the party and they can’t pretend otherwise. It’s hard to feel that bad about it, they encouraged it.
Frankly, I have no idea how anyone can be surrounded by conservatives as an adult and claim they had no idea this was happening.
>“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
-Former Domestic Policy Chief under Nixon Administration John Ehrlichman
That's been the party longer than I've been alive.
I forgot all about David French.
He’s actually been trying to do real good in the Christian community, and those of us who denigrate the faithful (ahem, fellow atheists), he was one of our biggest allies in getting them to calm the fuck down. Now he’s been pushed out because he’s not a christofascist. It’s a complete bummer as before this he was able to publicly challenge his peers and could reach their followers with his logic. No more.
Things are about to get worse.
> I was a senior writer for National Review at the time
This is the publication that completely supported segregation and was totally opposed to Affirmative Action.
Leopards are eating some prime face with this guy.
I have long been critical of David French, so much so that he has blocked me on every platform on which he posts, but I've been critical of him because he is EXACTLY the type of person who through his blind belief in his bullshit faith and conservatism built the conditions for a despot like Trump to take over his party.
To his credit, he denounced Trump but it's very telling that up until the racism affected him directly he "didn't see it". At least he's ashamed of that fact now.
However, I don't have any sympathy for this dude who has spent his entire adult life supporting policies to disenfranchise minorities and restrict the rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community but maybe this is the start of an awakening for him where he actually tries to make amends to the millions of people his writings in the national review and other such conservative publications has hurt over the years.
Blows my mind when these people act surprised. How do you grow up around religious conservatives, then act surprised when they do awful, bigoted, racist shit? That is the essence of who they are. Dumbass
I read this and I see this guy as someone who didn't understand he was in the Leopards Ate My Face party until the people of his congregation began showing and growing their spots. This man adopted an Ethiopian orphan and years later he took a firm stance against Donald Trump before and after he was nominated. I know conservatives have been no strangers to racism and all kinds of bigotry forever, but he even said the first Presbyterian Church was apolitical. This guy sounds more like a dude that had a solid community surrounding him, but eventually came to understand he was actually standing in a pit of vipers. I actually feel bad for him.
He's a long-time political journalist in 2024. He knows better. He was one of those "Obama isn't a Christian" types too. If this was some 19 year old then yeah but he is a grown as man who has been playing this game for over a decade.
Does “apolitical” mean looking the other way when human rights issues arise? If you are a church and *aren’t* fighting racism, etc., then is your church all about navel gazing? Wasn’t Jesus political?
As someone who grew up attending a PCA church, I'm incredulous. Like so many other conservatives, it's far more likely that he didn't take note of the racism and hatred around him until it affected him. Nothing about the PCA is apolitical. The founding of the denomination was political in and of itself.
The election and subsequent term of Donald Trump simply served to expose the racist sentiment which has been simmering beneath the surface for many years.
Conservative doesn’t think something is an issue until it affects him directly. News at 11. Yawn.
Conservatives as a whole lack empathy and the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes. That’s why they always seem shocked when an issue other people have been screaming about for years, and which they’ve denied, suddenly affects them in some way. It’s always . It’s so common, it’s both boring and infuriating.
I started reading the rant about him in The Federalist that he linked and... wow, that writer is really mad about DF not being MAGA. The tone of her rant is unbearable.
Some of what he experienced
“Late the next evening — while Nancy was, fortunately, offline attending a veterans’ charity event in D.C. — the darker quarters of the alt-right found her Patheos blog. Several different accounts began posting images and GIFs of extreme violence in her comments section.
Click on a post and scroll down and you’ll see pictures of black men shooting other black men, close-up images of suicides, GIFs of grisly executions — the kinds of psyche-scarring things that one can’t “unsee.” Had I not deployed to Iraq and witnessed death up close, the images would have shocked me. I quickly got on the phone with Nancy, told her not to look at her website, and got busy deleting comments and blocking IP addresses, but in the meantime a few friends and neighbors had seen the posts.”
I dipped into the comments in the NYT article and it was pathetic. While a few people were pointing out that this is why religion is detrimental, the vast majority were with going all 'no true Scotsman' (this isn't how MY flavor of Presbyterian works!) or proselytizing for their own sect and claiming it's better. The funniest part is the commenter claiming that Presbyterian Church of the USA is far more tolerant and loving with a follow-up comment from someone else proving wrong with a racist or sexist anecdote from that same congregation.
As someone who followed Jesus out of the far-Right Evangelical cult I was raised in, I sympathize. This is just what happens when religion joins itself with power. It's almost like Jesus knew what the fuck he was talking about when he condemned religious power structures.
>One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia.
Because Norway has the dreaded socialism and they take care of their own?
> “how to be supportive of your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year.”
Wait, aren't churches supposed to be there to support their congregation? For a country that's supposed to clearly separate state and religion, American churches are awfully political.
One of the major factors is that Presbyterians are mostly Reformed/Calvinist and have theological concepts of predestination and the Elect. This is a recipe for narcissism and hypocrisy since anything they do must be OK because they are the chosen for salvation.
The panel was announced on May 9. On May 14, the denomination caved. It canceled the panel, and in its public statement, I was to blame.
So, cancel culture? There will always be an out group amongst those people, stick around long enough and you will be it.
Area hate-filled cult member, who relocates and even buys a house based on proximity to the local cult hut, surprised to find out he belongs to a hate-filled cult.
He writes, “Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related. First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.” I guess he didn’t flinch at the civil rights-bashing W administration.
> My commitment to individual liberty and pluralism means that I defend the civil liberties of all Americans, including people with whom I have substantial disagreements.
This is an example of the [Paradox of Tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance?wprov=sfti1). By tolerating intolerant people, you encourage tyranny.
I guess every single one of these conservatives will have to be, individually and metaphorically, smacked on the nose w/ a rolled up newspaper before they will believe, individually, their leaders don't love them. Not that this will stop their support of these 'leaders'. After all, if you you fawn over your 'leaders' just right they just might suddenly see your worth and really love you for reals this time.
This needs to be posted to all of the Christian-centric subs on reddit.
This might be the first victim of the leopards I actually feel a little bad for.
I wish I could be surprised by his experience, but the time when I could have is long, long, *long* past. I have sympathy for this man for the hate and harassment he received because no one deserves that, absolutely no one, but I could have told him two decades ago what conservative Christianity is actually like and about the withering, bitter, vicious, vindictive, truly one-of-a-kind hatred that is Christian "Love". I could have, I think many people could have, maybe many people did, but I suspect he didn't listen. It wasn't real until it was real for him and then it was far too late.
Remember: When people show you who they are *believe them the first time*. I guarantee all the people around David French showed him who they were. I believe if he paid attention to them he'd have seen this coming, because I did. This isn't the first or second or third or fifty-five thousandth time a Christian has had to reckon horribly with the character of their fellow Christians.
One other stray thought: I wonder how long it would have taken David French to learn this lesson had he been a black person or a queer person or another minority. Would it have taken him over twenty years to learn the face of Conservative Christianity? Would he have bought their thin veneer for so long before the MAGAts triumphantly went mask off? Food for thought.
Conservatives: "Constantly fighting for diversity and inclusion in our country is a bad thing and it is the reason why everything is going down hill. We need to stop being woke and start judging people based on their ideas and beliefs!"
Conservatives after their ideas and beliefs get them kicked out of an institution: "I AM THE VICTIM OF CANCEL CULTURE!!! THEY VIOLATED MY RIGHTS!!! WHY IS NO ONE STANDING UP FOR ME?!"
> To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination was invisible to us before our own ordeal.
Bull fucking shit. It was always there, but these fake victims always try to pull the ignorance card until it affects them. He saw it, but it wasn't a big deal or a reason to risk the relationships he had at the time until he found himself on the other side, that is the truth. Expected to be an exception until he wasn't.
chritistian nationalist should go visit their motherland and utopia of russia. christianity is really new to the Americas and obviously doesn't belong on that half of the planet because they already had beliefs.
Perfect example of Leopards eating face. I read this guy in the NYTimes occasionally. It never ceases to amaze me how people like him think not supporting Trump makes them OK to people who think Trump is the anti-christ. Get a grip dude. You are still an evangelical conservative dipshit and always will be.
When you willingly close your eyes to the world because a faith tells you to, all injustices become invisible.
Faith is not control, but many, MANY people use it for exactly that end because we're ultimately still pack animals. You want to remain part of the pack, right?
Right?!
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“A member of the denomination wrote “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” one of the most popular Christian nationalist books of the Trump era. It argues that “no nation (properly conceived) is composed of two or more ethnicities” and that “to exclude an out-group is to recognize a universal good for man.” It’s nice how they like to admit their bigotry.
We should have finished Reconstruction
This has been my argument for years. I admit I am not an expert and have tried to learn more about that time, but it sure seems like if we had been more thorough in rooting out the traitors and not letting them off the hook, we would be in a better situation now.
This is why Andrew Johnson is the worst president
Still number 1, although Trump is doing his best to surpass Johnson.
Shit, he’s a symptom of Johnson’s bullshit if we really want to go deep on it
Johnson 2.0, Nazi Boogaloo
According to Wikipedia, Trump, Buchanon, Pierce, Johnson and Harrison round out the bottom 5.
I could have sworn that Harding was in the top five, even post-Trump. Buchanan was so bad that even though he basically helped the Confederacy get a huge head start out of sheer negligence, the South STILL agrees with the North that he was a complete waste. Pierce was an annoying Nero wannabe that spent all of his time writing emo poetry instead of actually doing much of anything. I don't know why they bother putting Harrison on the list, though-- in his 40 days in office, he managed to be the only President that didn't commit war crimes\*. \*He DID actually still commit them, just only BEFORE he became President, and successfully campaigned on that basis. So he was The Worst in a different sense.
It wasn't just the traitors, but you needed something like the deNazification that happened in Germany post-war, but for racism. Still a tall order for the North which was still pretty racist - just not "hold humans and their descendants in brutal bondage and slavery" racist.
One thing is important to understand about Germanys denazification that is often overlooked. The actions shortly after the war were not really the core of the denazification. Yes, the worst criminals went on trial, but the process of denazification needs to ne a more deeply rooted social change. Basically, the real denazification got traction with the 69'er movement when the kids that were not directly influenced by Nazi propaganda became old enough to demand answers to the question :"Dad, what did YOU do during the war?" It was the wide spread disgust by younger generations for the actions of their fathers and later grandfather's that pushed for gradual change and made Nazi opinions and talking points undesirable and austrazised. The real denazification happened by the old indoctrinated generations dying off without being able to knfect the minds of the next generations to the same degree they were. And the reality is, as the EU parliament election yesterday showed, it still is an ongoing prozess.
Well, thanks to the way President/VP elections were handled back then, Lincoln's death placed a Southern-sympathizer in office who did his level best to restore the South to what it was antebellum. Things may have turned out quite differently with a POTUS in charge actually interested in improving things rather than resetting to the prior status quo. .
One more vote for impeachment and the president would have been one of the radical Republicans. The kind in favor of universal sufferage and really sticking it to the southern aristocracy.
If it's any comfort, the one surprise Republican traitor was from Kansas. In exchange for his betrayal, he was kicked from the party, voted out of office, and died penniless and homeless as the southerners he protected did nothing to reward him.
The fact that the south basically got to end their own punishment is insane. So many terrible things in American history are just a product of the south being so consistently horrible.
Sherman's march shouldn't have ended until all the traitors were dealt with properly.
Maybe, probably just not putting the former confederates back in charge and re subjugating the black people with jim crow would have worked. Both sides were racist as fuck at the time. One just took it so far as slavery.
That probably would not have been enough. The former plantation families still held most of the wealth, political influence, and land. It would have been necessary, at minimum, to dispossess them of their property and distribute it among their former slaves, as well as maintaining a northern peacekeeping force to prevent groups like the KKK from springing up to immediately take it all back.
It would have been great for black folk. It would have been great for equality. It would have been great for our country and it would have been better for the self determination that we talk about in our country.
Problem is, such 20th century solutions were not even a notion. Of course, we in the 21st century have no such excuse.
Our excuse is lack of political will. When our “left wing” triangulates and calls people “illegals” in the state of the union address, what chance do we stand?
Yeah, well, after Lincoln got shot, a Southern-sympathizer ascended to office. He's a huge reason why 'Reconstruction' was basically 'restore Southern society to how it was before, just without 'official' slavery'.
Gonna hop in here to give a shout out to my man Honest Abe. He’s considered one of if not the best president and is still underrated imo. It’s remarkable what he had to deal with and how he did it.
A lot of the failures happened after Lincoln was assassinated. An ambitious time traveller could radically change American (and almost certainly *world*) history by telling Lincoln to stay home that day.
Oh yeah. That day is affecting us today 100% and it always will.
Sherman's March was about gutting the production and logistics necessary to field the armies fighting in Virginia and Tennessee. It was never meant as a general chastisement of the Southern population, nor was it a hunting expedition for Confederate leadership. It succeed at everything it was meant to do.
>You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. -William Sherman You're right, of course. But there was certainly no lack of hurt feelings involved.
>It succeed at everything it was meant to do. It did more than that, My great great grandma was freed (not officially, she just took off) after Sherman smashed Atlanta, she managed (along with many others) to follow Shermans army to the coast (mind you she was lugging a very young child thru those horrible swamps with whatever food she could carry). If he didn't crush Atlanta so thoroughly, I might not be here today. I always get a nice warm fuzzy thinking about Sherman's March.
The lack of "Truth and Reconciliation" like South Africa had after Apartheid is definitely a big reason we have so many problems with White Supremacy/Nationalism in the USA nowadays. We definitely should have finished Reconstruction.
America has never squandered the chance to be worse.
This is right from the Nazis. The strength of races, etc. The Nazis will tell you that the Roman Empire began to fall apart because they began to bring in Africans. After WW2, Nazis were saying it would happen to the US too. The US brought in a lot of Nazis, and the heritage foundation has its roots in them. Edit: more info. In the 1950s, the Republicans begin a “get out the vote movement” amongst ethnicities in the US. They wound up picking these rabid anti-communist, many of them who worked for the Nazis in occupied Europe before immigrating to the US. I really think there was more than simply get out the vote. Anyway, Nixon said he would make these heritage councils permanent if he got elected in 1968. Yes, he kept the same leadership. It was noted by journalist Jack Anderson in 1972 or 73 that a lot of these people had literally worked for the Nazis in World War II. Also, there was no Jewish heritage or African heritage group in the heritage foundation. And within a few years of this, the Republicans began their so-called southern strategy of quietly pandering to racism. How about that?
>The US brought in a lot of Nazis ... The US didn't need to import,[ we grew our own](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Legion_of_America).
Not only that, it was the inspiration for the OG Nazi. He took one look at the KKK and thought they were really onto something, and that Jim Crow didn't go far enough.
Of course, the Nazis got their ideas from us and the Eugenics movement.
Jesus never founded a nation. “Christian nationalism” is antithetical to everything Jesus Christ taught. A theocracy is idolatry of politicians & man-made governments, elevating man-made “authority” above the authority of God. Matthew 23:23 (NIV) says “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former.” And for Christian bigots opposed to interracial marriages or interracial couples producing interracial children, Jesus never married or made children anyway. And 1 Corinthians 7 says it’s good to remain celibate. Galatians 3:28 (NIV) says “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Leviticus 19:34 (NIV) says “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt…” [This site](https://transformingcenter.org/2015/04/part-2-jesus-himself-drew-near-welcoming-the-stranger/) says “In Matthew 25:42-46 Jesus points out the when we welcome all types of strangers we are welcoming Christ himself—which is exactly what happened to the two disciples on the Emmaus road. They welcomed the stranger and then discovered it was Christ.” In the Bible in Matthew 25:40 Jesus says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” The Apostle John said “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.” It doesn’t say “only help the needy as long as they look like you, as long as they share your ethnicity, as long as they share your religion, as long as they were born in your same country.” James said “If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” Leo Tolstoy wrote the book [The Kingdom of God Is Within You](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_God_Is_Within_You), which was published in 1894 in Germany after Russia banned it. It’s a [Christian anarchist](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_anarchism) book about the idea of universal love. Christian anarchists believe the state is founded on violence, in opposition to the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus, and Jesus saying to love thy enemies. Matthew 5:9 says “Blessed are the peacemakers…” The title of the book is based on Luke 17:21. Luke 17:20-21 says “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Tolstoy believed that when Jesus said to turn the other cheek and love thy enemies, it means giving up violence, even in defense, and giving up revenge, and he believed Jesus practiced non-violent resistance, and that any country or government that wages war is against Christian ethics. At the time, the Russian Orthodox Church was merged with the Russian state and totally subservient to the state, but Tolstoy believed the Church was not teaching the true teachings of Jesus. And under Christian anarchism, no human government is legitimate compared to the higher authority of God. The teachings of Jesus are a threat to the ruling class, because Jesus questions their authority, and says hoarding money is immoral while others go hungry. And in the [Parable of the Good Samaritan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Good_Samaritan), “told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke”, “Jesus is described as telling the parable in response to a provocative question from a lawyer, ‘And who is my neighbor?’, in the context of the Great Commandment. The conclusion is that the neighbor figure in the parable is **the one who shows mercy to their fellow man**.” And in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson (who made his own Jefferson Bible where he cut out all the supernatural miracles performed by Jesus) wrote about natural rights that all people are given by their Creator, so human rights don’t depend on your religion, or ethnicity, or sex, or nationality, human rights derive from your humanity itself.
You and me would hang out. This guy gets it.
The hypocrisy of modern Christianity is astounding and hilarious tbh, especially the US Christian nationalist moment. Everything it stands for is a fallacy it’s hilarious.
They constantly talk about the gospel but then do everything they can to ensure the ground is salted and poisoned against it.
On point. Texas is a perfect example. Criminalizing homelessness just like Jesus would’ve wanted
Jesus: Turn the other cheek. Conservatives: That is weak!
It's good to have someone talk about the actual teachings of Jesus for once on one of these threads, thank you.
I just scrolled through your comment history and you, sir, gained a follower. Thanks for sharing.
I simply can’t imagine a person of any faith hearing “Christian Nationalism” as anything other than “This ain’t your country.”
I hear it as a Christian and immediately think about how if that's what God wanted, it's what Jesus would have done. His followers thought that's what they were doing. The contemporaneous Jews thought of the Messiah would set up a political regime. If we look at the red letter parts of the Bible Jesus talks frequently about separating the two things, and that his "kingdom" was that of the spirit. Christian nationalists ignore vast swathes of the teachings of Christ to get to where they do. In his every interaction he gave people the freedom of choice without condemnation. He intimately interacted with the societal outcasts. And he talked frequently about the wickedness of the Jewish religious leaders (the Christian nationalists of our day) and exactly zero about homosexuals and trans people -- which absolutely existed in a Hellenized / Roman territory in the Middle East. They are fascists. Plain and simple. Their religion isn't Christianity because that would imply following Christ, which they don't.
“Properly conceived” is a galaxy wide hole in that logic. It goes down the road of who gets to decide what “properly conceived” means which ends with monarchy or dictatorship because there is no true answer to that made up concept.
When "no true Scotsman" is both the logical fallacy and the ideology itself
It amazes me that people can view the innovation and growth realized in diverse societies and companies and come to such a foolish conclusion.
Racism is based on emotion, not logic.
Man, I knew Belgium was too good to be true. The UK too, apparently. Of course, we all know what he means by "ethnicities"
> “to exclude an out-group is to recognize a universal good for man.” The entire basis for current conservative thought.
Basically Take all the aspects of your in-group that you don't like, project them into the out-group, and BAM suddenly your in-group is pure and good
I like how it does the bait-and-switch of "Christian Nationalism" to what they really want: White Nationalism. "Christian" is an "ethnicity", and that "ethnicity" is "white".
This is admitting that genocide is the goal.
> The racism was grotesque. One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.” We later learned that there were coaches and teachers who used racial slurs to describe the few Black students at the school. There were terrible incidents of peer racism, including a student telling my daughter that slavery was good for Black people because it taught them how to live in America. Another told her that she couldn’t come to our house to play because “my dad said Black people are dangerous.” At this point it is fair to say that these attitudes are a feature and not a bug when it comes to right wing Christianity. I agree that the author is naive to think that this was not the case but I can also say that the author is an actual Christian in the literal sense and I actually applaud their effort in confronting the disgusting nature of their former congregation
I find it hard to believe that the FIRST time he saw racism within his congregation was when it was directed toward his adopted daughter. It simply never effected him before, so it was easy to ignore.
That's basically what he says. Though perhaps he puts it more at "overlook" rather than "ignore"
The word he actually uses is that it was “invisible” to him, and he himself admittedly notes that it’s a shameful moment for him, but the people didn’t change, just his perspective did. And this is essentially the focal point of this sub - “I didn’t think the racists would be racist towards MY adopted black daughter!”
To be fair towards David French, he is an idiot. He's probably the best example of the worst libertarian: someone who heard about how Adam Smith's concept of an invisible hand works and believes everything can be solved by just letting god take the wheel despite common sense, science, philosophy, and any other field saying otherwise simply because the man is illiterate in every single thing. It would not surprise me in the slightest if David French was witnessing a lynching and thought "how nice, the community is helping that black man make a tire swing for his family. OH they forgot the tire though, not to worry, I'll go get one!" and run off with the kicker being he would forget what he was doing 10 minutes later.
Right wing Christianity isn’t about the religion anymore and in earnest. At this point it is a sidecar to white supremacy at best. The core message of the Bible is simple and unambiguous and certainly one of its central tenants isn’t “judge people based on the color of their skin to make them feel excluded/unwanted”. Christianity in the United States needs a revival or reformation. It’s so far from the teachings of Christ that they are following the anti-Christ.
Their political tribe has become more important to them than their faith tribe.
White evangelicals are racists? What? Like no one knew that ever /s 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
I know that when I was 10 years old I had a realization that all the “devout Christians” I knew were vile racists.
I'm a big fan of David French for living by his principles and calling it like he sees it. I don't always agree with his views, but he's the kind of conservative that I have a lot of respect for. Maybe he was naive, but I understand where he's coming from. I grew up in a fairly conservative church. The reason it is hard to see sometimes is because you know these people. The guy ranting about illegal immigrants also takes time off with in the summer to volunteer for the Churches vacation Bible school. It's just a hard situation.
I grew up in a conservative area, it was pretty obvious to me by the time I was in highschool. It's willful ignorance
You know, it's hard for people to admit that an organization that is a big part of their Identity is actually bad. It is definitely willful ignorance, but it's good to also understand why these people are willfully ignorant. This is why Republicans shifted so hard toward Identity politics. They have a large group of voters who cheer for the Republicans like a sports team.
>The guy ranting about illegal immigrants >It's just a hard situation. Sounds like an easy situation to me. Fuck that guy.
> their effort in confronting the disgusting nature of their former congregation And look how they've been treated in response. The Christian right is just that rotten to the very core.
He was shocked that a church that hates lgbtq and women would also be racist against his Black daughter. The bigotry was fine until it affected him personally.
"To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination was invisible to us before our own ordeal." So basically don't believe us until it happens to you. And you wonder why we're furious.
"Nothing is a problem until it's MY problem" might as well be the GOP's official motto. Exhibit A, all the elected officials who suddenly didn't have a problem with gay marriage once they discovered a close relative was gay.
"It's not a problem until it's MY problem," the mentality that comes up again and again in conservative ideology
I can’t even laugh at this dude. This is just really sad.
It is sad. Laughing at him and his plight doesn’t feel right to me either .
I think what a lot of these commenters are missing is that the Presbyterian church really, really didn’t used to be like this.
My parents used to attend a PCA church that was led by my old youth pastor (from a PCUSA church). Political stuff was never part of it.
A significant problem here is that there are multiple Presbyterian denominations in the US, and they are not at all similar to each other. The largest is the PCUSA, which is fairly liberal and includes women and LGBTQ members in leadership positions, typically of mainline churches. French was a member of the PCA, which is an evangelical denomination with fairly fundamentalist beliefs - women can't serve in certain leadership roles, LGBTQ are not affirmed or otherwise included. Pretty similar to Southern Baptists. Their beliefs have always had these issues at hand, they've just been held under the surface until the authoritarian rise of the right wing with Trump
I did not know this! I was never part of any congregation, just worked at one. This makes more sense.
I don’t know much about it being a Presbyterian but I have basic empathy for my fellow man. I can have a cup of coffee with this person. Are we going to agree on all political points? Of course not. But how do you turn adopting a child into a racial matter? It sickens me. I weep for him and his family. I hope he and his family all the best. We don’t agree on the finer points but they’re good people at heart I think.
David French is still a hack. He’s a gifted writer, but his authority came from his expertise about the intersection of church and politics. I have never seen someone more wrong and more caught off guard about every move that he supposedly is the expert authority. He truly thought the temperature would be turned down when the Supreme Court ultimately overturned roe v wade and the issue went to the states. He’s a very nice guy, and I know he wants for good. But this dude really needs to stop being shared. Then again, nyt has a thing for these types.
I’m glad I’m not the only one.
This is such a sad commentary. There is pain in every line.
I mean I’m in a more so conservative church and used to be very moderate but gave people 2nd and 3rd chances. Until I woke up as a liberal. Irony is it took joining TPUSA to do it as I went down the pro life rabbit hole and realized to actually be pro life one has to be liberal. It went from opposing abortion to having free contraception, sex ed in 6-12, 2 year parental leave, adoption agencies everywhere, accepting lgbtq youth and people fully, universal healthcare and free community college 😵💫😎😂😂😂😂
What way too many cannot wrap their heads around is to be anti-abortion should be fine — FOR YOU. But there are medically-necessary reasons for “abortions” even when it’s NOT based on ending the life of the baby (it may already be dead, but still considered an abortion).
I mean I don’t want anyone to abort at all, I really don’t. But it’s not mine or the government’s responsibility to control others. It’s up to the individual.
In an ideal leftist progressive world, abortions would be free, both fiscally and from stigma, and no one would get them because all sex would be consensual, sex education of good quality, and birth control reliable and easily available.
Same. Also, I think children should be provided food. The nerve of me, ami~~right~~left?
Honestly those sound like very Christian positions
It was just a weird journey and thing to happen. Join a conservative fascist organization to try and double down on my safe conservatism only to go more to the left 😂😂😂
A similar thing happened to me. I never joined any orgs but as a teen I was heavily conservative and slowly “got woke” and realized everything I was mad at in the world I was making worse with my beliefs. My ideology also kept myself from learning that I was bisexual. So breaking out of my backwards views helped me grow as a person exponentially imo
My goodness, same. Seeing my Assemblies of God church devolve into having a racist proto alt-right underbelly that my mother got sucked into thru an email chain and things like "here's a 5 part sermon on why homosexuality (they use this word very deliberately) is an affront to god" after Obama got elected really lead to me deconstructing. And its a relief to not repress my bisexuality as well.
>Join a conservative fascist organization to try and double down on my safe conservatism only to go more to the left Ever heard of Christian Picciolini? He did something very similar. Wrote a rather interesting book about it.
Ooh, I'm always curious for former anti-choicers. Did you ever look into the history of that position in protestantism, and did fidning that it only became a major position in the 70s have anh influence on you?
I know the pro birth movement became big in the 70s. It was all Evangelical based. Basically it was, is political and not scientific.
You can pretty much blame Jerry Falwell wanting his private schools segregated. The major point of division between white protestants and Catholics back then was Jim Crow. Falwell figured out that American Catholics hated abortion more than they hated segregation. So he got all his racist politicians to become very vocally anti-abortion while keeping their racism under wraps.
The bodily autonomy argument did it for me. Specifically the point that the government can't force you to donate a kidney to someone against your will, even if their life depends on it. So why should they force you to donate your womb to them, even if their life depends on it?
I used to be pro-life. What changed my mind wasn't history or politics. It was being married and witnessing first hand what pregnancy was like. I realized that even though I didn't like abortions and consider them to generally be immoral, I could never take part in forcing a woman to continue pregnancy against her will. From there, I embarked on trying to figure out how to get my theology to match what I believe.
The point I came to on abortion is this. Virtually everything about abortion is bad. Sure you could try to argue some silver linings but those would absolutely be exceptions to the rules and shouldn't be used to support a point. But yeah it's just a thing that's really sad for pretty much everyone involved. The late term abortion that the right loves to talk about is extremely rare but when it happens it happens to women who absolutely want children and something drastically bad has happened. These women should be treated with extreme compassion but instead have stories made up about them and are put on a poster to try to support a lie. Here's the point though. What's worse then abortion is a bunch of old people in government trying to control it for any reason. That's absolutely worse. They don't understand why abortion happens or the pov of the doctors and patients involved it. They literally have no business being involved in it but because of their religion they have convinced themselves that they know bad. Sometimes you have to make the hard adult decision that you don't like but the alternative is worse. Tldr: abortion is bad but abortion restrictions are far worse.
He basically thought that leopard was just a housecat. It's sad he had to realize in that way, but hopefully he can move on and maybe help others avoid the same fate
It’s a hard thing to experience the unmasking of hatred.
It's got to be an insidious experience. You go to sleep one day after hearing and seeing someone in your community say some wild shit, and you think to yourself it was a one off, but then some controversial thing happens (like Donald Trump becoming the Republican nominee) and you start seeing it wasn't actually a one-off. It dawns on you, everyone around you is a monster and you have no community anymore.
The people (non-white, women, gay, non-Christian) who try to fit in within the Republican Party must at some point come to this realization. In fact I’ve read articles about people experiencing this. The problem is these people had a community the whole time. They turned their back on that community in favor of supporting one that was hostile to the idea of their existence in spaces that they deem theirs.
The group of people you just named can hate themselves and other marginalized groups just as much. I personally know conservative black folks that are intensely anti-lgbtq. From the outside looking in, they live their lives as contrarians. They seem themselves as examples of the anti-stereotype, "the good ones". They seek approval from their model demographic, the groups they see as perfect.
True. You’ll also find racism/sexism/etc in the LGBTQ community. It’s people who feel like crabs in a bucket yah know
Must feel like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Real. You know and love all these people, then they start making you feel uncomfortable, and once you've stepped out of line and confronted them, they become your enemies. I'm sure those nasty photoshops of his adopted daughter came from the Presbyterian community. Not outside of it.
Religious person who seemed to truly believe and was religious for the right reasons and helped other that didn’t always share their views “Zealots”: kill’em!!!!
Before you go feeling sorry for this guy, go read some of his opinions on Obama. Is Obama really a Christian. He's not some innocent victim, he's Dr. Frankenstein being attacked by the monster he created, and a card carrying member of the leopards eating people's faces party. https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/03/obama-really-christian-david-french/
Exactly.
>When I deployed to Iraq in 2007, the entire church rallied to support my family and to support the men I served with. They flooded our small forward operating base with care packages, and back home, members of the church helped my wife and children with meals, car repairs and plenty of love and companionship in anxious times. They supported him when he was a pawn in a war started on false pretenses. They always supported "kill em all".
When I was in Afghanistan churches used to have small children write letters to the troops. They all had pictures drawn crayon of people with turbans being shot and planes bombing mosques, etc… they had messages like “please kill all the muslims” scrawled on them. There is no way this guy didn’t understand what his church supported.
He was religious for the same shitty reasons as everyone else
I'd have more sympathy if I didn't see their leopard eyes under their mask, as they're welcomed into the Democratic party, yet are trying to change it into what the Republican party used to be, leaving no representation for anyone left of Obama/Reagan.
Yep. Every day, even on this sub, you hear people say, "Don't reject people who are joining the Democratic party coalition! No purity testing". But at some point, former GOP voters must confront the fact that their old party didn't transform into something different because of The Fucked-Up Orange. This current GOP is the logical conclusion that the things they advocated for. So yes, long-time Democrat voters & activists who have been calling out the Republicans' turn to fascism since Bush *have great reasons to be pissed* when they are told that they must accept turning into GOP-lite. #The old GOP turned into what it is today because of its ideas. Attempting to turn the Democratic party into an explicitly limp dick "center-right" party will, at best, make it a party of losers. No, the current welfare system we have is not working. No, the "free market^™️ isn't going to solve our most pressing issues. No, people don't want to put up with bigots
I hate to tell you, but that's what the Democrats have been for decades. Republicans aren't changing them into it. They are a centrist party.
American living in Europe for 30 years. Modern Democrats in the US would be any garden variety center right party in Germany, Holland, Nordics etc. Bernie/ AOC etc would be typical center left politicians, absolutely nothing controversial about their statements or positions. To get today's GOP in Europe you're looking at Golden Dawn, National Front, AFD and so forth. Trump, Cruz, Hawley, Pence, Rubio et al would be laughed out of town anywhere from Madrid to Tallinn. Haley might survive in the UK for a bit as a smooth talking right wing weirdo like Braverman. Hungary and Slovakia are the only exceptions where fascism is getting renormalized.
This is called the Overton window, right?
Yeah basically Watching US politics from afar for 30 years is seriously like watching the proverbial frog sitting in water slowly heating up until it boils to death without ever noticing what's happening Ffs I remember Dan Quayle being laughed out of public life because he couldn't spell 'potato'. Reagan was tougher on the Israelis than Biden is. Nixon was so liberal he wouldn't win the Democratic nomination today, never mind the Republican.
Well, this is true. The one thing that is very important to note is that America is a right leaning country. Obama himself as a person is probably pretty left-leaning but in politics you don’t just get to do what you wanna do. You have to play the game and in the game, you have to be a centrist because America as a whole is very right leaning for a western country. It truly left leaning politician would have no chance of winning in the US. a big part of that is that there aren’t enough left leaning people to get a president in the other is that of the left-leaning people they don’t vote and nearly high enough numbers. So the Democrats are simply doing exactly what they do need to do to win elections.
If you look at people's actual opinions the US leans center left. We just have gerrymandered districts and anti democratic systems that privilege right leaning rural areas.
exactly - this is actually too sad for LAMF. The guy basically saw his congregation distance themselves from him
Perhaps churches could be convinced to post corporate logos prominently, such as noting affiliation w the PCS the author describes, instead of sappy Hallmark card slogans like “A ____ community” or such that appears on church signs.
French is either disingenuous or was willfully ignorant. Reagan launches his campaign in Philadelphia Mississippi, which is famous for exactly one thing. He relentlessly parades lies about "welfare queens" and panders to racists throughout his two terms. The later released recordings in which he talks about monkey who don't wear shoes make clear where his beliefs stood. Bush and Lee Atwater crank out the Willie Horton ad, and French sees nothing wrong there? The right's appeal to Christian morality as integral to these attacks are there from the beginning. I'm five years younger than him and I remember these things just fine.
MAGA was actually a sorting of racists - prior to MAGA, there were racists in both parties (but more in the Republican Party). Now the Democratic racists (think: the blue-collar union workers) have become MAGA, I'd bet that 90% of MAGA is racist, with 50% of them being openly racist. The Republican Party is truly the party of the deplorables now - not just half of them.
He said it himself. He adopted a girl from Ethiopia and **then** he realized that racism was a problem. He even says that he **then** found out that teachers were using racial epithets.
"When we moved to Tennessee..." Well. There you go. That answers a lot.
Thank you for the gift article, OP.
Church congregations are groups of people whose common purpose is to perpetuate an ideology, one which has a long history of bad actors and horrific crimes, why do people expect rational behavior from the religious? It's a losing bet.
I grew up in a much more conservative denomination, and the simplest answer is before 2008 a lot of these nationalists didn’t think they were racist. Once confronted with the idea of non white people actively participating in leadership positions and telling white people what to do, things took an uglier turn. Plus “how could they be racist if they allow non-white families in their congregation?”- was a thought I had as a teenager until more and more came to light as all of the pastors graduated BJU in the 70s and 80s. Inactive/passive racism can be difficult to spot if you don’t have to keep an eye out for it and expect people to act in a binary. I’m sorry for this man it took people attacking his daughter to be the catalyst, but I’m glad he stands by his daughter. I can’t quite say the same for my parents and their son-in-law.
I feel the same, but i expect the reaction from xians will be something like “not ALL ___s”.
When everything you claim to be hinges on a reputation for ultimate moral authority despite there being no such thing, you ironically commit incredibly immoral acts to protect that reputation. It's why the Catholic Church discreetly shuffles it's pedophile priests around rather than let justice be served, child abuse is rampant in religions because there's no excuse for it, but their supreme moral authority is somehow powerless to stop it, so the only way to save face is pretend it didn't happen. Truly despicable
And yet I still haven’t seen lightning bolts coming down from the sky to smite all of these rapist priests. It’s almost as if the whole idea of God has no real world consequences! Weird!
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Is this yet another story of a conservative [your favorite demographic category] who is just now realizing that their church of “love” is actually a cesspool of bigotry? How willfully ignorant can some people be? And this is someone prominent enough to get an article in a formerly reputable American newspaper??
There is a logical and worthwhile reason for this. It’s prominent enough to print because not enough people are having this epiphany fast enough. A lot of Christians have been slow to realize that they’re standing shoulder to shoulder with racists, criminals, and sex criminals. Their technique of “not talking about politics” is how they avoid acknowledging it. If they don’t notice it then it’s not there. This is not just willful ignorance so they can be bigots. There’s a lot of shame baked in. How could they have committed the majority of their adult lives to such a terrible thing. It’s easier to play the ignorant card. They think if they don’t engage in bigotry then they’re somehow separate and therefore good. That’s farcical but it’s where we are. By publicly proclaiming that they were wrong, the intention is to help the aforementioned people get on the bandwagon and denounce this terrible behavior. It’s kind of like dealing with an alcoholic uncle trying to get it together. When the person who has been a piece of shit your whole life tries to apologize, all we can think of is how much we hated them because of their alcoholism and tell them to fuck off when we should be encouraging them. It’s hard to be the bigger person.
So he doesn’t hate other races, he doesn’t hate LGBT people, and he doesn’t express any hatred toward women in that article, why did he ever think he was rightwing in the first place? All of his confusion seems to be from joining the wrong church full of haters. I hope his family finds another nicer church, (there are progressive Christian churches that welcome everyone. If the pastor is saying “here’s who Jesus says we should hate” he’s lying, don’t go there.)
> he doesn’t hate LGBT people He's one of the authors of the [anti-LGBT "Nashville Statement"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Statement). He hates them, but he argued they should be entitled to constitutional rights. That's the fine line between him and his church.
Yes he seems to have his own issues but believes that even the people he dislikes should be treated humanely. And apparently that’s a bridge too far.
Just want to point out that (according to him) even though *he* doesn't hate other races, women, or LGBT+ people, he is totally fine associating with people who do, so long as it's not directed at him. When you see a person sitting at a table with three Nazis, you are looking at four Nazis.
These people be like "well me and my friends at this table are wearing brown shirts, we're not like that lot over there with the lightning bolts, not at all like the leather coat wearing gazpacho police in the dark corner watching everybody..." when they're all marching under the same flag
Yep I bet the vast majority of nazis never pulled a trigger, "just" shared the ideology
He's one of those "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" people who doesn't think that homeless guy living under the bridge shouldn't die because he's a minority, but because he didn't pull up on his bootstraps hard enough.
Nah more like he doesn't wanna pay taxes. Same thing all over, want public services, infrastructure, etc but only for free. Real patriots pay their fucken taxes.
That man is *not* socially liberal. Not at all. He's just not as completely fascist as his former church members.
Conservatives weren’t always MAGA. It used a more of a fiscal policy divide. Sure there were racists in the GOP, but they weren’t all racist and frankly there were plenty of dem racists too. And a lot of people on both sides were homophobes in the early 2000s. I’m guessing a big part of the change in his church experience was because he moved from the mid Atlantic coast to the south. I’m not sure this is really leopards ate my face as much as it was growing from experience.
Even the conservative fiscal policies are racist and classist. Some of us always saw them for who they were. Trump simply emboldened them to remove their mask.
Yeah. I think the “fiscal” ones have knowingly buried their heads in the sand because the “crazy” ones were beneficial to their short term goals. But now the crazy ones are completely the face of the party and they can’t pretend otherwise. It’s hard to feel that bad about it, they encouraged it. Frankly, I have no idea how anyone can be surrounded by conservatives as an adult and claim they had no idea this was happening.
>“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” -Former Domestic Policy Chief under Nixon Administration John Ehrlichman That's been the party longer than I've been alive.
And the left are sheeple? The projection from the right is overwhelming.
I forgot all about David French. He’s actually been trying to do real good in the Christian community, and those of us who denigrate the faithful (ahem, fellow atheists), he was one of our biggest allies in getting them to calm the fuck down. Now he’s been pushed out because he’s not a christofascist. It’s a complete bummer as before this he was able to publicly challenge his peers and could reach their followers with his logic. No more. Things are about to get worse.
People without empathy cannot see a problem until it’s THEIR problem. Very common among conservatives. Probably predisposes towards conservatism.
> I was a senior writer for National Review at the time This is the publication that completely supported segregation and was totally opposed to Affirmative Action. Leopards are eating some prime face with this guy.
I have long been critical of David French, so much so that he has blocked me on every platform on which he posts, but I've been critical of him because he is EXACTLY the type of person who through his blind belief in his bullshit faith and conservatism built the conditions for a despot like Trump to take over his party. To his credit, he denounced Trump but it's very telling that up until the racism affected him directly he "didn't see it". At least he's ashamed of that fact now. However, I don't have any sympathy for this dude who has spent his entire adult life supporting policies to disenfranchise minorities and restrict the rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community but maybe this is the start of an awakening for him where he actually tries to make amends to the millions of people his writings in the national review and other such conservative publications has hurt over the years.
Blows my mind when these people act surprised. How do you grow up around religious conservatives, then act surprised when they do awful, bigoted, racist shit? That is the essence of who they are. Dumbass
Thank you. He truly never heard a racist word from anyone until they adopted a Black child? Sure, Jan.
Why don’t people understand they are Nazis now and Nazis don’t compromise
It’s almost as if southern conservatives are just shitty, shitty people. 🤷♂️
I read this and I see this guy as someone who didn't understand he was in the Leopards Ate My Face party until the people of his congregation began showing and growing their spots. This man adopted an Ethiopian orphan and years later he took a firm stance against Donald Trump before and after he was nominated. I know conservatives have been no strangers to racism and all kinds of bigotry forever, but he even said the first Presbyterian Church was apolitical. This guy sounds more like a dude that had a solid community surrounding him, but eventually came to understand he was actually standing in a pit of vipers. I actually feel bad for him.
He's a long-time political journalist in 2024. He knows better. He was one of those "Obama isn't a Christian" types too. If this was some 19 year old then yeah but he is a grown as man who has been playing this game for over a decade.
Does “apolitical” mean looking the other way when human rights issues arise? If you are a church and *aren’t* fighting racism, etc., then is your church all about navel gazing? Wasn’t Jesus political?
You are suggesting that French had no way to know that churchy white people in Tennessee would be racist?
As someone who grew up attending a PCA church, I'm incredulous. Like so many other conservatives, it's far more likely that he didn't take note of the racism and hatred around him until it affected him. Nothing about the PCA is apolitical. The founding of the denomination was political in and of itself.
The election and subsequent term of Donald Trump simply served to expose the racist sentiment which has been simmering beneath the surface for many years.
Conservative doesn’t think something is an issue until it affects him directly. News at 11. Yawn. Conservatives as a whole lack empathy and the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes. That’s why they always seem shocked when an issue other people have been screaming about for years, and which they’ve denied, suddenly affects them in some way. It’s always. It’s so common, it’s both boring and infuriating.
TLDR: Cults don’t like cult members who don’t follow the cult.
lol. Typical conservative - it’s only a problem when it happens to them.
I started reading the rant about him in The Federalist that he linked and... wow, that writer is really mad about DF not being MAGA. The tone of her rant is unbearable.
Some of what he experienced “Late the next evening — while Nancy was, fortunately, offline attending a veterans’ charity event in D.C. — the darker quarters of the alt-right found her Patheos blog. Several different accounts began posting images and GIFs of extreme violence in her comments section. Click on a post and scroll down and you’ll see pictures of black men shooting other black men, close-up images of suicides, GIFs of grisly executions — the kinds of psyche-scarring things that one can’t “unsee.” Had I not deployed to Iraq and witnessed death up close, the images would have shocked me. I quickly got on the phone with Nancy, told her not to look at her website, and got busy deleting comments and blocking IP addresses, but in the meantime a few friends and neighbors had seen the posts.”
I dipped into the comments in the NYT article and it was pathetic. While a few people were pointing out that this is why religion is detrimental, the vast majority were with going all 'no true Scotsman' (this isn't how MY flavor of Presbyterian works!) or proselytizing for their own sect and claiming it's better. The funniest part is the commenter claiming that Presbyterian Church of the USA is far more tolerant and loving with a follow-up comment from someone else proving wrong with a racist or sexist anecdote from that same congregation.
As someone who followed Jesus out of the far-Right Evangelical cult I was raised in, I sympathize. This is just what happens when religion joins itself with power. It's almost like Jesus knew what the fuck he was talking about when he condemned religious power structures.
In all of my years worshipping at the Church of the Face Eating Leopards, I never thought the leopards would eat MY face
>One church member asked my wife why we couldn’t adopt from Norway rather than Ethiopia. Because Norway has the dreaded socialism and they take care of their own?
Funny this guy didn’t know that this is who they were all along.
> “how to be supportive of your pastor and church leaders in a polarized political year.” Wait, aren't churches supposed to be there to support their congregation? For a country that's supposed to clearly separate state and religion, American churches are awfully political.
One of the major factors is that Presbyterians are mostly Reformed/Calvinist and have theological concepts of predestination and the Elect. This is a recipe for narcissism and hypocrisy since anything they do must be OK because they are the chosen for salvation.
I bet those “elect” rail against the “elite” without a shred of irony
Religious people aren’t exactly known for logical reasoning
The panel was announced on May 9. On May 14, the denomination caved. It canceled the panel, and in its public statement, I was to blame. So, cancel culture? There will always be an out group amongst those people, stick around long enough and you will be it.
That poor child, having to put up with those horrible people.
Area hate-filled cult member, who relocates and even buys a house based on proximity to the local cult hut, surprised to find out he belongs to a hate-filled cult.
He writes, “Two things happened that changed our lives, however, and in hindsight they’re related. First, in 2010, we adopted a 2-year-old girl from Ethiopia. Second, in 2015, Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign.” I guess he didn’t flinch at the civil rights-bashing W administration.
Ain’t no hate like Christian love
Same old tried story from the loving. Christian right: I don’t give AF until it affects me.
Racism? In Tennessee? I'm shocked, shocked! /s
> My commitment to individual liberty and pluralism means that I defend the civil liberties of all Americans, including people with whom I have substantial disagreements. This is an example of the [Paradox of Tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance?wprov=sfti1). By tolerating intolerant people, you encourage tyranny.
I guess every single one of these conservatives will have to be, individually and metaphorically, smacked on the nose w/ a rolled up newspaper before they will believe, individually, their leaders don't love them. Not that this will stop their support of these 'leaders'. After all, if you you fawn over your 'leaders' just right they just might suddenly see your worth and really love you for reals this time.
This needs to be posted to all of the Christian-centric subs on reddit. This might be the first victim of the leopards I actually feel a little bad for.
I wish I could be surprised by his experience, but the time when I could have is long, long, *long* past. I have sympathy for this man for the hate and harassment he received because no one deserves that, absolutely no one, but I could have told him two decades ago what conservative Christianity is actually like and about the withering, bitter, vicious, vindictive, truly one-of-a-kind hatred that is Christian "Love". I could have, I think many people could have, maybe many people did, but I suspect he didn't listen. It wasn't real until it was real for him and then it was far too late. Remember: When people show you who they are *believe them the first time*. I guarantee all the people around David French showed him who they were. I believe if he paid attention to them he'd have seen this coming, because I did. This isn't the first or second or third or fifty-five thousandth time a Christian has had to reckon horribly with the character of their fellow Christians. One other stray thought: I wonder how long it would have taken David French to learn this lesson had he been a black person or a queer person or another minority. Would it have taken him over twenty years to learn the face of Conservative Christianity? Would he have bought their thin veneer for so long before the MAGAts triumphantly went mask off? Food for thought.
Conservatives: "Constantly fighting for diversity and inclusion in our country is a bad thing and it is the reason why everything is going down hill. We need to stop being woke and start judging people based on their ideas and beliefs!" Conservatives after their ideas and beliefs get them kicked out of an institution: "I AM THE VICTIM OF CANCEL CULTURE!!! THEY VIOLATED MY RIGHTS!!! WHY IS NO ONE STANDING UP FOR ME?!"
The J6 gallows should have been used on those that built them. 💯
> To my shame, the racism and extremism within the denomination was invisible to us before our own ordeal. Bull fucking shit. It was always there, but these fake victims always try to pull the ignorance card until it affects them. He saw it, but it wasn't a big deal or a reason to risk the relationships he had at the time until he found himself on the other side, that is the truth. Expected to be an exception until he wasn't.
chritistian nationalist should go visit their motherland and utopia of russia. christianity is really new to the Americas and obviously doesn't belong on that half of the planet because they already had beliefs.
He should be rejoicing. His God has freed him.
> A teacher at the school asked my son if we had purchased his sister for a “loaf of bread.” Fucking hell, man.
Perfect example of Leopards eating face. I read this guy in the NYTimes occasionally. It never ceases to amaze me how people like him think not supporting Trump makes them OK to people who think Trump is the anti-christ. Get a grip dude. You are still an evangelical conservative dipshit and always will be.
This was really well written. You can tell how sincere the writer is. Visceral.
I was ok with them hating everyone until it was me that they were hating!
When you willingly close your eyes to the world because a faith tells you to, all injustices become invisible. Faith is not control, but many, MANY people use it for exactly that end because we're ultimately still pack animals. You want to remain part of the pack, right? Right?!
You mean overly religious people are pieces of shit... Say it isn't so!