But of Italian descent - father directly an immigrant and mother the child/grandchild of Italian immigrants. So as European as you could get for a non-European.
The Catholic Church is maybe not the greatest example of being blind to national or racial origin. Outright white nationalism is not going to fly under Francis - though you get the feeling that some American and Europeans church leaders would not fight nationalism too hard as long as the Church got its due.
They’re acutely aware of the issue and there’s been tension for decades in the upper echelons and the respective representation from different continents/nations. A majority of the College of Cardinals were Europeans a decade ago but Francis has made it a point to diversify the pool so the majority of Cardinals are no longer European but that tension with the more conservative old school elements is still there.
So while perhaps not to the extremes we’re seeing in the US, there’s certainly similarities to some of the things happening inside the walls of the Vatican.
And that’s exactly the point. Why are ecumenical bodies inviting or allowing the hatemongers to join their organizations?
If I started a cross-party political society that encouraged representatives of every political party to join and participate in our debates and deliberations, specifically including the Nazi party, I suspect you wouldn’t let me off so easily.
I think @Ulfreida’s contributions to this thread have been fantastic—insightful and clarifying. But I think Horatius has a point here. I for one would welcome Christian leadership calling a spade a spade, at least more directly.
“Not sure whose teachings you’re following, but they sure aren’t Christ’s. Yeah, I mean you. Sorry, you’re out of the club.”
ETA: Christ’s guidance is hard to live but pretty easy to understand. It’s actually very straightforward and unambiguous. I don’t think it would be tough to draw some pretty bright lines.
And the other guys will say the same thing in the opposite direction. That’s just how we wound up here with 200 different “Christianities” telling one another they’re doing it wrong.
Let ‘em. Like I said, I think some pretty bright dividing lines are possible. Those who argue that Christ commanded us to separate desperate families at the border and lock ‘em all up are free to do so.
Even if we say those other denominations “aren’t really Christian”, then what? Catholic ecumenical organizations work with Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu groups, too. Even most of the hate-based churches will still run things like soup kitchens and used-clothing drives and so on, and the ecumenical standard is that if we’re all doing those sorts of things, we should all coordinate our efforts so as to be more effective at it.
There is also a narrow technical sense in which each Southern Baptist church is its own denomination - namely, the Southern Baptist convention has no authority over any individual congregation. The convention as a whole can decide to kick a congregation out (“not in friendly cooperation with the Convention”) but cannot order a congregation to perform some action. This is in contrast to denominations with episcopal or presbyterian forms of government, where governmental authority is vested in bishops or elders respectively.
You don’t see the hatemongers in the ecumenical organizations - generally, they don’t want to be there, and most of them consider the ecumenical organizations to be heretical. But the ecumenical organization will consider the hatemongers to be Christian, just imperfect and sinful examples of such (as are we all).
If denominational perfection is the standard for membership in an ecumenical organization, then ecumenical organizations would be empty.
Well, from a religious standpoint, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus are just misguided. But nominally “Christian” faiths that distort Christ’s actual words are literally blasphemous, which is supposed to be a big no-no for religions. They are aware of what Christ said, but they co-opt his messaging for their own corrupt ends.
My parents go to a Presbyterian church, which has undergone a big demographic shift in the past decade. Due to an influx of African immigrants, largely Somali, from what I hear, the racial complexion of the congregation, the numbers of which had been in steep decline, has switched from almost entirely pasty white to Black. With the side effects of the potluck events having about 1,000% more flavor in the food and the choir producing something more akin to actual music (I remember being guilted into joining the fam for Christmas Eve services while home over the holidays in years past, and reflecting that the sound of elderly suburban Canadians intoning Christmas Carols is not that dissimilar to the “happy birthday” scene in Office Space). ANYWAY…point is that a few years back, a previous minister was falling out of disfavor with the congregation for a number of reasons, but one notable one was that he didn’t go hard enough in on social issues, and didn’t preach against our ungodly society nearly enough. So…not white supremacy, obviously, but the Venn diagram of attitudes among strikingly different congregations can cross over at the point of railing against “the other”
It’s a bit more complicated than you make it out. All Christians distort Christ’s words. As St.Paul wrote (I paraphrase): “in this life, I see as if in a mirror, dimly.” That is, we all see God via the metaphor of ourselves, we are unable to see God clearly because we are moral, human, fallen, separate. Who are we to say that a group who professes Christ sees, objectively, so much more dimly than us, that we can call them evil? Frankly, I don’t want to see those lines drawn. Doing so would distort Christ’s teaching as I understand it far more. Then it would be my own soul endangered.
It’s really the challenge of Karl Popper’s ‘paradox of tolerance’ we are speaking of. To what extent should a society tolerate intolerance?
Oh, no argument, I shouldn’t suggest that race is in any way a perfect correlation to belief, and that African-American is in many ways just as broad a term as Christian! Those churches that I had the pleasure to visit were very much in the mold of Martin Luther King Jr’s teachings, in the late 80’s, and were fighting to continue that legacy, while attempting to combat the rather pernicious (and now very clearly developed) myth that “there’s no discrimination now”.
It’s something I didn’t fully appreciate earlier, as I grew up in Southern NM, where I knew -ONE- African-American family, -ONE- Ethnically Chinese Family, and the rest was about 70% Hispanic and 30% Anglo. Sure, I felt a bit of an outsider as a Reform Jew, but I knew even as a teen that all I had to do was Not talk about myself and I’d pass.
All due credit to my Step-Mother though, who realized how little we understood, and took my brother and I out of school for a MLK day (prior to it becoming a recognized holiday) and expanding our horizons.
The African-American churches I visited in the late 80’s were in Winston-Salem, during the year my mother and stepfather were living there, and that was another eye-opener. My mother was friends with several members of the congregations (she was a teacher, retired now) and since she had custody of us during the summer, wanted us to meet new people.
An aside into MPSIMS territory, but my father was great at teaching me to be charming (when I wanted to be), analytical, and caring about people close to me. My mother and step-mother were great about teaching me about people who were dissimilar to me, and considering their needs, not just my own.
And even among them, there are sometimes differences in terms of liberalism - the Episcopal church I go to here in Dallas has some kind of strange oversight where we’re technically in our local diocese, but under the supervision of another bishop located somewhere else, because our pastor and congregation are very pro gay marriage, while the local bishop is less tolerant. I believe there are a couple of other churches in the diocese that are in the same situation, having also told the bishop to go pound sand.
I find this to be a good statement of how folks should act their faith.
I live in Topeka, Kansas, home of the rock that the Westboro Baptist church hides under.Way back in the seventies we knew they were weird but I doubt that anyone knew the gay protests were coming.
A group of friends I was part of held a rally at Gage Park and the one guy that had a computer(earky 90’s) printed out envelopes and invitations to all the churches in the phone book. Only three responded with members that showed up, and one was a local Episcopal congregation whose members came in their softball shirts, identiyfying them. That got them picketed too, and I jointed the protests against the WBC at that congregation. Boy, ol’ Phred sure had a potty mouth, you should have heard some of the things he would yell at us.
The Lutheran congregation I was a member of did not come, except for me. But the WBC did show up at our place, and ended up physically attacking our pastor, and then charged him with assault. The congregation paid for his defense, but did not support him in any major way. Guy took another call not so long after, I didn’t blame him and I ended up at another church.
So if we do criticize a church we need to be specific, and I wouldn;t paint with a broad brush.
I guess we are seeing the very common "well, why aren’t the ‘good’ [members of group X] loudly and publicly calling out, denouncing and rejecting the ‘bad’ [members of group X]?" line at work here. That we have never been able to resolve succesfully.
Anyway… as I and others mentioned, in the USA the overlap is very, very large between the two groups mentioned in the thread title. And “Christian Nationalist” for the purposes of USA politics is not a Christian who happens to be nationalistic or a nationalist who happens to believe in Christ, but a specific alignment that combines parts of a hardline version of both ideologies.
There is an opinion piece in the NYT today that I think many who have posted in this thread would enjoy reading. This is a gift link to the article.
The title of the article is The State of Evangelical America and is an interview by opinion writer Tish Harrison Warren with Russell Moore, the past president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore has also been a prominent Evangelical leader opposing Donald Trump and his presidency. Here is the main section that I feel is relevant to this thread:
Christian nationalism is the use of Christian symbols or teachings in order to prop up a nation-state or an ethnic identity. It’s dangerous for the nation because it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. Christian nationalism takes a political claim and seeks to make it ultimate. It says: If a person disagrees with me, that person is disagreeing with God. No democratic nation can survive that, which is why the founders of this country built in all kinds of protections from it.
Christian nationalism is also dangerous for the witness of the church, because Christian nationalism is fundamentally, at its core, anti-evangelical. If what the Gospel means is for people to come before God, person by person, not nation by nation or village by village or tribe by tribe, then Christian nationalism is heretical.
Christian nationalism assumes outward conformity enforced by social or political power. It transforms the way that we see reality with the assumption that the really important things are political and cultural, as opposed to personal and spiritual and theological.
I left the SBC many years ago but I have respected Moore for quite a while because he has taken this positon. For those not familiar with him, he has been a prominent pastor and leader for the last 20 years in the SBC. His influence of late has waned in certain circles but he is still respected by many church members. I suppose I will have to get his book and read it. There are plenty of positions he takes that are not at all aligned with my thoughts but if the interview is at all representative of what he has to say I will almost certainly be gifting the book to my siblings who are still very involved in their SBC churches. And some are still big Trump supporters.
Well, yes. Using that definition, the two circles in that Venn diagram do overlap a LOT. But not entirely, so the question posed by the Op can only be answered “No”.
Or not, as the OP admitted it isn’t 100% but felt the overlap is so substantial to be ignorable in terms of “meaningful difference”.
Still, I did and do disagree, with the caveat I mentioned earlier:
So for US voters, I suspect that 90+% of either group vote Republican, because that caucus has spend decades making sure that their listeners know that Democrats are anti-religion and anti-white people, who just want to put evil, criminal, Islamic/Atheists in chare of all things. The usual othering in other words. So @DrDeth is correct, and would technically have the support of the OP in that a perfect overlap is of course, false (and I doubt it’s even 99%) when it comes to individual ideologies. But as to how the components of those groups end up effecting everyone else through their actions, yeah, there is likely no meaningful difference.
The usual othering in other words. So