The Evangelicals are as twisted and nasty as they are for many reasons, but off the top of my head it’s because they have are obsessed with select parts of the Old Testament, and with the letters of Paul. They tend to forget about a guy named Jesus unless they can quote-mine his words to suit them.
They’re not Christians in my book, and yes, that may fall into the “no true Scotsman” fallacy; but by their words, they’re more fans of the Old Testament and Paul than of Christ.
But in naked truth, they believe in the prosperity gospel above all. They’re basically Ayn Rand with Old Testament rhetoric.
That’s very Old Testament (or if you prefer, Hebrew Bible). And generally, the OT is where evangelicals have their home. The only “chosen people”. The OT is a tribal document if there ever was one.
The only parts of the NT evangelicals seem to have adopted is baptism and ‘go and make disciples’. The stuff Jesus taught totally escapes them.
It is a simple cause and effect sort of logic which is very easy to understand and believe in –
Are you seriously argue that Christian persecution of heretics has nothing to do with, well, “real Christianity”? Because it sounds like you’re arguing that these were just intolerant haters who made up theological justifications for what they wanted to do anyone.
If that’s what you think, I’d politely suggest you need to read more about the evolution of Christian thought regarding heresy and its punishment. The people who laid the groundwork for Christian religious persecution weren’t stupid or vicious, they were for the most part smart and thoughtful people who had good and coherent arguments rooted in scripture, tradition and reason. (Some of the scriptural arguments rest heavily on the parables of Jesus, especially the one with the householder inviting people to a feast). St. Augustine for example started out believing in religious liberty and became convinced, quite against his initial convictions, that persecution of heretics was the right way to go, based on the experience of the church with the Donatists and Manichaeans and based on his reading of scripture. This isn’t a minor detail of Christian history that can simply be redefined away: there are clear theological as well as historical arguments why Christian states eventually started executing heretics.
There are certainly a lot of aspects of modern evangelical Christianity that are modern innovations without much grounding in scripture or tradition, but a lot of what they get criticized for (their position on abortion, homosexuality, etc.) are pretty much as ancient as Christianity is.
No one is redefining anything away. What adaher is talking about didn’t just start now. It was present back then, too.
Did Jesus teach that his disciples were to go about and kill heretics? No, he said that those who lived by the sword would die by the sword. Did Paul? No, he said not to cast judgment on disputable matters, and that following one person other than Christ was wrong. Sure, Ananias and Saphira died, but God directly killed them. It is not for Man to cast judgment, but for God. Judge not lest ye be judged was applied to all Christians.
No, what happened was the mixture of state and religion. With a state religion, you need unity, and one way to create that unity is to kill the dissenters. So they found excuses in Scripture to do that, ignoring the actual meaning.
The ideas aren’t new. But they also are not a core part of Christianity. I seem to remember that you are a Christian. Do you support those ideas? I know most Christians don’t. So you cannot say it is a core part of Christianity.
And if it’s not the core, then it must be added by outside influence. There must be something beyond Christianity creating this. And tribalism is clearly the most obvious additional influence, given how tribalistic Evangelical Christianity is. You don’t have to actually believe. And, if you want someone in your tribe, you’ll make excuses for them.
Sure, there are ideas in common between the statism and tribalism. That’s partly because the two ideas are innerconnected: statism is just formalized tribalism, really. And partly because Evangelical Christianity is essentially a state religion in a large part of the places where it is practiced.
But it’s still orthagonal to the actual teachings. St. Augustine is no less human than anyone else. He is just as much a sinner for killing heretics as an Islamic terrorist.
It’s the main reason I dislike the Tradition of Canonization. It’s not completely undoable, but it still can venerate people who did evil, rather than realize that even those who were important to the Church are flawed humans who did bad things, ala our country’s Founding Fathers and slavery.
My point was that some things do not have a theological basis. Burning heretics is so Old Testament and even in the Old Testament it’s tough to justify it for many of the “crimes” Catholics did in the bad old days.
Opposition to abortion and homosexuality on the other hand are solidly grounded in scripture, although the obsession with homosexuality is entirely out of proportion to the significance it has in scripture.
Religious people by their very nature are going to disagree with mainstream society on many key moral issues. I’ve actually contended before that if a religion does not, then it’s not even a real religion. It’s just people trying to justify modern morality as endorsed by some spiritual being rather than just being whatever 21st century Western humans deem moral. Likewise, many people with retrograde views on morality are getting them from a tradition that isn’t really related to their faith. Extreme homophobia tends to be a hallmark of machismo cultures, of which the South was definitely one. Homosexuality is a sin in most faiths, but it is not a dire threat to the community in the way that the Bible treats idolatry or work on the Sabbath.
Evangelicalism became politically aware in the early 1970s as a reaction to the Supreme Court cases, that outlawed abortion bans, and prayer in schools. I grew up around many politically engaged evangelicals and those were the dominant issues. No one ever mentioned anything about race.
The reason so many of us voted for Trump is that Clinton was so bad. She is someone who has been fighting for abortion ever since she entered public life. Her book as a first lady was called “It takes a village”. Evangelical Christian parents are paranoid that the secular humanists are targeting their kids. Her book seemed to confirm that. Trump is a bad person but he nominated a good Supreme Court justice. The gay marriage debate showed that to influence policy, the supreme court is more important than having the votes. When Trump promised to appoint good supreme justices that sealed the deal for many evangelicals.
Except that, again, there are numerous references in Scripture to instances of the wealthy being unjust, and of the perils of wealth. And the book of Job makes it very clear that just because bad things happen to someone does not mean that they did something wrong, and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes make it very clear that good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people all the time.
These people, like many/most/all christians, are not deriving their beliefs from the entirety of their scriptures. At some level they start selectively picking the parts of scripture that support their views, ignoring or rationalizing the counterexamples. This works even if the views are sourced from outside the scriptures entirely.
The opposition to abortion came well after Roe. In 1973, most Evangelical groups were neutral to or even for the decision. Opposition to abortion was a Catholic thing, not Protestant. Pro-life engagement was significantly later than the case.
I believe the term around here is “poisoning the well”. The way the OP framed it is sounds like there’s no interest in why Evangelicals believe the whole Bible including the creation story and the part about being created in your mother’s womb, or why being predominantly Middle class they’d vote for someone who at least pretended to feel their pain and bring their job back that Hillary’s husband sent to Mexico. Just more ammunition to support a preconceived notion that Evangelicals are terrible.
It would get physically uncomfortable for a great many people if Christians — or Muslims, Jews, Buddhists etc. etc. — started taking every injunction as inerrant.
I suspect that you were unduly influenced by people in your immediate area.
Opposition to abortion began long before Roe v Wade as various states considered amending their laws to permit it. While the Catholic church was the largest and loudest group on that side of the discussion, Evangelical Protestants were strongly represented. Your use the the word “Protestant” without a modifier treats all Protestant denominations as though they were in lock-step on all issues. This was not the case. The more conservative on the Evangelical denominations have always opposed abortion.
Similarly, the earliest politicization among the Evangelicals began with the issue of administration-led school prayer in the 1960s.
= = =
I believe that it was true that Evangelicals became more organized, politically, in the 1970s. However, that was the point where abortion and school busing were both addressed by SCOTUS and they lumped those with school prayer, (and, for some reason, Creationism), into their rallying cries.
(I know why they promote Creationism, but they were politically quiet on the subject in the 1950a and 1960.)
Randall Ballmer, chair of the Dartmouth religion department:
Certainly some evangelicals were anti-abortion all along. But the evangelical establishment, such as it was, was pro-choice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and there’s no indication that that drew substantial opposition from the people in the pews at the time. Antiabortion didn’t become a widespread stance among evangelicals until the late 1970s, and crystallized as the party line in the early 1980s.
As Christian blogger Fred “Slacktivist” Clark points out here, the switch was so recent at that point that when Christian publisher InterVarsity Press published a book in 1984 that took the 1970 party line on abortion as a given, the outraged reaction of evangelicals caught them completely by surprise.
So, why do evangelicals tend to oppose abortion being legal? The combination of quotes above from Waltke does make sense; if killing human life = capital punishment and killing fetus /= capital punishment then fetus /= human life.
Also, why the emphasis on Paul?