Texas, Five Other States Considering Secession

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

Right.

How far to the Right?

[Sam]

It's interesting that your only objection seems to be the characterization of people being in favor of "small/limited" government. At least though you've tied elimination of interest-based loans as a government policy to Christianity. I'd like to say you're showing yourself to be reformable in regard to admitting to your Christian nationalism, but you're merely using Scripture to bash people.

I think you still don't understand the distinction being made and I think you misremember my position on whether the government should eliminate interest-based lending.

-Sam

[Sam]

Nobody here has said or implied that governments should conduct themselves according to the rules of the Church. But I remain curious why someone who claims to be a Christian would be so hostile to the idea of the government recognizing and observing certain Christian principles in accordance with scripture.

When you get as far as being minimally aware of this contradiction, that'll be a good first step.

-Sam

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

The political pendulum seems to be swinging back towards the conservatives. People are getting sick and tired of the left's wokeness, letting crime run rampant, and their economic disasters.

Perhaps another bout of bloodletting on a large scale is what your country needs then.

[Mountain Man]

No, you’re being passive aggressive in implying he’s a CINO. Sparko did EXACTLY this in the post above.

Nope, I'm genuinely curious since it's not a stance I would expect a Christian to take.

[Sam]

Interesting that someone who calls themselves Christian doesn't want a government that does God's will or is favorable to Christianity.

Learning even a bit of US religious history would probably sort that out.

Source: Roger Williams – Minister, Merchant, Magistrate. NPS.gov

Born in London around 1603, Roger Williams was a deeply faithful man and an ordained minister in the Anglican Church. However, Roger Williams was dissatisfied with the hierarchy, political power, wealth, and ornamentation of the Church of England. He developed the belief that the government should not enforce moral or religious beliefs, and that civic life should be separate from individuals’ spiritual lives. Escaping the environment of religious persecution in England, Williams arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631, which was settled by English Puritans—other Anglican dissidents who wanted to “purify” the English Church.

In the Massachusetts colony, all aspects of daily life were regulated by Puritan religious belief and enforced by the government. While building a new life in Massachusetts, Williams began preaching “new and dangerous ideas:” religious freedom and spiritual equality. These concepts were deeply threatening to the Puritan way of life and the authority of the town officials. As a result, Williams was banished from the colony, and, rather than face the journey back to England where he may have been put to death, he fled.

Williams survived the harsh winter thanks to a rescue from the Wampanoag people. He had built a relationship with the Wampanoag in the years prior by trading with them and learning their language. Unlike most English, Williams believed that Indigenous people were equals under English law and that they rightfully owned the land upon which colonists settled. Thanks to aid and supplies from the Wampanoag and Narragansett, the radical minister traveled by canoe until he arrived at a freshwater spring at what is now the site of Roger Williams National Memorial.

Crediting his survival and success to "God's merciful providence unto me,” Williams settled the area with the permission of the Narragansett, who called the place Moshassuck. Along with other colonists, Williams built a community where religious beliefs and civil laws were clearly separated. In colonial Rhode Island, Anglicans, Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, Jews, atheists, and members of other faiths lived as neighbors with equal rights.

The written articles of the settlement, and the later Royal Charter, made Providence the first explicitly documented secular government in world history. Here, the earliest foundations of American democracy and equality flourished.

© Copyright Original Source

Source: The South, the War and ‘Christian Slavery’. Thom Basett. The New York Times. 2012.04.27

While countless Union soldiers and northern civilians depended on theological narratives to sustain them, a providential view of history particularly influenced how Southerners reacted to and interpreted the events of the war. After all, the preamble to the Confederate constitution, unlike the federal one it replaced, explicitly invoked “the favor and guidance of Almighty God.” They were, Southerners believed, a people chosen by God to manifest His will on earth. “We are working out a great thought of God,” declared the South Carolina Episcopal theologian James Warley Miles, “namely the higher development of Humanity in its capacity for Constitutional Liberty.”

Miles held, though, that divine mandate extended beyond simply the Confederate interpretation of states’ rights, and that Southerners were bound by the Bible to seek more than merely “a selfish independence.” The Confederacy must “exhibit to the world that supremest effort of humanity” in creating and defending a society built upon obedience to biblical prescriptions regarding slavery, a society “sanctified by the divine spirit of Christianity.” In short, as the Episcopal Church in Virginia stated soon after the war began, Southerners were fighting “a Revolution, ecclesiastical as well as civil.” This would be a revolution that aimed to establish nothing less than, in the words of one Georgia woman, “the final and universal spread of Gospel civilization.”

This “Gospel civilization,” many believed, didn’t just permit slavery — it required it. Christians across the Confederacy were convinced that they were called not only to perpetuate slavery but also to “perfect” it. And they understood the Bible to provide clear moral guidelines on how to properly practice it. The Old Testament patriarchs owned slaves, Jewish law clearly assumed its permissibility and the Apostle Paul’s New Testament letters repeatedly compelled slaves to be obedient and loyal to their masters. Above all, as Southerners never tired of pointing out to their abolitionist foes, the Gospels fail to record any condemnation of the practice by Jesus Christ.

© Copyright Original Source

-Sam

[Mountain Man]

When you get as far as being minimally aware of this contradiction, that'll be a good first step.

-Sam

There is no contradiction between "governments are not mandated by scripture to follow the rules of the Church" and "scripture does not prohibit governments from observing and promoting Christianity".

[whag]

Nobody here has said or implied that governments should conduct themselves according to the rules of the Church.

How else would you expect a government to institute Christian policy? Should they wing it?

[Diogenes]

I think you still don't understand the distinction being made and I think you misremember my position on whether the government should eliminate interest-based lending.

-Sam

Ah yes, you seem to think only certain chapters of Leviticus are legitimate for public policy while eschewing one's that don't fit your own politics. You're no better than the people you deride but you are worse in your denial.

[Diogenes]

Like I said, I wish I could find it surprising that you would take this sort of anti-Christian stance.

In Sam's defense, his opposition to the endorsement of Christianity by the State isn't "anti-Christian".

[whag]

Ah yes, you seem to think only certain chapters of Leviticus are legitimate for public policy while eschewing one's that don't fit your own politics. You're no better than the people you deride but you are worse in your denial.

Adopting all Levitical laws is a crude and ineffectual way to implement Christianity into public policy. Some consideration is in order.

[Diogenes]

Adopting all Levitical laws is a crude and ineffectual way to implement Christianity into public policy. Some consideration is in order.

If we're going to be serious about the State not endorsing Christianity, that would include all the Levitical laws, not just the ones Sam doesn't like. Of course, Sam is an unserious person, as he would be wont to say.

[Cow Poke]

Ah yes, you seem to think only certain chapters of Leviticus are legitimate for public policy while eschewing one's that don't fit your own politics. You're no better than the people you deride but you are worse in your denial.

I think Sam is a class case of a liberal who forces his theology to align with his politics --- and I know Sam will disagree, but that's my opinion. Cafeteria Christianity.

Maybe "forces" is the wrong word --- but I think you get what I'm saying.

[whag]

I think Sam is a class case of a liberal who forces his theology to align with his politics --- and I know Sam will disagree, but that's my opinion. Cafeteria Christianity.

Maybe "forces" is the wrong word --- but I think you get what I'm saying.

Every sect and denomination is a form of smorgasbord. That’s the whole reason branches exist.

[Sam]

I think Sam is a class case of a liberal who forces his theology to align with his politics --- and I know Sam will disagree, but that's my opinion. Cafeteria Christianity.

Maybe "forces" is the wrong word --- but I think you get what I'm saying.

The example that the guy tried to use to demonstrate this — opposition to usury — is an example I've explicitly argued is scripturally obligatory but should not be politically imposed. The other example often referenced — that Christian principles demand a particular attitude toward immigrants seeking refuge — is likewise a principle I've explicitly argued should not form the sole or even primary basis of secular policy.

You'll want to look elsewhere for your drive-bys.

-Sam