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Just sitting here thinking a couple of things about the notion of religious liberty and real and perceived threats to it in this country. (Full disclosure: I& #39;m Lutheran.)
Years ago, I taught at a Southern Baptist-affiliated uni. in Alabama . . . (anecdote alert)
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Years ago, I taught at a Southern Baptist-affiliated uni. in Alabama . . . (anecdote alert)
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. . . where regular attendance at chapel was a graduation requirement. This was during the days (the & #39;90s) when fundamentalists had gained control of the denomination and were doing what they could to purge seminaries and colleges of faculty who didn& #39;t toe their line.
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So chapel speakers by and large spoke in accordance with the fundies& #39; position on things. We weren& #39;t required to attend, but for some reason one day I happened to be there toward the tail end of a speaker& #39;s talk. I don& #39;t remember his name or topic, but I do remember this:
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At the Q&A at the end, a student asked him what he thought of the future of the Church in a non-Christian world. He said that he didn& #39;t worry about it too much because, after all, Christianity itself emerged out of a non-Christian world.
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And . . .I will have to come back to this later on.
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(Later on . . . )
I don& #39;t have any deep take on this; I just finding myself thinking about that statement a lot in conjunction with Evangelicals& #39; allying themselves with the GOP since the Reagan years. Somewhere in that span of time, they lost ability to speak truth to power,
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I don& #39;t have any deep take on this; I just finding myself thinking about that statement a lot in conjunction with Evangelicals& #39; allying themselves with the GOP since the Reagan years. Somewhere in that span of time, they lost ability to speak truth to power,
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to the point that the most prominent among them cannot speak out against Trump& #39;s obvious ethical and moral failures. Their very desire to remain allied with power has caused them to lose their real power:the moral authority to ask people to search their hearts/consciences.
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I *still,* 4 years later, can& #39;t get over Trump& #39;s telling an interviewer for CBN that he& #39;s never felt the need to ask God for forgiveness. And when Evangelicals didn& #39;t have a little "Come to Jesus" talk with him, I said, "Really? *This* is the horse they want to ride?"
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[Insert a bunch of stuff here about how Trump& #39;s statement signals something truly broken about him and that one doesn& #39;t have to be religious to understand that, the ability to admit being wrong and pledging to do better being kinda important in human relationships and all.]
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While sure, the Church does better when government isn& #39;t hostile toward it, it doesn& #39;t need to have a compliant government in order to flourish. Indeed, it can better retain its integrity if it& #39;s not too chummy with secular power.
End.
End.
Something of a coda to this thread. https://twitter.com/FredTJoseph/status/1314156225572024320">https://twitter.com/FredTJose...
