Civilized General Discussion Board: Excellent message for Christians about the perversion of religion and politics

I remember when both were normal..

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/nov/23/america-christian-evangelical-discrimination-immigration

Excerpt:The obvious and straightforward fact that the Jesus of the gospels calls for a kind of radical love centered on the poor is what has always made Christianity something of a scandalous religion: appealing to the masses, but because of its inherent radicalness needing to be contained. In the 1950s it was contained by dilution – Protestantism was so dominant that it basically baptized the status quo. The 1960s broke that – the leadership of these churches, who were among the most committed followers of Jesus, found that they had little choice but to march in Selma, literally or figuratively. But many of their followers did not want to; they had been on board because Protestantism was part of the fabric of American life, not a challenge to it. Membership in mainline churches began dropping off. And for many of those who still felt a cultural or personal need for Christianity, evangelicalism was on the rise: it meshed wonderfully with the emerging Reagan-era emphasis on individualism and spoke directly to Americans who rejected the movements of the civil rights era.

The idea that personal salvation – as opposed to concern for others – was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical, but over the decades it has morphed into the absurd farce we see now, where Jesus is held to bless every show of dominance and aggression we can imagine. There is, by now, a well-established genre of Republican officials posing for Christmas cards with submachine guns; Nashville Republican congressman Andy Ogles passed them out to his entire family for a picture. He was one of the congresspeople who led the charge not only to freeze USAID funding for the poorest people in the world, but to use that money instead for increased deportations from this country. It is as if he had decided to see exactly how un-Christlike it was possible for one human being to be – indeed, he demanded that the local private Christian college Belmont University lose federal funding because it had a hope, unity and belonging department that he thought was too much like “DEI”.