The Damage

In the days following September 11, 2001 there was a strong feeling in blog circles and talk radio that Islam is a violent religion and that all Muslims believed in violence as a basic tenet of their faith. I was a smug young conservative then and I was proud that my Christian faith can never be painted this way. Didn't we believe in loving your enemies, turning the other cheek, do unto others what you would have them do to you? My religion was pure, otherworldly and non violent.

The funny thing is that I now have this sense from my non-Christian friends, that Christianity is violent, racist, greedy. The colonization efforts of the empires of the past, American expansionism at the expense of the native population, missionaries who sail the world to convert souls only to kill, enslave and spread disease to indigenous people. Yup, I can now see that my own faith can look pretty bad..

This has come to a head during the Trump presidency and the coronavirus pandemic, evangelical Christians have been this president's strongest supporters and they strongly support his belittling of the virus. He would utter statements in his many rallies and tweets that the pandemic is over amidst a rising third wave, he would say that the numbers are inaccurate, he would say that it was not a big deal. And what do his "pro-life" supporters say? That the virus is a hoax, that masks are an impingement on their rights, that the virus is just a cold. Christians can be a cruel lot..

This topic brings me so much anger and pain, words rush out of my head as I type this post. I cannot fathom how far we have slid in the past four years and how we give this man a free pass to do and say whatever he wants. I cannot understand the evangelical love for this man! 

I learned something new today, the topic of abortion has been a rallying cry used by the religious right not because they originally believe in it but because it has been selected as an issue to rally the troops. Pretty much like global warming has been used by the left to rally their own troops. Both issues are real, but exploited to foment anger from the masses. I was shocked to find out that evangelicals in the 60's were not particularly concerned about abortion, that they found little biblical support against it. 

But I digress, here we are late 2020 and in many unbelievers eye Christianity as deadly or deadlier than Islam. All I see now in the church is politics, for a while I thought that faith and politics had been inseparably intertwined. But no, nowadays all I see is politics. This I see is the damage caused to the perception of Christianity among my generation, but this does not even touch the negative impression cast on the next generations: millennial, gen-z, I-gen etc. I shudder to think what they think of us.