I think people really underestimate how fucking evil a large chunk of American Christianity is, when they try to say to antichoicers “well if you’re against abortion, at least you should support things like WIC and SNAP, so that women facing an unplanned pregnancy can still feed their future kid”
I’ll be blunt, to American Christians like this, “but single mothers and their kids will starve!” is the entire fucking point. Being ostracized by your family and community and left for you and your bastard child to starve alone in abject misery and deprivation is what they believe the Godly punishment should be for being “unchaste,” and that things like food benefits and contraception are destroying moral society because they let women have unapproved sex without being as controlled by the fear of being cast out to starve with an unwanted kid (this also heavily ties into misogynist racism against woc, especially black women, who are accused of being “welfare queens,” draining good, properly chaste white Christians with kids born from their supposedly mindlessly lustful and irresponsible behavior, that can only be kept in check with threats of starvation or violence).
“Women (especially woc) cannot overcome their base urges and live virtuous lives without being heavily trained and coerced by threats of deprivation, isolation, and violence” is one of the most important unspoken ground rules of reactionary movements, both religious and secular
Evangelicals have no long-standing theological problem with abortion. My parents have been married for longer than evangelicals have been against abortion. Evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t care about abortion. Being against abortion was a Catholic thing. Evangelicals thought abortion is unfortunate, but not evil.
What changed?
Bob Jones v. US (1983).
Bob Jones University, an evangelical school, had a segregationist dating policy. It means what you think it does – they wouldn’t allow white students to date black students. They also wouldn’t admit black students who supported interracial marriage. This was in the mid-70s. Loving v Virginia was nearly a decade in the rearview mirror. The government threatened to revoke their tax-exempt status as a university unless this Jim Crow shit stopped. The school sued, and this eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Court, unsurprisingly, agreed with the government.
What was clear to evangelical leaders, then, in 1983, was that out-and-out racism was no longer going to be tolerated. What could they focus on that would have the same effect? What could rally the base without openly espousing racist views?
Reagan, with his “welfare queens” dog-whistle politicking gave them a like-minded politician glad of their support. And Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was only to happy to tell people what he thought of abortion.
So here we are, thirty-five years later, with every evangelical doing their damnedest to pretend that evangelicals have always been against abortion. They’ve lied themselves into believing it, and now they claim they’re against birth control too. That’s even more spurious – If they actually thought life begins at conception, then birth control would be a necessity, because fertilized eggs being rejected is the norm. Most of what they want to call human life never even gets implanted in the womb, or lasts very long if it does. And if they cared about life, welfare programs ought to be the most important, to ensure everyone has a good standard of living worthy of human beings.
But they don’t care about those things, so the only conclusion is that they are not pro-life. They just don’t want to see family planning and health care go to women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, etc.
It was never about being pro-life.
(and incidentally – Bob Jones v US was an 8-1 decision. Who was the dissenting voice? None other than William Rehnquist. Who was elevated to Chief Justice by Reagan when Warren Burger retired a few years later. None of what has happened has happened by accident)
And it’s worth noting that Bob Jones University defended their policy exclusively on religious freedom grounds, but Rehnquist’s dissent was based entirely on procedural grounds. Even the one justice who was “on their side” didn’t buy their argument and had to justify it on other grounds. It’s been a long road from BJU v. US to the Hobby Lobby case.
I have a similar theory about why evangelicals fight so hard against believing climate change when supposedly humans are stewards of the earth. It’s all about evolution. Climate change is a proxy war. It’s all the same rhetoric about scientists being corrupt and only looking out for their own interests and trying to shove their research down other people’s throats.
For a group of people who supposedly believe that God charged them with taking care of the Earth, they really seem to have bought into the whole “I can do whatever I want to the planet because God put us in charge of it” mindset really hard. Of course, maybe this is just the 21st century version of manifest destiny.
I think another problem is that with a large chunk of US evangelicalism, the world ending is what they want. The apocalypse means that the chosen few get carried off to heaven as a reward for beating the shit out of their gay kid or whatever, while the rest of us who failed to give the true believers the obedience respect that they feel entitled to are left behind to die in slow agony before being cast into eternal hell. It’s really hard to get people to give a shit about the planet dying when they view literally would have the world end to own the libs
It’s ABSOLUTELY what they want. During the Bush years, they were pretty up front about it, too. The entirety of the Evangelicals’ support of Israel is explicitly so that the Jewish People rebuild the Solomon’s Temple; which is a prerequisite for the events of Revelations to happen. The sooner it’s built, the sooner the Rapture can sweep them up into Heaven so they can laugh as all the “sinners” suffer the End Times. They don’t ACTUALLY care about Israelis or the long lasting sociopolitical factors of the area; they’re literally just pawns for the most death cult aspect of American Evangelical Christianity. It’s legitimately terrifying that people like this run large sections of a nation already capable of destroying all life on the planet.
It’s a fatal but common liberal mistake to assume that evangelicals are motivated by (misguided) compassion. They’re not. They will watch you die and be pleased about it because youve gone to hell faster.
White Evangelical Christians opposed desegregation tooth and nail. Where pressed, they made cheap, cosmetic compromises, like Billy Graham’s concession to allow black worshipers at his crusades. Graham never made any difficult statements on race, never appeared on stage with his “black friend” Martin Luther King after 1957, and he never marched with King. When King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech,” Graham responded with this passive-aggressive gem of Southern theology, “Only when Christ comes again will the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with little black children.” For white Southern evangelicals, justice and compassion belong only to the dead.
“What today we call “evangelical Christianity,” is the product of centuries of conditioning, in which religious practices were adapted to nurture a slave economy. The calloused insensitivity of modern white evangelicals was shaped by the economic and cultural priorities that forged their theology over centuries.“
I mean the whole damn point of the Nativity story is that the supposed son of God (interpret Jesus how you fucking want, of course) was born to a couple of poor, exhausted peasants in the stable for the inn, and his first bed was a feeding trough for animals. That would nowadays be like a poor couple where the mother gives birth in a parking garage behind the motel because they couldn’t find a better place and nobody else would take them in. It’s a pretty gritty setting, and the idea is that God was reborn in some of the rock-bottom lowest circumstances. The only thing majestic was all the angels and shit, and of course motherly love
I get that a lot of the art portraying Madonna and Child as fabulously wealthy europeans in splendid robes and golden light was meant to glorify God + whichever nobility was sponsoring the artist, and while of course it’s genuinely beautiful art, it just always struck me as horribly missing the point, which is that the supposed son of God started in incredibly humble circumstances, among the kind of people that everyone else looks down on
‘Massacre des Innocents’ by Leon Cogniét, 1824. Although the Feast of the Holy Innocents is in a couple of days time, this painting is still really relevant in that it portrays Mary as how She really was: a scared refugee mum, so fearful that Her son was going to be one of the Innocents killed by King Herod.
To expand on this, Jesus’s name is Anglicized in this way as well. We get Jesus from the Latin form of the Greek “Ἰησοῦς”(Iēsous), which is derived from the Herbrew “ישוע”(Yeshu’a, which meant “YHWH is Salvaion”, YHWH, or Yahweh being the name of God). When another form of that name, ” יְהוֹשֻׁעַ”(Yeoshu’a) was allowed to Anglicize through a different set of corruptions, it entered the English Language through Reformist Protestants as the name “Joshua”.
Yes. Jesus’s actual name is Joshua.
joshua christ this is fascinating
oily josh
Huh
Translation, they were white washed.
They were translated.
My mother works for a Jewish agency, and is always the one to record the ‘we’re closed in observance of’ messages. They close on Christmas because federal holiday and gentile staff, and she always swears she will say they’re closed in observance of ‘Josh’s birthday’.
josh’s birthday
Like … seriously, y’all need to understand, none of these were English-speaking white people names until English-speaking white people started naming their kids after people in the Bible.
This is like wondering why Shakespeare uses all those famous quotes in his plays.
Reblogging for Oily Josh. That’s going to be fun.
(also note Yehuda goes to both Judas and Jude – so two yaakovs two yehudas (and like what 11 yehudim? (It’s a ethnonym joke))
(also the modern equivalent of Judas Iscariot would be, like, Muhammed bin ISIS, or Seamus O’PIRA, or Helmut Nazi, or White Power Bob, or something. They’re probably not real names of real people, is my point)
My priest: Translating the Sermon to Spanish made me think of how some Greek words take four or five English words to get their full meaning. When Bible translators look at that, they have to paraphrase, which imposes bias. Then fundamentalists take those words literally. Can you imagine how many people that has hurt?
Me, an openly gay man:
THIS IS LITERALLY WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS AND PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT.
If your Christianity is defined by who you hate, it’s not Christianity
“Whoever says, “I love God,” but hates his brother is a liar. The one who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love the God whom he has not seen.” –
1 John 4:19-20
“He who said he is in the light, and hates his brother, is in darkness.” –
1 John 2:8-11
“Anyone who hates another brother or sister is really a murderer at heart. And you know that murderers don’t have eternal life within them.” –
1 John 3:14-15
“
You must not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the children of your people, but you must love your neighbor as yourself” – Leviticus 19:17-18
“Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers over all wrongs.” – Proverbs 10:12
“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loves is born of God, and knows God.” – 1 John 4:7
“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” –
Ephesians 4:31
Says who? Says the bible, my friend.
25 Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ 26He said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ 27He answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ 28And he said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’
29 But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’ 30Jesus replied, ‘A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan while travelling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity. 34He went to him and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, “Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” 36Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?’ 37He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’
Let us remember, when reading this passage, that the very idea that a Samaritan could have been “good” would have been scoffed at by Jesus’ original audience. The Samaritans were what remained of the Northern Kingdom of Israel after it had been conquered and its people enslaved and the important people carried off into exile and replaced by settlers from other parts of the Assyrian Empire. (Unlike the Southern Kingdom of Judah, nobody returned from exile.) They technically worshiped the same God, but on Mount Samaria, instead of Mount Zion, and they only accepted the first five books of the Bible as scripture, and you know how a lot of times people are more upset by someone who disagrees with them who is sort of like them than they are by someone who is just completely different? Yeah. In those days, Jewish people and Samaritans REALLY did not like one another. They did not drink from the same wells. They did not speak to one another. If Jewish people in Jesus’ day hated anybody, they hated Samaritans and Romans.
So this guy comes up to Jesus, and asks what he should do to inherit life.
And Jesus gives a quite clear, simple, straighforward answer: Love. Love God, and love your neighbor.
And the guy tries to weasel out of it, by asking for a definition for “neighbor.”
So Jesus tells a story in which the good guy is a Samaritan (knowing just how much bad blood there was), and says “him. He’s your neighbor, and you should totally follow his example, because EVERY HUMAN BEING EVER IS YOUR NEIGHBOR AND YOU SHOULD LOVE THEM, YOU HATEFUL MORON.”
Says who? Says Jesus.
I try not to post about religion very often, but these posts were just Too Good to not reblog u_u
just moving along like everyone else 