How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church
The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself.https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/evangelical-church-pastors-political-radicalization/629631/
https://archive.ph/sB9bg
“Before i turn to the Word,” the preacher announces, “I’m gonna do another diatribe.” “Go on!” one man yells. “Amen!” shouts a woman several pews in front of me. Between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching is the strangest ritual I’ve ever witnessed inside a house of worship. Pastor Bill Bolin calls it his “diatribe.” The congregants at FloodGate Church, in Brighton, Michigan, call it something else: “Headline News.” Bolin, in his mid-60s, is a gregarious man with thick jowls and a thinning wave of dyed hair. His floral shirt is untucked over dark-blue jeans. “On the vaccines …” he begins.
For the next 15 minutes, Bolin does not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting. Instead, he spouts misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the “radically dangerous” COVID-19 vaccines. “A local nurse who attends FloodGate, who is anonymous at this time—she reported to my wife the other day that at her hospital, they have two COVID patients that are hospitalized. Two.” Bolin pauses dramatically. “They have 103 vaccine-complication patients.” The crowd gasps.
“How about this one?” Bolin says. He tells of a doctor who claims to know that “between 100 and 200 United States Congress members, plus many of their staffers and family members with COVID, were treated by a colleague of his over the past 15 months … with …” Bolin stops and puts a hand to his ear. A chorus of people responds: “Ivermectin.” Bolin pretends not to hear. “What was that?” he says, leaning over the lectern. This time, they shout: “Ivermectin!” Bolin nods. This isn’t my first time at FloodGate, so none of what Bolin says shocks me. Yet I’m still struggling to make sense of the place.
Having grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pastor at another church in town, I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking. So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals—including my own father—became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say around election time. “Neither should you.”
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longform superb journalism
= new reply since forum marked as read
And when you wind up in the hospital or ICU, don't expect our sympathy either. Oh and you can't vote if you're incapacitated or dead, FYI. 
We're witnessing it right now in real time. 
Hell look at what the MAGAs are doing to Disney right now, and it's all at the bidding of fucking POS News Corporation. Imagine if Trump had the power to do whatever he wanted.
about the history of the Church over thousands of years. It ain't pretty. The Church is a Roman invention, established in 325 AD at the 1st Council of Nicea that was convened by Constantine the Great. The purpose of which was to answer 3 questions: 1) when to celebrate Easter, 2) the relationship between God and Jesus, and 3) what should be the laws of the Church?
Answer #1 was the 1st Sunday, after the 1st full moon, after the 21st of March.
Answer #2: Was Jesus a prophet, a God, a son of God? They came up with the Trinity of father, son, and holy ghost. How's that for a nuanced answer? And --- everyone had to agree to this or be labeled a heretic. The gnostics, who argued that everyone had a piece of God within were exiled or murdered.
Answered #3 was Canon law governing the internal hierarchy and administration of the church. Much of which was incorporated from Roman pagan religious law. Bishop of Rome became the Pontiff, which in Roman pagan religion was the high priest. Pontiff comes from the latin pons for bridge. The pontifex maximus (Latin for "greatest priest"
was the chief high priest of the College of Pontiffs (Collegium Pontificum) in ancient Rome.
For thousands of years, the Church has waged wars for land grab, completely intolerant towards other religions, and persecuted non-believers and those deemed as heretics with torture and murder.
The founders of our country were well aware of the religious wars that had raged across Europe. Many were not Christian, but deists and masons. It's why they were insistent that there not be a a state religion. That we could practice whatever faith we chose, or even no faith at all.
Then Christo-Fascists among us are Dominionists, who want to bring in the 2nd coming of christ and to rule and reign with him. They want to establish their religion as the state religion.
It a very fuzzy line, difficult for me to know which Christo-Fascists are more religious zealots using politics to get their way, or capitalist pigs using religion to get their way. But make no mistake, they are an evil lot and will do and say anything to get their way.
but this "modern" political extremism in those churches started well before 40 years ago, although certainly Nixon ("Silent Majority" ) and Raygun ("Moral Majority" and "Christian Coalition" ) helped to fuel it to get a voting bloc.
You had the stadium speakers like Billy Graham in the '40s and '50s-
leading to the "televangelists" like Jerry Fallwell in the '50s -
and Pat Robertson (from the early '60s) -
who in turn spawned more like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker in the late '60s/'early '70s.
(Of course we know what happened with this pair of charlatans)
And James Dobson and his fake nonsense in the late '70s -
and seguing to loons like Ralph Reed -
Bill Moyers had a book review back in 2017 for a book that took them back to their origins - https://billmoyers.com/story/evangelicals-in-america/
These people had been courted for many decades and given pithy self-important names, but were summarily dumped after each major election until 2017 when for the first time, not only were they fully embraced, but were permitted to run completely rampant and roughshod over everyone and everything, completely controlling the political agenda.
