CBSN looks at the growing split within the evangelical movement between those who take extreme ideological stances and those who try to provide a more unifying message.
Vice News looked at the rise of evangelical churches that echo the conspiracy theories of Q. This has alarmed some evangelical leaders who see this as a dangerous trend. One of them said that it used to be that evangelicals looked for churches that reflected their theology and beliefs about God. But he says that now some are looking for churches that reflect their political ideology. They want to hear their political views affirmed from the pulpit and this has given an opening to some preachers who are willing to go all in on extremist views and thus garner followers.
One thing that immediately strikes you when the camera pans over the congregations of these extreme churches is that they are almost exclusively white.
Another thing is that at one of the churches that is heavily featured in both clips, there is not a mask to be seen in the crowded tent where about a thousand people crowd together to hear the pastor say that he will throw out anyone who wears one. They are practically begging to be an Omicron superspreader source.
Such reckless behavior truly boggles the mind.
These people will kill us if they can.
Yeah, well.
What a surprise religious beliefs incline people to other weird beliefs.
(and what a surprise religion and politics are so entangled!)
I used to think “evangelical” meant someone who believed it was their calling to go out there and convert -- convince everyone else to join there side by being like them.
There appears to be an alternative interpretation -- “make sure everyone is like us by killing everyone who isn’t”.
Cultists, Mano. They’re cultists.
One sees a bit of a Wahhabi mindset here.
@nomenexrecto I never interact with any of these people or anyone who might be likely to like them. Its easy enough to avoid them because they delight in telling you their views no matter how extreme. If they want to not wear masks and take the chance on them killing themselves in the name of their god and their freedumbs, they should go right ahead. The faster they kill each other off, the less we will have to deal with their ilk in the future. Win/win there.
When you mix religion and politics, both will lose credibility.
@Lassi Hippleainen
It used to be when I was a kid fifty years ago that it was a matter of deep faith that the ‘render unto Caesar that which is Caesar” thing meant that the evangelical folk did not vote or engage in politics at all. Because this world is dirty and only the next matters.
They agreed with you.
Thing is, as Fred Clark over at Slacktivist has pointed out, the evangelical churches being built more around politics than religion isn’t a new thing, but it did happen within living memory. (He talks about the whole ‘Abortion is the great evil’ movement as “The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal“. And the whole thing was pushed from the evangelical side, the ‘Moral Majority’ folks who have wanted to stack the Supreme Court since the 1970s, but actually to get rid of Brown v. Board of Education rather than Roe v. Wade. It was always about the white supremacy. I mean, really, the Southern Baptist church was deliberately created to find biblical justifications for slavery in order to head off attempts at recruiting churches to abolitionism.
The problem now, of course, is that the people who knew it was all a con from the start aren’t the ones in charge anymore, and the people remaining are the explicit grifters who just love having a bunch of marks to work with, and those who were originally part of the fools being led and don’t know they’ve been lied to all along. The split we’re seeing is basically a split between those who are still holding on to at least the dregs of their respectability and those who have gone full into saying the quiet parts out loud.