Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. – Matthew 23:27-28
The United States is not, and never has been, a “Christian nation”, despite the claims of many modern evangelical Christians who are apparently unable to read anything other than the Bible and religious tracts. Most of the founders were Deists, and the Constitution clearly delineated that the new country was to have no state religion, that everyone has the right to worship (or not) as they please, and that church and state were to be entirely separate from one another. Unfortunately, the majority of the population were both Christian and far too stupid and selfish to understand why a state religion is an astonishingly bad idea, even for those who embrace the favored creed. As a result, legislators slowly introduced Christian notions of morality into the laws, and by the late 19th century both federal and state legal codes were thoroughly infested with odious statutes drawn from whichever Old Testament precepts Protestant Christians had decided to keep (while ignoring, for example, bans on eating shellfish or menstruating women attending religious services). But while these dour authoritarians were only too happy to adopt whatever prohibitions on pleasure they could get past the courts, they showed little interest in the pronouncements of the guy for whom their religion was named, such as all that stuff about charity, mercy and forgiveness (and separation of church and state). Still, up until recently, most Christians at least paid lip service to Jesus’ teachings, even if they weren’t too interested in enshrining them in the law. But as US “authorities” have increased their outward shows and proclamations of Christianity, their actual actions have become increasingly un-Christian. A quick Google search will reveal plenty of incidents of people being fined or even arrested for feeding the hungry, and earlier this week there was this item:
Hours after a humanitarian group released videos showing border patrol agents kicking over water bottles left for migrants in the Arizona desert, a volunteer for the organization was arrested and charged with harboring undocumented immigrants. Scott Daniel Warren…faces a federal charge of harboring two people in the country illegally…William Walker, an attorney for Warren, said his client’s actions were not criminal. “This is a humanitarian aid worker trying to save lives,” Walker said. His arrest last week came after border patrol agents conducted surveillance on a building where two immigrants were given food, water, beds and clean clothes…No More Deaths last week gave news organizations videos taken between 2010 and 2017, mostly by cameras at its desert camp. In one clip, a border patrol agent kicked over five water jugs meant to supply immigrants. In another, an agent pours gallons of water on the ground…
But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
Although (because?) I’m an outsider to US politics and the drafters of the Constitution, I entirely agree with what you say.
The current state of the US, and until very recently Ireland, was described as: ‘public righteousness, private hypocrisy’.
I fear the wrath of God upon America.
I am an American Christian and I agree except for one point, the timeline. There wasn’t that much Christian moralizing anywhere but local laws (Banned in Boston). Until the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Suffragettes (who had a lot of shared membership) got power. That is when suddenly the law had to be America’s mother and protect the vulnerable from the evils of alcohol, drugs, and prostitution.
Salem and the witches?
Salem at the time was an English colony in theory and a Puritan theocracy in effect. It was _before_ the founding of America or the notion of religious freedom and separation of church and state was an American thing. At the time Puritans were not tolerated in England and they fled to the Americas with many others who weren’t Anglican, to found their own theocracies. All these competing theocracies were what gave rise to the later, very novel notion that a unifying state must not be tied to any one of them.
Indeed; such colonies were theocracies. But you cannot say that their ideas vanished with Independence. And while the drafters of the Constitution were clear about the separation of religion and state, this didn’t mean that such theocratic ideas were eliminated.
No,they weren’t eliminated completely of course. America just got farther away from them at the time than any other nation.
And the same applies in the other direction. Jesus, whenever challenged on the issue, made it clear that Christianity was nothing whatever to do with state power, that “My kingdom is not of this world”, that Christianity’s sole concern with sinners was presenting them with God’s offer of forgiveness (and, let’s not forget, hellfire in the afterlife if that offer is not accepted).
American evangelical christianity is a church fully and completely infiltrated, corrupted, and co-opted by what Jesus and the rest of the NT calls “The World”. Jesus calls christians to save the lost, not throw them in prison. Biblically speaking, every church with a political agenda is a false church.
Very true about the co-option of the Church by the World.
And then we have today’s (8/21/19) “Trump: I am the Chosen One.”
https://www.newser.com/story/279457/trump-i-am-the-chosen-one.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=uol&utm_campaign=rss_top
If false it makes him a lunatic.
If true it makes him one of the Monsters (the Antichrist, the Beast, etc) from The Book of Revelations.