Saturday, June 08, 2019

Pro-Choice

It's not what you think.

Michael Gerson writes, "In their day of prayer, Graham and other Trump evangelicals have used a sacred spiritual practice for profane purposes. They have subordinated religion to politics. They have elevated Trump as a symbol of divine purposes. And they are using Christian theology as a cover for their partisanship.

So: This is blasphemy, in service to ideology, leading to idolatry, justified by heresy. All in a Sunday's work."

Gerson is not some wild-eyed radical. He is an evangelical Christian, at least as that term was understood before, oh, 2015 or so. He was the head speechwriter during the George W. Bush administration. He is a staunch Republican; again, as that term was understood prior to 2015. And he is a graduate of Wheaton College, whose most famous alumnus is, wait for it, Billy Graham.

And he points out the hard choices that evangelicals - the real ones, not the ones who subscribe to fake theology - have to make. In this case, I am pro-choice. In the past two weeks I've had lunch with three friends, all of them former evangelicals, and all of them currently adrift. "I can't do it," one of them told me yesterday. "Maybe some day, when my son is a little older, I'll tentatively dip my toe back into the church waters. But that's a big Maybe. And I certainly can't do it right now. I can't stand the blatant hypocrisy. It's too much."

These are the fruits of the theological capitulation that has taken place in the Evangelical Christian Church in Amerikkka. Be very assured that people are already making choices. They are walking away in vast numbers. And it's because of the unholy alliance that Gerson articulates in this article. People aren't stupid, at least most of them, and they can detect the whiff of blatant hypocrisy in the air, and in the naves and on the altars of the evangelical churches they've left. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/franklin-graham-has-played-his-ultimate-trump-card/2019/06/03/22a50b18-862b-11e9-98c1-e945ae5db8fb_story.html

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