At the country’s founding, “there was a Christian political theory that was assumed as a consensus position, and the laws of nature and nature’s God don’t make sense without a common shared understanding of the divine and of created order,” Meadowcroft said, adding that the belief that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” as the Declaration of Independence states, “only makes sense within the long story of the Christian West.”

Biblical language has been used throughout American history, from the founding and Abraham Lincoln’s arguments to end slavery, to combating communism and advancing the civil rights movement.

“We’re saying we need to return that biblical language and an acknowledgment of our Christian heritage to the public sphere if our institutions and our assumptions about human nature and the law are going to make sense, and that the longer that we keep those out of the public sphere, the more unmoored we become from these core moral assumptions that undergird our whole constitutional system and the more lawless our future will be,” Meadowcroft explained. “So this is not a call to revolution, or civil war, or any such thing, it is rather a restoration, a re-founding, and an establishment of genuine constitutional order again.”

  • Bongo_Stryker@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    3 months ago

    That last line bothers me a little. I think the parable of the good Samaritan informs us that we shouldn’t just “take care of our own”.

      • Bongo_Stryker@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        3 months ago

        Yea sure context. I just don’t want anyone unfamiliar to think the takeaway is that it’s correct Christian theology to help and care for other Christians only, and fuck everybody else.

        Someone in this thread says Christians are hateful and racist. Well yea humans are hateful and racist, but that’s absolutely not what Jesus teaches. So people can easily get the wrong idea by witnessing the behavior of those who are bad at doing religion, or worse, those who are deceitful. So I want to be sure (or as much as I can) that our discussion is not a source for someone’s misunderstanding.