3408

Isn’t that the wrong end of the horse?

3409
3410

Any context for why Kennedy would do this?

3411

The quote makes a headline. The correction goes on page 7.

3412

Ezra has opinions on why the Right is acting like a scared, wounded animal, fighting for its life.

tl;dr

3413

Better yet, the claim went on Fox, and the walk back was on CNN. Fox viewers saw the former but will never see the latter. It’s a strategy.

3414

Except that evangelicals have been feeling persecuted as long as I’ve been alive. I grew up feeling like my beliefs were under constant attack from “the world.” A Thief in the Night was a popular-with-evangelicals millennial cult movie from the 70’s that predicted guillotines for Christians who professed their belief. As a kid, I expected that martyrdom quite possibly featured in my future. A persecution complex is part and parcel of that worldview, not something new that’s cropped up with demographic shifts.

3415

now that’s how you do a War on Christmas

3416

Also grew up in that environment, can confirm this is very much the cultural feeling.

3417

Why? I grew up next to active Catholics and while there was a bit of the public vs. private school thing going on with the kids, they didn’t seem to feel beseiged. I was always jealous they got All Saints Day off after Halloween and we had to go to school, but they were my best friends growing up.

3418

I don’t think Catholics evince the same kind of siege mentality. Catholicism has always encouraged more engagement with culture, and Catholic enclaves in the U.S. are culturally integrated with local politics and civic life in a way that evangelical enclaves aren’t. Part of this is because evangelicals live constantly with the dissonance of being completely captured by a political movement (the GOP) that is generally antithetical to the values they’re supposed to profess. That dissonance manifests itself in a kind of compartmentalization that I don’t think Catholics experience. (I’ve never been Catholic, but was married to one and attended mass for 16 years.)

3419

I really don’t even know what is the difference between an Evangelical and a Christian. I’ve been a Nothing all my life, though obviously being raised in a Judeo-Christian culture has had its impact on me.

3420

I went to Catholic school briefly. While the church was, at the time, pretty explicit on certain matters (abortion, homosexuality = sin, gay marriage would have been unthinkable), they were also very pro-education, pro-science, etc. Evolution was straight-up taught in biology class, and the Jesuit teachers were urbane and sophisticated. It was worlds away from what I have gleaned of evangelical Protestant culture.

caveat: I once heard (via podcast) a history lecture from Liberty University which was great. As long as the topic doesn’t conflict with the institution’s core beliefs, I guess a professor is a professor.

3421

There are a ton of shades of Christianity, from Catholicism to bland protestant varieties (go to church on Sundays, otherwise just live your life in a mostly secular way) to Evangelical varieties that insist on biblical literalism and all that that entails.

My exposure to fundamentalism has mostly come from participating in creation/evolution debates in the early part of this century. I found the rise of creationist culture online to be alarming, and the GOP’s courting of that constituency helped to harden my resistance to that party even before the excesses of the W. Bush administration.

3422

I always wonder - what exactly makes our culture Judeo-Christian? Saying Happy Holidays begrudgingly and being dimly aware that Hannukah is also in December?

LOL. America has a Christian Culture. Full Stop.

Judeo is just thrown in there as a fig leaf/propaganda to remind “Real Americans” that they were the Good Guys in WW2, that Commies were Godless, and now - that there is no place for Muslims and others in American society.

3423

I think it is meant to be a reference to the fact that Christianity is itself descended from Judaism. The Old Testament is, of course, a Hebrew text, albeit I think not precisely identical with the Torah (I’m still a bit confused on certain matters of biblical textual evolution).

I suppose by the same token you might argue that Muslim societies should be considered Judeo-Muslim, as Islam is also an Abrahamic religion. But the Quran doesn’t incorporate the Torah in the way that the Christian Bible does, so perhaps the connection is less explicit.

3424

tl;dr version:
Christians are divided into 3 major sects: Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox. In general Orthodox geographically stems from Greece, Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, Catholics stem from the areas of Europe that speak Romance languages and Ireland. Protestants stem from everywhere else in Europe. Those are broad generalization and there are minor, but profound-in-impact doctrinal differences between the sects. Catholics have a rigidly hierarchical leadership structure, headed by the Pope–the top cleric, who resides at the Vatican in Rome, and a codified and ritualized approach to religious practice.

Protestants splintered into a million different doctrinal sects in the late 1800’s. Broadly, they fall into two categories: mainline Protestants and evangelicals. The mainline churches (Episcopals, some Presbyterians, some Lutherans, and some Methodists) practice their faith very similarly to Catholics and are generally quite liberal politically. Evangelicals, of which there are myriad sects, are characterized by a few common threads:

  • literal biblical interpretation, including 7-day creationism and a belief in a coming apocalyptic end-times
  • a focus on proselytizing–hence “evangelical”, which in a Christian context means trying to convert people
  • disdain for ritual and clerical hierarchy
  • overwhelmingly Republican
3425

And then you’ve got the Anglicans, who, while technically Protestant, have always seemed to me rather their own beast.

3426

You are asking for a rational explanation for a feeling which is inherently irrational.

However I will try an provide as best an outside looking in view as I can.

One important aspect of modern evangelical christianity is an obsession with the end times, the rapture. This is one of the single biggest driving forces in this mentality. See according to Revelation, in the end times, Christians are going to be persecuted. So in order to be in the end times, as they believe, they must be being persecuted. They sincerely believe Christianity is a persecuted religion in the US.

They follow on from this by going, if I am a Christian I should be persecuted. If you are not feeling persecuted then you, therefore, are not a true or good Christian.

And you can now see the framework in place. They are using a priori reasoning to contort reality to fit their perception.

So it goes from there, if I am not being persecuted then I need to be “more Christian”. And escalating behavior from there until they receive sufficient pushback to meet their threshold for persecution.

The Columbine shooting? That was a cultural gold mine. They wrote freaking songs about the shooting prolifically, specifically focusing on Cassie Bernall as a martyr. They believed the entire reason for the shooting was as a religious war targeting Christians. Christian radio was dominated by these songs for about two years. They won’t say it explicitly, though some will, but they fantasize about being Cassie in that situation.

There is also the degradation theory. In their mind the world must always be getting worse in order to spur Christ’s return. That the world was always better in some imagined past. Multiculturalism and secularism are evidence of this decline. The world must therefore be more violent and depraved than ever and Christians must hold on to decency.

This is the cultural stew that runs through evangelical mindsets. And so, when evidence does not support their prior assumptions on how they are treated, they escalate behavior to incite the very thing they feel must be.

3427

Yeah, I remember this being a big deal. And, of course, it turns out it likely never happened.