My faith in Christ was settled at 18. After that, my struggle was not with belief as much as with believers. In college, I wrestled mightily with indentifying myself openly as a Christian. Others, both in the culture & on my campus, had made the label toxic. Christians were...

...not respected. Some Christians on campus welcomed the disrespect as authentication of their faith. After all, Jesus was disrespected too. What they missed, however, was that Jesus was maligned for his compassion, love, association with the lowly & sinners, & for rebuking...
...the powerful & self-righteous. Christianity on my campus was maligned for being intolerant, bigoted, unintellectual, partisan, arrogant, mean, & condemning. This reputation was earned by the behavior of some believers at my school, but more by the national figures leading...
...the Religious Right. Simply put, the disrespect didn’t come because Christians were emulating Jesus, but because they were not. That’s why I struggled. To identify myself with this twisted anti-Christ Christianity would be a betrayal of the true Christ to whom I belonged...
...That was 1994. Today, I have teenage kids including one attending my alma mater. As we talk about faith, I hear echoes of my struggle in them & my heart breaks. The idolatry & hypocrisy that existed in American Christianity a generation ago I now far, far worse. My kids know..
...faithful Christians. They’ve seen authentic, Christ-centric, Sermon on the Mount Christianity. But the wider witness of the US church is so repulsive that I worry about the future of their faith. A significant % of white evangelicals fear Joe Biden, BLM, Antifa, & the libs...
...are out to destroy their faith. Driven to delusion by their fear, these Christians cannot see that their desire to defend the faith is precisely what is destroying it. The American church is not being persecuted from the outside. It is being perverted from the inside...
...& they are losing an entire generation in the process. When the autopsy on evangelicalism is done, the cause of death will not be liberalism, CRT, social justice, or wokeness. It will be Christian Nationalism. After the events of last week, in my view its death cannot come...
...soon enough. I want this sick, malignant church to die because, like my 18-yr-old self, I still believe in the Christ who raises the dead. And I pray that “what is sown in dishonor will be raised in glory” (1 Cor 15:43). /END

More from Religion

First thread of the year because I have time during MCO. As requested, a thread on the gods and spirits of Malay folk religion. Some are indigenous, some are of Indian origin, some have Islamic


Before I begin, it might be worth explaining the Malay conception of the spirit world. At its deepest level, Malay religious belief is animist. All living beings and even certain objects are said to have a soul. Natural phenomena are either controlled by or personified as spirits

Although these beings had to be respected, not all of them were powerful enough to be considered gods. Offerings would be made to the spirits that had greater influence on human life. Spells and incantations would invoke their


Two known examples of such elemental spirits that had god-like status are Raja Angin (king of the wind) and Mambang Tali Arus (spirit of river currents). There were undoubtedly many more which have been lost to time

Contact with ancient India brought the influence of Hinduism and Buddhism to SEA. What we now call Hinduism similarly developed in India out of native animism and the more formal Vedic tradition. This can be seen in the multitude of sacred animals and location-specific Hindu gods

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