Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.” 2 Corinthians 6: 14-18
Nehemiah is commonly preached as an example of godly leadership; he was a fellow who decisively acted and used state power to make things happen for the people of God. The story fits in well with the current Christian culture which seeks to use political power to accomplish godly purposes which are largely discerned through the strength of feelings. If you see yourself as among God’s chosen, and have strong feelings about how God is speaking to you (and yours,) what’s not to like? Those outside of that certainty, perhaps not so much. This polemic will exclude most of the questions concerning entanglements with Zoroastrianism, timeline discrepancies, archeological evidence regarding the state of the wall and the success of the rebuilding/repopulation projects, and the many complex questions concerning how the books of Ezra and Nehemiah fit together to simply take it as it is commonly taught in evangelical environments focusing on how the common (understanding of the) narrative supports the Christian Nationalist program which is comprised of people who think very highly of their God-given position to sift, exclude, and rule the rest of us for our own (supposed) good. I’ll begin by summarizing the story of Nehemiah to then shift to make an argument about how the current use and understanding of that story conflicts with other teachings throughout the Bible before moving towards how the story is inverted to fit current Christian political and social goals. As the overall number of evangelicals continue to diminish, the anxiety and perception of threat to the average evangelical grows. To maintain a sense of safety and strength, those evangelical groups who remain faithful have been for decades concentrating their influence to maintain comfort and the sense of supremacy. The writing is on the wall as white Christian demographic supremacy fades so they preach that representative and inclusive democracy must go. The evangelical’s take on the story of Nehemiah helps to provide godly sanction to the mission of silencing ‘the others’ to continue the Great Work.
Perhaps a better understanding of Nehemiah’s story is that Nehemiah himself is the antithesis of a righteous leader, but that is not how the story is commonly taught. A brief synopsis of the story goes that Nehemiah was a cupbearer to Artaxerxes I (465-424 BC,) the supreme political power in that area at that time. (Nehemiah was anyone but an ‘ordinary guy.’) Worship at the Temple in Jerusalem had been reestablished with the laying of the foundations of the ‘second temple’ in 536 BC under the commission of Cyrus the Great. Although temple worship was occurring in Jerusalem, Nehemiah was distraught upon hearing about the ‘shame’ of Jerusalem’s walls and gates remaining in ruins after 140 or so years. (The Samaritans had prevented the wall from being rebuilt.) Nehemiah prayed to the ‘god of heaven’ (there is no record that God answered this prayer) and then took it upon himself to solicit a commission from Artaxerxes to return to Jerusalem to rebuild its walls and gates. Nehemiah went to Jerusalem to organize a rebuilding project which was met with local opposition who were perhaps rightly concerned that the Jews might be organizing a revolt against the king (Neh 2: 19, Ezra 4:13.) Nehemiah refused to address these concerns to rather to take up arms to defend the project. After the walls were rebuilt, Nehemiah institutes economic reforms ending collecting interest from Jews. (This could make him popular.)
In all this, we are to take Nehemiah’s word that Tobiah and Sanballat are malevolent actors not worthy of assurance that the Jews are fixing to rebel. Granted, they are important actors defending their own interests, but evil? It seems reasonable to assume local leaders would be significantly incentivized to quell any potential for rebellion and tax evasion as they were all living under the boot of an empire. The admission that Nehemiah does not want to talk to these people who reside outside ‘the assembly of the Lord’ is very telling. Nehemiah blithely dismisses the concern (Neh 6:8) although his actions say otherwise. No matter, the ‘others’ are to be brushed off as ‘distractions,’ ‘haters,’ and ‘enemies’ because ‘God has spoken,’ as Matt put it his March 19th, 2023 sermon at CentNaz. (That’s just plain dishonest, Matt. Nowhere in the text does God speak; but I’m getting ahead of myself.) Now that Nehemiah’s power has been solidified, religious reforms follow as Ezra the Scribe read the Law which was ‘in his hand,’ (Ezra 7: 14) that is, in his power, to the people to separate themselves from ‘the others.’ (Scholarship tends to place the assembly of today’s Torah in the hands of Ezra.) The land was claimed as their own (Neh 9:6) and the tithing system was reestablished (Neh 10.) The ‘in’ (golah) group was named and (re)established accordingly in Nehemiah 11 & 12. All of this led to the violent separation of the holy from the unholy in chapter 13. (But Matt is not going to talk about this.)
Nehemiah 13 is very specific in its ethnic prejudice. No Ammonite (sorry Zelek) or Moabite (sorry Ruth) shall enter the assembly of God (Deut 23:3, Neh 13: 1.) All those of foreign descent were separated from the assembly (Neh 13:3.) Support for the church was firmly accounted for and teeth was given to the laws enforcing the Sabbath. Then the whole affair ended up with violence as Nehemiah admits to assaulting people (Neh 13: 25) for the apparent crime of being of the ‘wrong’ lineage. Apparently, to be holy, the unholy wives and children had to be ‘put away,’ divorced and disowned (Ezra 10) to maintain the purity of the holy people. (Welcome to Utopia.)
Lots of apologetics minded folks have tried to sugar-coat this to say that this purge was not ethnic in nature. I think the gymnastics involved to accomplish this are insurmountable. (As a former evangelical apologetics ‘expert,’ now that I’m outside of that culture, I think the general arguments to explain this away to the modern, liberal mind are convoluted and weak.) Nehemiah has been often cited as a defense for forbidding interracial marriage. (R.J. Rushdoony, reconstructionist and godfather of the Christian homeschool movement was explicit about this. Gary North and Doug Wilson are Rushdoony-lite descendants who have softened this kind of rhetoric for more modern ears.) The story of Nehemiah, if we are to suppose (as good evangelicals are instructed to do) his actions to have been indeed sanctioned by God, serves to uphold the unification of the powers of church and state, and to uphold the righteousness of separating ‘us’ from ‘them.’ It upholds and justifies the use of violence to accomplish this separation. The culture of separation Nehemiah and Ezra established led to the divisions and hatred between the Jews, Samaritans, and the Gentiles. The culture of separation continues today.
Jesus, Paul, and the later Christians who complied the New Testament, which included often unfairly maligning the Jewish leadership (strongly contributing to a long history of antisemitism and violence of Christian people against Jewish people,) most often sought to end Jewish ethnic and racial supremacy as it relates to who are the ‘chosen’ people of God. The New Testament thus supposedly supplants the Old, in an odd way, one people group for another even though some passages in the Bible say that all human beings are the inheritors of God’s greatest gift to us. Now that the white, Protestant Europeans who landed at Plymouth to eventually establish the greatest nation on this green earth (so we are told,) have assumed the position as God’s chosen, Nehemiah’s story has been appropriated to support the Christian Nationalist narrative and mission to save the world from the powers of the godless heathens. (As the enigmatic, inscrutable, complex love-hate relationship between Jews and Christians continues to confuse the hell out of me…)
The faithful may argue that this concept of separation was just an Old Testament thing. Think again. This is why I prefaced with the passage from 2 Corinthian 6: 14-18. The language is binary and explicit—light from dark, righteous from evil. This passage has been used literally to support the separation between religions but also based upon skin color. Our Puritan roots, the very success of the Protestant work ethic, and the assumption that the descendants of these ideals are now tasked with saving the rest of the world as they are ‘the city on the hill,’ fits very nicely into the belief behind the unification of church and state because if you take the Paul’s binary language to heart those who are not specifically Christian are literally evil. Do we take this literally? Or as hyperbole from which we make practical adjustments?
(Concerning being literally evil as an ‘other’: As Matt said, either on the 12th or 19th [forgot which,] something to the effect that, ‘just the name Geshem just sounds like he’s a really bad dude.’ Such an explicitly flippant, stupid, off-hand, unsubstantiated ‘observation’ from a religious authority in a sermon shows me the prejudice is just baked into a plethora of matters Christian don’t bother to give a second thought about how they hurt people by not caring about other people’s perceptions and experiences. Did Matt make this idiotic statement because Geshem was described as the Arab? I don’t know. Was it prejudicial? Definitely.)
Thus, it would seem if Paul’s directive were to be taken literally, those who do not profess to be Christian are not fit for leadership over Christians simply because they are evil. (But then there’s Romans 13. Ugh. Confused? Me too.) It seems then, that if God’s people are to remain holy, they either must remove themselves from the world, as people like the Amish have attempted to do. Or they must wield the political power to make the appropriate prohibitions and separations happen. The founding fathers did their best to create a secular government but white Christians have not had to worry about much since they’ve been demographically dominant for the past several hundred years. They’ve enjoyed the upper hand socially and politically and have thus so far been able to impose their will through democratic processes. Now that white Christians are in decline numerically, adjustments need to be made to keep the proper prohibitions and separations in place. Forward looking people who pioneered the Christian Right have been working this ‘problem’ for decades.
The Christian political establishment is more than happy to ally itself with people and organizations who do not necessarily share the same evangelical faith but share the same goal of moving the country towards a ‘Christian‘ autocracy. The ambitious know how to play the game with this very well-organized voting bloc. Paul’s directive to separate is now softened to the point where it is politically expedient. The evangelical largely sees the separation of light from dark as akin to the separation between Right from Left. This binary model encourages infiltration by power-hungry people who will claim the appropriate faith to be accepted, and thus gain power, to accomplish their own personal goals by offering the faithful what they want to hear politically. Being recognized as faithful it not so much following the peaceful, inclusive, and humble teachings of Christ as it is the mere public profession of faith and adherence to the Right’s political agenda. This is in good part why our leadership is populated with a mass of vitriolic miscreants, who better than 90% profess to be Christian, who rail on about the demonic ‘wokeness’ (an appropriated word which now is a catch all for anything the Right doesn’t like,) they, when pressed, cannot even define. We could thank Billy Graham and the Christian Right movement for this development of Christians fighting against communism and for the American way.
But how dare I criticize Billy? Reinhold Niebuhr criticized Graham’s popular program of public profession, which birthed things like ‘the sinner’s prayer,’ for its ‘pietistic individualism.’ (Although Niebuhr had kind things to say about Graham himself.) The historical collective action of evangelical Christians towards social causes, for both good and ill, eventually gave way to a very individualistic faith which suited and adjusted itself to the cares and desires of the individual. The doctrine of capitalism got merged in and the ‘social gospel’ faded to be associated with the evils of socialism and the communist threat. The shades of gray of collective human rational debate gave way to a black and white ethic guided by individual feelings backed by the authority of God. It’s absurd, but that’s what it’s come to be.
After several hundred years under this ‘Bible-backed’ supremacist assumption (God talks to me and not thee,) your own preacher does not have to be explicitly offensive to get the point across. All the cultural appropriations and assumptions are baked in thanks to a massive Christian media empire. (I’ve cited all kinds of statistics in this blog to support this assertion.) Evangelical Christians now believe in the use of political power to accomplish ‘God’s Ends,’ as they are continually filled with fear concerning the threat of ‘the others.’ Violence to achieve the ‘ends’ is no big deal. (Continued, and growing, sympathy for the ‘patriots’ of J6 shows this. Thanks to complicity and Tucker.) Helping this ‘end,’ FoxNews pastors a huge flock who’ve been trained by the evangelical system to receive the message; those at Fox are proven, through tangible evidence obtained from uncovered internal communications, bald-faced liars, frauds, frequently vicious, but they know their audience. FoxNews knows what their audience wants to hear, the actual truth does not matter, the mission is too important, and the illusion of supremacy must be maintained. To the evangelical, the ‘truth’ of God’s will is both personally felt and collectively revealed. The modern evangelical may be more forgiving than Nehemiah was, but there is still a very clear ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Pulling the curtain back reveals some very ugly stuff.
Summarizing much of what I’ve previous written about concerning the advancement of the Christian Nationalist agenda, the Christian media machine is immense informing the masses about how to interact with God. Money changes hands, power arrangements are negotiated, the bounds of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ are set. All this cultural influence programs our minds to adhere to an amazingly self-regulatory system balancing charisma with self-interest to keep ‘everyone’ (that is, God’s chosen) happy and the money flowing. The effect of all this cultural assumption and practice upon our understanding of how we now come to hear God is profound. The collective Christian culture, with all it many voices and desires has literally become the voice of God. How the book of Nehemiah has been preached for the past several hundred years has helped immensely with this process. I’ll explain.
It is curious to note that the typical pattern of ‘revelation’ in the Bible has God specifically speaking to someone to do something specific. Noah, make a boat (Gen 6: 14.) Abram go to Canaan (Gen 12.) Isaac don’t go to Egypt (Gen 26: 12.) Jacob, go home (Gen 31: 3.) Moses, tell Pharaoh to let my people go (Ex 3.) Joshua, invade Canaan (Josh 1.) Gideon attack the Midianites (Jud 7:2.) God audibly called Samuel to be a prophet (1 Samuel 3.) God told David were to go (2 Samuel 2: 1.) This pattern and explicit claim to the LORD speaking specific things continued through the recognized prophets, time and time again. The means of these interactions are often unclear, but the Bible makes the claim that the LORD (or an ‘angel of the Lord’) was telling something specific to a human being. Often times these revelations as depicted in scripture were accompanied by some miraculous manifestation and/or powerful personal appearance which often inspired great fear (which required reassurance to the hearer, i.e. ‘Fear not…’) The book of Nehemiah has none of this—anywhere. Yet preachers preach as though Nehemiah had heard from God even though the text itself makes no such claim. This is just plain dishonest.
Ezra 1 makes the claim that the LORD ‘stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia’ which led to a proclamation to commission and fund the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. I’ll offer that the benefit of the doubt. However, the LORD himself remains silent throughout the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah felt ‘shame’ concerning the state of Jerusalem’s walls and gates but there was no mention of God telling Nehemiah to go and rebuild them. Sure, Nehemiah prayed about it—but there was no recorded answer in the book accepted in the Protestant Canon. Why?
This is where human interest lifts its head. I propose that what happened in the compilation of Ezra and Nehemiah was to build a narrative to reforge an identity. What actually happened in history is a matter of much scholarly debate, but the return from exile narrative compiled in Ezra-Nehemiah seeks to establish an exclusive national identity. It was a matter of pride. (And control over the local population.)
Pastor Matt’s March 12, 2023 sermon assumes that God called Nehemiah to rebuild those walls and gates; Matt made it very clear that Nehemiah was responding to God’s call even though, to repeat, there is no record of God actually speaking in the book which records Nehemiah’s deeds. But because Nehemiah felt shame, prayed to God, and successfully garnered and organized the resources to accomplish the mission, it is assumed that it must have been God’s will—despite all the ‘difficulties’ I wrote about above.
Matt’s assumption fits perfectly into the charismatic understanding of how God communicates to us. This is how preachers can get up there to ask, ‘Hey, what are you passionate about?’ (Talk about herding cats…) What are people generally passionate about? The possibilities are seemingly endless. But not to worry, the machinery of appearance, language, pride, and self-interest regulates the whole mess in good part through what I talked about in an earlier post, the scapegoating mechanism. We must have somebody to blame for our problems—perceived or otherwise. This provides a way for us to divert and not look deeply into the consequences of our own beliefs and actions. Taking the assumptions which guide how Nehemiah is taught, what we think is our own agency, whatever we feel passionately about can now have God’s sanction. Just fill in the blank for whatever (within commonly accepted righteous guidelines of course) you desire. Awesome. So hey, you feel passionately about the unborn, right? Pray about it. Then step up to the plate, get involved, give money to the authoritarian organizations which claim to be pro-life. To hell with all the destruction, suffering, poverty, and death which comes from taking away women’s rights over their own bodies. Example one.
I know these arguments of mine anger righteous people, but time and again I’ve made the argument that pro-life people are not actually pro-life because the means they employ is mechanical, distant, willfully ignorant, dishonest, and authoritarian. The pro-life crowd doesn’t care much about those already born—that is a demonstrable fact. You may say (or feel that) you do but your collective political actions say otherwise by consistent evangelical Christian opposition to health care, education, and other social systems which alleviate poverty, mother and child mortality, crime, and other associated social and health care problems since those kinds of government interventions are almost universally regarded as bringing the evil of ‘socialism.’ (But what the hell, giving millions of dollars in taxpayer money to build an Ark Park in Kentucky is A-OK! That’s the Christian kind of socialism.) There is an inverse relation between mortality rates, poverty, and the relative strength of local abortion laws. That is shameful and this infuriates me.
Evangelicals try to enact these harmful laws in order to make themselves feel better. Making themselves feel like they are doing the will of God is what matters—if the plan is God’s will and/or if God himself has spoken is just assumed because Christians feel that it is. They won’t look at the measurable human results of what they are doing. Nope. Just pray about it. Your feelings, as formed and guided by your peers at church, on social media and the frauds at FoxNews, Focus on the Family, Hillsong, Salem Communications, or some silver-tongued, charismatic pastor, prophet, apostle, et. al., will be your guide. Those feelings rolling around in your heart and head are literally the voice of God—so says your preacher and the ubiquitous Christian culture which has just about everyone who thinks of themselves to be important saying, ‘the Spirit is saying to me X…’ or ‘the Lord has given me a word on my heart for you…’ thus putting the power and authority of God behind what the human assuming authority is saying. It’s dishonest. But it is all nicely concealed in pious language where the righteous adherent could cite the story of Nehemiah which shows that the strength and, better yet, the success (as we define it) of feeling and conviction proves that God has spoken. To hell with all the people who have been deeply hurt by this righteous charade. I do not believe the God of heaven intends for one person (or group) to lord over another person (or group.) We are all equally God’s children. Your observations, reasoning, and opinions are your own.
Addressing sermon point number two involves acknowledging the deep state of division in this country. Both Left and Right are calling each other fascists. This is how I see it: For example, the Right sees the Left as fascist because the Left defends the freedom and dignity of LGBTQ people to be accepted as they are. The righteous see LGBTQ people as so repulsive that it is an infringement upon their own sensibilities and ‘liberties’ that they should have to acknowledge and coexist with them. ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin’ is horseshit both philosophically and practically. Disgust blares throughout your national ‘conversation’ about our national downfall. You all are fooling yourselves if your honestly think that pithy little aphorism can hide the obvious scapegoating from those who are not you. As those who are not you see it, any policy, practice, or law which does not privilege the righteous, that is, white evangelicals, is defined as being fascist. This leaves us all very little to talk about with each other.
(One clear example of Christian privilege: The strongly demonstrable contributing ideology of white Christian nationalism was left out of the J6 committee’s report even though a lot of expert testimony was given, and it is a clear factor as social scientists have compiled volumes of evidence to support this claim. I think it safe to surmise that FoxNews would have picked the inclusion of that evidence in an official report to say something to the effect that not only is the demonic Left picking on poor Donald but also provide even more evidence that the Fake News Left just plain hates God and His chosen people. I think it is also safe to say that if Islamic ideology was a factor in the violence of that day there would have been volumes of testimony and analysis included in the report.)
The Left sees the right as fascist because what the Right is doing is demonstrably supremacist and exclusionary and this historically has led to violence; and they are not slowing down. For example, besides all the vitriol about eliminating transgenderism, which is people, concentration camps for homeless people, drag queens, the clearing of school libraries to suit the sensibilities of righteous folk, on and on…, righteous legislators in Florida have proposed Putin-imitating legislation which would require Bloggers who write about people in government there to register with the government, report income, or face penalties. That’s what Putin did in his country years ago and the Christian Right is trying to enact here. That’s just plain fascist as the righteous people are grasping at any power they can get their hands on. (And you all have the fucking audacity to talk in your sermons about listening to other people?!)
In sermon point number 2, Matt made it abundantly clear, that like Nehemiah, righteous people, having the sanction of God Almighty, have no obligation to address the concerns of critics. Those critics are ‘haters.’ As Matt said in minute 43, ‘the loudest boos come from the cheapest seats.’ (Fuck you, Matt.) So, you all are on a mission from God. I get it. Continuing in minutes 44 & 45, we learn that the only criticism the good Christian might have to listen to can only come from someone considered to be a brother or sister in Christ. (Do you really understand what you are saying?) Furthermore, the faithful are taught that criticism is to be chewed upon briefly like gum—if there is nothing there, the Holy Spirit will tell you if there is truth to this, spit it out. The message here is that the infinite number of things ‘God’ tells people to do, no matter how disparate, contradictory, exclusionary, and violent they may be, all, evidently, are equally true. As Matt made very clear, Nehemiah did not listen to his evil critics, righteous Nehemiah listened to God—even though nowhere in the text says that he was doing so. No matter.
Build your fucking walls, enact your fascist laws to give a façade to righteousness. Call for the elimination of various people you are disgusting with. Decry godless socialism. Attack the school system with vouchers. Separate. Divide, Rebel. Fund lies. Offer completely wacked out sex advice. Stand for the flag, kneel for the cross. Privilege yourselves because only you are righteous and as such are worthy of having a voice. Might I remind you, that even in your sermon you acknowledged that Nehemiah’s prayer to bring down the wrath of God upon the ‘haters’ was not what Jesus would have done. (Matt taught in minute 49 that Jesus was not on the scene yet to teach what he taught—so that makes this kind of prayer to curse your enemies okay. Evidently, the ‘truth’ of God’s word changes.) Jesus on the cross said, ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’ That is what Jesus did. But that’s not very personally empowering, is it? Neither is it safe. It is so much easier to defend the interests of yourself and your own group by demonizing your ‘opposition,’ as Nehemiah and Matt did. After all, the non-Spirit filled folk do not have the ‘answers’ as you do.
How human we are, right? We want to stick it to our enemies—the enemies of all that is good and true. This is why I see evangelicalism, the whole, rotten, corrupt, power-hungry, supremacist culture is rife with hypocrisy. You all follow Nehemiah’s example of leadership to grant special privileges to the righteous people while casting ‘the others’ who will not conform to your standards for what is human, thus deserving rights and recognition, out of the assembly of God. Just be reminded, again, that God, as recorded in your own Bibles, was silent in Nehemiah’s story. Yet in minute 50, Matt informs us that Nehemiah was seeking ‘the heart of God’ after he cited Nehemiah’s prayer calling down curses upon his enemies. That is seeking the heart of God? No Matt. Nehemiah is telling God what Nehemiah wants. God is silent in the text. No matter. Matt is twisting the text to suit the faithful’s desires which are making slaves out of the faithful. You are not freeing your flock, Matt; you are imprisoning them.
The evangelical is being actively taught that the internal thoughts and feelings of the individual are the voice of God. Critics like me who say, ‘Are you sure that’s God speaking?’ are ‘haters’ to be ignored. In minute 55 we learn that ‘the opposition will only be as loud as your internal insecurities allow them to be.’ (1) Reasoning and scholarship has nothing to do with knowing God’s will. (2) The strength of the feelings determines the certainty of God’s message. Therefore, be confident in your feelings that God has spoken (to you.) This should immunize the faithful against the questions of people like me who point out that the text does not say what the authority, in this case Matt, is assuming and teaching. To this critic, Matt exclaiming that Nehemiah was merely pointing the criticism up to God is not anywhere near as pious as it sounds; on the contrary, Nehemiah was (piously) claiming the authority of God who was, according to your own text, silent on the matter (even as Matt repeatedly claimed that Nehemiah was listening to God.) This kind of teaching, Matt, enables hucksters to pretend to hear from God, convey that ‘message’ from God, in gussied up pious language, to rally the troops to get with the program and support the building of the ‘kingdom.’ Millions have been deeply hurt, ripped off, and been taken advantage of because of this kind of teaching. In building the kingdom, we have built a violent, supremacist, furtive, conspiratorial, very tolerant of dishonesty, and authoritarian movement to save America for God which relies upon personal feelings of fear and desire to survive and flourish. And you Matt are directly feeding the beast with your dishonest teaching.
Now the faithful are free to feel like God has spoken even when supporting exclusion, hatred, violence, and oppression of ‘the others.’ After all, the righteous Nehemiah was completely okay with pulling the hair out of those who were not holy (Neh 13:25.) The process of ‘othering’ dehumanizes human beings. Once ‘othering’ is legitimized, the ‘pure’ folk become susceptible to the disgust and scapegoating mechanisms which leads to violence. I don’t believe one can pull the hair out of another human being without diminishing their humanity first. The teachings under the ideological umbrella of Christian Nationalism teach the faithful to ‘other’ human beings who are not seen as being part of the tribe. This is not love. Supporting nationalism is the antithesis of love. I do not recall Jesus teaching the Christian Nationalist approach to saving America for God. Christian Nationalists are appropriating the power of God to take what they want for themselves.
Don’t think you get a pass from me for not explicitly (that is, using clear, direct language) supporting Christian fascism, hiding behind the veil of plausible deniability. We are deeply, deeply divided on many matters including the opposing definitions of what love is. As I see the matter, you all teach a gospel of submission to your own superiority in order to experience a kind of dominionistic utopia on earth now and to be saved from the fires of hell after we die. I am ashamed for being fooled for so long; and this is why I am so passionate about opposing something so destructive to millions of people. But hey, why listen to me? I left the flock. I’m not worth of consideration according to your teaching. Regardless of what you all teach, this ex-vangelical believes that pretending there is no problem, as you Christians conceit to have the ‘answers,’ (as I once also believed) while upholding a man who made up a mission saying it was from God, which led to cruelty, separation, and violence as an ideal of Christian leadership, is just plain despicable. But hey, you have fears and anxieties to sooth and a world to conquer for Christ; that is, yourselves. You must be Christ-like and fight, fight, fight. I understand.