Its Time For The Religious Right To Embrace The Mind-Your-Own-Business Option

[Panich52]

It’s Time For The Religious Right To Embrace The ‘Mind-Your-Own-Business’ Option
Mar 28, 2017 by Rob Boston in Wall of Separation
Americans United

Every few years, someone in the far-right fundamentalist Christian community puts forth the argument that modern American culture has become so nasty and hostile to “traditional” Christians that it’s time to withdraw.

They don’t plan to go to a forgotten island somewhere. Rather, they would create a kind of community in internal exile. As much as possible, they’d form parallel structures, such as fundamentalist-oriented educational institutions and media channels, and tend to their own gardens.

Rod Dreher’s new book The Benedict Option is the latest to promote this idea. I haven’t read the book, but a recent column about it in The Washington Post made the concept sound romantic, exciting and almost noble.

There are a couple of problems with that. First is that the very rationale behind the Benedict Option is a massive fraud. That idea that it’s necessary for “serious” Christians in America to turn inwardly because they’re under some form of attack from a hostile culture is balderdash.

Anyone who knows history is aware that the early church was persecuted. But we are far removed from the days of Nero. Once Christianity became the favored religion of the Roman Empire, it began enjoying a privileged status. These days in many Western nations, Christian churches get state subsidies and other forms of support, or, in countries like ours that enforce church-state separation, their legal rights are protected by a governing charter. Not that this has stopped the Religious Right’s persecution narrative, of course. (And the claims you hear about the United States being “post-Christian”? They’re hogwash. There has been some slippage, but 75 percent of Americans still identify as Christian. “Post-Christian” is a term used by fundamentalists who are unhappy that not every Christian believes as they do.)

In some states and communities, fundamentalists who choose to run for-profit businesses are expected to respect the rights of others and stop subjecting people they don’t like – members of the LGBTQ community, non-believers and Muslims chiefly – to discrimination or ill-treatment. ...

More:
http://au.org/blogs/wall-of-separation/it-s-time-for-the-religious-right-to-embrace-the-mind-your-own-business

[50 Shades Of Blue]

1. They never will - these publicly pious hypocrites really get off on the total fiction that

they're being persecuted!

[PoiBoy]

2. They got their Supreme...

..they don't give a f*ck what anyone thinks anymore...

[Zorro]

3. Too Many "Christians"

Too few lions.

Sometimes I do pine wistfully for the good ol' days.

[TlalocW]

4. Not surprisingly the whole Lions and Christian thing

A bullshit tale dreamt up by some past Christians so they could whine about how persecuted they were.

TlalocW