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Jonathan Merritt @JonathanMerritt
, 5 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
I’m terribly concerned that the Christian Left is becoming a funhouse mirror projection of the Religious Right. Falwell, Kennedy, and Robertson encouraged the blanket support of the Republican Party. Now Christian Left leaders are doing the same with the Democrat Party. (1/5)
I’m seeing Christian Left leaders encourage voting a straight blue ticket—no matter what the candidate believes. It feels eerily similar to the way the Christian Coalition distributed voter guides in the 80s. (2/5)
Perhaps progressives haven’t learned the lessons that the Religious Right experiment teaches us. Instead, they are content to accept the same logic and parrot the same behavior as those they are reacting against. (3/5)
The Gospel of Jesus is not a recipe for consolidating political power. The Christian scriptures are not a partisan handbook. And the people of God must never become handmaidens to a ANY political party. (4/5)
Beware my progressive brothers and sisters that you do not become what you despise. Be the moral voice we need in this moment, committed to a cosmic king and not an earthly political party. (5/5)
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More from @JonathanMerritt see all

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THREAD: Recently, there’s been a little stir among some of my friends on Twitter about gendered language for God. It’s funny to me that those reject feminine language for God do so on the basis of how the Bible talks of God. I wonder if these people have actually read it...
Masculine metaphors for God (eg Father, King) are appropriate and helpful but not the only ones we can use to speak of the divine. Feminine metaphors are also helpful. In fact, the Bible uses A LOT of them, which is something I point out in #speakgodbook (amazon.com/Learning-Speak…)
If you’re a part of a “Bible-believing” church, you’ve probably never heard a single sermon based on one of these Bible passages even though your pastor claims to preach “the whole counsel of God.” Chew on that for a moment...
Read 6 tweets
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THREAD: Removing Paige Patterson from his post is only the first step in a long journey the Southern Baptist Convention must now embark on. Patterson is only a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
They need a strong resolution on domestic violence, which they haven’t addressed since the 1970s. Procedures must be put in place at SBC entities for dealing with reports of abuse and assault.
Leaders also need to address the pervasive tribalistic “boys club” mentality that has persisted for too long. The cover-ups must stop. The defenses of male colleagues’ bad behavior must stop. The coordinated efforts to run the denomination in secret male-only meetings MUST STOP.
Read 4 tweets
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The church will never be a refuge for abused women so long as prominent leaders like Southern Baptist Paige Patterson are making dangerous statements like this... baptistblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/leg…
The saddest part about this is that the Southern Baptist Convention is the ultimate boys club. So none of Patterson’s buddies will denounce this. They’ll click their tongues in private, but remain publicly silent.
Funny how progressives, who many SBCers would caricature as “godless” or “immoral,” have largely developed a zero tolerance policy when it comes to this. But many conservative Christians still tolerate it within their ranks.
Read 4 tweets

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In the early 1970s, a new idea began to spread like wildfire through the US Protestant evangelical right - that the social and political upheavals which beset America during the 1960s had been caused by a literal geographic invasion of demons. amazon.com/Invasion-Demon…
I own this book. In it John Hagee - whose political endorsement was heavily courted by John McCain in the 2008 presidential election primaries - describes personally casting out demons, in the style of the movie "The Exorcist".
Hagee has fallen under the influence of the 1948 Latter Rain revival which proposed the Gnostic paradigm that when Adam & Eve had been cast out of the Garden, God also withdrew his protective force field from the Earth and that allowed a literal invasion of demons which...
Read 17 tweets
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@girlsreallyrule Let this sink in, and everything else will make sense: Race, NOT #abortion was the FOUNDING issue of the religious right.

forbes.com/sites/chrislad…

bostonglobe.com/opinion/2018/0…

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily-whit…
@girlsreallyrule “In 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the biggest white evangelical group in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, supported its legalization. The group continued that support through much of the 1970s. “
@girlsreallyrule And the late Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, did not give his first antiabortion speech until 1978, five years after Roe.
Read 10 tweets
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Trump is running about 15 minutes late for his press conference because he had a busy morning... ah..... tweeting.

Follow me for a video thread, whenever it gets going.
Trump had absolutely nothing on his public calendar this morning and he is 25 minutes late and counting for his news conference
TRUMP: "Last night to the Republican party defied history to expand our Senate majority while significantly beating expectations in the House for the midtown (sic)... and the midterm year."

He then pivots to bashing the media.
Read 44 tweets
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Time has come for the lesson, "Who killed Anne Frank".

The lesson was originally taught by Doris Bergen, author of "Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich".

Do you think Hitler was the most responsible for the death of Anne Frank ?...
Who killed Anne Frank ?

It was an exercise Bergen designed for teachers in a course she was leading, for schoolteachers, that was called "Teaching The Diary Of Anne Frank", to raise their awareness of the "chain of complicity" that led to the Holocaust...
Bergen wrote out, on cards she passed out one by one to the teachers, "identities" of different people who each played a part in the death of Anne Frank - Hitler, Himmler, the person who snatched a scrap of bread from Anne Frank's hand in the concentration camp...
Read 27 tweets
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The Suffocation of Democracy

By: Christopher R. Browning

THREAD✔
1/
As a historian specializing in the #Holocaust, #Nazi Germany, and #Europe in the era of the world wars, I have been repeatedly asked about the degree to which the current situation in the United States resembles the interwar period and the rise of #fascism in Europe.
2/
I would note several troubling similarities and one important but equally troubling difference.

In the 1920s, the US pursued #isolationism in foreign #policy and rejected participation in international organizations like the League of Nations.
3/
Read 109 tweets
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The MAIN mental health problem here is the sadomasochism of the White majority that keeps voting @GOP to arm and kill themselves and others.
It's egregiously delusional to expect that you can flood the streets with hundreds of millions of guns and still prevent rampant gun death.
The White American majority is in outright denial/disavowal of the decimation of its communities by random mass gun violence aka terrorism.
Read 41 tweets

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