Thursday, January 20, 2011

I need my choir to be impressed with me … no matter who gets dissed.

It doesn't get any sillier than this ... and an example of why Christians have a lot of clean up work to do ... I wonder if 2000 years ago the first Christian (Jesus) accepted Jesus as his personal savior.

Yesterday: New Governor: Non-Christians not my brother, not my sister

He's known to be devout and once said that he felt he had been put in the position of Governor by divine will. He told the Birmingham News that "I don't feel obligated to anyone except the people who voted for me."
But his literalized attitude is merely a 19th and 20th century pentecostal notion.

That was yesterday. Today …
Well thank goodness for repentance, one of the hallmark Christian practices ...

I didn’t really mean what I said. I forgot that the governors podium is not a preaching pulpit.

The president of the national Interfaith Alliance, the Rev. Welton Gaddy, said Bentley went too far.

"I thought that with his statement he created two classes of citizens in Alabama, those that were his brothers and sisters in Christ and everyone else. As an elected official, he has the responsibility to serve all the people and treat all the people equally,'' 

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group that fights discrimination, said it sounded like Bentley was using the office of governor to advocate for Christian conversion. ADL regional director Bill Nigut:

"If he does so, he is dancing dangerously close to a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids government from promoting the establishment of any religion,'' 

Christian supporters outraged that this evangelical fundamentalist politician would be challenged for his religious beliefs, might ask, "What's the big deal?"

No big deal so long as the wisest point of view in retrospect is that of  Retired University of Alabama political scientist William Stewart,

"I don't think the governor needs to get into things like who is going to be in the kingdom and who isn't going to be in the kingdom.''  
No matter the intensity of personal belief and desire that this be a country founded on Christian beliefs, it's not. The governor speaking as governor needs to talk government talk and avoid the mixing in the theology of his own beliefs that make him sound both devout and arbitrarily separating his constituency into two camps of differing worthiness.

That is not freedom of religion in America, but the very thing that early evangelical activists pushed Thomas Jefferson to work toward, a separation that does not permit the rise of one religious point of view "authorized" by a secular government.
 

 

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