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This Month's Scripture Verse:

1 But false prophets also appeared among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. 2 Many will follow their indecent behavior, and because of them the way of the truth will be maligned; 3 and in their greed they will exploit you with false words; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep..
II Peter 2:1-3

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Showing posts with label persecution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label persecution. Show all posts

Friday, January 26, 2018

What Is he Most Pressing Cultural Issue For Christians In 2018?

Religiously conservative Christians here are fond of writing about culture and culture wars. They write about how to regroup from losing a culture war as well as thinking that we need to fight them in the first place. Trevin Wax (click here for a bio), who is a decent writer for the Gospel Coalition, wrote an article earlier in the month in an effort to try to identify the most critical cultural issues for this year. He first gave information on how to find the views of some prominent Christian thinkers on the subject. Then he listed his own views and divided them between the most urgent cultural issue across the globe as well as the most pressing cultural issue for Christians in the West (click here for the article).

In terms  of the world, Wax identified the persecution of Christians as being the most important cultural issue that Christians face. And that persecution calls on us Christians to minister faithfully to those fellow believers whose lives are under siege. Though there is comparatively no persecution of Christians in America today, the same cannot be said of other parts of the world, especially in the Orient and Africa where rival religions have resorted to violence in interacting with Christians.

Regarding the West, Christians, Wax is quick to say that Christians there need to to up their game so that the Christian idea of morality, especially regarding sexual issues and marriage, gains a prominent part in the public square. The problem, according to Wax, is our lack of 'imagination' in presenting the Christian case for morality. Thus, our problem is internal rather than external.

In both cases,  Wax inadvertently demonstrates problems that affected how he identifies urgent cultural issues. These two problems show the insularity of many religiously conservative Christians in both the West if not the world and authoritarianism.
 
The biggest cultural issues for Christians according to Wax revolve around what is either happening to or not happening inside of Christians and it involves the Western Christian partial reduction of of morality to sexual and marital issues. We are so fixated on either being persecuted or on how society reacts to our our pet sexual issues, that we have become oblivious to the real life circumstances and  moral concerns of others especially as they apply to non-sexual and non-marital issues.

Certainly worldwide persecution of Christians is an important issue that we cannot ignore. But the persecution of those from other faiths is also important. And in some areas, Christians have a hand in that persecution. And yet, this is not mentioned. For when Christians give political support to governments that attack the followers of other religions around the world, then Christians are supporting those attacks and are inviting reprisals on their brothers and sisters in the faith. Our support for Israel's Occupation against the Palestinians has not only produced the persecution of Palestinian Muslims, it has caused hardships for many a Palestinian Christian as well. And when Muslim reprisals are in response to Israel's Occupation, then Christian support for that Occupation has invited those reprisals.

Likewise, when Christians in the West press their moral values on society to the extent that they deny equality for those in society who hold to different moral values, especially values concerning sexuality, they show little regard for those outside of their community. Perhaps how religiously conservative Christians have been pressing their moral values on others is what Wax refers to when he says that Christians have a 'shriveled' imagination in how to promote their values, but that seems unlikely. Christians who have pressured society into accepting their moral values to the extent that they end up trying to deny equality for others cannot see the effects that their efforts have had on others. They can only think of their end game. 

Another characteristic exhibited that is also interfering with the ability of many religiously conservative Christians to identify is authoritarianism and the desire to gain control over society. That trait is seen in the attempts to use the law in order to impose Christian moral values, again especially sexual values, on society.

Our authoritarianism produces scorn for Christians among these in the West who value freedom. The opposition to equality in society for the LGBT community exhibited by many religiously conservative Christian has offended not just that community but its growing number of sympathizers. They see the issue as being that of these Christians trying to use their religious freedom to discriminate against others. And such a use of religious freedom hearkens back to when many religiously conservative Christians used their religious beliefs to defend Jim Crow. And when the Civil Rights Movement became prominent, there was hardly a religiously conservative Christian in the Movement. 

Certainly, we don't want Christians to conform to the less than biblical morals promoted in today's culture. But, we also don't want the moral values of society to be superior to the moral values of Christians. We should be free to admit when that occurs, but we should not want that to happen. And society's moral values sometimes exceed our own when we act controlling or ignore the neglect of moral values in our economic and political systems or in our nation's policies.

Thus the biggest cultural challenge that Christians face in 2018 is not what Wax is suggesting. Rather, the most pressing cultural issue is how to share society, and the world for those super patriotic American Christians,  with others as equals while maintaining biblical morals. The oppression of others, which has resulted from how religiously conservative Christians have tried to make Christian morals part of the public life, is not only causing scorn to be put on Christians by others, it is causing some Christians to question Biblical sexual morals. If we don't stop being inner-directed and controlling, we will be providing fuel for the persecution of ourselves. 
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Monday, May 15, 2017

ONIM For May 15, 2017

If you are not sure about the validity of a news story linked to below, you can use mediabiasfactcheck.com to check out the credibility of the source of most of the stories.


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Monday, August 4, 2014

ONIM For August 4, 2014

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Tuesday, February 11, 2014

The Even Darker Side Of Putin's Anti-Gay Agenda

The trouble with isms is the people who pursue them. Such people tend to be purists. And because they are purists, they are exclusive. Why be a purist? One pursues purism for at least one of the following two reasons: control and glory. All to often, people seek control as a response to fear while people seek glory in order to feel significant.

 Because of the above, the more one runs after an ism, the more one shuts out others from being insensitive to their sufferings to denying their contributions to vilifying them as monsters. The above applies to racism, nationalism, many ideologically based ism, and other kinds of isms.

 Thus, we should include the above when examining Vladimir Putin, Russia's leader, and his anti-gay agenda. That is because two isms are being consistently associated with the anti-gay policies he supports in Russia. These two isms are conservatism and nationalism. And whether Putin is taking an opportunistic ride on the popularity, in Russia that is, of these two isms or he is a true believer, he has securely attached himself and his anti-gay-rights position to them.

 Putin has described himself and Russia as the champions for conservative values. And he also explicitly rejects/resents Western liberalism's sometimes hypocritical attempts to impose its values on Russia in this matter. He says that this is a violation of Russia's democracy . 

 Such a defense revives old memories of the South's response to the Civil Rights movement. "Mixing Is Communism" read some of the signs defending segregation and Jim Crow. The advantage that Civil Rights workers of the past had that today's Western Liberals don't was that there was a centralized authority to which the Southern states were answerable. So all Civil Rights workers had to do to start facilitating changes in the South was to gain the sympathies of enough federal lawmakers.

 But today's world does not even consist of a confederation. That is because the world's strongest nation, the US, has followed the rule of force because it can. Thus, whatever moral force that the UN could exercise in this matter has been decimated. So the only outside pressure available to those concerned with the rights of gays consists of economic pressure through boycotts and political pressure through isolation. But such is unlikely since Russia has resources to sell and, with some legitimacy, been involved in mediating some of the world's hotspots. 

 Another Russian reminder of the old South's resistance are laws used to punish and imprison those in the LBGT community and their activists. While Putin insists that there is equality regardless of sexual orientation and that his only concern is preventing children from being exposed to homosexual propaganda, the law is written with a lot of leeway given to law enforcement and vagueness for potential arrestees. So while Putin claims there is equality for all regardless of sexual orientation, an act that recognizes the need to placate dissent and save some face, LGBT activists who publicly state that homosexuality is not perversion are arrested and imprisoned. At the same time,  gays and LGBT activists have been beaten and even tortured with impunity.

 In addition, Putin has recently announced a reversal in the birthrate of Russian children--a previous drop in Russia's birthrate was blamed on homosexuality (click here). This is described as being important for the future of Russia's growth. We should note that while the US has been recognized as the world's only superpower, in some ways, Russia has never ceased being a superpower. After all, how else would anyone describe a country whose nuclear arsenal could easily destroy the world many times over. Where they have failed to maintain their superpower status is their ability to project power throughout the world. But that is beginning to change.

 It wasn't too long ago that America was considering deploying anti-ballistic missile site bases in NATO's eastern countries to which Russia responded with the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons in a first strike. Combine that with how Russia is now looking to play key roles in brokering international conflicts and hot spots, along with its new weapons programs, we are looking a nation that is seeking to restore some of its glory and control from the past. But at the same time, we should note the harshness with which it has met dissent at home and this has occurred long before the conviction and imprisonment of its oppositional artists, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina. As of 2010, 19 Russian journalists had been killed (click here) including Anna Politkovskaya. Today, Russia controls much of the media. We should also note Russia's past brutal treatment of Chechnya under Putin's leadership.

 In order to reclaim power and prestige, unity is a necessity. And the more unity is desired, the more dissent and diversity are seen as Kryptonite. Putin is directing Russia to find that unity in the traditional values of conservatism and nationalism. We should note that combining strong-armed tacts with both a call to return to traditional values and nationalism was a trademark of Germany's Nazis. So we shouldn't be surprised that Russia's Neo-Nazis are the ones attacking gays and LGBT activists as well as Arabs, the latter has been occurring in the Ukraine. We should also note that gay rights activists have been attacked by those from the Russian Orthodox Church and "pro-Kremlin youth groups" (click here) . 

 Putin is in the midst of another power grab. This can be seen not just in his domestic agenda, but in his foreign policies as well. And our concern here is that his anti-gay agenda indicates what we can expect from him in the future. And that future looks more ominous everyday because he has wrapped himself up in isms that are harshly excluding gays and others who are different in Russian society. And he doing that in ways that are reminiscent of an atrocity filled past.


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