:vegan-edge:
This is actually a fascinating (and racist) undercurrent of White Evangelicalism that's probably difficult to understand or even believe unless you were raised in it.
A very large number of white Evangelicals - I'd say a majority - do not believe that black Evangelicals by and large are actually true Christians. By that, I don't mean self identification. I mean by white Evangelicals' definition, which is "have faith that Jesus died for their sins so they are going to heaven".
There is a pervasive belief in white Evangelical churches that black churches are more like "community centers". They think black folks all just sort of go to church by default but don't really believe all the necessary things it takes to be "born again". This Babylon Bee guy, in expressing that the majority of black evangelicals support legalized abortion is coming from this precise framing.
Supporting legal abortion, to most white Evangelicals, is not consistent with the "fruit" of correct beliefs that they would expect to see from a born-again Christian.
It's awful and gross and racist, but it's something the white Evangelical church tries to keep on the downlow so I try and bring it up when I can.
Yeah. Often this will take the form of "black pastors historically didn't have a religious education," which 1. Why do you think fewer African Americans went to college, Kyle? and 2. Evangelical protestantism is all about a personal relationship with God and not needing someone else to meditate between you two or interpret scripture for you, so what are you even talking about?
So for Joel Barry, it makes perfect sense that the Black church would be corrupted due to being separated from the white church. Doesn’t consider that it could be sustained by its connection to GOD.
As though white people, rather than Jesus, are the models to emulate.
???
That response nails it I think
they're still mad Jesus wasn't white and indeed was murdered by a white dude
Wait, were Italians white before the 20th century?
damn. and to think the mormons had visionquest themselves into reaching that position of passive aggressive racism. also puts the work of american evangelicals in the third world into perspective.
I guess for some additional context, a lot of white evangelicals believe Catholics aren't saved as well as a lot of white folks who identify as evangelical. They have a very exclusionary sense of what being a "Christian" means. They just feel very untroubled by saying that about an entire group of black folks as well...
If you go back a few centuries in our history down here you have jesuits converting entire native tribes. On some level they were racist, right? They believed that recent converts could never be properly christian. But what mattered was their souls were saved and, plus, their kids and grandkids will be closer to that christian ideal. A professor once called it 'multiculturalism of contempt'. I'm not a super religious person and besides I'm neither catholic nor evangelical. But now I'm starting to wonder if we've somehow regressed.
The story of missionaries and colonialism is a fascinating one but AFAIK no one has actually explored it much from a historical materialist lens. There's a lot there and the missionary work done by Spanish priests in the 16th century was very different from that done by Anglo protestants in the 19th century. Both evil, just in different ways.
Without exposing a whole lot the gist of it is that the portuguese were not above co-opting native leaderships and populations into the colony. This is not because they were less racist or because they were differently racist. It was because colonizers were not a monolith and had conflicting interests. You have the landowner who trades with tribe A to enslave tribe B. You have the government official who marries into Tribe C to have them protect a town from tribe D. You have the jesuit mission which settles members of tribe E who just lost a struggle against tribe F. And then there's a lot of variation within each scenario. Sometimes you have a jesuit priest going to the landlord and chastising them for the slavery, sometimes even 'rescuing' some people. Sometimes you have the priest and the tribal 'principal' growing fat off the people's work and extracting as much value as they can. Sometimes you can find priests and principals working together to call a strike to enforce some sort of serfdom esque 'labor rights'. The more I study it the more I feel that the colonial era was a perpetual state of barbarism where people's and groups' worth was only as great as the political and family alliances they could muster.
They’re just mad that black church music involves smiling and harmonizing, instead of droning dirges roughly approximating what the lyrics might have sounded like in Latin.
This is the only acceptable instance of being one of those "ACKshully tomatoes are a fruit" guys
The guy at the very end
You have clearly committed the fallacy of false equivalence... and also the bandwagon fallacy.
What a :expert-shapiro: way of speaking. "See! You did this thing and this thing so even if your points are right you're wrong because you broke the rules."
Not only are those fallacies badly identified, it's also an argument from fallacy, AKA the infamous fallacy fallacy. Yeah it's a completely unserious way of arguing, just eternally elementary school-brained people.
Understanding fallacies is a tool for crafting better arguments, and for destroying arguments resting on shaky grounds. You can't just point out that something is a fallacy, you still need to construct an actual counter-argument.
I love how no one engages with how abortion wasn't an issue the church really cared about before the 80s and how they are doing the anti-theological stance of being anti-choice. They have their own ways of ignoring what their own religion says, but this is my favorite own of anti-choice theists:
"I don't understand how protestants are anti-abortion, I mean, I understand Catholics because the Pope is infallible so they can ignore what the Bible says and just go with 'the Pope said abortion is wrong, so we don't have to care what the Bible says, abortion is wrong'. But the bible is clear in Leviticus and Proverbs that an 'unborn child' is not alive until it is born and takes its first breath, so there is no way a Christian can treat abortion as in the same league of moral wrong as stealing a dollar, let alone murder."
I'm so fascinated by how Babylon Bee guy acknowledges Redlining and such. Usually these people try to pretend that sort of thing didn't really exist or have a real effect, don't they?
It's so fascinating how it's being wielded here. Like, conservatives only bring it up to further condemn its victims.
Conservatives I know love to talk about things like operation paperclip and shit like that. I've noticed that people like Tucker Carlson are the only people on TV that talk about things that should be leftist talking points, but then of course they twist it to blaming immigrants or gay people somehow
The action of Capital is to consume, countermand, and coop any and all conflict that arises against it.
Using it as a weapon to say "the blacks are uneducated in our superior religion" is a type of weird I wasn't expecting today.
Like how they just gave up on the end and pulled out both "Woke" and the One Joke.
"the liberal democratic state is an institution corrupted by the forces of secularism, but also i think it should have to power to end life. it's called having a principled theology."
