Two Christianities

I'm a secular American conservative. I don't need or want any religious thinking in my life, although my obedience to the Constitution requires me to respect the right of others to hold religious beliefs.

Despite being secular, I've been exposed to a lot of Christians while I was growing up in America, and I see two basic types.

The first type included family and friends back in Arkansas, particularly at a small Southern Baptist church I was exposed to before the Southern Baptists were take over by an evil element back in the 1980s. I come from a line of people who held strong religious views, people who helped build churches, who donated land to churches, and who participated regularly in churches.

I kinda liked those people. Although I only attended that church on rare occasions when we were back home visiting, it seemed a pretty friendly place. I hated going, because there were too many other things to do that were fun, but I never came away from church feeling bad about myself. I never came away scared. I never came away from that church hating other people.

That was the first kind of Christian, decent people who were trying to live decent lives. They made good neighbors, and I tend to judge a person's worth by how good a neighbor he'd be.

These days I see way too many of the other kinds of Christian, who I think are best described as savage, evangelical nutjobs. Two of them made the news recently. One was family-values man Josh Duggar, who's reportedly a child molestor. Sorry, I mean he's a forgiven child molester. The other was minister Robert Doggart, who was reportedly planning to lead a vicious attack on a Muslim community while he stayed back about 350 yards as a "standoff gunner".

Duggar and Doggart are just two high-profile examples of this new kind religion. It's not fair to hold them up as representative of Christians in general, but they're certainly not the only people promoting jihadist-style Christianity. Many people in the Republic/Tea Party have also joined the savage, evangelical nutjob church. In the process, they've corrupted both their religion and their politics.

Unlike the Christians I met growing up, these savage, evangelical nutjobs show none of the good characteristics I once associated with Christianity.

Obviously not all of these people are child molesters or agitating REMFs, but they all share one disturbing trait. They equate their version of Christianity with being American. They've basically declared themselves a separate tribe within America and they don't think the rest of us belong.

But how American are these savage, evangelical nutjobs? They oppose the separation clause of the First Amendment. They support the preaching of their religious opinions in public schools. They support using their religion as an excuse to discriminate against other Americans. They support the prominent display of their religious commandments in public places where those displays have no business.

They claim that having freedom of religion doesn't mean having freedom from religion, which is exactly the same kind of twisted interpretation of the First Amendment that I've heard from some opponents of the Second Amendment.

They also seem to think that their Christianity gives them magical powers. See former Texas governor Rick Perry's pray-for-rain stunt back in 2011 for an example.

Let's not even get into their attitude toward poor people.

What's scary about these people is that they seem to view Christianity as a sin-and-repent lifestyle that doesn't require you to try to be moral. It only requires that you feel bad after you've been immoral. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it doesn't encourage truly moral behavior. It just gives you a get-out-of-guilt-free card.

I guess that's what really bothers me about these savage, evangelical nutjobs, their attitude of moral superiority even though attaining moral superiority in their version of Christianity requires no effort whatsoever. All they have to do is play the "forgiven" card.

That's not how the Christians I grew up around saw things. They didn't see themselves as epitomes of morality, they just tried to live moral lives. They didn't see the Constitution as a barrier to their goals, because they respected America, just like they respected their fellow American citizens. They didn't see Christianity as a label that made them automatically superior, they saw it as a standard they tried to live up to.

For people like them, Christianity is a lifestyle. For the savage, evangelical nutjobs like Doggert and Duggar and the moral warriors of the Republican/Tea Party, Christianity seems much more like a cross between a hobby and a business opportunity. It's a buffet of beliefs where they can pick and choose whatever dish they want for a particular meal.

I'm not Christian, so I really shouldn't care, but because I've seen how decent Christians behave, I find these latter-day political and entertainment Christians to be offensively un-American and immoral, and I don't see them changing until they stop mixing religion with politics. We can look at the Middle East and see where that path leads.

We have two Christianities in America. I don't think we need both of them.