Stranger than fiction: So-called ‘liberal’ Christians

As if parts of the Bible weren’t fiction enough, artist David Hayward at Patheos has created a cartoon in which Jesus takes a “selfie,” and this is supposed to be an analogy for Christ’s relationship to mankind … or something. Here is a link to the picture (Imagine Jesus with the crown of thorns holding a cellphone, and that’s really all you need to know).

Hayward, himself a believer who is often critical of some aspects of the church, provides this rather strained explanation:

The bible says that God was in Christ reconciling the whole world to himself. The story of Jesus is the working metaphor attempting to explain the perfect and complete living union of God and humanity.

So, this cartoon is not meant to be a sentimental, cute cartoon to give us warm fuzzy feelings. I really do offer that this is actually true.

There is now no separation.

This is what I don’t understand about liberal Christians: When you take sin, blood sacrifice, scapegoating, vicarious redemption, eternal life and eternal damnation out of Christianity, what do you have left of the religion itself? Love and charity, certainly, but these can be found and achieved with or without religion. How does a Christian make a statement like, “There is no separation,” between God and mankind when, based on their own scripture, clearly there is a separation, when clearly Christ demarcated a line that separated the wheat from the chaff, those who knew him from those who did not, the saved from the damned.

Liberal Christians hope to “soften the blow” of mainstream Christianity, as it were, to make it seem less archaic, less brutal and more palatable to modern ears. Centuries of Christian doctrine, however, back up the fact that there exists no “living union” between all of humanity and God. This is wishful thinking heaped onto more wishful thinking. A supposed union only exists between those who believe in Jesus and accept his gift of salvation, thus absolving him from the sinews of original sin and his specific set of sins. Those who do not do this, it is clear from scripture, are lost and in complete and utter separation from God. Whatever liberal Christ followers might be purporting to modern listeners, however much they might desire their beliefs to square with modern moral standards, however much they might believe in universal love and harmony, this can no longer rightly be called Christianity.

America’s religious shift

As it turns out, Barack Obama seems to have won the election, in part, by garnering support from evangelical Christian voters in key states like Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan‘s home state of Wisconsin, which is also, by the way, home to the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation.

This article, “The Great Religious Realignment,” provides a detailed explanation of the religious restructuring that is currently taking place in America.

Here is a summation of the trend from Sarah Posner:

The exit polls, like I have said, are imperfect: some states were not subjected to exit polling, and on religion questions, there’s so much inconsistency between how questions are asked in different states that it’s hard to compare two states where one includes data on evangelicals and the other does not. But given what we’ve learned recently about religious realignments—declining numbers of Catholics, declining numbers of mainline Protestantsdeclining numbers of evangelicals in the 18- to 29-year-old age group, and increasing numbers of unaffiliated voters, and in particular, atheists and agnostics in the 18- to 29-year-old age group—it seems like a significant shift is underway.

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