Monday, May 9, 2022

The Distinction Between Christianity And American Culture

An attack on or criticism of American history or American law is not an attack on Christianity itself.  These things are far from identical, even though conservative evangelicals love to treat them all as one philosophically inseparable bundle.  Thinking of them is actually antithetical to the pursuit of truth.  In fact, someone who takes commitment to Christianity seriously will not think lightly of the many disparities between Christian ideas and what American culture erroneously conflates with Christianity or associates with it to the point of ignoring the differences.  A Christian or general thinker eager to avoid assumptions would distinguish between actual Christianity and the social constructs or distortions it is so often confused for.

Christianity is not about capitalism (or socialism, for that matter), democratic elections, conservatism, liberalism, patriotism, or political correctness.  Its values oppose prominent parts of American culture like prison rape, racism against those of all skin colors, moral relativism, and many other ideas or behaviors.  Even aside from this, it is not specifically in favor of American-style society.  Christianity is about the uncaused cause having a moral nature that grounds specific obligations, revealing that moral nature to humans, and then mercifully extending redemption to all willing recipients.  Morality even takes precedence over salvation, but the moral commands of Yahweh and his offer of salvation are together what define Christianity as opposed to base theism or other ideologies.  Nowhere in these tenets is something like a particular economic system or governance by a panel of elected representatives prescribed.  Nowhere does the Bible demand a love of country itself, no matter how unjust or random its flaws are.

What the Bible does command is that one keep the particular instructions of Yahweh regardless of culture.  Sometimes they will look similar to the expectations of a given society, and sometimes the two will be at odds.  A Christian who gives almost any thought unshackled to cultural conditioning will see this.  No, an idea about anything from amoral metaphysics to epistemology to morality is not false just because it is popular at a certain time in American culture, and it is actually evangelicals, typically the hyper-conservative ones, who go further than the Biblical deity does in condemning something just because of its imagined associations with things that are in themselves unrelated, and sometimes just because of its popularity.

All the same, nothing is true because of its association with American norms or history--not because it is actually the norms of other countries that truly matter, as some liberals might pretend, but because only the truth could possibly matter, and truth is not determined or revealed by cultural expectations, traditions, or feelings.  It persists despite the most collective attempts to change it.  One of the delusions of Christian conservatives is the notion that the deity described in the book so many Americans at least pretend to respect would ever support more than a handful of extremely specific ideas they stand for.  The same is true of Christian liberals, just for different reasons.

Conservatives and liberals, whether or not they actually understand the most vital philosophical stances of the Bible or its relationship to broader philosophical facts and ideas, can both be quite guilty of two things: ignoring Christianity's real ideas out of laziness as they claim to support Christianity anyway or simply using real or distorted Christian ideas to manipulatively win over voters.  Christianity is not an American political system or even a political system first and foremost.  If anything, some American ideologies and norms happen to overlap with Christian theology as detailed in the Bible.  It is absolutely erroneous and idiotic to think that Christian moral prescriptions are identical to the whole of historical or current American culture in one way or another.

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