Tag: Christianity

The Story: Raphael Warnock has been the senior pastor of the Ebernezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, Georgia for 15 years. It is the church long...

As Christians celebrate the Easter season, it is a good time to consider what (if any) political meaning can be found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians should not over-politicize the Easter narrative, or Christian theology in general. On the extremes of the spectrum, the tendency to reduce Christianity to some kind of political or social principles for political activity results in two distinct mistakes: It tends to remove Christ from Christianity, making it just another social program, and it tends to subordinate the ends of Christianity to the ends of some political agenda. In other words, Christianity has no particular political agenda, or any program for a particular set of political arrangements. To the contrary, in fact: It means that the political meaning of Christianity is more profound and fundamental than any particular political agenda could ever be. The resurrection is not just Christ telling Caesar that he cannot triumph over this particular subversion at this particular time in Rome’s history. Instead, Christians believe, all politics is subordinated to, and relativized by, the death and resurrection of Christ. To do so always ends up defining what it means to be a Christian in purely political terms. That is not the political meaning of the Easter story. Easter teaches Christians that their politics must answer to their Christian faith, not the other way around.

Christians are called to avoid both. Maybe we should just drop out of the whole political system? But after 8 years of effort, he saw little change in the overall social and political climate, especially when it came to abortion in our country. I wanted to understand, since, from my perspective, a committed Christian cannot vote for a pro-abortion candidate. This would parallel my understanding of a Christian’s voting responsibility in the days of slavery. Reagan didn’t change things. It’s up to the church to change the abortion laws.” Now, you might disagree with his perspective, as I do. If we don’t cast our votes, we will quickly lose our voice – not just politically but in other ways. !” Well, I hate to break the news to you, but if we don’t vote and get involved politically, we won’t even have the ability to fight things like this. In the closing chapter of Donald Trump Is Not My Savior: An Evangelical Leader Speaks His Mind About the Man He Supports as President, I lay out seven principles to help us navigate these difficult waters.

Something similar is true of “Beautiful Country Burn Again” (Ecco, 433 pages, $27.99), Mr. Fountain’s series of rambling, denunciatory essays on the 2016 presidential campaign. Take a passage on Ted Cruz, for example: “You’d think he gargles twice a day with a cocktail of high-fructose corn syrup and holy-roller snake oil. But whereas Baldwin pleaded for a renewal of thought and understanding, Mr. Fountain thinks that the time for understanding is over and it’s time for fire—although what he means by “fire” is unclear. Each of these was a “redistribution of freedom, a radical reset of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation.” The book “may be read as the record of a developing crisis, one drastic enough to raise the possibility of a third reinvention, which, if attempted, will inevitably meet with vigorous, perhaps violent, resistance from stakeholders in the current order.” Mr. Fountain, a Southerner by birth, is an old-school progressive and a revolutionary radical. Thanks largely to Ronald Reagan, both Republicans and Democrats came to realize that an overregulated economy and high marginal tax rates couldn’t create sufficient growth to pay for all the social welfare programs we’d created in the ’50s and ’60s—not if we were to maintain a military capable of countering Soviet aggression. Birtherism was a “dog whistle blown through a megaphone.” I don’t deny that outright racism has had a role in Mr. Trump’s rise and appeal, but a nation as warped by white supremacy as the one described by Mr. Fountain wouldn’t need to express its bigotries through encrypted language. “Naming what politicians and other powerful leaders have done in secret often leads to resignations and shifts in power.” That’s true, but it’s also true, as the physicist Richard Feynman famously pointed out, that to name a thing isn’t to understand it. In an essay on homelessness, she writes that “the young can’t remember (and many of their elders hardly recall) that few people were homeless before the 1980s. There’s a great deal factually wrong with Ms. Solnit’s breezy observation about the homeless. But anticipating counterarguments isn’t Ms. Solnit’s thing.

Pope Francis addresses abuse in the Catholic church in his first Vatican appearance since Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Vatican official, accused him of covering up ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's misconduct; chief religion correspondent Lauren Green reports. FOX News Channel…

More than 300 Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses are accused of either sexually abusing children or helping others cover up abuse. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as…

Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has defied and angered the Catholic Church and Christians worldwide, after he said he would quit if someone could prove to him that God exists. Dr. Alex McFarland is here with his reaction. FOX News Channel…

Zion's Joy choir member speaks out on 'The Story.' FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business news. The number one network in cable, FNC has been…

Pastor Chris Sonksen explains why he's telling people to quit church, or at least the modern idea of church. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour all-encompassing news service dedicated to delivering breaking news as well as political and business…

Pastor Kenny Luck on why it's time to wake the sleeping giant of men's unique qualities, and how they can step up to help build stronger relationships with their wives and their children. FOX News Channel (FNC) is a 24-hour…