American Evangelicalism and National Idolatry

Events occurring and how they relate/affect Anabaptist faith and culture.
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Bootstrap
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American Evangelicalism and National Idolatry

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American Evangelicalism and National Idolatry

This page invited responses to the following questions, and contains links to answers by various writers. Note that this was written in 2010, and is not influenced by later events.
Recently it has been alleged that politically conservative evangelicals have conflated their political agenda with their faith and their preferred political party with the church of Christ. The participants at Tea Party events, and the recent "Restoring Honor" rally assembled before the Lincoln Memorial by Glenn Beck and others such as David Barton, have been disproportionately evangelical. Are they guilty of confusing love of God and love of country, or the conservative ideal with the kingdom of God?
1) When does patriotism pass over into idolatry? How do we define America-worship? What is the difference between loving, honoring, and worshiping America?

2) What are the healthy and unhealthy ways of relating politics and religion?

3) And what is the evidence that politically conservative evangelicals have become guilty of America-worship and wrongly relating their politics and their faith?
If you Google "When does patriotism pass over into idolatry?", you can also find quite a few responses that are not listed on the above page.

Which responses make sense to you? Can you read through some of these responses and point to one or two that you identify with? If you had to write a response, what would you say?
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Is it biblical? Is it Christlike? Is it loving? Is it true? How can I find out?
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Robert
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Re: American Evangelicalism and National Idolatry

Post by Robert »

These two things have been connected since the very start.

The Black Robed Regiment helped start the revolution.

While separation of church and state are core to the constitution, it seems it was a Quaker who pressed for that. Most of the others would not have had a big issue with blending the two.

Much of the concepts of the constitution were either drawn from or validated by scripture.

I see a lot of parallels with Middle East countries and Islam. It is so much a part of their culture that it is counter cultural to create a governing body that does not draw from the Koran in some ways. It would also most likely be unsustainable. I think that is what we are seeing in some of the countries there.
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Re: American Evangelicalism and National Idolatry

Post by Josh »

Robert wrote:While separation of church and state are core to the constitution, it seems it was a Quaker who pressed for that. Most of the others would not have had a big issue with blending the two.
Ironically, modern-day Quakers or their descendants such as evangelical Friends are almost entirely split into two camps: one side would want to have a right-wing, "Christian" government, and the other basically is on the far left wing and thinks government should be pacifist and promote a radical leftist agenda.
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