Agree to disagree on that one. Your faith IS a cancer, in its impact on people who don't believe as you do, but whose lives are being impacted by the restrictive mean-spiritedness of YOUR beliefs. You named a number of them, from castigating the LGBTQ+ community to immigrants coming to the US, whether to escape REAL persecution to trying to find a better life for themselves. You've decided that empathy is anathema to Christianity, when Jesus clearly thought of it as a necessity (at least part of the time).
Essentially, you and those like you have turned Christianity into a weapon to attack anyone who isn't you, who doesn't agree with you, who has the temerity to live a life different from you. I would heartily suggest that you deal with the lumber in your own eye before you attempt to handle the speck in someone else's.
They have become convinced that their narrow interpretation of tha bible describes the only way people should live, and they see no problem with forcing compliance with that interpretation.
The Golden Rule is so simple, and so hard to argue with. There's really nothing confusing about it. No one will ever be expected to succeed, but GOSH!, wouldn't it be really nice for people to just TRY to think of others as they do themselves?
What possible purpose are all those other squiggly lines in the Bible, except to create confusion? (And to provide adequate "cherry-picking" around judging others.)
The evangelical excesses may be the work of a few, but I don’t see the many doing anything to rein them in. At the end of the day the thing I detest most about the evangelicals is their conviction they have the right to force their religion on others. They have no such right, and they have little to no respect for the religious right of others. Once people become convinced they’re operating under divine sanction, they’re capable of justifying just about any behavior.
Indeed, it's the iceberg effect again. We see those making the noise. What is less visible are those who support the noisemakers with their silence. They need to be called out as much as those who are actively doing harm.
I'm sorry, is the "nice" white Evangelical lady asking us to have compassion and understanding for the group that:
Calls LGBTQ people groomers?
Says trans people are mentally ill?
Actively persecutes trans children attempting to live and play sports?
Calls Democrats "Demoncrats"
Denies progressive Christians are people of faith?
Demonizes all Muslims as terrorists and illiberal authoritarian fundamentalists?
Calls progressive protestors communists and anti-American and passes laws allowing motorists to run them down?
Viewed BLM as a violent movement that burned cities to the ground and celebrates Kyle Rittenhouse?
Calls women who choose abortion "sluts"?
Calls people who are pro-choice "baby killers"?
Says that doctors and nurses are killing people with vaccines for big pharma profits?
Accuses people they hate of being cannibalistic child pedophiles?
Said that AIDS was God's punishment for homosexuals?
Says that every natural disaster was God's punishment on the rest of us for not cracking down and persecuting gay people?
Hates churches that have women pastors?
Demonizes and persecutes immigrants and refugees and cheers draconian policies that actively hurt innocent people AND slanders and hates the charities that try to help immigrants and refugees?
Cheers a man and votes for men who are credibly accused of sexual violence or domestic violence?
Oh, I'm sorry, it hurts your feelings when people get angry about your group that overwhelmingly and actively harms actual innocent people every chance it gets? How horrid for you.
All of that she files under the headings "some evangelicals do some bad things" and "not all evangelicals". Because she, personally, doesn't like Trump, she thinks that any criticism of evangelical Christianity should be limited to vague assertion ls that a small number of them are bad but all the rest are wonderful. She is either lying or the biases of her bubble won't let her see reality, or maybe both.
Add to that the fact that Christianity as a whole deserves (and indeed has gotten) considerable analysis and criticism for its tendency to argue both sides of the argument, never mind the introduction of the concept of hell, AND a heaven which would be equally repugnant to anyone who can be bothered to THINK.
Religion in general deserves all the brickbats it gets, but none quite so much as Christianity.
I had an uncle who was the closest thing to a "Christian" I've seen.
While we sat with him for almost a year while the pancreatic cancer eat him away, he was never angry. He'd regularly say things to us such as, "I love all of you, but I love Jesus more!", and coming from him it was strictly a message of hope and love.
Just him. No one else. In almost 70 years of living around these folks and knowing thousands of them.
And (I have to mention this again) treat empathy as anathema, a negative trait to be avoided at all costs. These are scared little snots who, whether consciously or unconsciously, know that they are not only in the vast minority, but that their numbers are dwindling at what to them must be an alarming rate. Their reaction? To lash out and attack anything that isn't them.
What to do about them? Above all else, keep them from influencing others.
Nobody is “persecuting Trans children attempting to live and play sports”. What many are concerned about is:
1. Publicly endorsed irreversible hormonal suppressant treatments (and, worse still, bodily mutilation) for minors many of whom are suffering from puberty-related psychological problems which in nearly all cases will resolve with time. These child victims will not be able to repent at leisure because there’s no going back;
2. Unfair competition in high school and senior sports when biological males are competing against females;
3. The elimination of safe changing and rest room spaces for girls and women.
And there is a real concern about big pharma profits at the expense of public health. The big pharmaceutical companies are mostly corrupt. Crony capitalism and producer capture at its worst. Under the Reagan Administration (1986) they were given blanket immunity from suit in all cases where actual fraud couldn’t be established. I wonder how much they paid for that? And if you have virtually total immunity, guess what? You don’t have to go the extra mile or even the first mile to ensure as far as possible that your product is safe.
In 2026 to date these companies have spent some $500m in political lobbying. The Covid “vaccines” have reaped a horrendous harvest in death and disability. But no moral hazard for Pfizer et al.
Of course some of your critique is appropriate but much of it isn’t. This post would be too long if I were to call you out on all of it!
1. This is an absurd thing to be concerned about. Hormonal blocks are used to delay puberty. Stopping them allows it to continue. This therapy is in use with some cis children who start puberty too early with minimal side effects. And doctors do not just throw these out like candy. Trans kids have typically been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by their doctors and psychiatrists and this is the treatment recommended for them.
There might be an outlier case I do not know of, but bottom surgery does not occur before adulthood. And despite the President's lies, schools do not have a surgery ward to change Jimmy to Jenny during the school day.
2. Every school district and sporting organization where this occurs has policies and rules in place to address concerns and try to prevent boys from saying their trans to compete against girls. Athletes who compete in the Olympics, IIRC, have to have been on hormonal therapy and have lived as a woman for over a year. There is no evidence that trans-athletes are particularly dominant. If you have issues with the rules, take it up with the organization or the district, not bigoted, ignorant state legislatures and politicians who pass blanket bans that, yes, persecute and target kids.
3. Again... you cannot just say, "I'm a woman, so I want to change with the girls" and be taken seriously. You will need a doctor or psychiatrist to sign off on it and live as a woman. I don't know what your high school experience was like, but a boy deciding to dress up as a woman for six months to a year and endure crap and mocking from their peers just for a chance to see naked girls in the locker room is not happening. And nothing stops any predatory man from just entering the locker room or bathroom anyway. Plenty of predators, including teachers and pastors, have been caught sticking cameras in bathrooms and changing rooms.
Yes, it is persecution. The targeting of a minority (less than one percent of the population) by the State's monopoly on violence and the intention is to eradicate them from society by forcing conformity to gender roles on them, denying them medical treatment, or driving them to suicide.
What exactly is a “cis-gendered boy”? Could you please rephrase in English? It doesn’t relate to anything in the rational universe.
So, ages 15-17, 2.1 per 100000 “kids”. Of those 100000, how many are identified as “gender-dysphoric”? Seems I was right and it’s not just a few outliers.
My comment about Big Pharma (if you understood it) was directed against the manufacturers of the COVID “vaccines”. But if the cap fits.
Is there any industry more powerful than the pharmaceutical industry in the US? Except maybe arms manufacturers. Do you approve of the federal immunity the pharmaceutical companies were granted in 1986?
About hormonal blocks, well, we’re playing with fire here, playing with things we don’t understand. Each of us has his or her individual hormonal pathway at puberty. Some develop secondary sexual characteristics
Sorry, sent by mistake. Some young people develop secondary sexual characteristics at an earlier stage, some later. You don’t mess with the process. If it’s artificially delayed the young person may miss the reproductive boat. As Bret Weinstein keeps saying, we’re dealing with complex systems, not complicated systems. The human body isn’t like an automobile engine. There may be some for whom intervention is desirable in the case of extremely early onset of puberty, but , to coin a phrase, hard cases make bad law. Just as there are a very few cases of genuine hermaphroditism that may require surgery. We’re now in the realm of the ridiculous where whole swathes of teenagers are identifying as “non-binary” etc. It’s just the latest madness.
I note you’re careful to limit your denial to “bottom surgery” (orse genital mutilation). But these are not outlier cases. It happens not infrequently in the case of 17 year olds. They make an ill-informed emotionally based decision which has the potential to wreck the rest of their lives. You presumably don’t deny that bodily mutilation in the form of mastectomy, indeed double mastectomy, is inflicted on many minors.
Nobody is enforcing “gender roles”. What are gender roles anyway? I thought we’d got beyond saying boys should be train drivers and girls nurses! They’re all free to pursue whatever roles appeal to them!
And there are plenty of cases of biological males abusing same sex spaces and of gaining stolen valour in sport. Have you heard of “Lia” Thomas? We seem to be hell-bent on creating a dystopia for young women. They’re not “cis-women”. There’s no such thing as a “cis-woman”. They’re simply women. And they deserve to have their safe spaces protected. Some of them have raised their heads above the parapet in the cause of equal treatment for their sex and have been beaten up by biologically male thugs. In Scotland at least one biological male rapist who subsequently identified as a “woman” was housed in a women’s prison. This is unhinged and has to end.
I note you’ve nothing to say about the industrial-pharmaceutical complex.
Do you mind the extra K’s? I’m feeling generous today. In fact, I’m feeling so generous that I am only going to focus on one thing you say:
“But legitimate criticism of their political choices has shaded into something darker: contempt for an entire group of Americans.”
I am out and proud gay man, out of the closet that you and your ilk put me into for 55 years now. For the last 60 years— AT LEAST— of my life, I have listened to you so-called Christians say everything that you could think of, no matter how vicious or untrue, about LGBT people. But that’s hardly a new phenomenon. The last hundred years, the last thousand years, the last 2000 years, you have done exactly the same. Tell every possible vicious lie you could think of about a entire group of your fellow citizens, your fellow humans, and your own families.
You have done everything within your power to make our lives as difficult, unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous as possible. You have promoted laws making my way of loving a crime. I will let a singing duo, Romanowski and Phillips, tell you something: only an asshole would care about what I put in my asshole and who puts it there.
You and your filthy ilk have gone to other countries to make the lives of gay people there crimes. Russia, Hungary, Nigeria, Uganda, Senegal: uttering three simple words, “I am gay”, is enough to get you put into prison in those paradises on earth.
Ever since Anita Bryant raised her well coiffed reptilian snout above a Florida swamp 49 years ago, you have attempted to blame gay people for molesting children, ignoring facts, logic, and experience to project your own deficiencies onto us. As I have said many times, you can google gay men and sexual abuse, or drag queen and sexual abuse, or transgender people and sexual abuse, and you will be likely to get a few hits every single year. If you do the same for Protestant pastors and catholic priests, you will get literally hundreds or thousands of hits every single year. The few times you actually acknowledge that, you will claim that it is gay men, drag queens, and transgender people who are threats. And yet, virtually every one of those protestant pastors is married to a woman. The few allegedly transgender people who are arrested every year for waving penises around women’s locker rooms seem to me to be heterosexual men, because no one else is interested in doing that. And drag queen story hour? Children are getting read stories by men in costumes with their parents present.
In short, in parallel to your complaint about how persecuted you are, you are actually persecuting gay people for the crimes your people are committing. It’s not unfair if you do it, is it?
You have instigated and promulgated massive political campaigns to do everything you can to exclude LGBT people from participating fully in society as we are made. The morons spent $45 million in California 18 years ago, All to prevent me from marrying my husband. How many kids could have been fed or educated for that? All of the lies you told about my marriage, all the lies you told about me, all the lies you told about my deleterious effects on your marriage and family turned out to be—-wait for it—LIES!!!
You have called me and mine, without the slightest bit of evidence, threats, to marriage, family, children, heterosexuality, morality, and western civilization itself, such as it is. And yet I’ve never assaulted anyone. Unlike Trump. I’m still married to my first legal husband, unlike Trump. I’ve never molested anyone, unlike hundreds of protestant youth pastors and God knows how many priests. I’ve never been connected to a felony, unlike Trump. I’ve never even committed a felony.
And yet to hear you people talk, LGBT people are the actual threat despite a complete lack of evidence to that statement
I’m an American citizen, a taxpayer, a law abiding, productive, and contributing member of my society. I harm no one and I bother no one, except for those who want to be bothered by my existence and my participation in society. I expect to be treated like the good American, good person, and good citizen that I am. If you have proof that I’ve done a wrong or harm to someone— and I’m not including your claim that your puny God is absolutely horrified by something he doesn’t need to watch— so horrified that he wiped out thousands or millions of people— if you have the proof, then present it.
But you don’t. All you have is the stories that you tell yourself. Right now, transgender people are on your enemies list. You don’t know them, you don’t know anything about the subject, all of your announcements on the subject are based upon ignorance, stupidity, and spite. If you spent 1/10 of the energy on child molesting pastors that you spend on transgender people who are just trying to live their lives, what a much better world this would be.
So let me tell you something, Ms KKKristian. You’re not being persecuted. You’re being disagreed with. You’re being stood up to You’re being called out for your egregious nastiness, lies, religious dominionism, psychotic obsession with my asshole and what makes my dick hard. Don’t like the explicit language? Then maybe your side should stop using it. More times than I can count, I have listened to or read so-called Christians go on and on and on and on and on about whatever it is they imagine my sex life to be. I don’t discuss it with them, I don’t invite them into my bedroom to watch—-eeeewwwwwww.
So I’ll tell you what; GFY with a large cactus. You’re a liar, you’re a fake, you’re a hypocrite, and you are morally, intellectually, and spiritually corrupt.
You are corrupt because you are exactly that which you claim to hate.
Excellent rant. The true shame is that people like her will never read it, never want to read it, would cover their ears and eyes and scream, "LA-LA-LA I can't HEAR YOU!" at the top of their lungs, rather than acknowledge that you said something, never mind recognize the truth of it.
It strikes me that breaking through to such people is a near-impossibility. Isolating them, disempowering them, and letting them die off seems to be the sole solution.
Thank you. I have long maintained that it is impossible to reach people who are irretrievably poisoned because they believe everything that they think. That’s the very definition of “irretrievably“.
They are irretrievably poisoned by hate, fear, ignorance, stupidity, toxic religion, bad parenting, bad childhood experiences, lust for power, lust for money, lust to be God’s BFFF, traumatic experiences, and, I am increasingly convinced, their own frequent and very dark issues..
You seem to be peddling quite a bit of “hate” yourself. I suppose it’s OK to hate hateful people? I see personality traits in myself that I don’t much like and that are, objectively speaking, somewhat hateful. But I don’t hate myself. In fact I’m often guilty of giving myself a free pass, that I wouldn’t give anybody else in a similar context. Human nature’s a bit unaccountable I surmise. It’s easy to work yourself up into a righteous fury. Yes, everybody’s out of step except our Johnny!
But I do want to thank you for proving my point. What I said was all facts. I am very well aware of what evangelical Christians have been doing to gay people. I have been fighting against it war probably for longer than you’ve been alive. I don’t hate them, but I absolutely despise what they have been doing to gay people, and now transgender people, for decades and centuries.
I notice you don’t provide a single example or refutation of ANYTHING I said. Not a one. Just the accusation that I am being a meany-pie to those nice people over there.
I’m sure some of them are very nice to their mothers, and are more than willing to help those disgusting homos to see the true light of gawd’s holy love. You can look up alan chambers, Martinn Ssempa, Scott Lively, anita Bryant, Tony Perkins, john briggs, Victor , Scott Anderson, Doug Wilson, — the list goes on and on and on and on.
You can BS yourself, but don’t try with me. I know who you are.
I worked on a sheep farm as a teen. A joke the farmer made when things weren't going well was "We lose money on every sheep but we make up for it in volume."
Sure, a lot of white evangelicals suck -- but they make up for it in volume.
More generally, I like how Hemant focused on the all too typically poor logic. These folk arent even wrong.
Well, I happen to agree with Ms. Kristian on one point... Evangelical Christianity is not a cancer.
Cancer only spreads within a single body. It isn't contagious; it can't spread from one person to another at all. Evangelical Christianity, on the other hand, 𝘪𝘴 contagious- virulently so. It spreads itself by force whenever it cannot by persuasion, it has infected a large enough chunk of the body politic of the US to threaten the destruction of our system of government along with the rights of all our people, and indeed is also attempting to spread itself throughout the world. That spread is a core component of its theology- that the kingdom of their god will come about when they have conquered the world for him. It teaches that those who do not follow it are agents of evil, thereby indoctrinating its followers to be hostile to anyone who hasn't been converted to it. It is a belief system that does not value the lives of its own adherents, far less anyone else's. By its professions of divine favor and protection, it makes those it infects vulnerable to all manner of other harm, while also making them heedless of it, so that when faced with mortal danger they will choose their faith over reason and simply die.
Therefore, Evangelical Christianity is not a cancer.
Some evangelicals are nice, and Christian Nationalism is right up there among the very worst ideologies ever. Both those statements can be true. Yes, the guy who set my house on fire has nice parents. They're lovely people. But can we talk about how he set my house on fire?
"New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration released more than 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed 9/11 air quality records on Tuesday, revealing that city officials knew the air around Ground Zero was dangerous while publicly telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe. The documents sat undiscovered in 68 boxes in a city office until last year, after years of the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch suing for their release.
Among the records is the “Harding Memo,” sent in October 2001 to Robert Harding, Rudy Giuliani’s deputy mayor. It laid out the potential for tens of thousands of lawsuits over 9/11 air exposure and outlined legislative strategies to limit the city’s legal liability, rather than warn the public.
The documents show the pattern didn’t end with Giuliani’s term. A memo from early in the Bloomberg administration, five months after the attacks, acknowledged the city was “leaving itself open to a barrage of lawsuits” and suggested officials “discontinue telling people to clean their apartments with wet mops and rags.”
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said at the announcement, flanked by 9/11 families and Jon Stewart. “There was poison in the air, and on the ground, and in the window sills, and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes, and it stayed there for months.”
The numbers make the deception impossible to spin. Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11 itself. More than 9,000 have died since from 9/11-related cancers and illnesses tied to that toxic exposure, roughly three times the death toll of the attacks themselves.
It took a Muslim, progressive mayor to finally give first responders and survivors the transparency Giuliani’s administration buried, and the city continued burying through establishment Republican and Democrat administrations, for a generation.
The same Republican leaders who spent months insinuating Mamdani was somehow sympathetic to the 9/11 hijackers because of his faith, including Giuliani himself, now find their old administration’s cover-up exposed by the man they tried to demonize as a closet “jihadi.”
"It took a Muslim, progressive mayor to finally give first responders and survivors the transparency Giuliani’s administration buried"
In fairness, time was likely a major factor too, 25th anniversary and all. Political leaders of all stripes (and that includes liberal) become more willing to share bad news as the risk they and their administration will have to pay a price for it goes down.
“…These are the worst people in our country because they use their religion in two ways: as a weapon and as a shield.
They weaponize it whenever they want to and say, “We’re on the moral high ground. You’re a lesbian—you deserve to die. You’re a lesbian—the cops shouldn’t have revived you. Oh, your parents are Mexicans and they brought you over here? Yeah, you should go to jail and eat worm food.”
And then when you call them out on it, “Oh my god, they’re after the Christians. How dare they?! How dare they? We’re so oppressed. White Christians are so oppressed in this country!” …”
Where’s the lie? I get that Kristian doesn’t like her faith being called a cancer, but where is Welch wrong? We have story after story about Christians feeling persecuted because folks don’t want to hear their preaching while stuck on a plane, or subway car, or have them herd our children away from us at an arts festival. And yet they spread lies, bald faced, outright lies, about everyone else. Litter boxes in schools, men in bathrooms molesting girls, black men birdwatching in parks are attacking white women walking their dogs, immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets, women are aborting their babies after birth, vaccines cause autism, Muslims all want Sharia law in the USA, and so on and so on and so on and so on, ad infinitum. They use the lies to drum up average evangelicals ire so that they are all focused on the pretend dangers, and the average evangelicals are all too willing to believe the lies. I wonder why that is? Is it really the “left” that is painting evangelicals with the sweeping generalizations? Or does the evangelical political leadership know that bigotry will activate the plebes?
Kristian even lied about Talarico’s Christianity. Using known despised groupings (gay vegan, really!?!) to get her readers to discount Talarico’s obviously superior politics and morality so Paxton can overcome his blatant corruption that’s been adjudicated in court. She claims she’s not a part of the problem, while being the problem. Evangelical Christianity is a cancer that is destroying our nation, and until Kristian gets over her big feelings and recognizes the patterns, she will remain a part of the cancer.
Xtianity is indeed a cancer. Basing life decisions on fiction leads to bad outcomes. Imagine basing your decisions on what Harry Potter or Gandalf did or said and then demanding that others do the same. This is the madness that xtianity inflicts on society as a whole.
"And they want it both ways, because in the religion, that duplicity is taught. You can be morally duplicitous. You thrive in cognitive dissonance. And so this is just a massive, massive problem."
Living one's life based on a FICTION. If it were a well-thought-out fiction, that might be one thing. It ISN'T, and the fallout has shown itself entirely too much over the last two millennia.
My HS junior religion teacher (a priest I really liked and who is actually no longer a priest) talked about it frequently. I've read it a few times, don't remember a thing about it. That and Handmaid's Tale are books I keep thinking I should like, but just don't.
I spent an evening drinking with some Alvin Ailey Dancers, had a private conversation with SRV in his last year (and shook THAT HAND twice), once parked in the White House parking lot to teach Treasury Department employees, a watched an entire Warren Zevon concert from 3 feet away, I listened to Kurt Vonnegut give a lengthy speech to students at my alma mater, USC, and I twice saw and heard the spirit of a beloved pet raccoon, just as real as this keyboard.
I'm not willing to disbelieve in "miracles" or impossibilities just yet (but Trump is a real test of what I REFUSE to believe in....)
"No doubt evangelicals bring casseroles to sick neighbors."
I went through three episodes of losing an immediate family member (with the help of hospice each time), and we never received the first knock on the door here in rural SC, surrounded by family for miles around.
But I do love the concept that white evangelicals, even in the deep south, give a fark about ANYTHING but themselves. That's really nice....
My mom was recently in hospice at the local hospital. I specifically told them no pastoral visits. The other day I got a sympathy card from the pastoral staff at the hospital. They don't take no for an answer.
They still call here, and Dad's been gone almost 3 years.
Oddly, after a lifetime of "going along" to church, while clearly never believing, Dad welcomed this preacher at the end, and I'm happy for that.
Of course, we were also very happy that Dad regained his ability to read after most of a decade....ever through walls. (We were also happy about his many "visitors", until they began telling him to leave the house.)
Of course, Dad was easy. Mom was not, and a different hospice sent an old, Vietnam era nurse-guy yelling about how proud he was of Israel for murdering babies.
“But legitimate criticism of their political choices has shaded into something darker: contempt for an entire group of Americans.”
Pot, kettle, black.
Jesus Christ. White evangelicals are gleefully posing next to “Alligator Alcatraz” signs, saying that the alligators will be well fed (a clear callback to slavery and Jim Crow, feeding black babies to alligators) because they have decided all Latinos and Hispanics and people of darker skin are inherently criminal. They are the ones at Trump rallies talking about how “illegal immigrants” deserve what they’re getting just because they don’t have the right paperwork, or they do but ICE doesn’t care. They’re painting with the big brush, but now they’re upset that their political opponents have their own brushes.
If evangelicals didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have standards at all. Being nice to your white Christian neighbor isn’t a flex, being humane to the people that are different from you or who don’t do anything for you, is a better indicator of your goodness, though it’s still the bare minimum. And they fail at that.
Everyone should understand that essays like this one are preparing the ground for "domestic terror" charges for "anti-Christian bias" under NSPM-7. We must connect those dots.
Yes, NSPM-7 is very scary. Or, it will be if this regime starts directing LEOs toward picking people up simply because of an anti-Trump design on a shirt, a progressive yard sign, or a pro-Dem bumper-sticker on a car.
My MEDIUM article about the 10 years or so (thus far) of wearing progressive messages on a daily basis now begins with this:
[EDIT: 5/2/26 I no longer suggest this action for anyone with more to lose from violence or arrest than America has to gain from your actions. NSPM-7 (domestic terrorism) makes the risks far greater, and each person must ultimately make that decision themselves. But my intention is to continue….]
I have a longtime subscriber in Florida who does this, too. And she has largely good experiences and conversations. (I grew up in rural SC, so I completely grasp the risks you take. It matters. It makes a difference. I believe that.)
I notice more messages (of all types) being worn in public, and I suspect that may mean that people are increasingly frustrated by their inability to be heard, or a lack of feeling seen.
But your subscriber is the first time that I've EVER heard of a goal such being a conscious decision, other than myself!
It really is wonderfully empowering when someone smiles or nods or even speaks, since them feeling seen makes me feel seen (as a progressive) as well. If there may be some way I could hear of their experience (perhaps through the above link to my MEDIUM article), I'd be grateful to you, Andra. (But not to make anyone uncomfortable, or to possibly compromise security.)
Thank you, Andra. I hope you're in a safer place now.
𝐼'𝑚 𝑎𝑛 𝑒𝑣𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙. 𝑀𝑦 𝑓𝑎𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑖𝑠𝑛'𝑡 𝑎 𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒𝑟.
Agree to disagree on that one. Your faith IS a cancer, in its impact on people who don't believe as you do, but whose lives are being impacted by the restrictive mean-spiritedness of YOUR beliefs. You named a number of them, from castigating the LGBTQ+ community to immigrants coming to the US, whether to escape REAL persecution to trying to find a better life for themselves. You've decided that empathy is anathema to Christianity, when Jesus clearly thought of it as a necessity (at least part of the time).
Essentially, you and those like you have turned Christianity into a weapon to attack anyone who isn't you, who doesn't agree with you, who has the temerity to live a life different from you. I would heartily suggest that you deal with the lumber in your own eye before you attempt to handle the speck in someone else's.
They have become convinced that their narrow interpretation of tha bible describes the only way people should live, and they see no problem with forcing compliance with that interpretation.
Being in a bubble, they revel in their own self-perceived rectitude and care not about the hard their BS does to others.
I've said it before and will repeat: a reckoning is needed.
The Golden Rule is so simple, and so hard to argue with. There's really nothing confusing about it. No one will ever be expected to succeed, but GOSH!, wouldn't it be really nice for people to just TRY to think of others as they do themselves?
What possible purpose are all those other squiggly lines in the Bible, except to create confusion? (And to provide adequate "cherry-picking" around judging others.)
They who have the gold make the rules.
Yep
Sadly, so many simply lack empathy, and take that out on those they are told are beneath them, and there must be a hierarchy for them to function.
Yes and that is the heart of the problem!
The evangelical excesses may be the work of a few, but I don’t see the many doing anything to rein them in. At the end of the day the thing I detest most about the evangelicals is their conviction they have the right to force their religion on others. They have no such right, and they have little to no respect for the religious right of others. Once people become convinced they’re operating under divine sanction, they’re capable of justifying just about any behavior.
Indeed, it's the iceberg effect again. We see those making the noise. What is less visible are those who support the noisemakers with their silence. They need to be called out as much as those who are actively doing harm.
And the sooner, the better.
It is the fact that the rank and file do not rein in the few leaders committing the excesses that warrants the criticism.
They're the worst kind of herd animals. The kind that simply cannot or will not think for themselves.
That's why they call them, "sheep."
And we know the three reasons why the shepherd raises sheep...
I'm sorry, is the "nice" white Evangelical lady asking us to have compassion and understanding for the group that:
Calls LGBTQ people groomers?
Says trans people are mentally ill?
Actively persecutes trans children attempting to live and play sports?
Calls Democrats "Demoncrats"
Denies progressive Christians are people of faith?
Demonizes all Muslims as terrorists and illiberal authoritarian fundamentalists?
Calls progressive protestors communists and anti-American and passes laws allowing motorists to run them down?
Viewed BLM as a violent movement that burned cities to the ground and celebrates Kyle Rittenhouse?
Calls women who choose abortion "sluts"?
Calls people who are pro-choice "baby killers"?
Says that doctors and nurses are killing people with vaccines for big pharma profits?
Accuses people they hate of being cannibalistic child pedophiles?
Said that AIDS was God's punishment for homosexuals?
Says that every natural disaster was God's punishment on the rest of us for not cracking down and persecuting gay people?
Hates churches that have women pastors?
Demonizes and persecutes immigrants and refugees and cheers draconian policies that actively hurt innocent people AND slanders and hates the charities that try to help immigrants and refugees?
Cheers a man and votes for men who are credibly accused of sexual violence or domestic violence?
Oh, I'm sorry, it hurts your feelings when people get angry about your group that overwhelmingly and actively harms actual innocent people every chance it gets? How horrid for you.
All of that she files under the headings "some evangelicals do some bad things" and "not all evangelicals". Because she, personally, doesn't like Trump, she thinks that any criticism of evangelical Christianity should be limited to vague assertion ls that a small number of them are bad but all the rest are wonderful. She is either lying or the biases of her bubble won't let her see reality, or maybe both.
Add to that the fact that Christianity as a whole deserves (and indeed has gotten) considerable analysis and criticism for its tendency to argue both sides of the argument, never mind the introduction of the concept of hell, AND a heaven which would be equally repugnant to anyone who can be bothered to THINK.
Religion in general deserves all the brickbats it gets, but none quite so much as Christianity.
I had an uncle who was the closest thing to a "Christian" I've seen.
While we sat with him for almost a year while the pancreatic cancer eat him away, he was never angry. He'd regularly say things to us such as, "I love all of you, but I love Jesus more!", and coming from him it was strictly a message of hope and love.
Just him. No one else. In almost 70 years of living around these folks and knowing thousands of them.
Just.
Him.
Your uncle sounds like he was cool. I'm sorry for your loss.
Thank you.
He was really special, though his life was about as challenging as any I've even known of.
And (I have to mention this again) treat empathy as anathema, a negative trait to be avoided at all costs. These are scared little snots who, whether consciously or unconsciously, know that they are not only in the vast minority, but that their numbers are dwindling at what to them must be an alarming rate. Their reaction? To lash out and attack anything that isn't them.
What to do about them? Above all else, keep them from influencing others.
THIS. ☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻
I reposted for your clear insight, and excellent summation, thanks.
Nobody is “persecuting Trans children attempting to live and play sports”. What many are concerned about is:
1. Publicly endorsed irreversible hormonal suppressant treatments (and, worse still, bodily mutilation) for minors many of whom are suffering from puberty-related psychological problems which in nearly all cases will resolve with time. These child victims will not be able to repent at leisure because there’s no going back;
2. Unfair competition in high school and senior sports when biological males are competing against females;
3. The elimination of safe changing and rest room spaces for girls and women.
And there is a real concern about big pharma profits at the expense of public health. The big pharmaceutical companies are mostly corrupt. Crony capitalism and producer capture at its worst. Under the Reagan Administration (1986) they were given blanket immunity from suit in all cases where actual fraud couldn’t be established. I wonder how much they paid for that? And if you have virtually total immunity, guess what? You don’t have to go the extra mile or even the first mile to ensure as far as possible that your product is safe.
In 2026 to date these companies have spent some $500m in political lobbying. The Covid “vaccines” have reaped a horrendous harvest in death and disability. But no moral hazard for Pfizer et al.
Of course some of your critique is appropriate but much of it isn’t. This post would be too long if I were to call you out on all of it!
1. This is an absurd thing to be concerned about. Hormonal blocks are used to delay puberty. Stopping them allows it to continue. This therapy is in use with some cis children who start puberty too early with minimal side effects. And doctors do not just throw these out like candy. Trans kids have typically been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by their doctors and psychiatrists and this is the treatment recommended for them.
There might be an outlier case I do not know of, but bottom surgery does not occur before adulthood. And despite the President's lies, schools do not have a surgery ward to change Jimmy to Jenny during the school day.
2. Every school district and sporting organization where this occurs has policies and rules in place to address concerns and try to prevent boys from saying their trans to compete against girls. Athletes who compete in the Olympics, IIRC, have to have been on hormonal therapy and have lived as a woman for over a year. There is no evidence that trans-athletes are particularly dominant. If you have issues with the rules, take it up with the organization or the district, not bigoted, ignorant state legislatures and politicians who pass blanket bans that, yes, persecute and target kids.
3. Again... you cannot just say, "I'm a woman, so I want to change with the girls" and be taken seriously. You will need a doctor or psychiatrist to sign off on it and live as a woman. I don't know what your high school experience was like, but a boy deciding to dress up as a woman for six months to a year and endure crap and mocking from their peers just for a chance to see naked girls in the locker room is not happening. And nothing stops any predatory man from just entering the locker room or bathroom anyway. Plenty of predators, including teachers and pastors, have been caught sticking cameras in bathrooms and changing rooms.
Yes, it is persecution. The targeting of a minority (less than one percent of the population) by the State's monopoly on violence and the intention is to eradicate them from society by forcing conformity to gender roles on them, denying them medical treatment, or driving them to suicide.
What exactly is a “cis-gendered boy”? Could you please rephrase in English? It doesn’t relate to anything in the rational universe.
So, ages 15-17, 2.1 per 100000 “kids”. Of those 100000, how many are identified as “gender-dysphoric”? Seems I was right and it’s not just a few outliers.
My comment about Big Pharma (if you understood it) was directed against the manufacturers of the COVID “vaccines”. But if the cap fits.
Is there any industry more powerful than the pharmaceutical industry in the US? Except maybe arms manufacturers. Do you approve of the federal immunity the pharmaceutical companies were granted in 1986?
Hi.
About hormonal blocks, well, we’re playing with fire here, playing with things we don’t understand. Each of us has his or her individual hormonal pathway at puberty. Some develop secondary sexual characteristics
Sorry, sent by mistake. Some young people develop secondary sexual characteristics at an earlier stage, some later. You don’t mess with the process. If it’s artificially delayed the young person may miss the reproductive boat. As Bret Weinstein keeps saying, we’re dealing with complex systems, not complicated systems. The human body isn’t like an automobile engine. There may be some for whom intervention is desirable in the case of extremely early onset of puberty, but , to coin a phrase, hard cases make bad law. Just as there are a very few cases of genuine hermaphroditism that may require surgery. We’re now in the realm of the ridiculous where whole swathes of teenagers are identifying as “non-binary” etc. It’s just the latest madness.
I note you’re careful to limit your denial to “bottom surgery” (orse genital mutilation). But these are not outlier cases. It happens not infrequently in the case of 17 year olds. They make an ill-informed emotionally based decision which has the potential to wreck the rest of their lives. You presumably don’t deny that bodily mutilation in the form of mastectomy, indeed double mastectomy, is inflicted on many minors.
Nobody is enforcing “gender roles”. What are gender roles anyway? I thought we’d got beyond saying boys should be train drivers and girls nurses! They’re all free to pursue whatever roles appeal to them!
And there are plenty of cases of biological males abusing same sex spaces and of gaining stolen valour in sport. Have you heard of “Lia” Thomas? We seem to be hell-bent on creating a dystopia for young women. They’re not “cis-women”. There’s no such thing as a “cis-woman”. They’re simply women. And they deserve to have their safe spaces protected. Some of them have raised their heads above the parapet in the cause of equal treatment for their sex and have been beaten up by biologically male thugs. In Scotland at least one biological male rapist who subsequently identified as a “woman” was housed in a women’s prison. This is unhinged and has to end.
I note you’ve nothing to say about the industrial-pharmaceutical complex.
Oh, goody! This is one I can write about.
So, Dear Madam KKKristian,
Do you mind the extra K’s? I’m feeling generous today. In fact, I’m feeling so generous that I am only going to focus on one thing you say:
“But legitimate criticism of their political choices has shaded into something darker: contempt for an entire group of Americans.”
I am out and proud gay man, out of the closet that you and your ilk put me into for 55 years now. For the last 60 years— AT LEAST— of my life, I have listened to you so-called Christians say everything that you could think of, no matter how vicious or untrue, about LGBT people. But that’s hardly a new phenomenon. The last hundred years, the last thousand years, the last 2000 years, you have done exactly the same. Tell every possible vicious lie you could think of about a entire group of your fellow citizens, your fellow humans, and your own families.
You have done everything within your power to make our lives as difficult, unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous as possible. You have promoted laws making my way of loving a crime. I will let a singing duo, Romanowski and Phillips, tell you something: only an asshole would care about what I put in my asshole and who puts it there.
You and your filthy ilk have gone to other countries to make the lives of gay people there crimes. Russia, Hungary, Nigeria, Uganda, Senegal: uttering three simple words, “I am gay”, is enough to get you put into prison in those paradises on earth.
Ever since Anita Bryant raised her well coiffed reptilian snout above a Florida swamp 49 years ago, you have attempted to blame gay people for molesting children, ignoring facts, logic, and experience to project your own deficiencies onto us. As I have said many times, you can google gay men and sexual abuse, or drag queen and sexual abuse, or transgender people and sexual abuse, and you will be likely to get a few hits every single year. If you do the same for Protestant pastors and catholic priests, you will get literally hundreds or thousands of hits every single year. The few times you actually acknowledge that, you will claim that it is gay men, drag queens, and transgender people who are threats. And yet, virtually every one of those protestant pastors is married to a woman. The few allegedly transgender people who are arrested every year for waving penises around women’s locker rooms seem to me to be heterosexual men, because no one else is interested in doing that. And drag queen story hour? Children are getting read stories by men in costumes with their parents present.
In short, in parallel to your complaint about how persecuted you are, you are actually persecuting gay people for the crimes your people are committing. It’s not unfair if you do it, is it?
You have instigated and promulgated massive political campaigns to do everything you can to exclude LGBT people from participating fully in society as we are made. The morons spent $45 million in California 18 years ago, All to prevent me from marrying my husband. How many kids could have been fed or educated for that? All of the lies you told about my marriage, all the lies you told about me, all the lies you told about my deleterious effects on your marriage and family turned out to be—-wait for it—LIES!!!
You have called me and mine, without the slightest bit of evidence, threats, to marriage, family, children, heterosexuality, morality, and western civilization itself, such as it is. And yet I’ve never assaulted anyone. Unlike Trump. I’m still married to my first legal husband, unlike Trump. I’ve never molested anyone, unlike hundreds of protestant youth pastors and God knows how many priests. I’ve never been connected to a felony, unlike Trump. I’ve never even committed a felony.
And yet to hear you people talk, LGBT people are the actual threat despite a complete lack of evidence to that statement
I’m an American citizen, a taxpayer, a law abiding, productive, and contributing member of my society. I harm no one and I bother no one, except for those who want to be bothered by my existence and my participation in society. I expect to be treated like the good American, good person, and good citizen that I am. If you have proof that I’ve done a wrong or harm to someone— and I’m not including your claim that your puny God is absolutely horrified by something he doesn’t need to watch— so horrified that he wiped out thousands or millions of people— if you have the proof, then present it.
But you don’t. All you have is the stories that you tell yourself. Right now, transgender people are on your enemies list. You don’t know them, you don’t know anything about the subject, all of your announcements on the subject are based upon ignorance, stupidity, and spite. If you spent 1/10 of the energy on child molesting pastors that you spend on transgender people who are just trying to live their lives, what a much better world this would be.
So let me tell you something, Ms KKKristian. You’re not being persecuted. You’re being disagreed with. You’re being stood up to You’re being called out for your egregious nastiness, lies, religious dominionism, psychotic obsession with my asshole and what makes my dick hard. Don’t like the explicit language? Then maybe your side should stop using it. More times than I can count, I have listened to or read so-called Christians go on and on and on and on and on about whatever it is they imagine my sex life to be. I don’t discuss it with them, I don’t invite them into my bedroom to watch—-eeeewwwwwww.
So I’ll tell you what; GFY with a large cactus. You’re a liar, you’re a fake, you’re a hypocrite, and you are morally, intellectually, and spiritually corrupt.
You are corrupt because you are exactly that which you claim to hate.
Excellent rant. The true shame is that people like her will never read it, never want to read it, would cover their ears and eyes and scream, "LA-LA-LA I can't HEAR YOU!" at the top of their lungs, rather than acknowledge that you said something, never mind recognize the truth of it.
It strikes me that breaking through to such people is a near-impossibility. Isolating them, disempowering them, and letting them die off seems to be the sole solution.
Thank you. I have long maintained that it is impossible to reach people who are irretrievably poisoned because they believe everything that they think. That’s the very definition of “irretrievably“.
They are irretrievably poisoned by hate, fear, ignorance, stupidity, toxic religion, bad parenting, bad childhood experiences, lust for power, lust for money, lust to be God’s BFFF, traumatic experiences, and, I am increasingly convinced, their own frequent and very dark issues..
You seem to be peddling quite a bit of “hate” yourself. I suppose it’s OK to hate hateful people? I see personality traits in myself that I don’t much like and that are, objectively speaking, somewhat hateful. But I don’t hate myself. In fact I’m often guilty of giving myself a free pass, that I wouldn’t give anybody else in a similar context. Human nature’s a bit unaccountable I surmise. It’s easy to work yourself up into a righteous fury. Yes, everybody’s out of step except our Johnny!
Awww. Poor persecuted christian. So persecuted.
But I do want to thank you for proving my point. What I said was all facts. I am very well aware of what evangelical Christians have been doing to gay people. I have been fighting against it war probably for longer than you’ve been alive. I don’t hate them, but I absolutely despise what they have been doing to gay people, and now transgender people, for decades and centuries.
I notice you don’t provide a single example or refutation of ANYTHING I said. Not a one. Just the accusation that I am being a meany-pie to those nice people over there.
I’m sure some of them are very nice to their mothers, and are more than willing to help those disgusting homos to see the true light of gawd’s holy love. You can look up alan chambers, Martinn Ssempa, Scott Lively, anita Bryant, Tony Perkins, john briggs, Victor , Scott Anderson, Doug Wilson, — the list goes on and on and on and on.
You can BS yourself, but don’t try with me. I know who you are.
Maybe there’s a cactus in YOUR future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWEcMqM0acU
Thanks,
I worked on a sheep farm as a teen. A joke the farmer made when things weren't going well was "We lose money on every sheep but we make up for it in volume."
Sure, a lot of white evangelicals suck -- but they make up for it in volume.
More generally, I like how Hemant focused on the all too typically poor logic. These folk arent even wrong.
PS: I'm feeling human again!
Someone is pulling the wool over the farmer's eyes. 🐑
Welcome back to humanity.
Well, I happen to agree with Ms. Kristian on one point... Evangelical Christianity is not a cancer.
Cancer only spreads within a single body. It isn't contagious; it can't spread from one person to another at all. Evangelical Christianity, on the other hand, 𝘪𝘴 contagious- virulently so. It spreads itself by force whenever it cannot by persuasion, it has infected a large enough chunk of the body politic of the US to threaten the destruction of our system of government along with the rights of all our people, and indeed is also attempting to spread itself throughout the world. That spread is a core component of its theology- that the kingdom of their god will come about when they have conquered the world for him. It teaches that those who do not follow it are agents of evil, thereby indoctrinating its followers to be hostile to anyone who hasn't been converted to it. It is a belief system that does not value the lives of its own adherents, far less anyone else's. By its professions of divine favor and protection, it makes those it infects vulnerable to all manner of other harm, while also making them heedless of it, so that when faced with mortal danger they will choose their faith over reason and simply die.
Therefore, Evangelical Christianity is not a cancer.
It is a 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘨𝘶𝘦.
𝐾𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑒𝑙𝑓 ℎ𝑎𝑠 𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑐𝑜’𝑠 𝐶ℎ𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦 “𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑦 ℎ𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑜𝑑𝑜𝑥, 𝑖𝑓 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑜𝑢𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑎𝑙.”
Failing to see her own hypocrisy.
Crazy. Can you point me to where she said this? I’m a fan of Talarico.
Some evangelicals are nice, and Christian Nationalism is right up there among the very worst ideologies ever. Both those statements can be true. Yes, the guy who set my house on fire has nice parents. They're lovely people. But can we talk about how he set my house on fire?
Goldfish are “nice”
Crunchy, too!
He was a lovely guest at the dinner party.....right up until he set the house on fire to cleanse we sinners.
Hard not to think of Dylan Roof in that same context.
Apparently the cops thought so too, taking him for fast food on the way to booking him the murders of so many innocent people.
OT:
"New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration released more than 170,000 pages of previously undisclosed 9/11 air quality records on Tuesday, revealing that city officials knew the air around Ground Zero was dangerous while publicly telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe. The documents sat undiscovered in 68 boxes in a city office until last year, after years of the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch suing for their release.
Among the records is the “Harding Memo,” sent in October 2001 to Robert Harding, Rudy Giuliani’s deputy mayor. It laid out the potential for tens of thousands of lawsuits over 9/11 air exposure and outlined legislative strategies to limit the city’s legal liability, rather than warn the public.
The documents show the pattern didn’t end with Giuliani’s term. A memo from early in the Bloomberg administration, five months after the attacks, acknowledged the city was “leaving itself open to a barrage of lawsuits” and suggested officials “discontinue telling people to clean their apartments with wet mops and rags.”
“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” Mamdani said at the announcement, flanked by 9/11 families and Jon Stewart. “There was poison in the air, and on the ground, and in the window sills, and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes, and it stayed there for months.”
The numbers make the deception impossible to spin. Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11 itself. More than 9,000 have died since from 9/11-related cancers and illnesses tied to that toxic exposure, roughly three times the death toll of the attacks themselves.
It took a Muslim, progressive mayor to finally give first responders and survivors the transparency Giuliani’s administration buried, and the city continued burying through establishment Republican and Democrat administrations, for a generation.
The same Republican leaders who spent months insinuating Mamdani was somehow sympathetic to the 9/11 hijackers because of his faith, including Giuliani himself, now find their old administration’s cover-up exposed by the man they tried to demonize as a closet “jihadi.”
https://www.wbaltv.com/article/nyc-releases-911-air-quality-records/73641055
"It took a Muslim, progressive mayor to finally give first responders and survivors the transparency Giuliani’s administration buried"
In fairness, time was likely a major factor too, 25th anniversary and all. Political leaders of all stripes (and that includes liberal) become more willing to share bad news as the risk they and their administration will have to pay a price for it goes down.
“…These are the worst people in our country because they use their religion in two ways: as a weapon and as a shield.
They weaponize it whenever they want to and say, “We’re on the moral high ground. You’re a lesbian—you deserve to die. You’re a lesbian—the cops shouldn’t have revived you. Oh, your parents are Mexicans and they brought you over here? Yeah, you should go to jail and eat worm food.”
And then when you call them out on it, “Oh my god, they’re after the Christians. How dare they?! How dare they? We’re so oppressed. White Christians are so oppressed in this country!” …”
Where’s the lie? I get that Kristian doesn’t like her faith being called a cancer, but where is Welch wrong? We have story after story about Christians feeling persecuted because folks don’t want to hear their preaching while stuck on a plane, or subway car, or have them herd our children away from us at an arts festival. And yet they spread lies, bald faced, outright lies, about everyone else. Litter boxes in schools, men in bathrooms molesting girls, black men birdwatching in parks are attacking white women walking their dogs, immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets, women are aborting their babies after birth, vaccines cause autism, Muslims all want Sharia law in the USA, and so on and so on and so on and so on, ad infinitum. They use the lies to drum up average evangelicals ire so that they are all focused on the pretend dangers, and the average evangelicals are all too willing to believe the lies. I wonder why that is? Is it really the “left” that is painting evangelicals with the sweeping generalizations? Or does the evangelical political leadership know that bigotry will activate the plebes?
Kristian even lied about Talarico’s Christianity. Using known despised groupings (gay vegan, really!?!) to get her readers to discount Talarico’s obviously superior politics and morality so Paxton can overcome his blatant corruption that’s been adjudicated in court. She claims she’s not a part of the problem, while being the problem. Evangelical Christianity is a cancer that is destroying our nation, and until Kristian gets over her big feelings and recognizes the patterns, she will remain a part of the cancer.
Xtianity is indeed a cancer. Basing life decisions on fiction leads to bad outcomes. Imagine basing your decisions on what Harry Potter or Gandalf did or said and then demanding that others do the same. This is the madness that xtianity inflicts on society as a whole.
"And they want it both ways, because in the religion, that duplicity is taught. You can be morally duplicitous. You thrive in cognitive dissonance. And so this is just a massive, massive problem."
Spot on
Living one's life based on a FICTION. If it were a well-thought-out fiction, that might be one thing. It ISN'T, and the fallout has shown itself entirely too much over the last two millennia.
"A Canticle for Leibowitz."
One of the best required readings I had in Junior High.
My HS junior religion teacher (a priest I really liked and who is actually no longer a priest) talked about it frequently. I've read it a few times, don't remember a thing about it. That and Handmaid's Tale are books I keep thinking I should like, but just don't.
FWIW, here's a free online version:
https://ia800500.us.archive.org/13/items/calibre_library_68.132.22.122.231/A%20Canticle%20for%20Leibowitz%20-%20Walter%20M.%20Miller_803.pdf
Thanks a LOT! Bookmarked for the future!
Heard of it. Never actually read it. Noted for futures, with thanks!
It's a good read and entertaining and also shows the ridiculousness of basing life upon writings from long dead characters.
"The Drifters" for us.
And now I guess it's just ads for ICE recruitment.
Plenty of great stuff upon which to live one's life can be found in the fictional¹ Discworld universe.
(¹ Thus far I've seen zero evidence disproving that universe, and I'm still holding out hope of meeting Susan Sto Helit.)
RJ,
I spent an evening drinking with some Alvin Ailey Dancers, had a private conversation with SRV in his last year (and shook THAT HAND twice), once parked in the White House parking lot to teach Treasury Department employees, a watched an entire Warren Zevon concert from 3 feet away, I listened to Kurt Vonnegut give a lengthy speech to students at my alma mater, USC, and I twice saw and heard the spirit of a beloved pet raccoon, just as real as this keyboard.
I'm not willing to disbelieve in "miracles" or impossibilities just yet (but Trump is a real test of what I REFUSE to believe in....)
If their laws might kill me or others I care about, I’m going to have something to say about it 😎.
I suspect a fair number of us will have more than just something to say... 😡
I was flexing my (brain) muscles when writing that.
When push comes to shove I will be praying to my favorite saints.... St. Smith, St. Wesson, St. Ruger, and St. Saur.
"No doubt evangelicals bring casseroles to sick neighbors."
I went through three episodes of losing an immediate family member (with the help of hospice each time), and we never received the first knock on the door here in rural SC, surrounded by family for miles around.
But I do love the concept that white evangelicals, even in the deep south, give a fark about ANYTHING but themselves. That's really nice....
My mom was recently in hospice at the local hospital. I specifically told them no pastoral visits. The other day I got a sympathy card from the pastoral staff at the hospital. They don't take no for an answer.
They still call here, and Dad's been gone almost 3 years.
Oddly, after a lifetime of "going along" to church, while clearly never believing, Dad welcomed this preacher at the end, and I'm happy for that.
Of course, we were also very happy that Dad regained his ability to read after most of a decade....ever through walls. (We were also happy about his many "visitors", until they began telling him to leave the house.)
Of course, Dad was easy. Mom was not, and a different hospice sent an old, Vietnam era nurse-guy yelling about how proud he was of Israel for murdering babies.
larry,
I hope you mother is now well. If not, I hope her passing was a peaceful, loving one for everyone involved.
Thanks. Not well. The hospice folks at the hospital did a good job of making her comfortable in her last days.
“But legitimate criticism of their political choices has shaded into something darker: contempt for an entire group of Americans.”
Pot, kettle, black.
Jesus Christ. White evangelicals are gleefully posing next to “Alligator Alcatraz” signs, saying that the alligators will be well fed (a clear callback to slavery and Jim Crow, feeding black babies to alligators) because they have decided all Latinos and Hispanics and people of darker skin are inherently criminal. They are the ones at Trump rallies talking about how “illegal immigrants” deserve what they’re getting just because they don’t have the right paperwork, or they do but ICE doesn’t care. They’re painting with the big brush, but now they’re upset that their political opponents have their own brushes.
If evangelicals didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have standards at all. Being nice to your white Christian neighbor isn’t a flex, being humane to the people that are different from you or who don’t do anything for you, is a better indicator of your goodness, though it’s still the bare minimum. And they fail at that.
Nothing left for me to say.
Nothing is something.
Sometimes it's everything.
Words would just get in the way (couldn't resist the rhyme *smiles*).
Everyone should understand that essays like this one are preparing the ground for "domestic terror" charges for "anti-Christian bias" under NSPM-7. We must connect those dots.
"Not all evangelicals" is the religious version of "not all men", and it has been given the power of the state to oppress anyone who pushes back.
A 𝑻𝒓𝒖𝒆 𝑺𝒄𝒐𝒕𝒔𝒎𝒂𝒏 has entered the chat.
😉
Andra,
Yes, NSPM-7 is very scary. Or, it will be if this regime starts directing LEOs toward picking people up simply because of an anti-Trump design on a shirt, a progressive yard sign, or a pro-Dem bumper-sticker on a car.
My MEDIUM article about the 10 years or so (thus far) of wearing progressive messages on a daily basis now begins with this:
[EDIT: 5/2/26 I no longer suggest this action for anyone with more to lose from violence or arrest than America has to gain from your actions. NSPM-7 (domestic terrorism) makes the risks far greater, and each person must ultimately make that decision themselves. But my intention is to continue….]
https://medium.com/@foofaraw/many-more-people-will-die-because-of-trump-i-hope-i-wont-be-one-of-them-41b2f1493036
Of course, living in rural SC, I've always been aware of the risks.
I have a longtime subscriber in Florida who does this, too. And she has largely good experiences and conversations. (I grew up in rural SC, so I completely grasp the risks you take. It matters. It makes a difference. I believe that.)
Very cool, Andra!
I notice more messages (of all types) being worn in public, and I suspect that may mean that people are increasingly frustrated by their inability to be heard, or a lack of feeling seen.
But your subscriber is the first time that I've EVER heard of a goal such being a conscious decision, other than myself!
It really is wonderfully empowering when someone smiles or nods or even speaks, since them feeling seen makes me feel seen (as a progressive) as well. If there may be some way I could hear of their experience (perhaps through the above link to my MEDIUM article), I'd be grateful to you, Andra. (But not to make anyone uncomfortable, or to possibly compromise security.)
Thank you, Andra. I hope you're in a safer place now.
I'll share it with her. She may reach out to you since you're on the same page. :)