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When I began to browse Reddit, it was for funny memes and stupid stories. The world, then, was young, and I was happy.
But you know, I’m not a perfect man. One of my most noticeable flaws is that I’m totally, hopelessly, and incurably *Christian*. I just can’t do otherwise. And because I’m also an internationalist (I made mine the devise of the World Anational Association — even if I never joined this venerable organization —: I try to feel, think and act as if nations weren’t a thing), I’m always happy to feel the “worldwideness” of my religion discovering new perspectives.
[HTTPS] The World Anational Association on Wikipedia
What a ride, my dear fellows, when I connected the dots and discovered the Christian Reddit. I wanted to feel a cultural gap… and a gap indeed I felt.
I don’t know if the Christian Reddit is a good representation of the American Christianity. I don’t think so, and I sure *hope* that it isn’t the case.
Because what I found is fundamentalism. A strong, hard and self-aware fundamentalism, as I never saw IRL. r/Reformed (I’m Reformed myself) is populated with people who believe God chose to send people to hell, a view called “double predestination” that Calvin held, but that was abandoned by all European Reformed Churches as soon as the end of the 16th century. r/Catholicism is full of traditionalists who love to bless weapons during Latin messes. r/Protestantism will downvote you to the oblivion if you say that Abraham may not have been a historical character. And of course, homophobia is the norm there.
There are better subs, of course. r/Christianity, for example, is an exception. Even if there are fundamentalists in this sub, the enforced rule against bigotry keep the most violent comments far away. It’s a good sub, with a lot of different views, even if we can see a kind of ghettoization, some posts appealing more the conservatives, and other posts appealing the liberals. But as I’m mostly a lurker, that’s not a problem for me.
There are also subs dedicated to progressive Christians. r/OpenChristian is one of them, created for Christians open to homosexuality. The other ones are more political (Christian anarchists, Christian radical leftists, …). Most of the activity though occurs in subs dominated by fundamentalists, and that saddens me.
Are we, mainline and liberal Christians, that outnumbered in the English-speaking world? Or are we just afraid to stand up?
I hate the expression “moderate Christian”. I’m no moderate. I’m an extremist, an extremist of love, an extremist of forgiving, an extremist of inclusiveness. We shouldn’t be ashamed of ourselves. We’re not lukewarm because we accept the results of science, either natural (evolution, …) or historical (history of the biblical text, …), or because we read the Bible as it was written, a religious book from Antiquity, and not as an inerrant manual. It demands courage and a *very* solid faith to stay open and believe without the securities of the absolutes. It’s not to “please the world” that I proclaim that homosexuality isn’t a sin. I don’t care about the world, or I wouldn’t be Christian at all in one of the most secularized countries of the world. I teach that because that’s what the Bible and the Spirit by which the Bible was written taught me. That’s the Gospel. We should stand up to it.
Sorry if this post finishes as a rant, but I had some steam to unleash.
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Author: Adou (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Subject: Religion
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Date: 2021/05/03