I consider myself to be a Christian, albeit a struggling Christian who often fails to live up to the teachings of Jesus Christ, yet tries daily. I will admit that I am not much of an Old Testament Christian but rather focus on the teaching and guidance provided by Jesus Christ. For the most part, your beliefs are personal and can vary from one individual to another. I am troubled by something that is mentioned numerous times in the Bible, that we are to love one another, yet most people regularly fail to do so every day. There is even mention of loving your enemy, which seems almost nonsensical today.
There is a movement underway to install Christian Nationalism as the guiding religious philosophy for the country even though their movement is guided by a very narrow and rigid interruption of the Bible, not particularly the teachings of Jesus Christ. The Christian Nationalists want to impose their brand of religion on everyone in the country. They want religious indoctrination that represents their minority viewpoint, and the questionably Christian president is happy to go along, providing he gets their loyalty to him in return for whatever he wants to do.
Several actions are being taken by the federal government that significantly bother me as a Christian and seem to differ greatly from the teachings of Jesus Christ. 111 verses in the Bible reference love in various aspects and contexts, making love one of the most frequently referenced topics in the Bible. Loving one another, including the stranger in your midst, is prominently referenced. Loving your enemies drives home the point that love should be an essential belief of all Christians. Many Christians fall short of loving in the manner described in the Bible.
There is nothing Christian about most of the action implemented or being planned by the current administration. The top priority was to pass a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest members of society. Pandering to the wealthy is not something the Bible favors; quite the opposite. Jesus did not express any favor for the accumulation of wealth, often disparaging the quest by the wealthy to continually seek to become wealthier, often at the expense of other people.
Most people were fine with the plan to round up and deport criminal illegal immigrants. However, when the policy of the current president moved to the random rounding up of any available illegal immigrant, many people reconsidered their stance. Now, thanks to a bogus Supreme Court ruling, rounding up immigrants not for cause but by how they look or speak, this effort has taken a wrong turn. What we are doing to immigrants, some having lived here for years if not decades, is not something that has any Biblical basis and defies much of what Jesus mentioned with respect to love. Had the policy remained an effort to deport illegal immigrants doing criminal acts in the U.S., most Americans would support that effort, but that would not produce the volume of ethnic cleansing that the current president and his henchmen want, so they have expanded the scope of their deportation policy. Using third-world hellish prisons to detain deported immigrants is simply beneath what this country should be doing as a leading nation in the world.
Most of the actions taken so far by the current president and his chosen henchmen are the antithesis of the biblical teachings of Jesus. The cruelty and crassness of the actions taken over the past few months by the current president are unfathomable, given what we normally expect of a president. People will die because of health care legislation impacting Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and other ramifications from destructive health care policy. Budget cuts will greatly impact the overall functioning of government and make government responsiveness to citizens seeking assistance much worse. Although that may be the point, to make government function so poorly that people may succumb to a talking point about poorly operating government that has been bogusly used by Republicans for decades.
As Christians, we should want the government we live under to be honest, forthright, consistent, and to work for the betterment of all the people. Christian values do not impose the biblical viewpoints of an extreme minority that selectively chooses only what they agree with from the Bible and discards the teachings that don’t mesh with a certain political agenda and ideology. Christians understand that the separation of church and state protects all citizens from having the government decide what are your religious beliefs. What is being done under the disguise of Christianity has little to do with the biblical teachings of Jesus Christ and how all Christians should conduct themselves.
