It is a truth universally acknowledged that Canadians are fascinated by the United States and American politics. An article in the Globe and Mail entitled “The U.S. Circus of Religious Nationalism” gives Lorna Dueck and Stephen Lazarus the opportunity to discuss Donald Trump’s “attempt to grasp the loyalty of evangelical Christians.”
Dueck and Lazarus claim that Trump is “incorrect to boast, as he did at Liberty University, ‘We’ve got the evangelicals!'” because “[p]inning evangelical Christians to a unified opinion is like nailing jelly to the wall.”
Then Dueck and Lazarus go on to say
Christianity can never accurately be spun as a means to political greatness. Its leader Jesus was someone who gave himself and died willingly, with suffering, to restore people to harmony with God. His followers were then tasked to tell the entire world, in perpetuity, that the way of power is in submission to God. It means that love, forgiveness and justice for all, especially the poor, should mark all our decisions.
which is their attempt to nail jelly to the wall.
Patrick Clare provides a dose of reality in the third comment to Dueck and Lazarus’s article:
“Its leader Jesus was someone who gave himself and died willingly, with suffering, to restore people to harmony with God.”
In other words, 2000 years ago, God infused himself into his own teenaged virgin mother so he could get her pregnant with himself. He did this so he could sacrifice himself to himself in order to save the world from himself because a a woman named Eve was convinced by a talking snake with legs to eat fruit from a magical tree and inadvertently created sin.
and I do not like them Sam I Am’s Page answers Dueck and Lazarus’s question “The U.S. spectacle of religion and politics often seems bizarre to Canadians. Why is that?” with
Because its an impractical mix of myth with reality.
The commenter, I do not like them Sam I Am’s Page, is correct; American politics is becoming more and more bizarre. However, what is even more bizarre is Dueck and Lazarus’s attempt to promote a Jesus style approach of “justice for all” to politics.
The better way, of course, is to leave all religion out of politics.
Christianity was created to remind us that God has already chosen who our leaders are to be and we are therefore instructed to obey them.
Readers will recognize the wording of the comment, taken from the general wisdom accrued by gifted blasphemers against Christianity in recent years. It’s not original and I take no credit for it. My little feat was getting it into the pages of the Globe and Mail.