Hello me lads! Push has come to shove on the religious landscape again, and it appears to be a mammoth problem.
Serene Jones
Taking their cue from the Pope, politically-left issues are being rapidly adopted as "spiritual and moral issues" says 'Reverend' Serene Jones of the Union Theological Seminary. She feels that Climate Change in particular is one of those spiritual issues, as well as social justice in general.
Since the 2016 election, monthly lectures on social justice at the 600-seat Gothic chapel of New York's Union Theological Seminary have been filled to capacity with crowds three times what they usually draw.
"The election of Trump has been a clarion call to progressives in the Protestant and Catholic churches in America to move out of a place of primarily professing progressive policies to really taking action," she said.
In January, the 181-year-old Upper Manhattan graduate school, whose architecture evokes London's Westminster Abbey, turned away about 1,000 people from a lecture on mass incarceration. In the nine years that Reverend Serene Jones has served as its president, she has never seen such crowds.
This disparate group has jumped into political activism on policies of immigration, healthcare, LGBT, and social justice according to clergy members, activists and academics. Financial support is also picking up. Donations to the 'Christian' Social Justice activist group Sojourners have picked up by 30 percent since the 2016 election, the group said.
"It's one of the dirty little secrets of America that there has been a religious left all along and it just hasn't done a good job of organizing," said J. Patrick Hornbeck II, chairman of the theology department at Fordham University, a Jesuit school in New York. This is rapidly changing as these new liberal alliances mingle church and state quicker than you can say "Liberty Magazine."
One large woolly mammoth in the room is this: Many in the religious left are inspired by Pope Francis, the Roman Catholic leader who has been an outspoken critic of anti-immigrant policies and a champion of helping the needy. Pope Francis, has sparked those who are among the “religious left” to take a more politically active view on certain political issues.
Quite so. This movement has great potential among North American Adventists who have long reassured themselves that liberalism is a warm fur coat protecting them from the frozen devastation of a religious right ice age. Leading the leftward charge over this cliff is a plethora of NAD leaders and academics mixing WO and SJW and abortion rights and LGBT into a delicious progressive alphabet stew. The end result is two groups of people in dark ditches warning others to avoid dark ditches. I personally know an Adventist guy who blends religion with politics in order to get people to stop blending religion and politics. Urghh.
In fact, the elephant in the room (er . . . woolly mammoth) is that religion and politics make a bad mix, no matter which side of the cup you drink from. Just stop it. Allaya. Get out the Good Book. And stay there!
See you on the right side of the Sea of Glass, Mates! (2 Peter 2:15; Hebrews 10:12; Col. 3:1; Matthew 25:33-34).
Cheerio,
ChurchMouse