The Fraudulence of ‘Pro-life, Christian’ BulliesJOHN PAVLOVITZOver the past year I’ve watched the monsters descend on the students of Parkland, and other young people throughout the country moved to activism after their latest exposure to bloodshed and carnage.
They’ve trolled their social media accounts, attacked their sexuality, made fun of their college application rejections, and unleashed millions of minions and bots on them.
Teenagers.
They’ve been doing this to teenagers—middle and high schoolers, many of whom only buried classmates and teachers a few weeks ago.
Someone’s minor children—kids who are already living in the most turbulent, most confusing, most disorienting time of life. They are joyfully, unrepentantly bringing more turbulence upon them.
And what’s most stunning, most infuriating, is that the monsters doing this, claim to be “pro-life” Christians.
This is apparently their single-vote issue: life.
They treasure it, defend it, celebrate it.
They preach and protest and petition for it.
While they’re dragging these already traumatized young people on social media; manipulating their images, using them as talk show fodder, while verbally abusing them, and excusing every kind of sick harassment of them—they would tell you they fiercely value “life.” (That they support a President who is a bully messiah is a discussion for ....
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2018/03/29/th ... n-bullies/ How The Religious Right Made Cruelty Sacred and Compassion UnchristianJOHN PAVLOVITZWell, they’ve finally done it.
The Religious Right has completed their wholesale reboot of Christianity and it now bears no resemblance to the original. It has fully abandoned its namesake.
This week, watching Republican governors shipping exhausted migrants to other areas of the country in brazen acts of performative cruelty has been horrifying—but not nearly as much as witnessing the theological and mental gymnastics so many professed Christians have engaged in while trying to justify traumatizing already traumatized people.
It has been a grievous thing to see human beings who openly wield their adoration of Jesus, miss the stratospheric irony of their intentional mistreatment of those he claimed such affinity for while he was here: their heartless, loveless response to those he called “the least of these,” in the way the world disregarded and injured them. They find all of this perfectly fine, even Christian.
Supposed followers of the same Jesus whose family fled to Egypt to avoid genocide, are actually celebrating these malicious political stunts and branding our condemnation of them, partisan politics. That is how far afield they have drifted in 2,000 years.
Republican Christians have so lost the plot, that affirming anything remotely compassionate or decent now feels to them like a political attack; so fully embraced a Christianity of cruelty that actual empathy seems an act of ...
https://johnpavlovitz.com/2022/09/16/ho ... christian/