Christian Hypocrisy in America

"Gay marriage is a sin and it should be illegal! America is a Christian nation and our laws should reflect that!"

"The government has no right to take my hard-earned money and give it to people who 'need' it. Whether I give to others - or not - is MY choice, and I should be free to do what I wish with my money."

"Systematically separating children from their parents with no plan for how to reunite them is necessary to protect our borders. God bless America!"

- All prime answers to "Things Republican Christians Say."

Soooo....yikes, I guess? We've sort of hit a new low here, guys, and it's not a low that I really thought we would hit. We've reached a point where many Christians WANT to take children away from parents - again, with no plan for reuniting them - simply as a deterrent to keep other people from attempting to immigrate. And many more Christians, even if they won't say that they actually want it to happen, are content to point fingers at who "really" passed the law, or how "this has been going on for years and the media is now pointing it out," or other things that even if they were true, it wouldn't matter because HOLY CRAP GUYS WE PUT A THREE YEAR OLD IN COURT YESTERDAY WITHOUT HIS DAD BECAUSE WE HAD LOST HIS DAD IN THE SYSTEM. They don't want to fix what's happening so much as make sure blame is apportioned to the OTHER side, and that's sick.

So here's the point of this blog, the thing that's been bouncing around in my head for a couple years now and has only just now solidified:

When Christian Republicans say "We're a Christian nation and our laws should reflect that," they don't really mean that. They usually mean something more like "The gross, horrible sins that THOSE people commit are much worse than the small, negligible sins that my people and I commit, and they should be illegal."

They never mean sins like being uncharitable, or overeating, or judgmental. They never want to criminalize pride, or lust, or greed. And they certainly don't want to mandate giving to the poor - that's one thing they're actually pretty firmly against!. In fact, most of the sins they want to criminalize are those that they personally don't struggle with at all - and the sins that they want to tolerate or approve are those that make their lives easier (like the whole "separating families with no plan for reuniting them" thing).

So next time you hear a godless liberal hippy talking about how hypocritical Christians are...this is a small, small part of what they're talking about. It's that a Christian can somehow say both 1) the government should reflect Christian morality and criminalize gay marriage (or some other yucky sin), and 2) it's a government, not a church, and we need to protect our borders by using cruelty as a deterrent. These are diametrically opposed ideas that cannot coexist, and they can only appear to do so because of a substitution of fundamentalist legalism and law-worship for genuine Christianity.

I guess the rant is over? This whole thing leaves me with a sick taste in my mouth. Cognitive dissonance can sometimes be funny - but here it's horrifying.