A Milestone In Perception Is Here

By Charles Toy

I started The Christian Left in 2009 as a Facebook group. In 2010 I converted it to a Facebook page and after numbers started to grow I slowly added an admin team from a few page users eager to participate. That same core admin team is still with me, Rev. Mark Sandlin and Roger Smith. We have many other long-time admin team members but Mark and Roger have assisted in planning and daily operations since I asked them to join me not long after I began.

A ministry and a community began, for people who saw what was taking place and were persecuted for bringing it up.

From the beginning we've proclaimed loud and clear that The "Christian" Right had lost its way. This has always been one of the main motivations of our mission. Long before Donald Trump we've been sounding the alarm that our faith had been infiltrated and taken over by impostors and false teachers. We no longer recognized our faith in our churches. That was profoundly saddening to us.

We've been hammered relentlessly from the beginning about the two fake issues The "Christian" Right invented, marriage equality and women's reproductive justice. The fact is these issues were invented to coalesce a right-wing political movement within the church. The history of how this happened is detailed here.

You couldn't find many people who would agree with us in public. Everyone was afraid to cause hardship for themselves and their families whether it was personal, professional, or both. We took a pounding in the beginning. We still do.

That's starting to change. People are beginning to see the truth and speak up.

Miguel De La Torre, Professor of social ethics and Latino/a studies at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colo. wrote a piece in late 2017 that perfectly echoes what we've been saying for almost a decade.

"Christianity has died in the hands of Evangelicals. Evangelicalism ceased being a religious faith tradition following Jesus’ teachings concerning justice for the betterment of humanity when it made a Faustian bargain for the sake of political influence. The beauty of the gospel message — of love, of peace and of fraternity — has been murdered.

Evangelicalism has ceased to be a faith perspective rooted on Jesus the Christ and has become a political movement whose beliefs repudiate all Jesus advocated. A message of hate permeates their pronouncements."

We've probably made every one of those points 1,000 times.

The point of this blog is that perceptions are slowly changing. People are beginning to notice that following the teachings of Jesus has all but vanished in the US for the majority of evangelicals. 82% of them voted for Trump and stay loyal to right-wing extremism every election. Yet they represent themselves as the 'party of God.' The Gospel has been replaced with a cruel right-wing ideology.

You, the members of The Christian left,  have been early pioneers in rejecting the false teaching of The "Christian" Right.

Then this happened:

That's pretty big coming from a former chair of the RNC. We'll take any allies we can get on this point. This is another thing we've been saying for almost a decade.

They lost any authority to preach when they fell prey to reprobate minds precipitated by replacing Jesus with right-wing ideology. It's happened many times in history. The most recent turning away is well documented.

Some have suggested that real Christianity has been forced underground in the US. It wouldn't be the first time.

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