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How to be a unique Christian. Topics include: What is a closet Christian? Jesus hunts you down. Conversations with Jesus my friend.
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This is clearest in an anonymous treatise entitled Good Admonition to the Good Citizens of Brussels :. This freedom does not have its origin in the Pacification of Ghent, but properly belongs to an individual by nature and by natural right because religion is a bond that a person has with God. It is for this reason that he owes an account to no one besides God alone. This whole thing is well known and requires no proof. If people did not have the freedom to accept and hold such religion as they deem good according to conscience, then the Christian religion could never have gotten its start.

On the contrary, our parents would have had to stay in the heathen religion which they had once accepted without ever being able to change it. In Jefferson purchased a copy of Tertullian, now in the Library of Congress. Wilken ably proves his argument for the Christian roots of religious liberty against its secular critics. But since he began his research, more Christians have come to argue that society needs the unity of religious establishment and coercive force to direct its members to the right goods.

They see the separation of religious and political power as a false aspect of the liberal political order. Yes, John Calvin argued that in temporal matters Christians are subject to civil authority and only subject to God in matters of faith. Error had no rights, whether it came from the pope or Roger Williams. Wilken offers no direct argument against Christian critiques of religious liberty, but such an argument is implicit in his work. Like other aspects of the liberal order , religious liberty and freedom of conscience exist in the West because Christians developed them from the truths they held.

Those concepts should be understood rightly, not discarded.

Confessions of a Closet Catholic

Perhaps our society could use a more robust religious foundation, but respect for human dignity and the worship the Christian God desires require religious liberty. Physically compelling conversion or obedience to religious authorities is conducive to irreligion, not right religion. Tertullian and Lactantius were right on this question; John Cotton, John Calvin, and so many of their medieval forebears were wrong. About the Author. It was the Age of Reason, yes.

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It was also the Age of Sensibility. People who contributed to the culture of the Enlightenment were as diverse in their views on many subjects as people today. In particular, the views of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarding religion and its role in society were very different.

In this respect, he felt that early Islam was superior to Christianity. It led to civil war and mass murder. Napoleon reunited them, and so it remained in France until the Third Republic. By the time of the American Revolution, public opinion had moved from Lockean toleration to embrace freedom of conscience in religion as a natural right.

Experiential Religion

But the various states had in place varied solutions to the church-state matter. In consequence, the founders of the United States separated church and state at the federal level, leaving the issue of establishment to the states. Most states after some experimentation with general assessments and other looser forms of establishment in some instances went through the process of disestablishment as well during the founding generation.

Connecticut and Massachusetts followed suit by the s. Until the middle of the 20th century, however, there was no attempt to secularize society in the U. Religious people in America enjoyed free exercise of their faith — not just in private, but also in the public square. The harmony this resulted in surprised and even shocked the young Alexis de Tocqueville, who had always witnessed religion as the enemy of freedom in his home country.

With a few notable exceptions, religious peace prevailed for over two centuries under the American model of non-establishment and tolerance of public expression. In recent decades, the Religious Right and the Secular Left have both pushed agendas at odds with this long tradition. Each offers its own revisionist history of the founding.

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We would do well to study our history again. This is not to excuse the occasional excesses of the Right. What a crock. Start high school over. Yes, Rousseau may have argued against a particular kind of Christianity. And esoterically he may have have been a believer at all. But the exact same thing can be said about Locke. Locke answered by dancing around the issue. I would say you are reading Locke accurately, but not Rousseau. Locke does avoid discussion of the Trinity and may have been a Unitarian.

They are Deist. He may have considered himself a Christian, but it is a Christianity stripped of much of its doctrine. What is most significant is the way the French Enlightenment views Christianity as hostile to liberty.

Voltaire and the Encyclopedists are even more overtly hostile to the Christian faith. There is nothing remotely like this in 18th Century Anglo-American thought. Really Voltaire was that bad? The French Revolution eventually became overtly hostile to Christianity. It started as arguably a continuation of the American. In some ways, the French Revolution started off with ideals similar to the American and became progressively radical. But the approach toward religion was different from the very first. Some clergy supported it, which was critical in breaking down the Estates General and forming the National Assembly.

Then in the spring of , just a year into the Revolution, the Assembly approved the creation of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which effectively reduced the status of clergy to civil servants. This led to a schism of the Gallican Church along with civil unrest.

Unrest intensified into civil war with the downfall of the monarchy. This hideous nonsense finally quiets down after the downfall of Robespierre in the Thermidorean Reaction, and for a few years Church and State are separated. Napoleon, however, made a concordat with the Pope and reinstated the traditional place of the Gallican Church. Only in was the French state finally secularized. In the U. Indeed what? The modern liberal order are the same ss the evangelical Christians of the reformation?

Dude, you need to seriously study. The reformation was not an enlightened reaction. It is a path that can be dangerous, as Mandela foresaw.


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His life's work was to unite people across race, gender and even religion. As Mandela's death reverberated around the world last week, religious leaders joined the chorus of tributes, each describing a man who seemed to know and understand their faith intimately. In a meeting with a Hare Krishna swami, who quoted excerpts from the religion's founding text, Mandela finished his quotes, challenging him to find a part he did not know.

Ultimately, his faith, like everything else about Mandela, played to the great theme of his life: reconciliation. In the famous struggle play Woza Albert! The government locks him up on Robben Island for being a "communist agitator". But Christ, or Morena as he is called in Sesotho, simply walks back to freedom across the Atlantic Ocean. It was an intentional parallel with Nelson Mandela, who was still imprisoned in when Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon wrote the play, while the world campaigned for his freedom.

Mandela's moral stature as a leader has inevitably invoked messianic imagery in the outpouring of grief after his death. And his release from jail after 27 long years became something of a second coming. BBC presenter Evan Davis told listeners that Mandela should be ranked alongside Jesus in "the pantheon of virtue" and the political editor of the Telegraph, Peter Oborne, wrote: "There are very few human beings who can be compared to Jesus Christ. Nelson Mandela is one. Indeed, Mandela himself "never failed to affirm that he was only human", said Chetty.

He once said of himself: "I'm not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying. Theology professor Graham Duncan said the picture of Mandela will hopefully become more balanced over time. Create Account Lost Your Password? Toggle navigation Toggle profile. Create Account. He chanted the words that always made the elderly statesman's face light up when he heard them: "May the Lord bless you and keep you. Photograph by Madelene Cronje "The [apartheid] policy was supported by the Dutch Reformed Church, which furnished apartheid with its religious underpinnings by suggesting that Afrikaners were God's chosen people and that blacks were a subservient species," he wrote in his autobiography.

Accordingly, Mandela kept his religious beliefs very much to himself. She has worked at various periods as senior reporter covering politics and general news, specialises in mediamanagement and relishes the task of putting together the right team to create compelling and principled journalism across multiple platforms. Read more from Verashni Pillay verashni verashnipillay Verashni Pillay. Nelson Mandela.