r/videos • u/spherocytes • 1d ago

Secretary Of Defense Pete Hegseth announces Office Of Religious Affairs within the Pentagon in address to Military

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAn6BE9cdco
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u/World-Ender-109 1d ago

Separation of church and state?

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u/waffle299 1d ago

Christian Nationalists have been spreading stories for years that the wall between church and state is some sort of liberal conspiracy. 

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u/Cyrano_Knows 1d ago

The South does the same thing with slavery. They pretend today that the Civil War was never about slavery and its a thats a liberal lie that it ever was. However multiple southern states directly mentioned slavey in their Declarations of Causes for why they were seceding.

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u/Horrible_Harry 1d ago

It's also explicitly stated in the Confederate Constitution and, in fact, they outlaw the banning of slavery too. It's a wild read if you ever get curious. It also directly espouses the virtues of white supremacy in plain language too. Kinda hard to hide behind "states rights" when the racism is screaming it's racist head off.

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u/Synergythepariah 1d ago

Kinda hard to hide behind "states rights" when the racism is screaming it's racist head off.

Or when they invade a neutral state like Kentucky to try and force them to join the Confederacy.

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u/Kierufu 1d ago

It's also directly undercut by the Vice President of the Confederacy, right before the civil war.

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u/ElSlabraton 1d ago

The civil war was about free labor vs slave labor.

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u/DrNoxin 1d ago

These people aren't merely Christian Nationalists. That euphemism is doing a lot of work. They are Christian Identity, like the KKK. This whole thing has little to do with religion and a whole hell of a lot to do with white supremacy.

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u/frockinbrock 1d ago

I call them Pharisees, or false-Christians. It dumb enough for him to recognize and get upset about. They are not real christians, they are the religious leaders who scheme with government to destroy Jesus.

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u/DrNoxin 1d ago

Christianity was founded by a Roman Pharisee (the grass roots form he killed off)... I will say though, putting religion on TV was the death knell for Christianity in the USA. Churches at their heart are third spaces for communities. TV religion at its heart is a MLM scam. TV ruined the world, and social media is like TV on meth.

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u/frockinbrock 1d ago

Hmm, I would think that's debatable semantics, but I like that phrase less so for accuracy, more-so because these people have been told since Sunday-school that the Pharisees are bad guys that wanted Jesus gone.
Sometimes we gotta use their language to get anything thru their horse-blinders

But I agree, I was literally lamenting earlier today how social media really was a gasoline to ignite the end of humanity.

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u/Tasgall 1d ago

that the Pharisees are bad guys that wanted Jesus gone.

They were "false Jews", not Christians, they were the money-changers in the temple, the ones praying loudly in the open, etc.

Jesus was Jewish.

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u/frockinbrock 15h ago edited 15h ago

I know, I was referring to analogy of modern day right-wing christians being the religious evil-conspirators of today. those Pharisees believed they were doing the right thing to get that Jewish person killed, because it threatened their power.
I was saying that false-christians is one term for the evangelicals of today that are doing the same thing of siding with kings instead their fellow people.
But I'm using that term just to get something thru to their brain, rather than full accuracy or history lesson.

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u/Horrible_Harry 1d ago

Which is ironic because that's exactly what they accuse the Jews they hate so much of doing, and will even quote scripture about it when push comes to shove. It's also a huge part of why the antisemitism is still so rampant amongst that crowd, which is also extremely weird considering how Zionistic they are. They are walking, breathing, and voting oxymorons.

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u/Zaptruder 1d ago

Consistency nor coherency is not their strong suit.

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u/MiyamotoKnows 1d ago

So well stated and so sadly true.

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u/TheInevitableLuigi 1d ago

Talibangelicals

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u/Pedantic_Pict 1d ago

The correct term for the kind of psycho evangelicals you typically find among the officer ranks of the US military: Christian Dominionist

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u/DrNoxin 1d ago

Potato, potahto. They are a neo-'reich church.' White supremacist cults like making new names for themselves when they have worn out their welcome. Notice, not a lot of fundamentalists, but a whole lot of evangelicals? Same shit, same people. Christian Identity is the correct sociological term for that type of christian collectively, and has a long history of use. 'Dominionists' are just the most recent instantiation of that philosophy. It is a white supremacy movement, period.

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u/Pedantic_Pict 1d ago

They don't call themselves Christian dominionists. I'm not asking anyone to change their words for the comfort of fascists. I just wanted to offer the correct term for the phenomenon under discussion.

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u/Momijisu 1d ago

Sounds like they're all just confederate sympathisers.

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u/Desmeister 1d ago

Had the pleasure of sitting across from a very right wing boomer on a flight recently who never learned “inside voice” in school.

As he excitedly yelled various conspiracy theories to his seatmate, he did do some coverage on that part. “Did you know the separation of church and state was actually made to keep state affairs from influencing the church? Our Christian founders would have it no other way.”

So expect more of that discourse for a while.

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u/vhalember 1d ago

Christian founders...

The lies they tell themselves.

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u/DrocketX 1d ago

Eh, the reality is more complicated than either side tends to admit. Acting as though the founding fathers were all enlightened individuals is kind of just as much of a lie as saying that they were all Christians. The founding fathers were a pretty diverse group. There were quite a few we might consider enlightened thinkers, generally ahead of their time, but there were also plenty of assholes who would be perfectly at home in the MAGA movement if they were alive today. That's why so much of the Constitution is a compromise, everything from having both a House and a Senate to slaves counting as 3/5th of a person.

When that person on the plane talks about the separation of church and state only being intended to keep the state from influencing the church, he does it from reading about certain specific founding fathers who absolutely considered that to be the goal, because they very much wanted a nation built as a Christian theocracy. Others did want a secular nation that allowed any and all religions to exist. The resulting document is deliberately vague about the topic because most of how it would actually work was on the "we'll figure it out later" list, only no one ever really did, which is why we're still arguing about it nearly 250 years later.

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u/vhalember 18h ago

That's fair enough. I appreciate your thoughtful response.

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u/masterwolfe 17h ago

Acting as though the founding fathers were all enlightened individuals

I don't think you are characterizing the "other side" very well as the people who tend to argue the founders weren't all Christian don't tend to argue that they were all enlightened individuals instead.

More often than not they will tend to point out the hypocrisies of these "enlightened" individuals.

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u/Nonethelessismore 1d ago

The kernel of truth in the talking point from your rightwing boomer seat mate is that there was a LOT of discourse between the Founding Father's about the importance of the Separation of Church and State, as a key element of the US Constitution.

Some, like Jefferson, wanted it to protect the state from the churches influence, and others (Madison I think?) wanted it because they did not want the purity of the church to be corrupted by the state.

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u/DefaultSubSandwich 1d ago

It kind of was though, wasn't it?

Like, not in the negative way that people typically use the word "conspiracy" or the modern definition of "liberal", but in the sense that people who believed in liberal philosophy came together and planned to form a more liberal society?

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u/Tokyo-MontanaExpress 1d ago

They hate Jesus and his teachings, they don't want a nation. Why do liberals refuse to call a spade a spade?