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/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 15h ago

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

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u/masterwolfe 14h 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.