A large country called Reality

 

This is a post I have been meaning to write for a while on a topic that obviously calls for further thought. Partially it is a correction and realization of something I mentioned in a paper I wrote for a school program.  In the paper, I was writing about why Jewish people are so often persecuted, and that is not a light topic.  I am not talking about people getting a bad grade unfairly or being uninvited to parties.  I am of course referencing things like mass murder and the holocaust.  So anyway I said it was because of both race and religion, but after being in a habit now for a while of thinking of things in threes, I see that there is a third identity factor for a whole people and that is the concept of “nation.”  So it is race, religion, and nation.  And currently Israel has a chunk taken out of it called Palestine which is officially recognized on some maps and supported by many political people from other know-it-all places like some of the United States.  I don’t know what will happen with all of that. I personally support extending Israel’s borders into Syria and Iraq to create a safe zone with new rules and culture in the middle east.  But anyway I mention that also because I think that the “race, religion, nation,” identity combo for populations is also relevant to why people want Christian nationalism in the United States.  It was something that did exist more organically for a while but was lost.  But part of what that Christian nation tried to provide was another trio called “liberty and justice ‘for all.’”  “For all” is the third part of another set of three things.  It really is a helpful thing to look for those trilogy combos, and something that people used to do more when some amount of Christian education was the standard for most thought.  That too, was lost, and there will be a cost to it, though I am in the camp that sees a lot of it as sacrificial outreach that will reap a good harvest of inclusion instead of total destruction.  But anyway, that “liberty and justice for all” trinity had a different mission than just forcing everyone to subscribe to the main religion, and religious liberty was something that people did try to offer as a nation, and actually succeeded with in some ways.  And people who want to fight that are having to in some ways make their aggressive politics turn into a new religion itself, which I believe will be exponentially a worse embarrassment than pipe dreams of Christian nationalism.  This post is kind of political to put on my theology blog, but notice the concepts. It is very theological and these principles will not be skipped or ignored successfully by anyone.