Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) bashed former President Trump online and said Christians who support him “don’t understand” their religion.
“I’m going to go out on a NOT limb here: this man is not a Christian,” Kinzinger said on X, formerly known as Twitter, responding to Trump’s Christmas post. “If you are a Christian who supports him you don’t understand your own religion.”
Kinzinger, one of Trump’s fiercest critics in the GOP, said in his post that “Trump is weak, meager, smelly, victim-ey, belly-achey, but he ain’t a Christian and he’s not ‘God’s man.’”
I’m not sure what distinction you’re trying to make. He’s saying these Christians don’t understand their religion, as in they’re not following what he thinks Christianity is supposed to be. That’s the very definition of the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy.
You’re doing it too, honestly. What you learned in Sunday school doesn’t match how these republicans are interpreting it, so they’re not following the real teachings.
I’m saying you can look through the history of the official stances of the Christian church and find many, many examples of sanctioned atrocities. You may not like it, but Christianity has never been what’s printed on the tin.
If we are going that road you could argue that much of the “Christian church” has split pretty far from Christ’s actual teachings.
Sure. Or that the original teachings were all over the place to begin with, because it’s an amalgamation of various regional beliefs and stories meant to gain political and social control over areas it spread to, adopting and bastardising random beliefs it encountered. Because that’s what literally happened.
Eventually the Catholic and Anglican churches decided which books/teachings would be ‘correct’ based on what whomever was in charge decided. There are many books that were included or excluded from the bible because they were convenient or inconvenient, and the end result was a weird, inconsistent mess. The Catholic Church’s official library has what’s now considered banned texts that were official canon a few centuries ago. What changed that made them wrong? Politics.
And of course the three major Abrahamic religions can’t agree over whose interpretation is correct, to the point of genocide. But yeah, one sect of evangelical Christianity is ‘right’ such that we should all be subjected to it.