From now on, as Andrew Sullivan has established and Phillip Martin has advanced, "Christians" will be replaced with Christianists and "Christianity" is discarded in favor of Christianism.
You're going to have click on the links to get the frontstory. Here's my summary: the new words most accurately describe the co-optation of selected religious tenets by (mostly -- well, virtually exclusively) the Republican Party and their various acolytes in order to advance their political agenda, but which betray the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Christianists, in short, are hypocrites, and I believe Jesus would have spit them out of his mouth.
Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about:
- Christianists like Bill Frist -- and his buddy James Dobson -- really don't give a cat's ass about domestic animals -- or poor people, for that matter.
- Christianism is Tom DeLay grinning through his mugshot, letting us "see Christ through him", while lobbyists pour champagne on his daughter in a hot tub.
- Christianists like Rick Perry go to church to sign a bill that outlaws marriage except between heterosexuals while our children go without the proper schoolbooks to pass the state-mandated tests to advance to the sixth grade.
- Christianism is when Greg Abbott argues before the United States Supreme Court that a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state Capitol doesn't violate the First Amendment. And a majority of Justices agree.
- A small group of Christianists gathered just this past weekend in Pasadena to choose the man -- sorry, Dr. Sekula-Gibbs -- who will try to fill the golf shoes of The Hammer. The Seven District Twenty-Two Apostles, minus the Sugar Land mayor who was saved from the dead by prayer, dutifully answered their questions (.pdf).
Gee, I'm sure there's more examples of Christianism but I haven't even Googled yet.
Can you think of any?
