Ryrie opens up his book with Bonhoeffer who suggests that part of what led to the invisibility of religion and the obsession with the political was the inability of the church to prevent the Holocaust. 

We are proceeding towards a time of no religion at all: men as they are now simply cannot be religious any more … Those who honestly describe themselves as ‘religious’ do not in the least act up to it, and so when they say ‘religious’ they evidently mean something quite different.

Ryrie, Alec. The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (p. 32). Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.For the Christians who formed the backbone of the civil rights movement in the United States, it became a point of principle to play down their religious identity and to forge broad alliances that paid no heed to faith.

Ryrie, Alec. The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (p. 33). Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.

I did some commenting on his video before I left for SouthEastuary. https://youtu.be/ymTiWayr9TY?si=_RD7fx75bAd4vtp9

The moderate/left EEEEvangelical elites have been in the sort of collapse the CRC-Exiles have been in. Here Kaitlyn Schiess who’s become something of a darling of this crew in getting confronted about wanting her values to be manifest in the political realm but NOT wanting to identify as a dread Christian Nationalism has to do a bit of backtracking. 

We want covert Christian Internationalism. Smuggle Jesus in without anybody seeing under the guise of “it’s just universal right and wrong…” 

Those principles were, as President Roosevelt put it in his ‘four freedoms’ speech in 1941, freedom of speech and of worship, and freedom from want and fear. America sought these freedoms, he insisted, not only for itself but ‘everywhere in the world’.11 Beside that stirring, universal vision, Eliot’s ‘new Christian culture’ looked particularist, unambitious and downright parochial. It was Roosevelt’s America which popularized an ingenious new label for what the Allies were defending: not Christian civilization, but Judeo-Christian civilization. Under other circumstances, conscripting Judaism into a supporting role in a Christian drama might have been crass, but at this moment it was an inspired move. It of course directly defied Nazism’s murderous obsession with Jews and Judaism, and – against some trends in liberal Protestant theology – firmly asserted that Christianity had Jewish roots. But it also made it clear that this newly imagined Judeo-Christian civilization was irreducibly plural. It was a broad-based alliance, which, by going so far as to embrace Judaism, also made it obvious that Christians of all kinds would be part of this united front. It is true that President Roosevelt said in 1942 to two of his staffers – one a Catholic, one a Jew – that ‘you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.’ But he was joking, in his sawtoothed way, and they knew it. America was by then fighting for a world of religious freedom, and if America’s collective religious imagination as yet only extended to Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism, the point still stood.12

Ryrie, Alec. The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (p. 25). Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.

Canada is of course the elder brother compared to the prodigal American son who rebelled. Nothing like a prodigal son triggering the defensiveness and re-activating nationalism by re-electing an Orange man. 

Ryrie (who is a Brit) points out that it was finally Roosevelt who won the day on this cementing American hegemony. It was OUR universal empire of the four freedoms that scolded Uganda in keeping up with gay liberation OR ELSE… 

Trump is the most ironic character here in that his nationalism is an abandonment of the quiet Empire America has been running all along. Western Europe is sort of like the Ukraine of the 1990s not quite knowing what to do with momma Russia has to pull back. Hungary figured it out quickly though. 

Americans, like the Brits before us just found the Empire too expensive to keep. Unfortunately Empire is sort of a way to allow limited wars and avoid the sort of powder keg that WW1 was with competing regional powers. 

The religion of the empire is going away with the empire. What will happen next? The reversion to older root stock is a reasonable expectation. 

The true irony is that rather than some Brit in a pit helmet the true conservatives today wave rainbow flags in blue hair and rainbow vestments of mainline churches. https://youtu.be/tDPMcdd7F0A?si=x_fGzPlExge9hVai

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