OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
Again, sure. I don't agree with that understanding of Christianity, but I am very conscious of what I might term the 'neo-pagan right' or the 'post-Christian right', and the accompanying wish for a faith more robustly nationalist or even racialist than Christianity.
Christianity is fascinating for... well, a lot of reasons, and obviously the most important one is that it's literally true, but putting that aside and speaking more sociologically, Christianity is simultaneously individualist and universalist. God is the creator of all things and all people and the faith has a universal scope. Nothing is excluded; God is not parochial. At the same time, God is always encountered as an individual, and individual piety, and the unique relationship that God forms with every single person is likewise at the heart of the faith.
Where does that leave intermediate institutions? Elsewhere in the thread we have the start of a discussion about what this means for the church, and there's also a very rich well of Christian reflection on the concept of nations. What are 'the nations' as a theological category? Are they a problem, something merely temporary and to be abolished in the eschaton, and at worst occasions of idolatry? Or are they in some way intended features of God's design, or vectors of blessing?
I am more sympathetic to the latter view, and have talked about this before, but even granting, as I would, that the nations and their various searches for God are intentional features of his design (cf. Acts 17:26), the question of what their precise role in design is remains heavily contested, and that's where I'm going to end up in pretty fierce dispute with the new paganism, as it were.
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
Sure? I'm not saying that those historically Catholic countries don't have amnesties or allow illegal migrants. I'm saying that they don't do that noticeably more often or more enthusiastically than similar non-Catholic countries.
OliveTapenade
13hr ago
Wouldn't they still be considered members of their native nations? The question is not whether the Indian in question was literally born inside a reservation, but whether the Indian is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
My understanding is that as early as the 19th century the understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment was that, outside the exceptional case of natives, anybody born on United States soil was a citizen. There was some room to debate it but Wong Kim Ark settled that and has stood as precedent for well over a hundred and twenty years. My sense of most of the pre-WKA disputes is that they are transparently racially motivated, and generally casting about wildly for justification, via a Dred-Scott-like "well, it can't possibly have meant that group as well!" rather than anything plausibly rooted in the text itself.
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
Cromwellian theocracy is one of the possible political arrangements compatible with Protestantism, I would say. But it is not required by Protestantism either.
OliveTapenade
19hr ago
lol. lmao, even. It's a great ideal, but it's very clearly not the reality.
I am shocked, shocked to hear that the United States supreme court has acted lawlessly!
In case the sarcasm was not clear, I wholly agree that the history of the supreme court is full of politically-motivated or agenda-driven rulings that do not conform to the plain original meaning of the text. Barely two hours ago I complained about some of them.
I do not consider lawless past action to license lawless future action. The court has behaved badly in the past. That does not confer a right to behave badly now or in the future.
OliveTapenade
19hr ago
"All people to whom United States law applies", basically. In practice it means "not the Reservations, not diplomats". I think the original meaning of the phrase is pretty clear, and interpretation of it to confer birthright citizenship goes back to the 19th century.
OliveTapenade
19hr ago
Multiculturalism elegantly refutes the protestant notion that there can be authority without authorities.
This is not a Protestant notion.
Obviously Protestantism acknowledges authorities in some sense - the Bible is clearly authoritative, for instance. You must be taking the view that 'authorities' must mean some sort of human organisation.
But Protestantism clearly allows for the existence of human organisations and governance. Even leaving aside secular governments, which hold authority in their proper (and limited) spheres, every Protestant tradition that I'm aware of has governing authorities in the church. Protestant churches have synods and assemblies and all the tools of government. What Protestants assert is that these authorities, though valid, are necessarily subject to higher authorities, which includes the likes of scripture.
Authorities exist but they are bounded in a way that they are not in Roman Catholicism. The Protestant case would be that the Catholic investiture of absolute interpretive and governing authority in the institutional body of the church is a kind of idolatry.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
For what it's worth, and I realise this wasn't directed at me, I think Obergefell does join the long list of decisions based on the Fourteenth Amendment that are indefensible on their own merits. One of the reasons I think the Fourteenth was a mistake was that it is sufficiently open to be read so as to smuggle in any policy change along these lines.
I disagree with the policy outcome of Obergefell, but that is irrelevant to the legal reasoning. As regards the law, I think the material substance of Obergefell was a matter for congress, not the courts.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
I suppose I have a very simple take on this, which is:
The Fourteenth Amendment clearly says birthright citizenship. Therefore birthright citizenship.
That's the end of it, surely? We don't need to import anything else. The supreme court's only job is to say what the law is. I think that birthright citizenship is an incredibly bad policy. The US is a small and radical outlier for having it; almost every other country on Earth is more sane.
However, I do not see any other way to interpret:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
That's what it says, so that's what the law is. It's stupid, but it's the kind of stupid that requires a constitutional amendment to repeal. Get on that, America.
OliveTapenade
21hr ago
Let's sanity-check this for a moment.
Let us consider comparable First World countries. If your theory holds, then the influence of the Catholic Church should positively correlate with mass migration. So, for instance, you might expect Ireland to be considerably more supportive of mass migration than England. Italy should be more supportive of it than Sweden. Spain should support it more than Denmark. Even in America, we should expect the US to be, though influenced by the Catholic Church, less supportive of mass migration than the entirety of Central America and South America.
Is this what we actually see?
I applaud the inventiveness of the top-level post - "the US is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Catholics" is a nice change from "the US is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Jews". But it doesn't survive more than a few minutes' consideration.
If nothing else, I think it requires a very specific and narrow level of Catholic ideology in power. The USCCB supports refugees and immigrants while still opposing abortion, euthanasia, LGBT, and so on - well, how are all those latter issues doing? We just saw the pope being quite critical of AI bots. I guess the Catholic conspiracy had better get on to that immediately, because man, it is doing a bad job of stopping those in the US.
I don't follow? What are my choices meant to be?
I think you can make a Christian argument for the existence of nations and national cultures being a positive good, and in fact I would make an argument like that. I'd say also that there is a universal moral law to which nations no less than individuals must conform, and that this implies particular moral obligations about how nations relate to each other. I think that means I can robustly support the existence of a community of nations. I am not obligated to endorse some sort of one world government, and I am certainly not obligated to endorse open borders.
What does Acts 17:27 have to do with that? That is indeed a justification for why God would set many nations and many peoples upon the Earth - that we would each seek him and reach out for him and perhaps find him. That is good and entirely compatible with the continued existence of nations.
More options
Context Copy link