This week in Come, Follow Me, I read about the first use of the term "Christian":
Too often secular elites and government officials focus so much on certain favored identities--such as race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity--that they miss the importance of religion as a profound source of identity. They see religion and religious faith--especially traditional Christian faith--as something akin to a quirky private belief or hobby, like secretly believing in the yeti or UFOs, or belonging to a weekly bowling league. "You are welcome to have your own private fantasy world, but keep it private and don't make me acknowledge it!"
Perhaps that would be harmless by itself, but too often secular elites and government officials also see faith and faith communities, with their competing demands on loyalty and their adherence to tradition, as an intractable obstacle that interferes with achieving their own ideological views of a just and modern society
I fear that often they even see religion itself--not only particular beliefs to which they object but also faith in God itself--as outright dangerous, as an uneducated and superstitious way of thing that ought to be cast aside as soon as reasonably possible. "Religion is obviously a fraud," this thinking seems to go, "and while sometimes it is harmless enough, the sooner it is abandoned in favor of reason and reality, the sooner we can be secure against its dangerous consequences."
Some people are increasingly willing to use social and legal forces to pressure people to change or abandon their religious beliefs, convinced they will be better off for having discarded those beliefs as quaint anachronisms. (Elder L. Whitney Clayton, Religious Identity Like Marrow in Our Bones, Ensign, July 2019, p. 54)
And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. (Acts 11: 26)Then, when reading an article from the Ensign, I found these gems of paragraphs:
Too often secular elites and government officials focus so much on certain favored identities--such as race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity--that they miss the importance of religion as a profound source of identity. They see religion and religious faith--especially traditional Christian faith--as something akin to a quirky private belief or hobby, like secretly believing in the yeti or UFOs, or belonging to a weekly bowling league. "You are welcome to have your own private fantasy world, but keep it private and don't make me acknowledge it!"
Perhaps that would be harmless by itself, but too often secular elites and government officials also see faith and faith communities, with their competing demands on loyalty and their adherence to tradition, as an intractable obstacle that interferes with achieving their own ideological views of a just and modern society
I fear that often they even see religion itself--not only particular beliefs to which they object but also faith in God itself--as outright dangerous, as an uneducated and superstitious way of thing that ought to be cast aside as soon as reasonably possible. "Religion is obviously a fraud," this thinking seems to go, "and while sometimes it is harmless enough, the sooner it is abandoned in favor of reason and reality, the sooner we can be secure against its dangerous consequences."
Some people are increasingly willing to use social and legal forces to pressure people to change or abandon their religious beliefs, convinced they will be better off for having discarded those beliefs as quaint anachronisms. (Elder L. Whitney Clayton, Religious Identity Like Marrow in Our Bones, Ensign, July 2019, p. 54)
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