Sorry, but we're not to blame for that. The West has not been Christian, it has been a culture-gang that has merely used Jesus as its gang sign.
Hmm? I don't care about 'the West' being Christian (or the East, or the North, or the South). Directions don't accept or reject Christianity.
My point was that, because of the affect of the increasingly aggressive secularization of society on everyone in it (Christian and non-Christian), the influence of the claimed majority doesn't result in what most people here would consider to be a Christian society. And it doesn't do that because those of us here who would rightly say "In a Christian society, XYZ wouldn't have (ever) happened" are a part of the minority who still care about what would/should/ought to have represented to begin with, as opposed to the majority who may culturally identify as Christian because they went through first communion, or their parents made them go to Bible camp once, or Jesus is, like, a
totally chill dude. That's what I meant by Christians becoming just another one of many groups: We're the minority within the majority for even having this discussion, rather than just parroting "America is Christian because look at the percentages" (as though those can never change, or as though they mean something even if they have no discernable effect upon society) and then calling it a day, or even worse, saying America is not a Christian country because look at all the different non-Christians in it (what Fr. Josiah Trenham of the Antiochian Orthodox Church refers to as the Diana Eck model, after the Harvard comparative religion professor, referring to the methodological blindspot found in modern religious studies research where every group is represented in the narrative build around survey data
except for Christians who are the numerical majority, in order to make the case that the existence of all these other groups in itself means this or that about the religious character of the country, as though it somehow cannot be religiously heterogeneous and also have a dominant religious identity by self-identification, as many other countries already do without sociologists claiming this or that about their religious identities when the clear majority of the inhabitants of the country identify with a particular faith, e.g., Lebanon, UAE, Russia, etc).
If America had ever been Christian, there would not have been slavery, there would not have been genocide against native Americans, there would not have been the crushing of human laberors for profit, there would never have been Jim Crow--all of them preached as "righteous" and biblical from the very pulpits of "Christian" congregations.
No, that wasn't Christian, that was just Jesus used as a gang-sign by a cultural gang that ran roughshod over everyone else.
I did not grow up in a world of "Christian culture." I grew up in a world where a white man could kill me with zero repercussions, or rape my mother with zero repercussions, where the police would even join in or stand by and watch.
Every person in these pictures called himself a Christian, but every one went to hell if he did not repent of being in this place on these nights:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zsK9qQYI...pp+and+Abram+Smith,+Marion,+Indiana,+1930.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C65J0V2XAAElsQ6.jpg
Yeah, I'm not really talking about any of this. I'm talking about how it is that we can have a country where the political sway of the majority is used against the practice of the faith of that same majority, due to the effect of a particularly Western type of secularization upon the entire society, which is a different (though probably related) discussion than whether or not people who claim to be Christian or that "they were raised in a Christian society" actually behave as their faith says they ought to.
Let me put it this way:
In Egypt, the majority is Muslim, so they put into place laws that reinforce the faith of the Muslims in a very public way, as a way of being responsive to the majority of the society, who publicly manifest their faith in what is nevertheless a religiously heterogeneous society, with neither the expectation nor reality of punishment for doing so.
In India, the majority is Hindu, so they put into place laws that reinforce the faith of the Hindus in a very public way, as a way of being responsive to the majority of the society, who publicly manifest their faith in what is nevertheless a religiously heterogeneous society, with neither the expectation nor reality of punishment for doing
In the USA/Canada/Australia/whatever western country, the majority is Christian, and so they put into place laws that reinforce the separation of the expression of the faith of the majority from the society, in the name of being open to absolutely everyone and every religious idea they may have (but to some more than others, a la
Animal Farm: Halal Edition...I guess the pigs are changed to chickens in that one or something), because to do otherwise would not be freedom-loving enough, or would be racist, or would or wouldn't be this or that.
See, it's different outcomes and seemingly different motivations, and yes somewhat different behaviors, but not in the sense of "these people aren't/have never really been truly XYZ."
Even when I agree with you, as I do here, to break it down to the level of behaviors that we can classify as either in keeping with Christianity or not (which we can do, but this particular subforum is probably not the best venue for it) feels a bit like a slightly more sophisticated version of the No True Scotsman fallacy. And besides, I wouldn't argue about the West being Christian anyway. I'm a westerner by birth, but I belong to an Eastern church which has had very little to do with western Christianity in the last 1600 years or so, so I don't feel qualified to say who is behaving better, as it's not like I'm going to be completely objective here.