The embrace of two politicians is not a repudiation for the overwhelming demonization that the left have made towards Christians. And their insistence that Christians and other people of faith should not be silenced and no be able to participate in the public square.

Again, this is based on a narrow definition of what makes one a Christian, Veronica. It’s also entirely without examples here. You can’t expect to be taken seriously when your response to being given concrete examples is to reject them while providing zero of your own.

Many Christians don’t like Trumps behaviour but they find it far more palatable to the smug/pompous behaviour from those on the left who look down on them and see them as inferior. There is a reason that Boris Johnson and the Tory party in the UK had a landside victory 2019.

The question you don’t seem to be entertaining at all is where this perception of smug and pompous behavior on the left, or a superiority complex, comes from. I’ll grant that some of this exists on the left, but you’re conveniently ignoring the equivalent on the right. Tell me about Trump and the Republicans’ treatment of immigrants, racial minorities, Muslims, and so many others. Why is your focus here so heavily and exclusively on religion and the left?

Perhaps what the left is criticizing is the hypocrisy and entangling of religion with politics in American conservatism. Perhaps the reason that Boris Johnson and the Tories had a landslide victory has more to do with their appeals to racism, xenophobia, and general bigotry in their politics than with intolerance or religious persecution by the left.

I’d say there are far more examples to prove the case of the former than to prove the latter, especially these days. It’s an antiquated fiction to pretend that the right is justifiably reacting to religious persecution. Their definition of religious persecution frequently involves their ability to go about restricting and trampling on the rights of others, as in the backlash both to gay rights and abortion rights in the U.S.

Also you seem to have a very narrow view of Christians and many of the verses you threw out in your article have to do with people (church members) who have toxic attitudes and behaviours and have no intention on changing.

My article is literally appealing to Christians as members of a broader religious demographic, so how are you finding a “very narrow view of Christians” in it? If you’re basing that on the scripture I quote in it, I’d argue that you’re in fact the one drawing on narrow criteria. Nowhere do I imply that scripture alone, or the verses I select in particular, are all it takes to be a Christian.

But to address what you claim about the context of those verses — yes, I’ve heard this before and I’m familiar with the context. I actually did study the Bible for years, including during university. There are indeed passages that have an historical context worth taking into account. However, I think it’s honestly a shallow argument to claim that just because a passage has a historical context, there can be no other valid interpretation of it.

The fact is that few, if any, Christians consistently treat their Bible that way. Should we take Christ’s sermon on the mount as wisdom to live by today, or was it just intended for his disciples because it was delivered to his disciples, according to scripture? If we take the latter view seriously, we might as well give up on seeing the Bible as anything other than a bygone relic. Which I hesitate to think many Christians (notably conservative ones) would be comfortable with. Context matters, but context isn’t everything, especially with religious documents that are religious in part because of what ‘eternal values’ they’re also believed to communicate.