which churches are/were pro-war?

besides the Southern Baptists

that is unbelievably sickening

Convention was formed? They split with the Northern Baptists over slavery.

I was raised Southern Baptist -- my parents aren't even affiliated with them anymore. I've heard preachers deliver rascist sermons. They're hated by a lot of people here in the South, but they still wield an inordinate amount of political power.

they attended during the elections. The pastor was trying to tell the congregation who they should vote for...and it wasn't the Dems.

In one of the largest African-American churches in Houston, TX. The pastor asked the congregation to give Ron Kirk (D) consideration (because he had just given a speech), but don't forget about his boy, Rick Perry (R) for Governor in the same breath.

The whole sermon they didn't say a peep about the build-up prior to the Iraq invasion.

I don't know what is worse. The silence of the "Black Church" in the run-up to Bush & Co.'s invasion or the way the "Black Church" (or at least some parts of it) have become nothing but corporations more focused on fundraising than social causes like they once were. But maybe I'm crazy.

My next door neighbor was (they have since moved, hope it wasn't something I said) a charismatic Catholic and wholeheartedly supported the war. I didn't even bother asking how she got around the whole pope thing, but I did give her a hand out from the Vatican on the Catholic teachings on war.

The Pope spoke out very strongly against the war.

The local Baptist church here in Florence, KY had a pro-war rally on July 4. I know because it was televised on public access. The guest speaker was a vietnam veteran who talked about how evil the muslims are and that they had this war coming, that the war is just in God's eyes. It made me sick to hear that shit.

he made one statement which i think was a failsafe so people couldn't say later he didn't speak out...

the Pope was VERY vocal AGAINST bush8s war!!!!...and the PNACers knew this would be so and launched ait early attack against catholic church in 2000/01 to discredit it because the catholic church has ALWAYS been social justice and peace activists...remember phil and daniel berrigan, thomas merton, dorothy day, archbishop oscar ramero and mother teresa...the nuns arrested in past 3 2 years...and catholic church has lead the annual march on the school of the americas at ft benning Ga. for over 15 years and hundreds of priest and nuns are arrested every year and spent years in prison for "crossing the line" damn it!

http://umns.umc.org/03/mar/178.htm

snip>

WASHINGTON (UMNS) – Nearly 70 people, including a United Methodist bishop and dozens of other religious leaders, were arrested near the White House March 26 during a peaceful demonstration against the war with Iraq.

snip>

Others arrested included Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit; Rabbi Arthur Waskow of Philadelphia; Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s; and Nobel Peace Prize laureates Jody Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire.

Those arrested were charged with demonstrating without a permit, according to Sgt. Scott Fear, U.S. Park Police spokesman. The group

snip>


sounds pretty vocal to me.

but he had them all praying for Mr. Bush, and sermonizing that now was the time to support the troups and that protesting would only lead to blah blah blah....so I would conclude that he was pro-war.

the church itself was anti-war (as per their consistant life ethic), but the people of the church (and all churches for that matter) are not monoliths.

That's the way it is in my parish. Many, many pro-war Catholics.

big hawks.

Remember the Crusades.

But Catholics are not historically peaceful, remember Joan of Arc. Also, many bloody battles were fought by Isabella and Ferdinand of Aragon and Castille to drive the Moors from Spain, all in the name of Catholicism and with the approval of Rome. These battles were not in self defense but to drive the non-Christian inhabitants from Spain.

There are peace loving Catholics and peace loving orders of religious, however, Catholicism itself is not peaceful like the Quakers and others that really preach peace.

That's like saying that Germans are a violent people because of WWII, the Franco-Prussian War, or the barbarians attacks on rome. That's like saying all Italians have a bloodlust because the Romans watched galdaiators fight.

What about Joan of Arc? She was a Catholic woman fighting for France in the Hundred years war between England and France, get your history straight at least. She was both burned and cannonized by the church, thus showing your extreme over-simplification to be erroneous.

As for Ferdinand and Isabella, the Moors/Muslims had driven up into spain overthrowing the Catholic/chrisitan rulers. Does that make Islam a violent religion? No, but when its Catholicism damn they must be violent people. Ferdinand and isabella fought a political war, one ally happened to be the church which was a powerful POLITICAL force at the time.

Has the Church done ill in the past yes, does this make it violent no.

Your statements read as ignorant as the freepers complaining about Islam being a religion of violence

Western European Catholics were forced by the King to attack Arabs nearly 1000 years ago. Therefore, catholics who are under 700 years old cannot possibly be peaceful. Anyone who would suggest that Catholics who dissolved the military in Costa Rica are peaceful must be a flaming retard.

my pastor is too. so are many of our members-but not a majority, sad to say.

and insulting statements i've seen in awhile. Way to bring the level of discourse up and work with fellow DUers to help get progressives elected. With bigotry like that who needs enemies

read above

My Catholic friend told me her church supported the war. When I asked how it could when the pope didn't support the war she said, "We don't have to do every thing the pope tells us." So I guess now Catholics can pick and choose.

Long time social activists and liberal church.

and Amish and Menonites...all the traditonal peace churches. Also many of the other religious groups, not just Christians, must have been against the war also non-theists, humanists etc. since the "war" was illegal abnd inhumane.

what churches advocated the war but many christian (born again types)
coservative church members were pro-war. They are also pro-death penalty, yet the are pro-life. That just doesn't make any sense whatsoever

edited to add church members

Many Southern Baptists supported the war because they are the ones who bought the Southern Baptist Convention in the last ten years. (Falwell, Dobson... I'm looking your way.)

But Southern Baptist churches are autonomous. Some hold to a pacifist belief, just like Mennonites. Others rejected the war, and there is even a Baptist Peace Fellowship. In fact, Jimmy Carter is one of only 2 Baptists to win the Nobel Peace Prize and opposed the Iraq war. The other Baptist was MLK Jr., who opposed the vietnam war. Clarence Jordan ( www.koinoniapartners.org )was a Southern Baptist Pastor and essentially helped begin the Civil Rights movement. He was investigated by McCarthy because he was against WWII.

BTW, the Southern Baptists reversed their position on slavery in the years following the Civil War- 130 years ago. The bigots who still exist today (Hagee, maybe?) are not doctrinally true Baptists.

In the last 20 years or so, those who took control of the Southern Baptist Convention have systematically eliminated perceived "liberal" professors from their colleges and universities. This, along with the politicization of the church's doctrinal pronouncements, has caused an ongoing exodus of members and entire congregations. You're right in what you say about Baptists and their core beliefs. However, the Southern Baptist Convention seems to have disregarded those core beliefs in recent years and has morphed into a radical political action committee.

that's why I left and went to the Presbyterian Church. I hope I can someday return, because while I like my church, Presbyterianism is just too formal for me. I still visit Carter's church sometimes and enjoy it though, since I live locally, but they've joined a splinter group of the Southern Baptist Convention called the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. They're currently the true Southern Baptists in exile.

that simply calls itself Reformed. I guess, theologically speaking, it has more in common with the Presbyterians than any other denomination. I'm glad to see they've moved on from the Southern Baptists -- I was a teenager when all that crap started within the church and I saw the implications of it all before they did. I wasn't sure how they would deal with it all -- whether they'd just accept what people were shoving at them or if they'd stand up. They did me proud!

the Methodists are losing members

they may be starting to gain some members again, but overall they lost a lot of them during the 90s. Lots of congregations left, and when Jimmy Carter finally gave up on a compromise with the fundies, that was the last straw for a lot of people, and they quickly left and formed new Baptist denominations.

I know for a fact that Southern Baptists have lost a lot of members in America. But they are evangelical, so they're also constantly making converts. They send "missionaries" constantly into heathen areas like Utah and Spain, where people haven't heard the "gospel." Is that enough to make up for what they've lost? Who knows -- but in the end, you only have the numbers of the Southern Baptist Convention to guide you.

I love to point him out as my example. :)

So that would mean they would probably support Bush.

during the Clinton administation?

Church of Christ churches are also autonomous, not having a creed. So views could run the gamut. The general view is to pray for the President, no matter who it is.

thier the only ones i know of ALL others came out publicly AGAINST bush*s war!

:puke: :puke: :puke:

I really found the fundy Baptists to be the dumbest white people I had ever met in my life. But they don't just go to church on Sunday, it seems they have to go during the week so that the brainwashing is reinforced. I really feel sorry for the ones who wake up and realize everything they had believed in and lived for is lies and I have met a few that this happened to. Unfortunately, it hasn't happened to enough of them.

Very few, if any, denominations are or were "pro war." Many congregations supported this and other wars, many didn't, and many church governing bodies fell all over themselves defining "Just War" and tried not to alienate their congregations.

Even within church groups and congregations, there are divisions. ELCA Lutherans, for instance subscribe to the Just War doctrines, and made a statement against this war a an unjust one, but many congregations disagreed. Missouri Synod Lutherans take Just War less seriously, and made few comments at all, tacitly going along with the war.

Methodists were also divided, with some against it, and some for it. The divide was, as with the Baptists, largely along North/South lines.

There is a similar divide among Jews. Judaism has strains of thought similar to Just War, but it's a minority opinion, iirc.

God bless the good ol' ELCA. Both my congregations (Eugene and Cheyenne) were anti-war, although the Cheyenne congregation was a lot less so than Eugene. One of the ladies at Central, the church in Eugene, helped me make it through my first protest without doing anything too stupid. (before she stepped in I almost got beat up by some anti-semites!)

We were called unpatriotic because we questioned that stance. There may have been others who thought like us, but they never said. The stance of the church was that the war was just.

I know, I called and asked. That is what I was told.

Clinton was raised Southern Baptist

?

the religious right in the early 1980s definitely had something to do with it, and they somehow took over their churches. It costs a lot of money to send a pastor to vote at the Southern Baptist Convention, and typically small and rural Baptist churches can't afford it, so I theorize that only megachurches could afford to send voters- megachurches dominated by the most wealthy Baptists. That's only one reason, though. Falwell was definitely influential somehow, but if you look closely his beliefs are more Puritanical Calvinist than Baptist.

If anybody can find a detailed explanation of how this happened on the net, I would greatly appreciate it.

your help here! If I remember correctly, there were these churches -- in Atlanta and Dallas and other large cities in the South. And they grew to gargantuan sizes and their pastors had gargantuan egos. And these pastors, like their churches, were wealthy and had certain political leanings. They must have looked at the popes in the Middle Ages for inspiration. They had a congregation of 20,000 people who believed what the pastor told them, but that wasn't enough. They needed temporal as well as spiritual power.........

Like Howard Hunt of Texas. They realized that the free beliefs of Baptists could be exploited. They decided to break any consensus about political, moral, or religious issues, and do their best to marginalize people who didn't agree.

if they liked homosexuality and abortion. They asked them if they liked communism. It was just a matter of time before their people became worried about the direction their nation was going. And they were doing their patriotic best to stop America from sliding into the hands of the atheistic communist humanist jaws of Satan.

The last 10 years or so has been the final takeover.

At long last, I found this link. Makes sense.

http://www.tribalmessenger.org/daily_buzz/right-wing-history.htm

This guy explains it better than I ever could. For obvious reasons.

I have no idea how this thing could ever be reversed. Maybe it's because I'm too tired right now. It will have to wait until tomorrow.

...would come from what they describe as "non-denominational" churches. While that sounds very open and tolerant, the truth is that most "non-denominational" types are actually fundamentalists who are against denominations because a) all of them have "departed from the faith" (i.e. they're not fundamentalist) and b) "all you need is the Bible, anyway." In case it isn't obvious, most of these have heavy ties to the Religious Right, and their "Biblical" beliefs have a considerable amount of nationalist heresy -- the notion that God has chosen the U.S. as a sort of "new Israel," and that the civil, political, and ethical standards in place at the time of the founding of the U.S. (or at least those they imagine as having been in place) constitute "God's plan for mankind."

:eyes:

I don't recall any major denominations other than the Southern Baptists backing the Iraq war. Even the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, who normally aren't too fond of Muslims in general, didn't have much to say this time -- probably because they knew that Saddam Hussein's government had been notably generous to Iraq's Christians (he saw them as part of a buffer against Islamic fundamentalism), and that said Christians were likely to suffer reprisals once Saddam was removed, and probably suffer even more if the end result is a Shi'ite-run "Islamic Republic of Iraq."

they didn't have an official stance, although most leaders were in favor of it.

The only church I know of to officially have a pro-war stance was the Moonies.

At there last convention they even voted to continue support of the war.

Read my previous post.

At least here in Michigan. Talked to a Lutheran minister on the phone and he explained that taking over Iraq was consistent with the teaching of the Bible.
Another church(accross the street from me) had a "support our troops" message in their neon lit sign for weeks.

there are different synods. That must've been a conservative synod as the ELCA was against it.

church , synod, what do I care. you asked the question.

There is a tremendous theological chasm between the ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) and the Wisconsin synods. You simply cannot lump together the various synods of the Lutheran faith and call it the Lutheran church - the differences are too great.

Yeah the southern baptists are the largest protestant congergation though. I heard that in the 70s they voted unaanimously to confirm a womans right to choose. I think they've gotten much more fundementalist after that.

http://www.mchorse.com/southernbaptistanon.htm

SNIP...."I'm a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) survivor. I have survived the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC, and today remain a faithful and active Baptist. I have the fortune of living in Texas where the fundamentalists have been unable to takeover the state convention. There is a Baptist church in San Antonio, affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), where I can worship as a free and historical Baptist. I'm no longer a Baptist minister, but serve as an elder and the treasurer of this congregation.

My break with the SBC was long and painful. It began in 1994 when the fundamentalists fired Russell Dilday from his position as President of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. That was when I began to realize that there was no going back to the way things used to be....."END SNIP..

I doubt many even realize it has happened. I know and have taught some of the figures involved in this takeover. I knew their parents, their families. They were good people. They have been propelled in a direction that is dangerous. Most do not even know it.

On Edit:
This saying was found at the site, very apropos:

All struggles are essentially power struggles.
Who will rule, who will lead,
Who will define, refine, confine, design,
Who will dominate.
All struggles are essentially power struggles,
And most are no more intellectual than
Two rams knocking their heads together.

-Octavia E. Butler