[Jesus sits on a rock, speaking]
A new command I give you:
Love one another
[an angry character talks back to Jesus]
What if they’re something bad like gay, trans, brown, or communist though?
[Jesus is facepalming on his rock]
I don’t want to be a messiah anymore
Yes it certainly morphs after Constantine makes it the state religion, rather than a cult.
I am reading a book on the Baltic Crusades and it was talking about the diametrically opposed ideas of state violence and a pacifist religion. Essentially, pacifism doesn’t work as a state policy. The Christian church struggled to decide what violence the state should be able to commit.
Augustine, thought war could be justified in certain circumstances, one of which was if the following peace created more good than the evil if the war wasn’t fought.
Nowadays, I don’t think people even know that Christianity was/is a pacifist movement.
I mean, it should be obvious to Christians today that Jesus repeatedly and consistently made a clear distinction between the “kingdom of heaven” and secular nations. Separation of church and state was absolutely one of the premises the early church worked off of as a teaching of Jesus himself. The idea of a “Christian Nation” is indeed antithetical to the very foundations of Christianity. The early history of Christianity is pretty lost on people today and people are quite unaware of just how drastic the changes in Christianity were in the early 300s, and how gigantic of a deal it was for the Roman state to adopt Christianity at the time.
And don’t forget Aquinas, who literally sandwiched his one chapter on war between the chapters detailing mercy. If I remember the professors correctly, that was no mistake, and was very, very thematically intentional. Christians are downright fucked in the head as they try to cognitive dissonance their way into reconciling our species’ lust for war with high minded ideals of love and kindness.
That’s the neat thing. For some reason every war does.