Whether someone is an alieving Christian can be hard to determine because of where you set your threshhold—typically people act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others. But entirelyuseless brought it up in the context of the people who run the government and I think it’s exceptionally clear that most of them aren’t. I certainly doubt that the members of the Supreme Court who voted for gay marriage are either evangelicals or religious Christians.
Christianity is not a unified body of doctrine, and a very plausible explanation for why people typically “act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others” is that they in fact believe that some things are true but not others.
That’s the inverse of “no true Scotsman”. “No true Scotsman” refers to the situation where you arbitrarily exclude people who you don’t want to count as members of a class, by saying “that isn’t really Christian”. In this case, you can arbitrarily include people who you do want to count, by saying that any non-Christian things about them aren’t really non-Christian.
Then every Christian can count as a religious Christian.
Whether someone is an alieving Christian can be hard to determine because of where you set your threshhold—typically people act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others. But entirelyuseless brought it up in the context of the people who run the government and I think it’s exceptionally clear that most of them aren’t. I certainly doubt that the members of the Supreme Court who voted for gay marriage are either evangelicals or religious Christians.
Christianity is not a unified body of doctrine, and a very plausible explanation for why people typically “act as though some things about Christianity are true but not others” is that they in fact believe that some things are true but not others.
That’s the inverse of “no true Scotsman”. “No true Scotsman” refers to the situation where you arbitrarily exclude people who you don’t want to count as members of a class, by saying “that isn’t really Christian”. In this case, you can arbitrarily include people who you do want to count, by saying that any non-Christian things about them aren’t really non-Christian.
Then every Christian can count as a religious Christian.