Christian Converser

Category: Nationalism

  • Political Faultlines Continue To Divide US Churches

    Apologies for the slowdown in delivery of posts from this blog in 2022. The authorship has experienced many distractions, much of which have been personal family circumstances. These have been overcome enough by now to resume blogging. A faultline that has emerged this year in the US over evangelical engagement with political culture in the…

  • US Theocracy Movement Gets A Boost [3]

    As outlined previously, the shift towards Dominionism / theocracy gained considerable momentum during the term of the Trump presidency and the lingering effects continue to the present day, not least because Trump is likely to seek a second term of office and has never ceased campaigning. Previous Republican presidents, however, saw the potential for the…

  • US Theocracy Movement Gets A Boost [1]

    Recent decisions by the US Supreme Court intentionally push North America further in the direction of a theocracy. As explained in previous posts in this blog, the current ideal of theocratic government is strongly intertwined with the significant following that dispensationalist theology has gained in the US since the mid-19th century. The USA is an…

  • Against Gun Idolatry – David French

    David French has written another informed commentary about the gun violence situation in the US, and here we see again the contrast between New Zealand and the American nation, and our different heritages. French sees the key problem as it happens in America today as being one of gun idolatry, and perhaps that is a…

  • David French’s Take On Critical Race Theory

    Critical Race Theory (CRT) has become the latest conservative evangelical bogeyman in the American church ever since the Trump Administration, whereby a relatively obscure and mostly unknown set of concepts (outside of the legal profession, where it has been taught at academic level for some decades) suddenly attained a very questionable amount of prominence as…

  • America Stumbles Towards Theocracy

    The big news in the USA in the last few weeks has been the possibility of the conservative-dominated Supreme Court repealing current federal abortion law (Roe v Wade). This is far from an open-and-shut case for theologians, despite the widespread support for this direction from conservative evangelicals in the US and worldwide. That’s because the…

  • NZ Churches Seek Judicial Review of Government Covid Protection Framework (Traffic Lights) [2]

    In the first part of this series we briefly examined the circumstances of the establishment of lodging court cases against the Government’s vaccine mandate policies by two separate groups of Christians. These groups are FreeToBeChurch, and the much more widely known Family First. The purpose of this part is to dig into some of the…

  • Theological Controversies Influencing US and NZ Churches [1]

    It’s very plain and has been for many years that churches in New Zealand are theologically influenced by viewpoints that originate from the USA. Whilst these ideas may be mainstream with the overall culture of society in America, they begin to look rather odd when imported into another country where cultural values are very different.…