These Christian Nationalists Want to Stone Adulterers to Death
“Stoning is appropriately barbaric,” argues Luke Saint, the author of the Sound Doctrine of Theocracy and a recent guest on the podcast of the Lancaster Patriot, a far-right publication based in Lancaster Pennsylvania, an hour-and-a-half drive west of Philadelphia.
“That means there’s no closed doors. There’s nothing in the back room, where you’re just executed quickly and quietly — out of the sight of the public,” he adds. With stoning, Saint advocates, “Everyone knows who the accuser is. And everybody knows who the victim is. Everyone knows who the perpetrator is. Everything’s out in the open.”
“Nobody wants to do it,” Saint says. “And that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
Foes of Christian nationalism are frequently derided as hysterical when they compare the movement to the Taliban, or the fictional Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale. But as this podcast illuminates, there are factions of Christian nationalists who don’t just want to take America back to its supposed Christian origins. They seek to jettison our constitutional system of checks and balances in favor of a government based on biblical law, including reviving punishments that clash violently with modern notions of human rights.
Saint is an extremist, but he’s not a nobody, and he’s not alone. His interviewer is the Patriot’s managing editor, Chris Hume, who has editorialized that America’s path forward must be “blazed by setting a clear course towards a Christian society, based on the Bible and biblical law.” (Hume also believes that the GOP’s current crop of far-right candidates are far too squishy: “Until politicians like [Doug] Mastriano and [Ron] DeSantis begin operating on a platform of biblical law, they will only propagate the problems.”)
He is also the chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society (MARS), which touts that the Bible provides “all necessary directions and instructions for a just, happy, and productive society.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...234797127/
“Stoning is appropriately barbaric,” argues Luke Saint, the author of the Sound Doctrine of Theocracy and a recent guest on the podcast of the Lancaster Patriot, a far-right publication based in Lancaster Pennsylvania, an hour-and-a-half drive west of Philadelphia.
“That means there’s no closed doors. There’s nothing in the back room, where you’re just executed quickly and quietly — out of the sight of the public,” he adds. With stoning, Saint advocates, “Everyone knows who the accuser is. And everybody knows who the victim is. Everyone knows who the perpetrator is. Everything’s out in the open.”
“Nobody wants to do it,” Saint says. “And that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
Foes of Christian nationalism are frequently derided as hysterical when they compare the movement to the Taliban, or the fictional Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale. But as this podcast illuminates, there are factions of Christian nationalists who don’t just want to take America back to its supposed Christian origins. They seek to jettison our constitutional system of checks and balances in favor of a government based on biblical law, including reviving punishments that clash violently with modern notions of human rights.
Saint is an extremist, but he’s not a nobody, and he’s not alone. His interviewer is the Patriot’s managing editor, Chris Hume, who has editorialized that America’s path forward must be “blazed by setting a clear course towards a Christian society, based on the Bible and biblical law.” (Hume also believes that the GOP’s current crop of far-right candidates are far too squishy: “Until politicians like [Doug] Mastriano and [Ron] DeSantis begin operating on a platform of biblical law, they will only propagate the problems.”)
He is also the chairman of the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society (MARS), which touts that the Bible provides “all necessary directions and instructions for a just, happy, and productive society.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/po...234797127/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
