BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley apologized Wednesday for his remarks about only Christians being his brothers and sisters.Read the rest here.
Bentley said he didn't mean to insult anyone when he told a church crowd on Monday that those who have not accepted Jesus as their savior are not his brothers and sisters, shocking some critics who questioned whether he can be fair to non-Christians.
"Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I'm telling you, you're not my brother and you're not my sister, and I want to be your brother," Bentley said Monday, just moments into his new administration, according to The Birmingham News.
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15 hours ago
8 comments:
He is simply going too far. This man should not be allowed to hold office and he should be impeached immediately. No government official should ever promote a religion and they should NEVER tell the people they lead how to worship, when to worship or who to worship.
Chris Taus--
Really? Impeached? From the article, it looks like he was speaking in a church to a church crowd. This was not an executive order mandating different treatment of Christians and non-Chistians, this was not the establishment of any particular religion, this was not the vetoing of some bill because Christians did not get preferential treatment. What this looks like is a governor invited to speak at a church who said some church-type stuff. Are you then saying that getting elected governor ought to require one to abandon any theological beliefs one might hold?
So was he speaking as a Christian man or as a governor? I think it would be hard for anyone to prove this either way. Free speech, people.
Tush-
Big difference in ol' Joe saying it and the Guv saying it.
Free speech involves responsibility especially for someone who is powerfully visible.
Matushka Anna--
Take a look at this article which gives more of what he said.
I'll note that Gov. Bentley is a Southern Baptist deacon, and he made this statement, what the writer of the article described as an "altar call" from the pulpit during a Southern Baptist church service.
I am just annoyed that he apologized for this. If somebody were to suggest that a Jewish politician who said something like "the Jewish people are in a unique covenant with God" at a synagogue somewhere could not be fair to gentiles, would that person not be rightly accused of being an irrational anti-semite? Yet we find that even in the Bible Belt, it seems that being a Christian and being the governor are seen as contradictory.
As an Orthodox Christian, I find this horrifying: to claim to be a follower of Christ and fail to see the image of Him in your neighbor is to betray that claim utterly and completely.
back when i was in college in alabama, 1993, i think it was, the Alabama Southern Baptist convention produced a county by county map of the state, with the percentage of "unsaved" in each one. at that time, they were only counting their fellow Baptists. not Methodists, Church of Christ, Pentecostals, and surely not Roman Catholic or Orthodox.
the issue here wasn't that the governor was speaking at a private church function, but was speaking in his capacity as governor in celebrations marking MLK day. that is what is unacceptable.
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