The crisis in the U.S. church

“How can you be a Christian and support abortion?”

“How can you be a Christian and support Trump?”
Seemingly simple, the distance between the questions is massive, made wider by  Christology, pneumatology, eschatology and Biblical hermeneutic.
Simple questions are seldom simple.
More than anything, nationalism has overpowered Christianity in many people and in many churches. Nationalism is where the symbols of religion and government intertwine and become more important than the philosophies behind them. Nationalism helps you value the country’s flag over people.
As some American Christians moved away from the values behind the words, and simply worshiped the pages of the Bible, it grew easier to prioritize tax cuts for the wealthy over programs for the poor.
Nationalist Christians seem to care more about abortion, than about the health of living women or children.
(By the way, if you want the government to make abortion illegal, then you surrender to the government the authority to make abortion mandatory in the future. Think about that for a while.)
They worship a false Christianity of their own creation and outright reject the actual teachings of Jesus.
The gap between the two versions is as different and stark as the people it affects — the powerful rich and the powerless poor.
Jesus is on the side of the powerless. The least of us. The weakest.
When the actual words of Jesus lose their meaning, people suffer, churches lose their way and Christians leaders become no different than the oppressors of the Empire. Nationalist, Western Christianity becomes an institution for the powerful and not Good News for the poor.
“The crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence.” ~ Walter Brueggemann