The “not-Christian” rhetoric has got to stop. We keep resorting to this sunny Sunday-school version of Christianity the good. But in order to believe that, you have to discount most of the last 1700 years of organized Christianity’s history.
But from the persecution of Arianism through the crusades and the church standing in the way of every progressive social development, through the hills of dead children in residential schools, to this awful christofascism… this is what religion without secular constraint does. This is what it always did. This is what it will always do.
Most of the Christians most people in the modern west will have ever met, up to a point, were in fact decent secular people in a secular society. They may have affected to be Christians is some airy fairy way, but their behaviour, for instance not persecuting people who were not their in-group, their behaviour was constrained by a secular society, by the separation of church and state. THIS is exactly what was inevitably going to happen when that separation broke down, when religious ideology was once again allowed to govern individual conduct.
You should have known full well this would happen. You were warned. But you wanted to pretend that the whole blood soaked history of Christianity was just a few bad actors. That REAL Christians didn’t do all the horrendous things they in fact either did or facilitated, any time they were ever in political control.