It started with one friend saying "Find me on Parler." I immediately started looking at what Parler was. According to wikipedia, Parler is a United States-based microblogging and social networking service launched in August 2018. Parler has a significant user base of Trump supporters, conservatives, and Saudi nationalists. Posts on the website often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories.
As I watched my friends, sign up for Parler, it seemed that those who were moving were moving for one reason, they don't want to be challenged by the left. They don't like being challenged by those who didn't vote for Mr. Trump. That is the only reasons they can be ignoring the fact that Parler's far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories. In fact, the only way I can explain what is going on is Exodus.
In fact, I personally don't see how Christians can go over to Parler in good conscience.
Antisemitism should stop Christians if nothing else does. No doubt there is plenty of overt anti-Semitism, whether in the blasphemous slur that all Jews in all places are responsible for the death of Christ, or in other forms of stereotypical assumptions on display in Christian communities about Jewish people. Anti-Semitic attitudes can be quite subtle too.
A common interpretative move in Christian circles is to extrapolate from the anti-Pharisaic passages in the New Testament to Judaism writ large. Many contemporary Christians see themselves as the spiritual ones, while imagining that “the Jews” are the Pharisees of the New Testament, unyielding in their legalism. The notion that all Jews are “legalistic” and obsessed with ritual instead of a living relationship with God is quite prevalent in Christian communities. My experience has uniformly been that people who espouse these beliefs do so almost entirely without actual knowledge of contemporary Jewish belief and practice and have no deep friendships with Jewish persons.
At its worst, these attitudes may contribute to persons becoming actively anti-Semitic. At the very least, such attitudes contribute to a culture of apathy and moral disconnection from our Jewish neighbors. Christians have a moral obligation to vocally condemn anti-Semitism through education and interfaith relationships.
Christians are commanded to love God and love their neighbor. A Christian cannot in good conscience do either of these things and be racist and anti-Semitic.
With respect to Christian attitudes towards Jews, it is important to know that Christianity was a Jewish religious movement. Jesus was Jewish and all his earliest followers were Jewish. The concerns, sacred texts, ethical assumptions, and theology of Christianity grew out of the context of Second Temple Judaism.
Jesus’ most fundamental teachings arose out of engagement with the sacred texts of Judaism. The spiritual and ethical core of Christian practice can be traced to Jesus’ response to the lawyer who asked him which was the greatest commandment of the Law in Matthew 22:35. Jesus responded with a pair of scriptural commands from the Hebrew Bible, the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:17-18.
Loving God and loving neighbor were the greatest commandments, Jesus said. And these were of course entirely consonant with the teachings and practice of Judaism. So, to hate any person is a violation of the command to love God and neighbor. For all persons are made in the image of God and we cannot love our neighbor if we hate them and spread lies about them.
So because of my beliefs, my love of the Jewish people I can't join Parler. If you are a Christian and you have made the jump for "Freedom of speech" remember you have freedom of speech, you can say what you want, you can share what you want, and believe it or not, you should be fact checking all this time.
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