Jennifer Strope

I’d watch

Are Evangelicals dishonest or just low-IQ? St. Alphonsus didn’t write in English, but Italian: “Io vi venero”: “I venerate thee”. And when first translated, “worship” was used to include Latria AND Dulia. Typical Evangelical: thinks everything was written last week in English.

Theologically I dont agree with Catholicism but they rlly made beautiful churches

Fact! Do you notice how often the Protestants on X so often charge that Catholics don't read or are forbidden from reading scripture? It's as if this charge by itself innoculates them from having to defend their views against orthodoxy. Few of them will make a sincere effort to discuss. It devolves quickly into tropes and epithets.

I don’t think I’ve met one Protestant who regularly practices fasting.

This is not about Catholics versus Protestants. That’s what the dividers want. The moment it becomes a religious sectarian fight they’ve won because nobody has to debate the actual issue. The real issue is about soul liberty. And that was not a secular idea. It was not an Enlightenment idea. It was a deeply Christian idea and the men who planted it in the foundation of this nation paid for it with persecution, exile, and blood. Roger Williams was a Baptist minister and founder of Rhode Island who was expelled from Massachusetts for arguing that civil government had no authority over the conscience before God. He called it soul liberty. The idea that faith coerced by state power is not faith at all. John Leland was a Baptist preacher in Virginia and one of the most important and least remembered figures in American founding history. He pressured James Madison directly. Told him he would not support ratification of the Constitution without a Bill of Rights that protected religious conscience. Madison listened. Without Leland’s pressure there may be no First Amendment. James Madison himself wrote in his Memorial and Remonstrance that religion flourishes in greater purity without the aid of government. That state entanglement with religion corrupts faith rather than strengthening it. Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is a document he considered one of his three greatest achievements alongside the Declaration and founding the University of Virginia. That document declared that the opinions of men are not the province of civil government. Period. These were not atheists constructing a godless state. These were men shaped by centuries of watching the marriage of church and state produce the Inquisition. The Thirty Years War. The persecution of Baptists in England. The exile of dissenters in the colonies. They had seen what happens when institutional religious power controls civil government and they built a wall against it in the founding documents of this nation. That wall is not anti-Christian. It is the most Christian idea in the founding because it protects the integrity of faith itself. Soul liberty means your conscience before God belongs to God alone. No pope. No king. No state. No institution. No political movement wearing the name of Christ. God alone. That is the tradition being threatened. And it’s not being threatened by Catholics or Protestants. It’s being threatened by Catholic Integralists and Protestant Reconstructionists. It is being threatened by the idea that the state should legislate morality and be subordinate to Church authority. That the separation of church and state is not a feature to protect but a problem to dismantle. It is being threatened by people who have decided that the way to win the culture war is to seize the state and use it to enforce a religious vision that the founding generation specifically and deliberately and at great personal cost built this nation to prevent. So when someone tries to make this Catholics versus Protestants don’t let them. Know your history. Know what you’re fighting. The question is not which Church. The question is whether ANY church or institution or earthly authority gets to stand between you and God. The men who founded this great nation said NO. Don’t let them reframe it into a sectarian fight so you forget what you’re actually defending.