how to identify as a virtuous person
remember virtue?
back in the good old days in the reformed church with the catechism and the predestination and the clockwork monster god we were always taught that our good works were filthy rags. real gross stuff. suppurative. oozy.
however (tilt head to the side and widen eyes: here comes the mystery!) you still gotta do em mmmmkay?
why? because gratitude. the saints will of course persevere but those saints who are persevering will evince that perseverance by the quality of their good works. christian virtues. fruits of the spirit. that sort of thing.
now this is transparently no different from earning your salvation in its particulars. the anabaptist and the baptist do the same stuff. the horrible and heinous arminians vs the honourable and horthodox calvinists who (praxisally at least) were you to throw their various doctrinal squabbles in a burlap sack and do a blind taste test are pinot blanc and chardonnay.
you need an excessively almost superhuman palate to differentiate.
anyways i've gotten off the point a bit here. the point is there were virtues you had to do if you were to say you were any kind of christian at all.
this is just a tiny bit different to how evangelicals practice christianity today. been that way since the "moral majority" (scare quotes very much intended; these are some real bad mofos) decided to make abortion into an identity issue for evangelicals so they could resegregate the usa. i realise this sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory and i would say so too if it wasn't for the fact that they said this. with their own words. we have the documentation.
and also if you care to cast your eyes upon the current usa govt headed by gutter-racist-in-chief tr*mp and his minions who are to a man gutter racists supported by their neonazi flagbearer el*n m*sk... well it appears to have worked a little! they're giving resegregation the old offbrand christian college try!
was there ever a time where christianity wasn't about identity and instead was about virtue? no. of course not. we've always been kneedeep in identity. but used to be that part of the identity involved doing some of these good works and whatnot. even luther didn't want that to go away.
in the current day everything is about identity. and christians are no different. stan culture whether the disease or the symptom is everywhere all the time. there's not a substantive difference to how christians comport themselves online and say how kpop fans comport themselves and this is absolutely a damning statement. i wouldn't blame you if you'd prefer the kpop stans to the christians. i do!
but still when was the last time you heard any public christian messaging other than maybe catholic? concern itself about christian virtue or fruits of the spirit or discipleship or the holy spirit working sanctification in the life of a believer (pardon the jargon)?
for me it's been years. literal years. everything has been sucking into your god damned (and i do not mean this as an expletive; i mean it in its original sense) culture wars. this is no good. when you can claim christianity as an identity where you get to do whatever you like as long as you advocate for the right (pun intended) politics and oppression of certain groups of people and for the tearing down of liberal democratic society so you can force your politics on other people... well what exactly are we doing here?
you can see why this sort of christiany is broadly unpopular. because it's gross and weird and the people who promote it are often hateful and miserable and violent and impatient and mean and noxious and dishonest and cruel and dissolute.
you can also see how this brand of christianty--for it is exactly that: a brand--is largely detatched from the scripture it claims to venerate more than anyone else. after all it's more than anything else an organ of capital. and this is something that's very hard to advocate for if you're taking any of the words of jesus seriously. he has (famously!) a rather dim view of wealth. and yet the evangelical church is riven through with mammon. supporative. it oozes out of them. and--i think i read this somewhere--you cannot serve two masters. you will love the one that buys you a mcmansion.
there's a reason that the evangelicosphere is populated by fraudster and grifters. they're not trying to advance the kingdom of god. they're not interested in the improvement of the character of their parishioners because they don't have parishioners. they have soldiers. they're fighting a war!