I generally have vowed to stay out of specific political discussions online, but this is not about any specific political issue – I have seen this claim too often with many issues or candidates from all side of the spectrum and in different locales (and not just the presidential election in the USA that dominates discussion right now).<\/p>\n
I am seeing far too many people declare that support for [a specific candidate or law or hot button political issue] is “alienating” (or various synonyms, but mostly that interestingly specific word) them from the rest of the Church membership.<\/p>\n
If that is happening to you, I am sorry to say, then you have put politics as your idol, partisanship before discipleship. I have even seen several people saying things like finding out a church leader\/ministering brother or sister\/fellow church member supported candidate [X] or issue [Y], they would refuse to let that person even enter their house.<\/p>\n
I could come up with examples from the right or left or center or even non-USA politics, but this is not about specific issues, (and any attempt to make it all about whatever specific issues you feel are more important than church fellowship in the comments will be frowned on).<\/p>\n
One of the benefits and blessing of Church is learning to deal with messy, bizarre, screwed up humans and still loving them, despite their preferred politics, cultural preferences, or personal hygiene. Keep in mind someone else at Church thinks you’re the messed up crazy one (I know lots of people see me as the really screwed up dude at Church), but they will still show up to help you move or do your yard work or sustain you in a calling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I generally have vowed to stay out of specific political discussions online, but this is not about any specific political issue – I have seen this claim too often with many issues or candidates from all side of the spectrum and in different locales (and not just the presidential election in the USA that dominates discussion right now). I am seeing far too many people declare that support for [a specific candidate or law or hot button political issue] is “alienating” (or various synonyms, but mostly that interestingly specific word) them from the rest of the Church membership.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latter-day-saint-thought"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47437,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47436\/revisions\/47437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}