this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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So, funny thing, since the first schisms of orthodoxies and protestants away from The Church (today, the Roman Catholic Church), no one has had authority to decide who is Christian and who isn't. And in the 20th century forward, every Christian had someone (usually more than not) that believed they were false. And on occasion we had some that asserted you are Christian even if you are decidedly not. (Not to be confused with universalists, who believed salvation was extended to everyone, period.)
Even these days, we have apologists who figure that if you adhere to enlightenment or post-enlightenment values, you're pretty Christian anyway but that's because they're trying to feed you more of their proverbial pudding.
The Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, an academic enclave that studied different religions and kept an online index, asserted from their pantheistic perspective a Christian is anyone who identifies as one, regardless of how they behave or the principles to which they adhere. And this is consistent with the general LGBT+ community who now has a big list of labels to help people figure out their gender and sexual orientation. And because all this is fluid, we take people at their word regarding how they identify even if it doesn't fully inform how they behave.
Besides which, Christians often have a rich tradition of acknowledging they suck at adhering to Christian values, e.g. feeding the hungry, enriching the poor, etc.
So all that said, if you adhere to values that some Christian ministries agree with, those are your values, and we need not give credit or authority to ancient scripture, when we also have centuries of history of dealing with the consequences of poor mores. Case in point the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (still a charter of aspiration rather than mandate) was forged from the metals of consequence and suffering through history when those rights were not respected and afforded. Our values come not from divine inspiration rather are informed by events in which they weren't respected and people suffered and died for it.