“This is how we should order our lives together,” he said. “And frankly, yes, we are going to impose it upon you. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry, but this is good and right and just if it lines up with God’s standards, and I am going to enforce my morality on you in as much as our morality is God’s morality.”
“You should always check yourselves,” he continued. “Do I believe what God believes? Am I defending what God says is good?”
“And if it is, then you should have the courage to say, ‘This is how we’re going to run our town, this is how we’re going to run our county, this is how we’re going to run our state, and this is how we should run the United States of America by legislating the morality that we can find in the Bible.'”
At what point is something considered an entirely different belief system though?
Part of why there are so many different sects of Christianity is because belief systems can differ quite a lot on what the focus is for followers of the faith.
Even Mormons are considered Christian, but many Christians would put them in their own category since they have an entirely different holy book that they follow.
Maybe it comes back to the word for ‘Christian’ being this less meaningful, all encompassing, definition. In which case, I feel there’s an argument to be made that having at least some other way to show distinction matters, whether that’s a new word or phrase entirely.
For the sake of conversation though, I feel there is some utility in using the word we are already familiar with, in this case ‘Christian’, and making a compelling definition, in the context of the conversation, based on the values echoed in the text. I feel that we can still hold the general understanding that this is a narrow definition, but it’s one made based on those values that we may want to see encouraged.
TL;DR: It’s difficult to have a conversation about any group of people that is made up of a wide assortment of people from different walks of life.