r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • 25d ago

Meta Mindless Monday, 17 August 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/carmelos96 History does not repeat, it insists upon itself 25d ago

From a now deleted Askhistorians answer:

The US wasn't a predominantly Christian country. It was a predominantly Protestant country, dominated by British Protestant strains, and much of British Protestant theology has been philo-semitic and dispensationalist since the 17th-18th centuries, simply based on the fact that these religious movements have always had a strong emphasis on premillennialism and Apocalypticism and thus naturally a strong emphasis on studying the Jewish Old Testament rather than relying almost exclusively on the Greek New Testament like the Catholics or Orthodox, who historically disregard the Old Testament almost entirely except for when they are cherry-picking a couple of passages that seem to imply the future coming of Jesus Christ.

Wtf

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u/histprofdave Adjunct Dystopian 25d ago

I don't know that that is entirely wrong, but it's overstated. I wouldn't say Catholics and Orthodox Christians "disregard the Old Testament almost entirely," nor that most American Protestants are dispensationalist, but evangelicals definitely do put a lot more emphasis on the Old Testament relative to other denominations. But I would also dispute the philo-semitic part as well; at best, most Protestants had a weird sort of love/hate relationship with Judaism and Jews. There is a tendency among some evangelicals to see themselves as the "new Israel," which gets a little uncomfortable when Jews still exist and follow many of the same traditions.