In honor of the 12 Days of Trial, AUReform.com had prepared a piece about the conflicts in the early Church during the days of Constantine and Nicaea, specifically focusing on the often dishonest and violent roles played by the Roman and Alexandrian-Athanasian factions.

However, in the context of recent media focus on anti-Catholic rhetoric by certain Evangelical leaders, this blog post on ancient conflicts seemed almost to align itself with those who would demonize the entire Roman Church as “The Great Whore.”

So, offering an ecumenical antidote to recent sectarian vitriol, let us instead simply assert that AUR and RCC both honor the Emperor Constantine, albeit in different ways and for different reasons.

Although AUR believes that the difference between Unitarian and Trinitarian views of God, the universe, and morality are significant and critical to salvation, we also believe it is easier for a good-hearted Trinitarian Catholic to get into the Kingdom of Heaven than it would be for prejudicial, sectarian, and materialist hate-mongers… even if they were strict Unitarians.

We believe that, however important to salvation might be the idiom on which sectarian and denominational differences are based, God does not respect our moral prejudices based on those cultural difference. There is a reason Jesus taught us about the Good Samaritan, member of a hated religious minority considered heretics by Judean Jews. There is a reason Jesus praised the faith of a pagan Centurion. There is a reason Paul told the Greeks that the “Unknown God” honored in their pagan temples was the same as the God of Christians.

Condemning entire other religions is not the teaching of Jesus Christ.  It is a tactic of autolatrous tyranny.  The great irony in certain allegedly Christian leaders attacking hated outsiders as representing the “The Great Whore” is that the Apocalypse from which they lift that language makes clear that it is the Beast that hates Babylon.

Although AUReform.com may still, on a later date, publish this important history of the conflict between Unitarians and what would become the Roman Catholic Church, we did not want even the appearance of agreeing with those who would condemn Catholics as a class by publishing it during the current news cycle.

Have a safe Memorial Day weekend!