Response to conservative Christians celebrating Rittenhouse acquittal

You guys are such a great witness for the guy who told people to turn the other cheek and sacrificed his life to save others, even though he had the power to kill anyone who threatened him. No wonder so many people are leaving the church.

If only you looked at Kyle's victims and saw Jesus (Matthew 25:45), maybe you'd understand why other people don't see this as a cause for celebration.

Maybe if you saw them as human beings instead of a faceless enemy (with faults, yes, but that doesn't mean they deserved to die), you would wish for a resolution where nobody got killed instead of celebrating that the killer won't face any consequences (and inspire many more killers to come).

Maybe if you cared about human life, not just fetal life, you'd mourn the loss of these human lives.

Maybe if you interpreted these experiences thru the lens of scripture, instead of interpreting scripture thru the lens of your politics, you wouldn't be celebrating something that is DIRECTLY the opposite of what Jesus explicitly stood for.

Are conservative (or liberal) Christians "not real Christians"? Are they just reading into the Bible what fits with the worldview they already had?

Having seen both sides of it now (I grew up in a conservative Christian home thinking liberal Christians were not really Christian at all; now I'm a liberal atheist who finds a lot more common ground with liberal Christians than conservative atheists), I really feel that both conservative and liberal Christians start with a general side of the political spectrum (you can even take out the conservative/liberal political dichotomy and just call it legalism vs. empathy), and then connect with the parts of the Bible which support that basic worldview. There's too much of the Bible that isn't internally coherent, so the only way to make sense of dozens of books written over hundreds of years by a bunch of different authors is to have some basic starting points to know which parts you accept at face value and which parts you reinterpret to fit with the parts they contradict.

It's easy to say "oh, those people aren't really Christian" (whichever ones you disagree with). I think the reality is that Christians on both sides are earnestly trying to follow half of the Bible and casually tossing out the other half. That isn't something fake Christians do, it's something all Christians necessarily must do, because the Bible is a big book of multiple choice that doesn't have any single coherent worldview. I think an earnest reading of the Bible with a sincere desire to follow what it says makes conservatives more conservative and liberals more liberal. The fact that someone reads it and comes away with ideas like Westboro Baptist Church doesn't mean those people were hateful already and they just read into the Bible what they wanted to see. But the fact that a sincere and devout reading of the Bible can turn people into hateful monsters like that also doesn't mean that liberals reading the Bible and coming away with a bunch of bleeding-heart hippy-dippy love stuff are reading into it stuff that isn't there. Both sides of the ideological spectrum are truly and accurately contained within the disparate lessons taught in that diverse collection of writings.