Why Conservative Christians Would Have Hated Jesus

This blog often notes the reality that while professing support for Christian values, today's conservative Christians - and certainly those within the Republican Party - are pursuing agendas totally at odds with the Gospel social message.  It's as if the worship a reverse version of the Sermon on the Mount and believe that Mitt Romney's vulture capitalism is the highest form of walking in the shoes of Christ.  Other than seeking to police everyone bedrooms to impose a puritan form of sexual conduct, they truly despise the message of Christ.  A piece in Salon looks at why the "godly folk" would hate Christ if he returned today.  Here are excerpts:

Jesus never could have been the pastor of a contemporary evangelical church nor a conservative Roman Catholic bishop. Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics thrive on drawing distinctions between their “truth” and other people’s failings. Jesus by contrast, set off an empathy time bomb that obliterates difference.

Jesus’ empathy bomb explodes every time a former evangelical puts love ahead of what the “Bible says.” It goes off every time Pope Francis puts inclusion ahead of dogma. It goes off every time a gay couple are welcomed into a church. Jesus’ time bomb explodes whenever atheists follow Jesus better than most Christians.

Put it this way: Godless non-church-going Denmark mandates four weeks of maternity leave before childbirth and fourteen weeks afterward for mothers. Parents of newborn children are assisted with well-baby nurse-practitioner visits in their homes.

In the “pro-life” and allegedly “family friendly” American Bible belt, conservative political leaders slash programs designed to help women and children while creating a justifying mythology about handouts versus empowerment.

In “God-fearing America” the poor are now the “takers,” no longer the “least of these,” and many conservative evangelicals side with today’s Pharisees, attacking the poor in the name of following the Bible.

So who is following Jesus?

Confronted by the Bible cult called evangelicalism we have a choice: follow Jesus or follow a book cult. If Jesus is God as evangelicals and Roman Catholics claim he is, then the choice is clear. We have to read the book–including the New Testament–as he did, and Jesus didn’t like the “Bible” of his day.

Confronted by bishops protecting dogma and tradition against Pope Francis’ embrace of empathy for the “other” we have a choice: follow Jesus or protect the institution.

Every time Jesus mentioned the equivalent of a church tradition, the Torah, he qualified it with something like this: “The scriptures say thus and so, but I say…” Jesus undermined the scriptures and religious tradition in favor of empathy. Every time Jesus undermined the scriptures (Jewish “church tradition”) it was to err on the side of co-suffering love.
Every time conservative Roman Catholics try to stop the Pope from bringing change to the Church they are on the side to those who killed Jesus.

In evangelical and Roman Catholic fundamentalist terms, Jesus was a rule-breaking humanist who wasn’t “saved.” A conservative bishop would have refused Jesus the sacraments. Christianity Today magazine would have editorialized against him, called for his firing, banning and branded him a traitor to the cause of Christianity.

The message of Jesus’ life is an intervention in and an acceleration of the evolution of empathy.

Jesus responded by attacking the preeminence of religion, tradition, dogma and group identity, offering an entirely new way of looking at spirituality by emphasizing basic human dignity above nation, state, gender or religion: . . 

Evangelicals struggle to conform Jesus to a book, not the other way around. And the conservative bishops have aligned themselves with the American neoconservative wing of their church against not just the Pope Francis but against the emancipating logic of Jesus’ empathy time bomb. If Jesus isn’t the “lens” evangelicals and Roman Catholics read the Bible and their traditions through then whatever they say to the contrary they do not really believe Jesus is the son of God.

Well said.  The reality of just how unChristian the godly folk have become goes a long way toward explaining why 30% of the younger generations have simply walked away from Christianity.  The "godly folk" have made it something truly ugly.  Hatred of others has become conservative Christianity defining characteristic, along with conduct that would have embarrassed the biblical Pharisees.

Problems in the Religion Are Symptoms of Something Deeper

As so often noted on this blog, the Christian Right - or Christofascists as I prefer to call them because it better describes their totalitarian agenda -  love to loudly proclaim their godliness and piety and to condemn those they deem to be "sinners," yet by their actions demonstrate a total contempt for the Gospel message of Christ as perhaps best articulated in the Sermon on the Mount.  It's the behavior that convince me that hypocrisy and hate are the true attributes of these Christofascists.  It's also to perception of "Christians" that seems to be driving the under 30 years of age generations - including my three children - from institutional Christianity.  A post on Blue Virginia gets to the the underlying problem of these individuals and their style of religion.  Here are some excerpts:

I bet the way you act and feel in your church is a lot more in keeping with the Sermon on the Mount than the way your political leaders encourage you to act and feel.

How much of the peacemaker do your leaders foster in your heart? How much of the merciful? How much do your leaders encourage the spirit of "love thine enemies" and of eschewing contempt (Matthew 5:22)?

If you believe we should be guided by the Sermon on the Mount, are these leaders the kind you should allow yourself to be guided by?

In this particular instance -- of the church-going Republican supporters who follow one spirit in church and an opposite spirit in the political realm -- I am focusing on another kind of brokenness: a tendency to hold contradictions, without noticing or trying to resolve those contradictions. People who are inhabited by fundamentally opposing elements are not of a piece. They're broken. 

There's something broken, in this case, about someone who goes to church and says he believes in the ethic Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, and then goes home and is a devotee of Rush Limbaugh the rest of the week, somehow manages not to see the conflict within. The spirit of Limbaugh is about as far from the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount as you can get.

The same people who don't notice any contradiction between the two opposite spirits they embrace can also embrace the contradiction of being a self-declared "patriot" who habitually relates to the U.S. government as the enemy, as if it were an occupying power. And these "patriots" include gun-rights advocates whose main arguments for allowing citizens to own weapons of war is that we citizens need to be prepared to fight the government. 

The pattern of self-contradiction -- of lack of integrity, of lying to oneself-is thriving today throughout the political right. "I SAY that I believe in such and such, value such and such; but I ACT as if I am the opposite of what I say." 

The lie is entirely fundamental to this. I tell myself I'm what I should be, but I'm giving expression to what is forbidden. 

Such contradiction is a sign of brokenness. And behind this brokenness is a force (a spirit) that fosters brokenness in everything it touches. The problem with these churchgoers -- who, in the realm of power, are obeying a spirit the opposite of what their Lord teaches - is but one instance of the larger truth.

The disconnect between claimed faith and religious belief and actual conduct towards others is nearly total as is the hypocrisy of the Christofascists.  You cannot be a true follower of Christ and at the same time hate everyone who isn't a self-proclaimed white evangelical Christian.