Most self-professed Christians are straight-up frauds. More precisely they are, as journalist Kurt Eichenwald put it, “buffet Christians.” Unhealthy, unwise and unfit for religious duty, they gorge obsessively (and vote single-mindedly) on “abortion” and “gays,” pretty much skipping everything else. They mindlessly select indignant consternation for two issues above all else, because it’s easier to swallow for their feeble and conscience-challenged minds. Because it’s much easier than the demanding and purifying challenge of the Sermon on the Mount, which instructs followers to assist the poor, downtrodden and oppressed, give away one’s possessions and doing to the least is the same as doing to your God.
As a result, they remain spiritually malnourished, but with midsections that bulge grotesquely disproportionate as those of the starved and diseased children in slums, the same ones they no longer care about after they make it out of the womb. These church-going Christians are carcasses of false piety, full of malignant bile bursting out of protruding empty guts. At the Buffet Supper they guzzle down the soda of Right-wing propaganda from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and the self-selected biblical passages and cheap platitudes of their local pastors who do the same, and end up spiritually obese, laden with toxic fat and empty calories. Which renders them unable to do much else but belch vulgar and disgraceful enmity for immigrants, the poor, gays, blacks, academics, and anyone else not in their exclusive Conservative Christian club upon which rest the fundamentals of bigotry, mercilessness and self-righteousness.
There’s another irony that always strikes me. Somehow modern Christianity has been co-opted by an infantile interpretation that if Jesus were to come back he would be an eminently identifiable divine Jesus. As if their “dear Lord and Savior” would be some three piece suit-wearing CEO stepping out of a mega-church and into the makeup room before making his pitch for more money on the local evangelical television show. Not even close. They’d never recognize him in a million tries.
The reality is this: he was a dark-skinned Palestinian Jew; a wandering, ragged, unemployed carpenter with prostitutes, drunks, outcasts and low-wage workers for friends, drifting from one commune to another.
And were he to come back as he was, there is no doubt in my mind how he would be welcomed.
I would bet most of today’s Christians, encountering him standing on the corner of main st. in their town, would avoid, be afraid or spit on him, the most right-wing would also yell at him to call him a dirty hippie who should get a job. Others would immediately call the police on him. Some would get in their cars to run him off the corner, while younger offenders would throw rocks or hurl epithets at him.
Maybe a neighborhood vigilante like George Zimmerman would say he feared for his life and shoot him in the back, or a cop would bash his head in after he flipped over a desk inside a bank. Ultimately in the greatest irony, he would be hauled off again by the NYPD or Homeland Security or the FBI, just they way he was by the Romans. Fox News would attack his clothes, speech, hair, hygiene, call him an enemy of the state and devote round the clock coverage to denigrating his past, his family and friends - and many across the country would fall in line to follow suit. Indicted for his incendiary sedition, reckless revolutionary speech, he would be handcuffed, gagged and stuffed into an orange jumpsuit depriving his senses, and thrown straight into a Guantanomo Bay jail cell, where he’d still be held without trial and out of the public eye, lest he cause more trouble to the oligarchs and bankers.
The times today are not that different. We just use different names.
And today’s American Christians are yesterday’s Romans.
Both societies were forged in jingoistic worship of empire, conquest, pillage and money.
Last thing I'll say is there's so much more to be written about the unholy alliance between American Exceptionalism, Get-Rich-Quick(TM) schemes that feed an every man for himself culture and this bizarre conflation of capitalism with democracy - and the churches implicit support of it all. Another time.
Today Pope Francis hereby put these frauds on notice.