#jesusdojo

It is not from your own property that you give to the poor. Rather, you make return from what is theirs. For what has been given as common for the use of all, you have appropriated to yourself alone. The earth belongs to all, not to the rich. Therefore you are paying a debt, not bestowing a gift.

The men MAGA celebrates are so anxious about their own masculinity that they have to keep staging cartoonish caricatures of “manliness” to hold their anxiety at bay, no matter how many people die from measles or wars of choice. They turn their personal fears into public policy via the dark magic of projection. Their self-doubt about their own masculinity becomes legislation that leads to the suffering of people who are nonconforming in gender identity or sexual orientation—nonconforming to MAGA’s myopic understanding of what it means to be human.

But the reason I am responding to this moment is because the values being canonized in the public square as Christianity contradict the gospel. They are not the values of Jesus. They are the values of the cult of White Christian nationalism, which worships guns, power, and the nation instead of God. It has several prophets, including prominent people in our government and leaders of some of the largest churches in this country. They preach fear, exclusion, and control. They praise greed as virtue, treat empathy as sin, let millionaires and billionaires define morality, and sanctify violence as if it were holy. Jesus preached mercy, not cruelty; welcome, not exclusion; peace, not bloodshed.

Decades ago, the French cultural critic Jacques Ellul observed that technological societies gradually reorganize human expectations around efficiency and speed. When rapid results become the dominant measure of progress, habits that require patience now feel irrational. Waiting itself can seem unnecessary. In such an environment, the slow processes that shape human character — learning, healing, reconciliation, and spiritual growth — are easily misunderstood because they refuse to operate on technological timelines.

The values adopted by Western Christianity are, foundationally, the opposite of the teachings of Jesus. Jesus talked of loving our neighbors, especially the ones we dislike. Today, Western Christians spread hate and indifference, and they even sanction hunting down immigrants. The Samaritans shared a common border with Israel during Jesus’s day; but instead of cheering the deportation of his Samaritan neighbors, Jesus both welcomed them and learned from them.

Today, we often neglect the stunning fact that for the first three centuries of its existence, the Christian church was by and large committed to unconditional nonviolence. Tragically, no sooner had the church acquired political power in the fourth century than we find Christian leaders—whenever it was in their ecclesial, political, or national interest to do so—choosing to follow the examples of sword-wielding ‘heroes’ of the OT rather than the cross-carrying example of Jesus.

I think many of these loud and aggressive converts are more in love with Christianity than they are with Christ. They love the creeds, the church fathers, the liturgy, the saints, the history, the culture of Christendom, the doctrine, the dogma, the theology, the Tradition. What they don't seem to love very much is Jesus, as evidenced in their becoming belligerent social media trolls.