A Newsweek article dated Aug. 9, 2023, stated the following:
Russell Moore, former top official for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) who is now the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, said during an interview aired on NPR’s All Things Considered this week that Christianity is in a “crisis” due to the current state of right-wing politics.
Moore has found himself at odds with other evangelical leaders due to his frequent criticism of former President Donald Trump. He resigned his position with the SBC in 2021 following friction over his views on Trump and a sex abuse crisis among Southern Baptist clergy.
In his NPR interview, Moore suggested that Trump had transformed the political landscape in the U.S. to the point where some Christian conservatives are openly denouncing a central doctrine of their religion as being too “weak” and “liberal” for their liking.
“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching—’turn the other cheek’—[and]to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’” Moore said. “When the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ’ … The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak,” he added. “When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”
I say the interviewee (Moore) made great points about the religious right viewing Jesus and the Bible as too “woke.” Where I differ from Moore’s assessment is what he identifies as the “genesis” (pun intended) of white conservative Christians going off the rails.
I place it a little bit before Drumpf came on the political scene – at the very least, 200 years before.
This is Christianity?
If you ask the people indigenous to this land, who endured the horrendous “Trail of Tears” and had their land and lives stolen, they’d tell you they never met a Christian who practiced what they preached.
If you queried those neighbors from the south who had their land violently stolen and to this day are called “illegal” for coming across the border into a space that was originally theirs, and asked them if they had seen any Christians, one of them might tell you “No he visto ningun Cristiano.”
Maybe check with those hard-working Japanese Americans living on the West Coast during the 1940s who had their land, businesses and homes taken by America’s good Christian folk while they were thrown in concentration camps. On second thought; don’t ask them.
What about checking in with Blackfolk of any era of US history? Never mind.
Conservatives: ‘Jesus is too Woke’
We don’t have to go back down memory lane to see that the vast majority of people who identify as white and Christian and American, have mos def been two out of those three, but certainly not Christian. And the “white” part is suspect too, if you go by Ancestry.com results. But scratch that. Their actions and attitudes, especially about “non-whites,” verify their white card.
But even if we just look at the period identified by Moore, the most pro-Bible, pro-prayer, pro-NRA Jesus, “Christians” are anything but. And don’t take my word for it. Just check out “The Word.”
Bump that. I’m not going verse-for-verse with these heathens. I’ll just summarize.
The Good Book says love and care for the poor. Drumpf disciples demonize the poor.
The Bible tells followers of the Christ to welcome the immigrant. The GOP’s entire planform is based on declaring immigrants the devil incarnate… the Brown ones. The Black ones they don’t even see as human. The Asian ones they view as potential spies. And the white ones – from their perspective, there’s no such thing as a white immigrant.
Scripture instructs us to care for the widow, even though they did women dirty constantly in biblical times. And I guess regarding the “doing dirty” part, today’s white evangelical Christians have been consistent – taking women’s agency over their own bodies, voting against equal pay for women, practically making abortion and birth control illegal but issuing no penalties for males who create these pregnancies, creating conditions that have women and children as the largest demographics classified as poor, etc.
Not only do these bible-thumping, scripture-quoting “Christians” not help the orphans, they go out of their way to create orphans – snatching children from their parents’ arms and locking them up in cages. Y’all do realize the vast majority of those children have never been reunited with their families. Yeah, that was done by those “Christians” who swear to God they are pro-family.
Jesus was accepting of others. They name everyone outside their klan enemies.
Jesus challenged and castigated religious leadership that sided with the Roman colonizers over their own people. These faux-Christians are literally the Romans.
They “do” unto “others” and then treat “others” in ways that show their white-hot fear that “others” will “do” unto them in the same vile, inhumane manner. That’s not living by the “Golden Rule.” That’s giving the world a Drumpf special “Golden Shower” while mocking the disabled, cheating workers and telling Blackfolk there’s no room in the inn.
Not to toot my own horn, but I wrote a book years ago (2004) titled “Weapons of Mass Distraction: And Other Sermons for a New World Order” because I was outdone at the nerve of conservatives claiming to be the arbiters of all things Christian. The book was/is a call to action for those tired of these hypocrites running around claiming the authority to define what is and what isn’t Christianity.
And now them same fools are saying the quiet part out loud – “Jesus is too weak, too woke for me.”
Not going all the way in, but…
I haven’t even got on the fact that bruhman Yeshua was a revolutionary Black Messiah who was not born to die, but rather was all about calling his people to build a Kingdom of God (Promised Land, Heaven) here on earth… in other words, a self-determining reality where God’s people bent their knee to no one but God.
I won’t even waste time stating that when Jesus declared what his ministry was all about in Luke 4:18-19 (The spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind and liberation to those in chains) everything focused on making life better on this side of the grave, while standing against oppression and injustice.
But I will say, wherever you fall on the Christian spectrum, if you view Drumpf as your “grab-em-by-the-whatever-with-your-little-hands” messiah, then Jesus (the Christ) is mos def too woke for you. So, stop using the term that describes a follower of The Christ (Christian) and call yourself what you really are – an anti-Christ. Or idiot. Both work.
