My mom said that today in church her pastor said in the sermon that Jesus told us to help the poor, and taking money away from public schools to give to charter schools only widens the gap between the rich and the poor. She then added that Jesus spoke against adultery and lust and would not have approved of bragging about sexually assaulting women. According to my mom, people got up and walked out.
The pastor also started the sermon by noting that she’d heard of another minister who read the entirety of the Sermon on the Mount at the pulpit, to be told by the so-called Christian parishioners after the service that it was offensive and they didn’t agree.
The Sermon on the Mount is straight up the words of Jesus.
I recently read an article that said, hypocritical Christians in America don’t actually worship Jesus. They worship America, and even then, it’s a very specific, self-centered idea of America.
YES. EXACTLY.
My mom’s church talks almost every Sunday about how Christians are called to welcome strangers and foreigners and does tons of stuff to help refugees because HELLO, IT’S RIGHT THERE. IN THE RED TEXT, NO LESS.
I don’t believe everything they believe, but I REALLY like those people.
What a lot of these people are is idolators.
Not in terms of the realness or unrealness of who they worship, but in terms of how they’ve warped their focus away from the reality and turned it towards a fantasy of their own construction.
By definition, an idol is an image with no god behind it.
What they have done is taken the idea of Jesus and created a false image of him, nothing like the reality, to carry around in their back pocket, or to wave around on signs, and pull out and shove in people’s faces to justify all manner of unChristlike behavior.
It is a “worship” that is fundamentally self-centered rather than deity-centered, wherein the deity in question is more of a pocketbook get-out-of-jail-free card than directive to live by, and more of a status symbol than a guiding light.
That people will, without a shred of self-awareness, rest themselves assured that Jesus would want them to tip their waitress with a Jesus pamphlet made to look like folded-up money (to take only one example out of many) is the ultimate dismissal of everything the original stood for.
There is a line in the Bible about Jesus meeting his false worshipers and saying “I do not know you.” It seems like plenty of so-called Christians have beaten him to the punch with how quick they are to say they don’t know him.
A lot of churches and organizations in America that call themselves Christian churches are in fact Christianist cults. They no more represent Christianity than Daesh represents Islam. In addition to the usual nonsense of so-called Christians being pro-war, anti-immigrant, racist, and so forth, there are a lot of sects/movements that are just completely toxic and not Christian at all, even though they use that label. If you are Christian and want to have some fucking nightmares, google “christian dominionist,” or “prosperity gospel.”
Still think this is the most realistic diagram of the difference between the theological Jesus and the Comfortable Reinterpretation of Jesus.
American Christianity is, at this point, like the Cult of the Emperor in ancient Rome, which is simultaneously both ironic and appropriate given the history involved
