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They soon settled on Long Island and tried to raise us to be progressive, free-thinking, sexually repressed Catholics. Which is why I would eventually turn to stand-up comedy, as I could never afford the therapy I so deeply required.
The slaughter of the Midianites, where God commands Moses to kill all the men and nonvirgin women—but keep all the virgin girls—didn’t make its way into any of our illustrated children’s Bibles.
And I was taught—relentlessly—that Christianity was about the things Jesus prioritized: Service to others. Forgiveness. Caring for the poor, the sick, the stranger, the prisoner. Fighting injustice with nonviolence, like Dr. King and Gandhi. Standing up for the less fortunate, like Dorothy Day and Catholic Charities. Love. Empathy. Compassion. And go wash your hands, we’re leaving for Mass in five minutes.
His overall parenting strategy was to guarantee that I’d be way too liberal to ever fit in with Christians and far too Christian to ever blend with liberals. And almost every therapist I’ve ever been able to afford has agreed that his plan worked perfectly.
In the eighties and nineties, my father the social studies teacher always kept the news on. Being that this was during the rise of the Moral Majority and Christian right, I was exposed to many interviews with white men who were introduced as “Christian leaders.” But these Christians didn’t talk about helping the poor, welcoming the stranger, or fighting injustice. They never mentioned the evils of racism. They didn’t quote scripture to justify the need for all of us to take care of the least of us.
These right-wing Christian media stars preached the virtue of forcing poor pregnant women to give birth against their will, that they might experience substantially greater poverty and greater risk to their health. They warned us that any government programs that actually helped the poor were “communist.” They expressed outrage at protests against racism, while never denouncing actual racism. They always punched down—always attacking the poor, the addicts, the migrants at the border, and a gay minority they assured me the Bible condemned, somewhere. Millions of American Christians were
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Watching TV news was the first time I became aware of Christianity as a political force in my country, but it was a Christianity I couldn’t understand. I didn’t have the words to express it, but it was awkward to be told I was the same religion as these men.
These were the fundamentalists, the power-hungry grifters who took advantage of the fact that most people don’t know the Bible all that well. They were charlatans, frauds, hypoc...
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In a 2018 US News and World Report survey of more than twenty-one thousand people from all regions of the world, the majority of respondents identified religion as the “primary source of most global conflict today.” And I can certainly understand why they feel that way. But they’re mistaken.
The primary driver of most global conflict, oppression of women, suppression of science, persecution of gay people, and abuse of power is not religion. It’s the extreme fundamentalist wings of all the world’s religions that provide all these dramas for the rest of humanity.
In recent decades, the US has witnessed fundamentalist Christianity publicly mutating into Christian nationalism: the belief that God intended America to be a Christian nation and that a “true” American should be Christian, too. These hopeless romantics fervently believe the Bible must be prioritized in both your government and your day-to-day life.
Well, their interpretation of the Bible, that is.
And our meanest Christians tend to piously and publicly worship Jesus as their King, because that’s considerably easier than following his inconvenient teachings.
It’s a gospel of control over caring, power over humility, and judgment over mercy. They won’t fight for the words of Jesus, but they’re profoundly committed to stuff they believe he said.
Jesus modeled servant leadership, washing his disciples’ feet and teaching that the greatest among his followers should be the servant of all (John 13:1–17, Matthew 20:26–28). He was not about total right-wing domination of the school board.
And if there’s one thing the Bible shows us, it’s that authoritarian government, aligned with some extreme conservative religious fundamentalists, literally killed Jesus.
In contemporary America, you’ll hear a steady refrain from the pulpits of preachers and the podiums of politicians: “Christianity is under attack.” Christians still constitute the majority and wield significant cultural and political influence, mind you, but that’s never stopped a narrative of systemic oppression. This talking point, which pairs nicely with shrieking claims of persecution, warns of an encroaching secular agenda that seeks to destroy “traditional Christian values” and turn our families into transgender atheist groomer communists who listen to hip-hop and use paper straws.
Christianity is under attack—but by divisive right-wing fundamentalists who publicly worship Jesus while fighting against, voting against, and legislating against his actual commandments. Help the poor? No. Care for the sick? No. Turn the other cheek? No. Render one’s taxes? No, sucker. Be kind to the incarcerated? Hell no. Welcome the stranger? Bitch, please. Modern right-wing Christians have been suckered into an anti-Christian trap of aligning with power, instead of challenging it. But conservative power was what Jesus stood up to—not for—time and time again:
Historically, American Christians of both major political parties have used a Bible to justify the slaughter of Indigenous people, the enslavement of African people, the labor exploitation of Asian people, ignoring the suffering of European Jewish people, cruelty to gay people, the indiscriminate detention and torture of Muslim people, and of course, pushing perpetual second-class citizenship on female people.
nobody hates like a Christian who’s just been told their hate isn’t Christian.
Never forget that the first-ever protest by a white person in this hemisphere against slavery and human rights abuses was against Columbus himself, led by his ship’s own Catholic priest, Bartolomé de Las Casas.
The extreme right uses Jesus’s name as camouflage.
What I lack in credentials, I make up for in name-dropping.
I generally trust people who are seeking the truth; I tend to be wary of those who claim they’ve found it.
Spiritual people use religion to become better people. Fundamentalists use religion to pretend they’re better than other people.
And remember—if your church isn’t telling you to love your enemies but keeps telling you who your enemies are, you’re not really in a church.
“The politics of Jesus and the politics of God are that people should be fed, that people have access to life, that people should be treated equally and justly.” Rev. James M. Lawson Jr.
Jesus’s public career as a traveling preacher and healer lasted only three years—less than Nirvana and the Smiths, slightly longer than Cream and the Sex Pistols, and about as long as the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He was only one of many radical preachers of the time, and traveled with twelve men and several women—at least three. You might think that this would mean there were actually fifteen apostles. But women aren’t counted as people in the Bible, so any female apostles were officially decreed by the early church to have been sacred-adjacent groupies.
Jesus disdained wealth and earthly power, and challenged traditional laws of his own faith. He rejected earthly materialism, renounced the idea of revenge, and commanded us to welcome the stranger. I know, right? Just like Donald Trump.
Jesus lays down a spiritual manifesto of social justice, compassion, and ethics in his most famous appearance; it’s like his Woodstock.
Do Not Judge (Matthew 7:1–5): He cautions against hypocritical judgment, telling followers to first examine their own faults before pointing out the faults of others (y’know, like all those thoughtful folks on Fox News).
Trump defenders may be intrigued to know that while Jesus never once condemned abortions, immigrants, or gay people, he was seriously not a fan of adultery, and spoke out against the divorce laws of Moses because he thought it should be harder for men to dump their wives.
“My suspicion is that when non-Jews read the interactions between Jesus and the Pharisees in the Gospels… they may see ferocious rebuke and fearsome condemnation. I read the Gospels and assume that Jesus and the Pharisees… are sometimes engaged in earnest debate, sometimes jabbing in jest, sometimes just… living in community, and disagreement? But that those debates have rules and parameters that are agreed-upon and upheld by all parties—there’s no excoriation; they’re just throwing down, like we do.”
THE TOP 3 RIGHT-WING ARGUMENTS ABOUT JESUS CLAIM 1: “Sure, Jesus said to take care of the poor—but that’s the job of Christians and churches. He didn’t say the government should do it.” You’ll notice that the people most convinced that America’s a “Christian nation” are the same folks who don’t think it’s government’s job to take care of the poor.
The parable of Matthew 25:31–46 is known as the Judgment of the Nations, since Jesus explains exactly how the nations of earth will gather before him to be judged based on how they treated certain people.
Then, Jesus addresses those who don’t think societies should care for poor and sick people, or incarcerated people, or immigrants. This part is like Jesus’s memo to the Heritage Foundation.
Jesus asserts that his true followers are the people and societies who care for the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the immigrants, and the incarcerated. And he tells you who his fake followers are—the ones who are openly religious but indifferent to the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the immigrants, and the incarcerated, the lowest of the low. How we treat them is how we treat him.
Jesus emphasizes that nations will be judged based on their actions and treatment of the vulnerable—not their religious affiliations or beliefs. He’s not just commanding individuals—he’s calling on societies to commit to compassion, mercy, and kindness on a policy level.
Welcome to Leviticus, the third book of the Bible and the Holy Grail of scriptural picking and choosing. If the Ten Commandments are God’s simple contract, think of Leviticus as God’s six-hundred-plus terms and conditions. It’s okay, nobody reads them all.
Leviticus has many beautiful passages—and quite a few laws that might seem archaic or barbaric to humans of the twenty-first century. It’s a book that’s attributed to Moses, doesn’t apply to Jesus followers, and whose rules are almost universally ignored by Christians—unless they want to punch down against a gay minority they dislike.
THE NEW COVENANT (AKA HOMOPHOBE KRYPTONITE)
It’s the starting point for the Christian movement, and essential to understanding why people who claim to be Jesus fans don’t get to use Leviticus quotes to justify their antigay hang-ups, ever.
“A person doesn’t have to be a Paul-hater. He was doing the best he could…. How would Paul have known that scratching out letters to help sort out the challenges and problems of the early church were somehow going to be turned into the infallible Word of God for all humankind. That’s on us, not him. Paul did the best he could given the circumstances and where he was at in his own spiritual journey and evolution.” Jim Palmer,
Remember that time Jesus said, “If you don’t work, you don’t eat?” Or when he condemned gay people? That’s in the New Testament, right? Or when Jesus gave a list of all the people who can never get to heaven? And when Jesus taught women to be silent, and submit to their husbands? Many of our friends, neighbors, coworkers, and loved ones clearly remember Jesus saying those exact words in the Bible, somewheres. Alas, Jesus said none of these things. It was all Paul, founder of modern Christianity; the church’s first spin doctor, and the guy who right wingers quote alarmingly more often than
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One of the most zealous haters of early Christianity was a man who seemed almost genetically designed to persecute Christians: an ultraorthodox Pharisee who was also a Roman citizen, and, on top of that, a dick.
If Jesus was the game-changing rock star, Paul was his hardworking, deeply uptight, conservative PR guy.
There was no way that Saul/Paul could have known that one day, bigots and incels would quote him instead of Jesus to justify their hatred of women and gay people.
And while Paul upheld many of Jesus’s teachings, Christ was more of the ideas man. Paul was the outside consultant who conceived all the theological models and organizational structures, did much of the original hiring, and pretty much ran the startup.
Paul’s a bit edgier than Jesus in ways that make him more attractive to a certain kind of right-wing believer. While the Gospel teachings emphasize love, compassion, and inclusivity, Paul’s personal opinions about women and sexuality just couldn’t help but bleed through in his writings. Which means that over the last two thousand years, many Christians have been taught to prioritize certain passages from Paul’s letters that suit their personal biases over Jesus’s irritating orders to love everyone.
Paul wrote in a patriarchal society where women had limited rights and roles. His letters reflect the norms of his time—and to be fair, some argue that he was much more progressive for his time than it might seem. He actually worked with many women in his ministry—with a high level of respect and acknowledgment of their contributions—which does seem inconsistent with his more misogynist bullshit.
