- Messages
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So, this is something I think about a lot. I grew up in a conservative evangelical household in a conservative town, and fell in love with Jesus at a really early age. I entrusted my life to the Lord when I was in elementary school, and never ever forgot my surrender to His will. To this day, it is the central reality of my life.
As I grew and developed, I lost a lot of the Christian dogma that those around me told me I needed to believe in. Things like the inerrancy of scripture, the existence of hell, and the numinous divine approbation that suffused American and Western history. I learned that Jews also believed that God is Love, and so did Muslims. That Buddhist meditation merged with the Tao te Ching can make eating a spoonful of Cheeri-Os a divine epiphany, even without marijuana. That ethics wasn't a religious issue, it was a survival one. That religion could bring a black person and a white one together under one roof, and might in fact have developed specifically for that sort of reason, to unite tribes under one banner.
Anyway, I retained my love of Jesus and his gospel, and my trust in God's will, even while I lost a lot of standard Christian dogma. Then I went to UNC and became Bart Ehrman's grad student for 6 or 7 years, and really deepened my knowledge of the Bible - old and new - and the cultural and historical contexts that produced it. Bart was and is a pretty strongly atheist-leaning agnostic, and I'm a pretty strongly theist-leaning agnostic, but we got along famously, and never really discussed theology at all anyway. He's wicked smart, and has one of my favorite senses of humor I've ever come across. He's also in his own way extremely humble, and a genuine spiritual seeker. I just feel extremely blessed to have gotten to meet him and know him, and have him be my teacher in so many ways, on so many topics.
All that intellectual study really rammed home for me the major defining point not only of Jesus and Christianity, but also of the Judaism that produced it. And that is a deep, abiding, and selfless commitment to the physical, emotional and spiritual well being of five classes of people: the poor, the sick, foster kids, elderly women living alone, and immigrants. Those categories of people are mentioned all over in the Bible, in the Old and New Testaments, and are the ground bass for the entire Biblical tradition: make sure everyone is taken care of, and don't exclude anyone ever.
The modern American republican party perverts this gospel into a "Christianity" that is about abortion (not in the Bible), homosexuality (hardly in the Bible), or immigration (in the Bible, but as an injunction to welcome immigrants and provide for them). I don't believe in Satan or dark powers, but it's absolutely true that Christianity has been corrupted into a kind of American nationalism that would have been bewildering not only to Jesus, but also to the majority of Christian theologians until about 1500.
And money? Donald Trump wants to make us all rich? If there's one teaching that runs all throughout Jesus' ministry, it's that wealth is neutral at best, but most often actively spiritually destructive.
I don't mind atheists, because at least they're honest. MAGA "Christians" though? Lord help us.
Donald Trump and MAGA are an active cancer on my religion. I know there are a lot of Christians who feel the same way. Maybe not the majority, but a lot.
As I grew and developed, I lost a lot of the Christian dogma that those around me told me I needed to believe in. Things like the inerrancy of scripture, the existence of hell, and the numinous divine approbation that suffused American and Western history. I learned that Jews also believed that God is Love, and so did Muslims. That Buddhist meditation merged with the Tao te Ching can make eating a spoonful of Cheeri-Os a divine epiphany, even without marijuana. That ethics wasn't a religious issue, it was a survival one. That religion could bring a black person and a white one together under one roof, and might in fact have developed specifically for that sort of reason, to unite tribes under one banner.
Anyway, I retained my love of Jesus and his gospel, and my trust in God's will, even while I lost a lot of standard Christian dogma. Then I went to UNC and became Bart Ehrman's grad student for 6 or 7 years, and really deepened my knowledge of the Bible - old and new - and the cultural and historical contexts that produced it. Bart was and is a pretty strongly atheist-leaning agnostic, and I'm a pretty strongly theist-leaning agnostic, but we got along famously, and never really discussed theology at all anyway. He's wicked smart, and has one of my favorite senses of humor I've ever come across. He's also in his own way extremely humble, and a genuine spiritual seeker. I just feel extremely blessed to have gotten to meet him and know him, and have him be my teacher in so many ways, on so many topics.
All that intellectual study really rammed home for me the major defining point not only of Jesus and Christianity, but also of the Judaism that produced it. And that is a deep, abiding, and selfless commitment to the physical, emotional and spiritual well being of five classes of people: the poor, the sick, foster kids, elderly women living alone, and immigrants. Those categories of people are mentioned all over in the Bible, in the Old and New Testaments, and are the ground bass for the entire Biblical tradition: make sure everyone is taken care of, and don't exclude anyone ever.
The modern American republican party perverts this gospel into a "Christianity" that is about abortion (not in the Bible), homosexuality (hardly in the Bible), or immigration (in the Bible, but as an injunction to welcome immigrants and provide for them). I don't believe in Satan or dark powers, but it's absolutely true that Christianity has been corrupted into a kind of American nationalism that would have been bewildering not only to Jesus, but also to the majority of Christian theologians until about 1500.
And money? Donald Trump wants to make us all rich? If there's one teaching that runs all throughout Jesus' ministry, it's that wealth is neutral at best, but most often actively spiritually destructive.
I don't mind atheists, because at least they're honest. MAGA "Christians" though? Lord help us.
Donald Trump and MAGA are an active cancer on my religion. I know there are a lot of Christians who feel the same way. Maybe not the majority, but a lot.
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